Run.
But my head keeps spinning, starts ringing . . .? Ringing like ship’s bells—
My father kneels next to me, his voice low as the ship wakes around us, the bells growing in intensity. “You’re the only reason your mother is dead.”
He leaves me there. Walks away, his steps blending with the frenzied movements of the others on board. My stomach twists, but I can’t stay here. I need to move. The bells—
The first scream comes from the crow’s nest. “BRACE FOR IMPACT.”
A war horn blares, and I blink. Bodies thunder across the ship.
Then a crash sends me rolling like an empty barrel, and my ribs crack as the ship rails catch me once again.
The enemy boards us from the opposite side, each of them dressed in scarlet and grinning as they swarm with the advantage of surprise. The head of their ship is shaped wrong, its nose drawn down and solid. Deep gouges mar the wood, proof of its previous victims. They meant to hit us.
“Greetings! Who wants to introduce me to your captain?” a shirtless man asks as his feet hit the deck and the groups begin to trade blows. His grin is shiny. Half his head is shaved, the other half braided. He holds his sword wrong, with lazy, unearned confidence. Five men flank him, their eyes stalling on the sudden carnage. Their crew is already falling.
Do they know whose ship they boarded?
I stand, hissing as my ribs protest. I’ve had worse, but damn if it doesn’t hurt every time. I take a half second to prod the injury—no breaks—and push myself to move as my father approaches the man, whose cheer is quite literally cut short as the longsword,Gutter, glides through the flesh of his stomach and blooms through his back.
“I’m Captain Vincent Ivor,” my father says, leaning in, sinking the blade until the hilt presses into the man’s bare skin. He projects loud enough to let the enemy know the mistake they’ve made. “And I prefer to introduce myself.”
As if on cue, the crossbows are loosened and blazing sluggar bolts arc into the air. They catch the enemy ship’s sail, lighting the fog in a bright haze. Pandemonium erupts, and men begin to scream.
I sprint for the rowboats again, cradling my injured shoulder. It’s not three steps before a woman is in my way, baring her teeth as she swings a shortsword into the space I was about to occupy. The air shifts inches from my face as I rear back, then I’m forced to leap away again as she swipes to spill my insides. She’s dressed in scarlet from head to toe, and if I’m not wrong, the buttons on her jacket have been replaced with small bones. Carpals, metacarpals, sections of fingers and toes. Fae, shifter, human? There’s no way to know.
There’s little more I hate than left-handed fighting, but I’d like to keep my carpals, so I manage to pull the bola from my waist and swing, aiming the weights so the two shorter arms hug her neck while the longer swings around like a noose. By the time the hit lands, I’ve drawn my dagger and adjusted my stance. She stiffens, clawing at the rope that chokes her, and I fly forwards, shoving the crying, begging, eight-year-old version of myself into the safer recesses of my mind before burying the blade up into the pit of her arm. I yank towards me, severing flesh and artery.
She tries to scream, but struggles for air. I kneel and assess the situation as she goes down, her legs and hands twitching till the very last. The enemy ship is ablaze. My father fights, surrounded by our best vipers, and any that go against them fall in arcs of blood and gore.
I retrieve my bola and continue on to the row boats, not bothering to hide the jostle as I manoeuvre it over the water and board, stomach skipping with every small movement it makes. The pulley is rusted, and it takes a couple pulls to get itstarted. Just as it begins to descend, a rogue bolt shoots from the fog, nearly spearing me.
Go, go, go, go—
A man explodes from the fog, his eyes burning with fury. His scarf is scarlet, his linen shirt bloody, but there’s no way to tell if it’s his. I dodge the first frenzied swing, but with the boat below the railing now, I’m quite literally a fish in a barrel; he’s got the high ground. I leap from one side of the tiny boat to the other, trying to wrap his sword arm, using my bola like a whip. If I can get a hold of him I can pull him overboard.
When he lands the fatal blow, it misses me by inches.
I’d managed to get the long arm of the bola secured around the hilt of his sword, but he rips his arm sideways, refusing to let me disarm him. Instead, his sword impacts the rope securing the rowboat on one side.
And the world tips.
I’ve only got a moment to realise I’m falling before frigid water swallows me from head to toe. The surface of the water hits nearly as hard as the wood of the deck, and the man above must have cut the other side too, because the rowboat comes down on top of me, twisting the world.
Everything in my body screams in pain, screams for me to swim, but I don’t know the way. The darkness is absolute. Every direction takes me farther from air. The waves are still angry, disturbed by the ships that create their own wake as they collide. My lungs burn. My ribs burn. My cowl tries to strangle me and I rip it away, leaving it to the sea.
With one arm, I flail, taking a random, hopeless guess which way is up, but a wave sends me endover end, shoving water up my nose and I panic, fighting the cough that would steal precious air. The loose sleeves of my blouse slow me down, ballooning around my face, imitating any number of creatures that might lurk a handbreadth away, unseen in the pitch black.
Like that one.
Somewhere beyond me. In the indistinguishable gloom. Barely there. The difference between the dark of the night and the dark of a nightmare.
A shadow.
A long fin angling it my way.
That manic laugh bubbles from me again, and I don’t mourn the air that leaves me.
