upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty.
He thought of it as a sort of—liberation. Every knife in the sea, a piece of history ripped off like dead skin.
"Saint Ismene." A forest of snakes writhed around a hollow whalebone handle, mouths snapping at tails. The smiling blade, curved to the skies, was a fang torn from a basilisk's mouth; half of it was stained a gruesome shade of pink. Old blood. He had never managed to buff it out.
Ismene had been a particularly cruel Saint. Caine had always suspected that the village that had Sainted her had done so only to avoid the coils of her dearly beloved familiar. It was a brittle blade, besides. He had used it unhappily and sparingly.
Saint Ismene, lost to the seas.
Caine loved them, his knives, but as one by one left his grasp in a spinning, spitting arc, as metal and bone and gem flipped handle over blade into a mass that was not him, not anyone, he felt he could have given them no better end.
It was wonderfully poetic, for one, and wholly perverse, for another. He had not even prised the rubies from the handles, because that would be maiming, and Caine had always disparaged such spiteful work.
Poetry and perversity. Really, he had outdone himself.
Their blades were going dull, anyway.
"Saint Gaheara." Three raw rubies winked like three bulbous eyes. A sheath of scarred bronze sealed away an edge battered by shaky, inexperienced cuts. Gaheara had been the patron Saint of children. Her troubled, solemn bust, three-eyed yet strangely beautiful, kept vigil over all orphanages in Vectaeryn. There had been no Saint more fitting for his very first blade.
Saint Gaheara, sunk to the sand.
Far overhead, a black-breasted gull screeched its troubles to the sun. Caine lifted his head and let the weight of his braids drag it back, back, back, until black throat curved like Ismene's fang, until silver eyes winked like Gaheara's rubies.
The third knife trembled in the air. "Saint Vol—"
“You, ah, figuring on getting those back?”
Saint Volta would cry blasphemy at finding himself face-down in murky, foreign surf. His exploits had been legendary in a land made flesh from legends; a princeling's first words was not 'Father,' but 'Volta.' Darkly, Caine figured he had not yet put enough distance between himself and his Saints to test their divine ire so.
Sand rained out of the dagger's vine-like grooves as Caine swivelled haltingly towards the suggestion of a boy blurred blue-bruise-red by the dying sun.
"Not particularly," he called back, letting the sea-winds carry his voice, twirling Volta in swinging arcs as he watched the boy’s long shadow with half-lidded intrigue. He could make out little else of him save for a swathe of white hair, for he had not come close enough for seeing.
Caine had yet to decide if that was flattering or not.
"I have entirely too many of them," he explained instead, gesturing loosely towards the satchel staked with handles in varying shades and hefts.
The lantern-lights of the Night Markets flickered like fireflies above them, the merry symphony of drums and laughter, and the occasional cymbal crash of a shattering wineglass, filling the gaps between words.
His mouth dipped like a crow's wing. Volta spun tidily to a halt, roman nose clean down. “Here.” Sunset glanced off the dagger's lively silver carvings. Dragons and their foolish boy-heroes. “Saint Volta.”
And then he merely waited, his offer sealed with a smile.
How his Saints would love him like this.
