“You’d not know what to do with trim like that if I gifted it to you, little man.” He looked at Mia again. “I’ll take the raven-haired one. You may keep the blonde, Draker. But I’d put a bit in her mouth and irons on her wrists before you let your whelp near her. You can have the boy, too, if it please you.” He motioned to Tric, still laying on the stone floor. “Take that one below for Aleo to look at. Send the Dweymeri and Liisian to the Thorn Towers.” A lazy wave at the tidal pool. “Give the tall one to Dona, she’s not had Itreyan for weeks.”
Mia’s heart was racing. The shadows rippling around her.
“Hold on to me,” she whispered in Jonnen’s ear. “Blind anyone who comes near.”
“I … I will try…”
Mia squeezed Ash’s hand. “Stay close to me, love.”
Mia had no idea what to do about Tric. No idea what to do about the leviathan waiting for them in that pool. No idea if they’d even make the water, or where they’d go if they reached the ocean. No weapon save the two-inch punching dagger in the heel of her boot and the shadows, writhing and rippling around her.
She felt a wulfguard grab her shoulder.
Her hand curled into a fist.
“Hold! Hold!” came a cry. “What fray is this?”
The pack of brigands near the door parted, and Mia felt a dizzying rush of relief. The newcomer flashed a four-bastard smile and dropped into a bow that would’ve shamed the most polished courtier of any Francisco, I all the way through to XV.
“Majesty,” he said.
Cloud Corleone shot Mia a sideways wink and whispered.
“Sorry we’re late.”
CHAPTER 25
HERITANCE
“Well, well, my Lord Bloody Maid.”
The King of Scoundrels grinned at Corleone the way drakes grin at seal pups.
“Well met, old friend.”
The tone of Valdyr’s voice left no illusions in Mia’s mind as to whether he and Cloud were actually old friends—she could no more imagine Valdyr having friends, old or otherwise, than she could imagine a sand kraken having a pet puppy. But her relief at seeing Corleone breeze into the hall hadn’t quite worn off yet.
The captain was clad in his usual kit—dangerously tight black leather pants and a black velvet shirt open a touch too far, the feather in his tricorn propped at a jaunty angle. Beside him, BigJon wore dark leathers and a bright blue shirt of Liisian silk, his drakebone pipe propped at his lips.
“My king,” the captain said, sweeping off his hat and bowing again. “The heart sings to see you looking so well. Have you lost weight, perchance?”
“What the ’byss do you want, Corleone?” Sigursson spat.
“A word and then some, before you drop one of my crew in the drink.”
“Crew?” Sigursson raised an eyebrow. “What are you babbling about?”
“These dogs are all salted,” the captain said, gesturing to Mia and her fellow captives. “Crewed to the Maid afore we shipped out from Godsgrave after the games. And here you are, treating them like freshwater trout.”
“Saaaaalted?” Valdyr drew the word out as if savoring it, leaning out over the railing with his chiseled teeth bared in a grin. “Is that so?”
“Light’s truth, Majesty. May the Everseeing rot my toddler off if I lie.”
“A tale to both confound and amaze.” The king smiled wider, tongue pressed to one wicked-sharp canine. “Since the Maid just put into harbor this very hour, and these seven arrived in Amai yesterturn?”
“I sent them overland from Galante,” Corleone said. “I had business inland.”
“Bull-fucking-shit,” Draker spat, dragging his thinning red hair off his brow.
Corleone tilted his head. “You mean to tell me you know who crews aboard my ship better than I, Hangman? When was the last time you set foot on my decks?”
“When I was plowing your mother,” the captain growled.
“O, aye, she sends her regards, by the by,” Corleone replied without skipping a beat. “She told me to tell you she hopes you’re not still embarrassed. It happens even to the best of men, apparently.”
Guffaws and chuckles echoed about the room as the Maid’s captain turned attentions back to his king.
“Majesty, these seven are my crew. Salted, every one. There’s no place for them on their knees or in the pens or the pool, besides.”
“Seven?” Valdyr crooked one scarred eyebrow. “Even the child, now?”
“Cabin boy.” Corleone offered his four-bastard smile, sweet as honey and smooth as silk. “My last fell overboard in the Sea of Silence.”
“Tragic.”
“BigJon certainly thought so. He goes in for a bit of buggery recently.”
The Maid’s first mate dragged his pipe off his lips, about to voice protest. “I do—”
“So one of your crew still knocked my boy’s teeth out of his head.” The captain of the Hangman spat on the deck. “There’s tithe owed for that.”
Corleone glanced at the monocle boy, flinched at the sight of his mangled snout, then leaned in for a closer look. He turned and held a finger aloft to Valdyr.
“A moment, great King, to confer with my people? I’ve not had a word crossways since Galante. I’m sailing a tad behind the tide.”
Valdyr leaned back into his throne, hefting Mia’s gravebone blade and smiling like the cat that got the cream, stole the cow, and bedded the milkmaid twice.
“By all means.”
Corleone turned to Mia and her comrades, the easy smile on his face belying the deathly urgency of his tone. “Right. I’m dangerously close to being hideously fucking murdered here, so if you bastards would like to catch me up with what the ’byss you’ve been doing since you arrived, that’d be appreciated.”
“Murdered?” Bladesinger frowned up at the Scoundrel King. “He’s done nothing but smile since you walked in.”
“The more Valdyr smiles at you, the closer you are to dead,” Cloud said. “He’s about two crossed words away from slitting my throat and fucking the wound.”
“That’s disgusting,” Ashlinn hissed.
“Aye, the last man who endured it probably thought so, too.”
“Tric, are you all right?” Mia asked.
The boy was still sprawled on the floor in chains, but he glanced up and nodded.
“AYE, I’M FINE, MIA.”
“Look, I don’t mean to sound impolite, but fuck him,” Corleone said. “And unless you want to be as dead as he is, you need to tell me what in Aa’s name you did.”
“The twat with the monocle put his hands on my tits,” Mia said flatly. “So I broke his face. And two of his friends. Ash helped.”
“It was exciting,” Ashlinn nodded.
Mia thumped the girl’s arm to quiet her.
“Did you request said hands be placed on your…” Corleone’s eyes drifted downward. “… accoutrements at any point?”
Mia raised her eyebrow and stared.
Hard.
“Right,” Corleone nodded. “Had to ask.”
The captain turned to the assembly, arms held wide.
“My salts tell me their ungentle treatment of Draker Junior here was warranted response to advances both unseemly and unwelcome.” Corleone shrugged. “Seems a plain sailor’s quarrel to me. Certainly nothing to be troubling His Maje—”
“Shuzafuggin larr!” Monocle slurred through his busted lips.
Corleone looked at him sidelong. “I beg pardon?”
“He said she’s a fucking liar!” Draker spat. “I got the tale rightways from my three lads, they said this lying slip asked them for a roll then got shirty when rebuffed.”
“And you believe that?” Mia blinked. “Are you a liar or a fool, sir?”
“Watch your mouth, whore.”
“Call me whore?” Mia nodded slow. “Fool it is, then.”
“There were witnesses aplenty,” Ashlinn said. “If we—”
“Enough!”
The bellow pierced
the air, sharp and bright. All eyes turned to the balcony. Valdyr was sitting up straight in the Throne of Scoundrels, Mia’s longsword placed point-first in the floorboards, one scarred and callused hand at rest on the pommel.
“Draker,” he said. “If you have umbrage, then call for Affray. If not, shut your fucking mouth before I make you my woman and burn your ship into the sea.”
The Hangman’s captain took an involuntary step back, but then glared at Mia.
“Aye,” the man snarled. “The Hangman demands Affray.”
Mia whispered sidelong to Butcher. “Is that the trial-by-combat thing?”
“Aye.”
Corleone raised a hand. “Now, ju—”
“I accept,” Mia shouted.
A chorus of cheers and shouts went around the mezzanines, the captains and their crews clunking tankards and stamping feet and expressing general contentment at the possibility of more bloodshed.
“Shit,” Corleone sighed. “Shiiiiiiiiiit.”
“What?” Mia hissed. “I already kicked the little bastard’s teeth out of his head. You think I can’t skip along a few of those wires and knock his arse into the drink?”
“You’ll not be fighting Draker Junior,” Corleone explained. “It was the Hangman who issued challenge. The ship. That means her captain gets to pick his finest salt to romance you. He’s not about to send his son and heir to fight you, or you could claim Draker Junior’s share of the ship through Heritance.”
“Heritance!” Butcher cried, immediately lowering his voice. “That was it! That’s the law I couldn’t remember! I knew it was an H word.”
“What the flaming blue fuck is Heritance?” Mia whispered.
“Fourth Law of the Salt,” Cloud said. “Governs ownership of property acquired in pursuit of matters … felonious.”
“Eh?”
“Booty, lass,” BigJon said. “It’s about booty and right of conquest. Be it on Seas of Four, or dry of land, when you claim a man’s life, you claim all he was. You kill a man, his purse is yours. You kill a captain, his ship is yours. So you kill Draker Junior, anything his father has bequeathed him would go to you.”
“Let me understand this,” Sid said. “You people have codified a law that actually encourages you to murder your comrades and take their shit?”
“Well, how would you run it, then?” BigJon demanded, looking Sid up and down. “A man gets topped and any bucktoothed mongrel with a sticky set of fingers can come grab what he wants? Or the state takes it, maybe? Sounds a recipe for chaos to me.”
“Aye,” Corleone nodded. “This way, it’s all kept aboveboard. I keep telling you, just because we’re pirates doesn’t mean we’re lawless brigands.”
“And I keep telling you,” Sid boggled, “that’s exactly what it fucking means!”
“Claim a man’s life, you claim all he was,” Mia murmured.
“Aye,” Corleone said. “So the fellow they’ll send to fight you won’t be possessed of much. And anything he does own, he’ll probably bequeath to his captain or mates before the battle.”
Mia looked across the room and saw a mountain of a man wearing a hangman’s noose who was indeed hastily scribbling a note on a scrap of parchment. He handed the note to his captain, who tucked it inside his greatcoat. The man then took the stairs down to the common floor. He was Dweymeri, as big as a small wagon, his saltlocks cut into a short, wild crop atop his head. His biceps were thicker than Mia’s thighs, his face marked with beautiful inkwerk and rent with awful scars earned from a lifetime of battle.
Sigursson had climbed down from the king’s balcony to stand before Mia. He held out a heavy wooden blade edged with obsidian shards.
“Mother Trelene watch over you, girl. Lady Tsana guide your hand.”
“All right, then,” she muttered.
Mia handed Jonnen over to Ashlinn, kissed her girl fiercely on the lips.
“Don’t you die on me,” Ash warned.
“Sounds a sensible plan.”
“You actually have a plan?”
Mia sucked her lip and scowled. “I’m working on it.”
The girls kissed again, until Corleone finally cleared his throat.
“Is there anything you’d like to bequeath to…”
Mia turned to look the captain in the eye, and his voice failed.
“Right,” he nodded. “Had to ask.”
Mia kissed Jonnen on the brow. “I’m going to need Eclipse. Just for a while, all right?”
The boy nodded slow, glanced at Mia’s opponent. The man was twirling his blade through the air as if it were an extension of his own body, the air left bleeding behind it. His muscles caught the muted sunslight, gleaming like polished steel.
“Remember what Father says,” the boy said.
“Aye,” Mia nodded. “I remember.”
“Good fortune, de’lai,” he said softly.
It was the first time he’d ever called her sister. The first time he’d ever acknowledged they were familia. And even there, with death peering over her shoulder and breathing cold on her neck, Mia smiled. Blinking the burn from her eyes and feeling her love for the little bastard swelling with the lump in her throat. She hugged him, kissed his cheeks, heart melting as his arms slipped up around her neck and he hugged her back.
Turning, she drew a deep breath, took the blade from Sigursson’s hands.
“Eclipse?” she said.
Sigursson’s eyes grew a little wider as the daemon slipped from Jonnen’s shadow. The wolf prowled once about Mia’s legs, black as truedark, then vanished into the shadow at Mia’s feet. Dark enough for three.
“Just who the fuck are you?” he asked.
But Mia was closing her eyes. Breathing deep. Feeling the fear melt off her bones as her passenger devoured it whole. In the space of a heartbeat, she was no longer a frightened girl dancing on razors. She was a destroyer. Shadow-forged. The blood of the night flowing in her veins, and the splinter of a fallen god burning dark inside her chest.
Unbreakable.
“Eclipse, you move where I point you, aye?”
“… AS IT PLEASE YOU…”
She marched across to the edge of the pool as Sigursson turned to the assembly. His voice rang out over the throng.
“Affray is called! Hangman has challenged, Bloody Maid has answered! Fight to the fall, and may the Daughters have mercy on your souls!”
Mia looked down into the water, to the dark shadow of the leviathan, coiled in the depths below the wire grid. It was thirty feet long if it was an inch—a hunter of the deep, grown fat and baleful on the blood of the men and women Valdyr threw to it.
Mia’s opponent dragged off his boots and shirt. His torso rippled with muscle, every inch covered with tattoos—women and fish, mostly, though some appeared to be a combination of both. Not to be outdone, Mia stripped off her own shirt, tossed it carelessly to one side. There was some scattered applause as the audience realized she wore nothing underneath.
Eyes on my chest, bastards, not on my hands.
She pulled her boots off next, twisting the left heel as she did so, palming her punching dagger. Mia hopped up onto the cables, wrapping her bare toes around the wire for grip. The steel hummed under her feet, like the strings of some grand and terrible instrument, the first notes in a song of blood and ruin. The Dweymeri jumped up onto the cables, too, the impact of his landing running along the steel and shaking Mia where she stood. The man smiled, stomped the cable again to throw Mia off-balance, then raised himself up on one foot, arms spread, in a demonstration of perfect poise.
Mia made her way across the wires cautiously. Glancing down to the cool blue water six feet below, she saw that colossal shadow, circling, impatient. The brigands around them were baying and stomping, and she was in mind of her time in the arena. The silkling. The retchwyrm. The chaos of the Venatus Magni. The adoration of the mob, when their applause sang in her veins in time with her pulse, and fear … well, fear was something only her opponent had to worry
about.
But those turns were behind her now. She didn’t fight for the mob anymore.
She fought for herself. And the few she loved.
“What is your name, sir?” she called out.
“Ironbender,” he replied.
Mia held out her wooden sword, dropped it into the water below them.
“Excuse me for a moment, Ironbender.”
She raised her punching dagger, gleaming between her knuckles.
“Eclipse?”
She pointed to the balcony above. And the wolf who was shadows surged and vanished, and Mia
Stepped
off the wire
and up into
the shadowwolf
now coalescing in the
dark at Valdyr’s feet, leaping up and straddling the big man’s lap and plunging her dagger into his throat. The King of Scoundrels gasped, knife-green eyes going wide. But by the time he’d raised his hand to fend her off, the dagger had already punched through his neck three more times,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
sluices of blood arcing off Mia’s blade and scything through the air as the crowd blinked in confusion at her disappearance and then realized where she was, sitting astride their sovereign, fist wrapped in his braids and hacking at his mangled throat,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
cries of terror and outrage as she worked, face twisted, teeth bared, red on her lips on her throat on her breasts, hot and thick as he gargled and spat and flailed, clawing at her neck, muscles taut and fingers curled, but the blood, O, the blood,
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