Darkdawn

by Kristoff, Jay

  MAJESTY

  She was still naked when they kicked in the door.

  Mia woke to the ring of heavy footfalls, hackles rising down her back. But she was only reaching for her britches when the boot splintered the frame, the door smashing inward on its hinges. She was up and rolling across the floor in a heartbeat, drawing her gravebone blade from its scabbard. Ash dragged her sword from beneath her pillow, stood on the bed, freckled skin bare, weapon drawn.

  Four men loomed on the threshold, each with a black wolfskin about his shoulders.

  Wulfguard.

  The one in front was a Vaanian almost as tall as Tric. Handsome as a four-poster bed full of top-shelf sweetboys, thick blond hair and beard parted into seven plaits. A long scar cutting down his brow and cheek wasn’t enough to ruin the picture.

  “This them?” he asked.

  Mia looked into the hallway, heart sinking as she spied a familiar face framed by lank red hair, a monocle still propped on his blackened eye.

  “Tha’sher,” the lad lisped through busted lips. “Bish nogged out my fuggin’ teef!”

  Mia heard Bladesinger cry out from down the hall, Sidonius cursing.

  Jonnen …

  She took a step forward, naked as the turn she was born, ready to make these bastards sorry they ever had been. The men fanned out into the room, each with hands on their sword hilts. The fact that they hadn’t even drawn steel yet told her they were either incredibly stupid or extremely confident.

  The leader looked at Mia, green eyes flashing.

  “His majesty, Einar Valdyr, Blackwolf of Vaan, Scourge of the Four Seas, commands your presence before the Throne of Scoundrels, girl. If you’ve gods, you’d best set to praying.” His gaze flickered to Ashlinn, standing with sword drawn on the bed. “And if you’ve clothes, you’d best put them on.”

  “Unhand me, brigand!” Mia heard Jonnen cry. “My father will have you flayed and fed to the dogs!”

  “’Singer?” Mia called, heart rising in her throat.

  “Aye?” she heard the woman yell.

  “Is everyone all right? Is Jonnen—”

  “They have him in hand,” the woman called. “But he’s well.”

  “I am not well!” the little boy cried. “Unhand me, cretin, I am the son of an—”

  “You want us to gut these bastards, say the word, Crow!” Butcher yelled.

  “I’d not give that word,” the scarred man counseled, “if I were you. That sword sits well in your hand, but you’ve nowhere to run. And if King Einar gets word you tried to run, it’ll go all the worse for you.” He shook his head. “You fucked up badly, girl.”

  Mia’s mind was racing, and she was cursing herself a fool. She could kill these men, she had little doubt, but for all she knew Jonnen could be at the point of a knife. If he got hurt before she reached him, she’d never forgive herself. She was bare-arsed, her friends were outmanned, she’d no idea where Tric was or the lay of the land.

  Patience, she told herself.

  She looked this Vaanian fellow over, weighing him up in her mind. Easy authority. Understated confidence. Intelligence. His men were busy soaking up an eyeful, but he’d not looked away from her eyes once since she drew her sword.

  “What is your name, sir?”

  “Ulfr Sigursson, wulfguard and first mate of the Black Banshee.”

  “Does your king usually send his first mate out to round up troublemakers?”

  “When he’s bored,” Sigursson replied. “And I have bad news for you, lass. He’s been bored a great deal of late.”

  Mia glanced to Ashlinn, still standing on the bed.

  This is the danger, she realized.

  In having people she cared about. Familia she loved. She let her guard down around them. They made her vulnerable. Her enemies could use them against her. Mercurio. Ashlinn. Jonnen. Sid and the Falcons. If she were alone like she’d been in the beginning, she’d just be a flicker in the shadows, already gone. If she were alone, she could gut these four like spring lambs and be on her way. If she were alone …

  But then she’d be alone.

  She looked into Ashlinn’s eyes.

  And what would the point of it all be then?

  Mia curled her hand into a claw, meeting Sigursson’s stare. The shadows around the room began to move, stretching out toward the man, pointed like knives. Her hair blew about her shoulders in a cold starlit breeze that touched only her. To his credit, the brigand held his ground, but he finally drew his blade.

  “Just who the fuck are you?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

  “We’ll come with you, Ulfr Sigursson,” Mia said. “But if you or your men touch me or my friends in any unseemly fashion, I’ll kill you and everyone you ever loved. Do you understand me?”

  Sigursson smirked, finally looking her up and down. “My men follow my lead. And you lack the appropriate block and tackle to hoist my sail, little girl.”

  The man stooped and flung her britches at Mia’s head.

  “Put your fucking clothes on.”

  * * *

  A stone fort awaited them at the south end of the docks.

  It rose up direct from the water, its wall like a cliff face. It was limestone, round like a mighty drum, a crust of weed and mussels encircling its waterline. Cannon pointed from its battlements and guts, out across the water. From its highest tower, a green flag flew, trimmed with silver and set with the sigil of a black wolf with bloody claws. Around its wall were hung a hundred gibbets, filled with men and women. Some dead, some living, most somewhere in between.

  “Fuck me,” Butcher was muttering. “Fuck me…”

  Sigursson walked in front, the wulfguard marching around them. Mia and her comrades had been disarmed, save the small punching dagger hidden in the heel of Mia’s left boot. Sigursson was carrying her gravebone sword like a new toy. Sid had earned himself a black eye and split lip when the wulfguard charged into their room, and his chin was crusted with blood. Ash walked close beside Mia, and Mia carried Jonnen in her arms. Even with Eclipse in his shadow, she could feel the boy trembling. She squeezed him tight, kissed his cheek.

  “All will be well, brother.”

  “I want to go home,” he said, on the verge of tears.

  “Me too.”

  “You should never have brought me to a place like this.”

  Mia watched the keep’s broad, iron-studded doors opening wide before them.

  “I’m not feeling the grandest big sister in the world right now, sure and true.”

  She was already looking for escape routes. Shadows to Step into, moments she might slip her mantle about her shoulders and vanish. She could manage Jonnen. Maybe even Ashlinn if she tried hard enough. But Bladesinger, Butcher, and Sid …

  Fear coiled in her belly. Fear like ice and crawling worms. Fear for those she cared about. She wanted Eclipse back to help her manage it, but that would strip Jonnen bare and Goddess knew what he’d behave like then. And without Mister Kindly—O, ’byss and blood, how she missed him now—she was forced to deal with it herself. Push through the frost and the shakes, the memory of Bryn and ’Waker lying dead on the cold stone and think, think, think how the fuck they were going to get through this …

  She heard shouts and jeers ringing ahead as they walked a long hallway lined with arkemical lanterns, on through the fort’s guts. More wulfguard flanked a broad set of double doors ahead. The men nodded to Sigursson and glanced at Mia and her comrades with bored expressions. The doors were oak, carved with grim reliefs of drakes and hooksquid and craykith and other horrors of the deep. The nevernight wind howled through the fort’s belly like a lonely wolf, and the cold shivered Mia’s skin.

  “Where the ’byss is Tric?” Ashlinn whispered.

  “No clue,” Mia murmured in reply. “Not far, I hope.”

  The doors opened wide.

  The room was almost two hundred feet across, circular, built similar to an amphitheater. Three concentric wooden rings rose around the edges, akin to
the tiers of an arena. The rings were filled with seamen and sailors, a motley of leather caps and tricorns, greatcoats and ruffled cravats and leathers, scarred faces and silver teeth. Smoking pipes and gleaming blades and feral smiles. Pirates, all.

  In the center of the room was a broad tidal pool, carved directly into the limestone floor and open to the ocean beneath. The waters were blue, slightly clouded, rippling with faint chop. Suspended above the pool was a mesh of taut steel wires, each spaced two feet apart, forming a grid six feet above the water’s surface. The crowd was cheering and baying around it. And balanced atop it, two men were dueling.

  A lean Dweymeri and a broad Liisian, both stripped to the waist. They fought with wooden swords, which Mia found a little odd. The weapons were edged with obsidian shards, so they could cut well enough—each man was bleeding from a gash or two, their claret dripping down into the water below. But without a direct blow to an artery, the weapons wouldn’t be enough to kill.

  “What is this?” Sidonius hissed.

  “Affray,” Butcher explained. “Fifth Law of the Salt. Trial by combat.”

  “Fuck the salt and its law,” Ashlinn whispered. “Who the ’byss is that?”

  Mia followed Ash’s eyeline. At the highest tier in the circles, separate from the others, Mia saw a mighty chair. Its back was a ship’s wheel with twelve broad spokes, but the vessel it came from must have been crewed by giants. The rest of the seat was crafted of bleached coral and human bones, carved and twisted into the likes of horrors from the deep. It was hung with a hundred trinkets and ornaments and curios—some Mia recognized from the salted she’d seen roaming the streets of Amai. A rope tied into a noose. A red leather glove. A white rag stitched with a death’s head.

  Tributes, she realized.

  A man sat sprawled on the throne, one leg propped lazily on the back of a slave boy, who was bent on hands and knees before him. A chill ran down Mia’s spine as she set eyes on him—an involuntary shiver she couldn’t quite suppress. His eyes were rimmed with kohl, the most piercing green she’d ever seen, like emeralds shattered and sharpened into knives. His skin was tanned by years in sunslight, blond hair shaved into an undercut and running in long plaits across the top of his scalp. His beard was plaited, too, his jaw heavy, his face flecked and nicked with a dozen scars. He was built like a blacksmith, clad in leather britches, long boots. His muscular chest was bare, and over his shoulders hung a greatcoat made of cured human faces, stitched all together. The coat was so long, it trailed to the floor at his feet.

  “That’s Einar Valdyr,” Butcher whispered, clearly terrified.

  “On his Scoundrel’s Throne,” Mia murmured.

  The wulfguard shuffled them to one side. Mia met Ash’s eyes, saw she was tense and ready. As the men clashed on the wires, Mia again scanned the room, looking for the exits, shadows. There were two hundred privateers in here at least, thirty more wulfguard, Valdyr himself. Fighting wasn’t an option. And as the doors slammed shut behind them, escape seemed a distant dream.

  The crowd roared and Mia turned her eyes to the duel—the Dweymeri had drawn blood again, a fresh gash along the Liisian’s shoulder, dripping down into the waters beneath them. The wires hummed like lyre strings as the men danced and lunged, the Dweymeri skipping across one cable to avoid his foe’s sword, the Liisian’s blow going wide. The smaller man lost his balance, started to wobble. The Dweymeri struck a quick blow into the Liisian’s knee, almost tumbling himself. The Liisian cried out, his footing failed, and as the crowd rose up and roared, the man slipped through the cables and down into the tidal pool below with a splash.

  The Dweymeri sailor bellowed in triumph. The Liisian man in the water surfaced in a panic, swimming toward the edge. Mia saw Valdyr move for the first time, rising up from his throne and stepping to the balcony’s edge so he could better see. And beneath the water, Mia’s belly churned as she saw the motion of a long, dark shadow.

  The Liisian had made the pool’s edge, but the water was low, the walls too high for him to reach the lip. He lunged upward, and Mia caught a glimpse of his face—blanched and terrified. His fingers scrabbled at the stone as the crowd stomped their feet. And as Mia watched, a long tentacle, hooked and black and glistening, rose up from the water, wrapped itself around the man’s throat, and dragged him under.

  Black Mother, it’s a leviathan.*

  Thrashing sounds. Garbled cries. The water flushed red as the crowd howled. Up on the balcony, Valdyr clapped, throwing back his head and laughing. The faces on his coat reminded Mia of those faces beneath Godsgrave, screaming all in time. She saw his eyes were alight, that his teeth had been filed back to points.

  Aye, all right. I could believe a jackal birthed this bastard.

  “The Daughters have spoken!” he roared.

  Quiet dropped upon the room like a hammer, and every man and woman in it fell utterly still. Valdyr stood with arms spread wide, his voice deep and booming.

  “My Lady Indomitable, be you satisfied?”

  A woman in her early thirties stepped forward on the second level. She had blond hair drawn back in a braid, no kohl around her eyes, no paint on her lips.

  “Indomitable is satisfied, my king,” she bowed, smiling.

  “My Lord Red Liberty, be you satisfied?” Valdyr demanded.

  A bearded Itreyan with a vicious scar and a red greatcoat with brass buttons bowed low, his face as sour as if he’d eaten a bowl of fresh dogshit.

  “Red Liberty is satisfied,” he said. “My king.”

  “Well, that is a fucking relief,” Valdyr said, returning to his throne. The man propped his boots up on the slaveboy again, leaned back, and stroked his plaited beard. “Now, who else brings quarrel? Or can I return to my wine?”

  “Majesty!” A snaggletoothed Liisian with thinning red hair and a poisonous-looking cat curled around his shoulder stepped forward with a bow. He had a noose tied about his neck like a cravat, just like the lads Mia and Ash had thrashed yestereve.

  “My Lord Hangman,” Valdyr replied without looking at him. “Speak.”

  “The matter I mentioned earlier, Majesty,” the man said, glancing at Mia with an expression she could only think of as “covetous.” “Your wulfguard have returned.”

  “Aye, aye, what news, Sigursson?” Valdyr asked.

  “Six in hand, Cap’n,” the man beside Mia called. “Caught them at Maria’s.”

  “And the seventh?”

  As if on cue, the doors crashed open, and a half-dozen battered and bloodied wulfguard shuffled into the hall, dragging a struggling figure. Mia’s heart surged and she took half a step forward, but Ashlinn placed a hand on her arm to still her.

  “Tric…”

  He was wrapped in chains, writhing like a serpent. They’d stripped off his black, tattered robe, left him with only his leather britches beneath, the rusted iron links cutting deep into his skin. The wulfguard threw him to the floor and he snarled, his saltlocks writhing across the stone. A faint flush of rage kissed his cheeks, a spatter of blood smudged on his skin.

  “Bastard killed Pando, Trim, and Maxinius,” one of the wulfguard declared, his nose smashed to pulp. “Broke Donateo’s legs like they were fucking kindling. I stabbed the fucker three times in the chest and he didn’t fall. Barely even bled.”

  “Tric, lie still,” Mia called.

  “MIA…”

  One of the wulfguard stepped forward and kicked him in the head. “Shut the fuck up, you unholy cocksucker!”

  Valdyr looked down on the struggling Dweymeri boy, knife-green eyes narrowed.

  “Cap’n?” Sigursson held aloft Mia’s gravebone blade. “May I approach?”

  Valdyr grunted assent, kicked a rope ladder over the edge of his balcony. It was then Mia realized the man’s position was unassailable by anyone in the room. The only paths to his perch were a bolted door behind the Scoundrel’s Throne or the ladder he’d just tossed to his first mate. Glancing around the hall, she saw at least fifty men who looked like
they’d cut their own children’s throats for a ha’-beggar. She could feel that undercurrent of violence again. Peering into the eyes of the folks around the room as they looked up at their king.

  Not a man or woman in this room loves Einar Valdyr, save perhaps his crew.

  The king of pirates holds his throne through fear …

  Sigursson climbed the ladder, spoke in hushed tones in his king’s ear, handing over Mia’s gravebone sword. Valdyr’s kohled eyes finally met hers, and Mia had to force herself to hold his gaze. Even near a hundred feet away, she could feel the power radiating off him. A feral, bloodthirsty intensity that made mere children of the men around him. There was an allure to him—that much was undeniable. But it was an allure bound to leave bruises on your skin, and blood on your sheets.

  Valdyr stared at her for a long, silent moment, lips curling in a hungry smile.

  “What say you, my Lord Hangman?” he finally called. “What tithe asked?”

  “This freshwater bitch broke my boy’s teeth,” the snaggletoothed man said, nodding at Monocle’s mangled mouth. “She’s his by right. The blonde, too.” He motioned to Jonnen. “And I’ll take the sprog by way of the insult.”

  “Will you, now, Draker?” Valdyr smiled, his pointed teeth gleaming.

  “… Majesty willing, of course,” the captain said, lowering his eyes.

  Valdyr turned his eyes to Monocle, tongue pressed to one sharpened incisor. “You really let this slip get the jump on you, boy? I’d be shamed, were you my get.”

  Monocle lowered his gaze, his cheeks burning as a chuckle rippled through the hall. Valdyr hefted Mia’s gravebone blade. He ran his knife-green eyes up and down the blade, then up and down Mia’s body. His smile curled her belly.

  “Eclipse,” she whispered. “Be ready.”

  “… ALWAYS…”

  Mia glanced at ’Singer, Sid, and Butcher, whispering soft. “We head for the tidal pool, then into the ocean. That thing in the water is better than the things out here.”

  Sidonius nodded. “Aye.”

  “Fuck me…,” Butcher murmured.

  King Valdyr looked down at Monocle and sneered razors.