The port was the humble kind the kind that doesn't appear on important maps, where the ships are small and weathered and the dockworkers know each other by name. Fishing vessels mostly, a few cargo runners, the occasional passenger boat passing through on its way somewhere more significant.
The ship they needed was not small.
It sat at the far end of the dock like something that had wandered in from a different story entirely broad-hulled and tall-masted, its flanks carrying the faint blue luminescence of Leviacore, the rare mineral that let vessels of its class move faster and further than anything wind alone could manage.
It was already pulling away from the dock, ropes cast off, the gap between hull and pier widening with the patient indifference of something that operates on a schedule.
"We need to hurry," Emerion said, already running.
Arlienne kept pace beside him, silver hair streaming back, and somehow found the breath to smile.
"You really are a perfect runaway, brother. Years of practice finally paying off."
"Not the time"
Arlienne stopped.
Since they were holding hands, Emerion stopped too or rather, his body stopped and his momentum didn't, and he went down onto the dock boards, landing squarely and ungracefully on the one part of the human body least designed for absorbing impact.
He sat there for a moment.
"Are you," he said carefully, "out of your mind."
"Sorry, sorry." Arlienne pressed her lips together in a way that was not entirely successful at concealing that she was trying not to laugh. "But and I need you to hear this calmly we can fly."
Emerion looked at her.
Looked at the ship.
Looked back at her.
"You panicked," he said. "At the beginning. You were the one running."
"I was being appropriately urgent. There's a difference." She tugged his hand. "Come on. Before it gets further."
He let her pull him to his feet, and they ran three more steps out of what felt like the necessary conclusion to the bit, and then lifted off together from the end of the dock rising above the heads of the few dockworkers who looked up with the mild curiosity of people who have seen stranger things and crossed the widening gap of grey water between the pier and the ship in the time it takes to exhale.
They landed on the deck with a sound that was clean and solid and drew exactly as much attention as two people appearing from the air without warning deserved.
Every eye on the deck found them.
Emerion took in the staring faces and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
"Wonderful," he said quietly.
Arlienne looked around at the crowd with the expression of someone surveying a room they've just walked into and finding it satisfactory.
"Come on," she said, nudging his arm. "Smile. You can't undo what's already happened all you can do is face it well." She turned to the nearest cluster of staring passengers and gave them a smile of such complete, luminous confidence that several of them looked away first.
Then she turned back to Emerion and added, under her breath: "Though perhaps next time we land somewhere less central."
"Perhaps next time we simply board the ship like normal people."
"Where's the fun in--"
The footsteps came from the direction of the bridge heavy, deliberate, the particular rhythm of authority moving toward a problem it intends to resolve.
Three officers in blue blazers and white trousers approached in formation, the one at the front wearing an expression that had decided something before he arrived and was simply here to deliver the verdict.
"Intruders," he said. "Leave this vessel immediately or you will be detained."
He looked at them at their plain dark travelling clothes, their lack of crests or insignia and found nothing in the picture that required him to revise his assessment.
Arlienne tilted her head.
"Intruders?" she said, with the mild curiosity of someone who has just heard a word used incorrectly. "Is that how you address your passengers, officer?"
The officer's expression moved through confusion and arrived at something harder. His hand reached out and grabbed the collar of Arlienne's black shirt.
"This ship runs on Leviacore," he said, pulling her slightly forward. "The only people who can afford passage are nobles, senior merchants, or ranked military personnel."
His voice dropped into something that wanted to be contempt. "You want me to believe that commoners like you could pay for a single step aboard?"
"You have a great deal of confidence for a man in a uniform," Arlienne said pleasantly, as though commenting on the weather. Her expression had not moved. "I find that interesting."
The officer's face went red. His free hand came up.
A hand closed around his wrist.
"I'd advise against that," Emerion said.
His voice was level. His palm was pressed flat against the officer's forearm and glowing faintly blue not a full spell, not a threat exactly, just a reminder that a spell was available and the person holding it had already decided to use it if necessary.
The officer went still.
Into the silence came the sound of a different set of footsteps unhurried, purposeful, the kind that parts a crowd without effort.
The captain was somewhere in his late fifties, grey-mustached, wearing the same blue as his officers but distinguished by a cap and three gold stars at his shoulder that had clearly been earned rather than given.
He took in the scene with the eyes of a man who has managed people for a long time and can read a situation in under five seconds.
"What is happening here," he said. Not a question.
Emerion released the officer's wrist and stepped back. The officer straightened his jacket and turned to his captain with the speed of someone assembling an explanation.
"Captain, these intruders became violent when we asked them to identify themselves"
"They attempted to cast a spell"
"We witnessed it, sir"
The captain looked at them for a moment. Then he turned to the Dawnveil siblings with an expression that was stern but not yet decided.
Emerion opened his mouth.
Arlienne touched his arm once barely, just the tips of her fingers and stepped forward.
"Your officers have an interesting way of welcoming passengers,"
she said, her voice shifting into the register she used in council meetings polished, precise, carrying just enough edge to make the softness of it feel deliberate.
"I understand they're young. I do hope it isn't a reflection of the ship's broader reputation, which already has some ground to recover in recent records."
The captain's expression didn't change, but something behind it did.
"Do you have documentation of your passage?" he asked, respectful now despite himself.
"Of course." Arlienne produced the ticket and held it out with the ease of someone who always knew it was there.
He examined it carefully. Looked up. Looked back down.
"Everything is in order." He closed his eyes briefly, the expression of a man absorbing an outcome he'd hoped to avoid, then removed his cap and held it to his chest with a slight bow. "I apologize on behalf of my crew. They are--"
"Young," Arlienne said. "You mentioned."
"Yes." He put his cap back on. "Young."
The first officer had gone quiet, but not peacefully quiet the quiet of someone whose pride had just been formally weighed and found wanting in front of a crowd. He looked at Emerion with something flat and unmoving in his eyes.
"Her companion still threatened us," he said. "That can't simply be--"
"That's because you had your hand on her collar."
The voice came from somewhere to the left, bright and completely certain.
She was perhaps twelve years old by appearance blonde hair, blue eyes, wearing a sleeveless black top with the ease of someone who has never once thought about what other people might make of her outfit.
But her voice carried adult conviction, the kind that knows exactly what it's doing.
"I'm sorry," the officer said, turning to her with visible irritation, "and who exactly are"
"Someone who was standing right there and saw what happened."
She looked out at the crowd that had gathered the passengers who had drifted over and were now watching with the particular appetite of people who have paid for a voyage and found the entertainment arriving early. She clapped her hands twice, sharp and clear. "We all saw him grab her collar, yes? Before anything else happened?"
Silence.
The crowd held its breath in the way crowds do when they want to agree but haven't yet decided if it's safe.
She clapped again.
"Come on. He can grab passengers' collars and nothing gets said, but then he moves on to you next. So we all saw it?"
A man near the railing cleared his throat.
"I saw it," he said.
A woman beside him nodded. "So did I."
"He was aggressive before they did anything"
"I saw him reach for her"
The voices came one at a time at first, then overlapping, until the deck was full of them. The three officers had gone the color of old paper.
The captain exhaled slowly through his nose.
He turned back to Emerion and Arlienne with the expression of a man who has finished calculating and arrived somewhere he didn't particularly want to be.
"I cannot make this right," he said simply. "But I can refund your passage and carry you to your destination without further charge. It's the least the ship owes you."
"That would be appreciated," Arlienne said warmly, as though accepting something thoughtful rather than something owed.
"I'll arrange it immediately." He turned to his officers. His voice dropped back into command register. "You three. With me."
They followed. The first officer glanced back once not at Arlienne, not at Emerion, but at the blonde girl, with an expression that was harder to read. Surprise, maybe. Something adjacent to hurt.
Then he was gone.
The crowd began to dissolve back into the business of being on a ship. The music started somewhere below deck drums and something bright and stringed, a xphone perhaps, the notes drifting up through the boards and within moments the atmosphere had shifted entirely, the way it does when something entertaining finishes and the next thing begins.
Arlienne turned to the blonde girl and took both her hands.
"Thank you," she said. "Genuinely."
The girl smiled wide and uncomplicated, the smile of someone who did the right thing and found it completely sufficient.
"It was my pleasure. Justice has to go somewhere." She tilted her head. "I'm Ririyen."
"Arlienne. And this is my brother, Emerion."
"Just Arlienne and Emerion?" Ririyen asked, with the light curiosity of someone who notices things. "No family name?"
Emerion's expression didn't shift. He let his sister take it.
Arlienne's face changed a subtle thing, just a slight downward tilt of her chin, a look that arrived in her eyes like a window closing.
"We don't really use one,"
she said. "We're bastards, I'm afraid. We never knew our parents." She paused just long enough to let that land. "We were raised by a retired soldier he was close to the Dawnveil household, so he named us after their children. Sentimental, I suppose."
Ririyen's eyes moved to Emerion.
He put a hand on Arlienne's shoulder and closed his eyes briefly the gesture of someone absorbing something familiar and still heavy and said nothing, which said everything.
The lie was immaculate. He had forgotten how easy it was, when the emotion underneath it was real enough.
"I'm so sorry," Ririyen said immediately, her voice dropping. "I shouldn't have asked that was careless of me"
"It's fine," Arlienne said softly. "Really."
Ririyen gave a small bow anyway. Around them, the few remaining members of the dispersing crowd had apparently overheard enough to be visibly moved one older woman had her hand pressed to her chest, another man was staring at the middle distance with glistening eyes.
Emerion looked at the ceiling of the sky above him and thought that they may have slightly overcommitted to the performance.
Then Ririyen coughed sudden, sharp, one hand pressing a handkerchief to her mouth. The sound was brief but had something wrong in it, the kind of cough that comes from somewhere it shouldn't.
"I need to go," she said, already stepping back, her composure reassembling quickly but not quite completely. "I'll see you both around. And I'm sorry again truly."
She was gone before either of them could respond, moving through the thinning crowd with purpose.
Emerion watched the space she'd left.
"Do you think we overdid it?" he asked.
"We were perfectly calibrated," Arlienne said, watching the direction Ririyen had gone with an expression of mild, focused interest. "This trip is going to be very interesting."
She said it the way she said most things she found genuinely compelling with that particular light behind her eyes, the one that Emerion had learned over years meant she was already three steps into a line of thinking and had no intention of sharing the beginning of it.
He sighed.
"Let's just get to the room without landing on anything," he said, and walked toward the interior of the ship.
"Hey don't leave me out here alone," Arlienne called after him, falling into step. "I helped you. I deserve companionship."
"You called me a runaway twice in the last twenty minutes."
"Terms of endearment."
"They are not."
The door to the interior swung shut behind them both, and the deck returned to the ordinary business of a ship underway water moving beneath the hull, music drifting up from below, the coast growing smaller behind them.