Throatcuttr sailed again the night after the God of the Waves washed Sharuuq clean in the sun and the salt.
Reikr’s crew had lost two good raedrs in their last raid on the blood-drinkers, one of them his trusted marshal. Lemaell had finally woken, but not as the man he had been. When put in his fingers, daggers and food slipped out again. Even basic hand signals were beyond his capability. His comprehension of the spoken word was slow when it came at all, and at times he had trouble recognizing his wife’s face.
The couple would not return to the greatship after the next storm season. They would remain in Cryst’holm with the elderly, the children, and the infirm, and Reikr would have to find a new marshal.
The losses could not be ignored, but neither could able-bodied Waeld hide in the safety of the sea while their brothers fought the blood-drinkers.
The lead ship for this attack would be Darkwind, with Throatcuttr and Saltspray as her ancillary defenders, cutting through any retaliation from the dirters. The largest of the three, Darkwind was outfitted to withstand the power and torque of the large city-sinker trebuchet, where the smaller two rode faster in the water, carried smaller ship-killing trebuchets, and were agile enough to cut off chasers.
After much deliberation, the Waeld elders had declared Soromet Darkwind’s raed commander. Their decision, they explained, was based upon Soromet’s destruction of the delta city, the insistence of her crew that they would rather sail under her than a new commander, and the fact that Chaelon had taken Darkwind for Soromet and no one else.
However, Soromet did not believe the answer was so straightforward.
“It was because of that dirter,” Soromet had told Reikr. “Dragaar or Kalaset must have spoken in my favor with her in mind. If a woman can pass the test of steel, there is no reason she cannot command a raed ship.”
Reikr had shook his head. “They would not be swayed by a filthy dirter.”
“Perhaps not swayed, little brother, but even a small leak can sink a greatship. The loss of the Raen was the first crack, such a powerful tribe of warriors sent to the depths. The blood plague, the war, my commanding Darkwind to carry out the bombardment, and now a Daughter of Steel? A man may not interpret signs, but even he ought to be able to see that the God of the Waves is moving in strange ways.”
“This dirter is your friend now?”
Behind the silks, his sister’s blue eyes had narrowed. “Do not be willfully ignorant. My Chaelon is in paradise now, too. Do you believe I wish to embrace a dirter? The God sent her to the Waeld, that cannot be denied. If even she can be washed clean enough to live on His ocean, what else might be possible?”
They sailed in a wedge pattern, Throatcuttr in the lead, watching for dirter vessels. For the first several hours, Reikr navigated alone. He thought it likely the other two raed commanders were doing the same, though without a moon, he could not make out who stood at the helm on the dark shadows to either side. The wind was with them. Around Throatcuttr’s deck, raedrs rested, shoring up strength for the coming battles.
After the fall of the Raen, the dirter ships had begun ranging farther and farther into the ocean. The Phaet were accustomed to patrolling for the rare ship that slipped past the First Tribe, but since the Raen’s destruction, the Second was stretched too thin to catch every chaser or warship the dirters launched. The Hael preyed upon the coasts now as well, but the Sixth Among the Ocean Rovers were a tribe used to hunting creatures of the deep, not fighting dirter armies taken to sea, and their thirst for vengeance made them unpredictable.
The most dangerous waters stretched from Siu Jinial to Big Harbor, ports that launched their own seagoing armies. It was in these waters that the Raen fleet had fallen three years before, crushed in a single night by a cloud of black smoke that had spewed armored blood-drinkers onto their decks.
Since then, the seagoing blood-drinkers had become cleverer. No longer did they dress in heavy plate and mail. After seeing many of their own dragged to the depths under the weight of such armor, they had taken to wearing boiled leather, though at close range that could not deflect the projectiles fired by the flashdirks.
In time, Reikr suspected, the dirters would pad or layer their armors to stop the shots from penetrating. That was what he would do. But by then the Waeld would have come up with a way to increase the force of the flashdirks to negate cushion.
When the clouds cleared and the stars showed their faces, Reikr gave the navigation to Gaevl and went below. Raedships were not made for long-term berth of a crew, but their commanders kept quarters aboard for themselves and their wives. Reikr’s cabin had already sat empty for two years when the Dirter War began, sweet Tharaket supposedly safe in Cryst’holm with their young ones.
Since their deaths, Reikr used his cabin for storage. Extra flashdirks and balls, the smaller replacement parts for the trebuchet, his charts and navigational tools, ledgers he had stopped writing in, books Tharaket would never read again, wax tablets with the last few notes she had made before their daughter’s birth. Reikr no longer used the empty bunk, but bedded down on deck with the crew.
It hurt to think of his elder sister sharing his fate. Some part of him had been buoyed through his own losses by the knowledge that Soromet and Chaelon were together and happy, their raedship a refuge where his had become a tomb.
He intended to double-check the number of rivets they had brought for the trebuchet. A better method of affixing the war machine to the deck was under development, but currently, because the fasteners began to tear free of the planks around the eighth shot, extras must be stocked. The number of rivets aboard was forever niggling in the back of his mind, never seeming quite enough.
But when Reikr opened the cabin door, he found the Daughter of Steel sitting on his bunk, swinging her bare feet and poking a finger down the tube of a flashdirk.
“Caelenel told me you all call these things flashdirks because they’re small as a dirk,” Lathe said by way of greeting. “But what if you made ’em bigger and stuck a whole buncha balls down there at once? Then you wouldn’t have to reload so much. You could call the big ones flashswords. That’s a better name.”
Reikr snatched the weapon away from her before she shot herself. Thank the God of the Waves the barrel was empty.
“Multiple balls stick in the tube, and it explodes in your hand,” he said. “Why are you on my ship?”
“Well, first I figured I’d cut your throat and take command. Earn Throatcuttr her name. Then Dragaar told me navigating takes a lot of degrees, and I plumb ignored degrees in arithmetics lectures, so I figured I’d come along and be a raedr a while, and when we got close to shore, hop over the side. I can’t swim, me, so you’ll have to sail in close where I can touch the bottom.”
“I told you once that I did not want a blood-drinker on my ship.”
“Sure, but if I’d decided on it, Throatcuttr would already be my ship. Just call yourself lucky I don’t fancy your job no more, Raed Commander.”
Reikr was almost twenty-one, a man proven years ago, but he had never been so close to childishly displaying his anger.
“We have passed into dangerous waters. It is not safe for an unmarried woman aboard a raed ship in wartime.”
“For a wily seadog, you ain’t too bright, are ya?” She hopped off the bunk, her feet hitting the planks with soft thuds. “Here you are, wasting time quarreling at me, when you could be giving me orders on where and how to fight.”
“You would fight your own people?”
“My own people were close-rats, but Soromet probably killt ’em all when she hit Siu Carinal. Nowadays, my people are Waeld. See?” Lathe pointed to the silver cuff encircling the top of her ear.
The cuff was a strangely delicate sight worn with the masculine clothing. If not for that, from behind, she could almost be mistaken for a dark-haired young man who had just begun to grow his hair long.
From behind, and from the shoulders up. Shoulders down, the swordbelt was cinched too tightly to mistake her womanly form for anything else.
A flood of annoyance washed the thought away. Throatcuttr sailed dangerous waters; Ocean Rovers might die this night. Only a fool would allow himself to be distracted by a shapely dirter.
“Why bother becoming a Daughter of Steel if you meant only to spurn your place in the tribe and return to land?” he demanded, hoping to shame her. Even better if he could reveal that she had been sent as a distraction, an insidious way for the blood-drinkers to destroy another great tribe.
If Lathe was shamed or concerned at being found out, she did not show it.
“You got river water in your ears? For my sister and my brothers. Anyhow, the man of night’n fire wanted me to take the test of steel so’s I could open my blind eye.” She closed one eye and looked at him out of the other to demonstrate the God of the Waves only knew what. “He must’ve wanted me on Throatcuttr for some reason, too. Probably because he can count—you lost two swords, I got two swords. I’m what you need.”
“Even if I believed—”
“Dirter chasers, dead ahead!” Jaiir called from the bow.
Scowling, Reikr loaded the flashdirk he’d taken from her.
“Stay below,” he ordered her.
***
Lathe stayed below until Reikr left the cabin, then she turned invisible and headed up on deck after him.
The Ocean Rovers’ ships had changed formation, sending Soromet’s to the back of the pack. Throatcuttr and Saltspray sliced water toward the oncoming dirter ships.
One chaser had the name Weilan’s Folly painted on her prow and the other Weilan’s Last Drink, meaning they must be near Siu Jinial. That was where the king had hung the traitor Lord Weilan, who had been known best for drinking and for making half his men-at-arms into men-at-sea to protect shipping lanes from the pirates. At Thornfield, Lathe had heard from Forty-Seven that Siu Jinial had a big celebration every Winterlight, topped off by a fake hanging of a big fat effigy on the cliff overlooking the water.
On Throatcuttr, Reikr had half the crew manning the wheel and sails, while the rest of them loaded a smaller version of the trebuchet Soromet had destroyed Siu Carinal with.
Weilan’s Folly leapt over the waves, speeding straight for them. A crowd of longbowmen at Folly’s rail shot volleys of burning arrows dipped in pitch.
Lathe cussed and jumped aside as a flaming shaft narrowly missed pinning her invisible foot to the deck. Invisible didn’t mean invulnerable, crazy Master Saint Daven had liked to remind her. She ducked behind the mainmast.
Reikr stalked the deck, shouting orders like the arrows couldn’t touch him.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Lathe wasn’t that stupid. She would wait back behind the mast until the ships got close enough for her to hop decks and start cutting down archers.
From what she remembered of legal sciences lectures, it was only treason to kill soldiers from your own land if the king told you not to. Sometimes it was murder, but that didn’t count if you were grafted. It was brother-killing if you killed another Thorn, but you didn’t get sentenced for that because your lord usually made you do it.
She didn’t see any Thorns on Weilan’s Folly. No kings, either.
All possible repercussions considered, Lathe decided she had no qualms about washing the Folly’s deck with blood.
“Fire!” Reikr hollered.
Even though Throatcuttr’s trebuchet was a third the size of Soromet’s city-killer, the ship rocked beneath the swing of its arm. A metal ball the size of Lathe’s head whistled through the night at the oncoming ship.
The shot crashed through the Folly’s gunwale, tearing off a section and making archers leap for cover. Already the pirates had loaded another ball. At Reikr’s order, the next one smashed into the Folly’s hull a foot above the waterline.
Then the warship was too close for the trebuchet. Reikr signaled and Throatcuttr turned suddenly, scraping alongside Folly’s hull with an almighty growl of wood on wood. Rail splintered. Some archers scrambled back, while others dropped their bows and yanked out blades.
“Grapples!” Reikr tossed one of his own hooks across the short gap, the rope yanking tight almost instantly. He leapt over after it, his flashdirk belching flame.
A dozen more of those spurred hooks shot through the air to fasten Throatcuttr to her enemy.
Lathe whooped and launched herself after the raed commander. Invisible, she crashed into the press of bodies on Folly, bowling over an archer, and splintering the arrow he’d been nocking. Fearsome battle cries exploded behind her—more pirates boarding.
Sea scraps were nothing like the castle fighting that Lathe had learned at Thornfield. For that matter, it wasn’t anything like fighting on the greatship’s enormous deck either.
Folly was crowded with men, and in minutes the planks were slick with entrails, seawater, and spilt pitch. There was no space for a decent spin or flurry of blades. She had to shorten every sweep of her twin steels to keep from cutting up her allies by accident.
Lathe couldn’t slice open guts through the boiled leather breastplates the Folly men wore, so she stabbed for throats, groins, and armpits.
A ball from one of those blamed flashdirks grazed her forearm, leaving behind a bright blaze of pain that stung worse than a catfish spine. Invisibility wasn’t going to do her much good if it got her killt by one of her allies.
Cussing, she let the invisibility drop and crashed into the swing of a big soldier wielding a longsword. She sliced open the unprotected inside of his bicep and swept under his arm, getting drenched in a rain of blood.
She considered mirroring her image as she opened another soldier’s throat, but figured it’d be smarter not to do that either. Reikr was the only one aboard with enough schemer in him to realize she probably wasn’t where it looked like she was. Anyway, it was smoky and dark and confused enough on the Folly that the Children of Night soldiers weren’t posing much of a threat to a fully trained Thorn, even ungrafted as she was.
To add insult to the chaos, Lathe kicked over a brazier where the bowmen had been lighting their dipped arrows. The hungry flame ignited the spilt pitch and raced along the deck. An archer who’d been splashed in the oily black sludge went up screaming. Soon the lingering wounded crawling along the deck were burning as well.
Up on the quarterdeck, Reikr had traded his fired flashdirk for his cutlass and cudgel. He fought a handful of men in the fancy uniforms of the current Lord of Siu Jinial, three to one.
A longbowman near Lathe saw the same thing at the same time and drew an arrow on the raed commander. Lathe hacked through his bowstring and his throat, all in one swing. The bow straightened out with a twang, and the arrow tumbled to the deck while the archer groped at his spurting neck.
Up on the quarterdeck, Reikr kept the fancy Siu Jinial sea soldiers dancing around ratlines and wheel, but he hadn’t managed to kill any of them yet.
Lathe knew from experience the longer you waited to finish a fight, the more tired you got and the more mistakes you made. She grabbed a flashdirk off a dead pirate and checked its tube. Loaded and unfired.
A half-burnt, half-dead man crawled along the burning deck nearby. He swiped a dagger awkwardly at her, but she pulled her leg, stomped the dagger out of his fist, and kicked it away.
Then she hightailed it for the quarterdeck.
She climbed up the ladder, popping up over the top of the planks just in time to see Reikr meet the longsword swing of a Siu Jinial officer with his cutlass. The longer land steel stuck out past Reikr’s blade and lodged in the ship’s wheel. Reiker swung his cudgel, but the officer hooked an arm around his. They were bound up.
From the side, a second officer chopped his sword at the raed commander’s skull.
Lathe didn’t have a burning brand to light her flashdirk, so instead she stole some medicine from the pitch-fire and blew it onto the igniting pan.
Flame singed the back of her hand, but the black sand poofed. The flashdirk jumped like a frog. The ball missed the officer’s sword arm entirely, smashing instead into his hip with a small geyser of blood and bone chips.
The man dropped to the deck screaming, his strike at the raed commander forgotten. Lathe killed him with a hearty chop to the neck on her way past.
Reikr and the first officer tore free of each other. Their brawl hooked around the wheel toward the stern rail.
The third officer lunged toward the raed commander, rapier glinting in the firelight.
He was fast, but Lathe was faster. She smacked his needle-thin blade aside with one twin steel, and shoved the other up into the soft spot under his jaw. With a twist of her hips, she thrust the blade upward. The bone palate crunched, and the blade slid into the man’s brain. He grabbed her sword, but his hands were limp and fumbling.
Nearby, Reikr’s cudgel landed a skull-cracking blow to the first officer. The officer dropped, shaking and shuddering, half his head caved in.
The man impaled on Lathe’s blade slithered to the deck, dead. She put a foot on his chest and yanked her steel out. She looked for the man whose skull Reikr had smashed, but the raed commander had already opened his throat with his cutlass.
Straightening again, Reikr’s gray eyes met Lathe’s. He wiped blood from his face with a soot- and blood-soiled sleeve, then nodded.
She executed a perfect courtly manners bow.
Aboard the Folly, the ring and clash of battle slowed, overtaken by the moans of the dying and the screams of the burning.
A few ship-lengths away, the Last Drink stood with her bow angled toward the night sky, her masts on fire and her crew a boiling confusion of shouts and splashing in the dark water. She’d taken a ball beneath the stern waterline, and her back half had filled and broken partway off, dragging the nose of the ship with it.
All around the sea battle, fins and tentacles sliced through the waves, predators drawn by the thrashing and noise and stench of blood.
Reikr, Lathe, and the rest of the Throatcuttr raedrs went through the Folly and dispatched any survivors. Pirates didn’t believe in taking prisoners, and none of the Children of Night thought to claim the testing of steel like Lathe had.
The pirates did believe in taking plunder, though. Raedrs combed through the dead, looting anything they wanted so long as it came from men they had killed themselves. Lathe hadn’t kept close track of her kills, but the officer whose hip she’d blown off with the flashdirk ball had a sword that matched her longer steel, fancy basket hilt and everything. She took that and tossed her spare not-quite-twin sword overboard.
Belowdecks, the Folly was taking on water from the second shot to the bow. She was sinking slowly now, but she would speed up as the seawater weighed her down and more holes were pulled beneath the waves.
Reikr ordered the return to Throatcuttr.
While they were unhooking the grapples, Soromet’s Darkwind came about, untouched by the fighting. Saltspray had suffered a small fire, but the damage was superficial, quickly put out by buckets of wet sand and seawater before it could spread to the black powder casks.
“Return to eastward heading,” Reikr told his helmsman.
As they took the lead of the wedge again, the commander turned to the business of declaring the plunder’s rightful owners. To Lathe, that looked like Reikr inspecting what every raedr had taken from the enemy and agreeing it was theirs now. Only one dispute arose—two men claimed to have killed the same soldier on Folly. Both thought they ought to get the dead man’s dagger, a wicked looking thing with roughcut rubies in the hilt. Reikr pried the gemstones out, handed half to each man, kept the last stone that made the number uneven, then tossed the blade overboard.
Lathe only had the sword to declare. She’d been too busy looking for a match for her steel to worry about other shiny stuff.
“Next time, I’ll loot me some gold and jewels,” she told Reikr.
“You acquitted yourself well in your first raid,” he said, although it sounded like he didn’t much enjoy admitting it.
Lathe wiggled, unable to hold still in her excitement. “That means I get to be a raedr.”
“It means I will not cast you overboard,” the raed commander said, moving on to the next crewman. “Yet.”
She grinned. That was gronchety pirate-talk for she got to be a raedr.
***
Throatcuttr battled two more fleets of enemy chasers before they reached Siu Jinial. Each time, Darkwind pulled back while the smaller raed ships dealt with their assailants. In their second clash, Reikr sank one chaser outright with the small ship-to-ship trebuchet before attacking and boarding another. In the third battle, Lathe led the boarding charge and killed the enemy captain before the rest of Throatcuttr’s raedrs made the leap over the rail.
There was a lot to be said for the berserker approach in pirate fighting, even if she was still getting the hang of using twin steels in the cramped confines of a deck. She even honed her fire-breathing trick, getting it to where she could concentrate the flame to a tiny pop inside the igniting pan instead of all over her hand. The problem was that stopping a foe with a metal ball wasn’t as noticeable as chopping him down. Half the time, raedrs shooting flashdirks didn’t even know which man they’d hit, and you had to know which corpses you’d made or else you couldn’t loot them and claim their valuables.
Throatcuttr’s crew warmed up to Lathe fast. Skirmish after skirmish, the Daughter of Steel proved herself not only unafraid of death or injury, but as merciless to her foes as she was faithful to her allies—everything a good raedr ought to be.
Mostly Reikr avoided her, but Lathe didn’t let that worry her none. She just made sure her piles of loot got bigger with every dirter ship they sank. He couldn’t ignore that.
The sun burned high in the sky when they finally arrived offshore of Siu Jinial. Darkwind ran out her city-killer trebuchet, while Throatcuttr and Saltspray intercepted patrol ships. Soromet decimated the harbor, leaving it a wreckage of burning and broken ships and quays.
As a parting shot, Darkwind flung her last enormous ball into the heart of the port city to show that no dirter was safe on the pirates’ coast.
Darkwind was larger than her protector ships, but she could only hold so many shots for the city-killer. After each bombardment, she had to resupply, which meant sailing back to the greatship.
The fleet met only scattered resistance on their return to the Waeld, chasers that had no idea their home port was burning. Still, by the time the tribal vessel was spotted on the horizon in all its colorful glory, Lathe had amassed an impressive pile of plunder. She wondered how many of those fancy uphill folks in Siu Carinal had ever seen that much loot.
“Bring what you have taken aboard the greatship and present it to Kalaset and Dragaar,” Reikr advised.
Lathe wasn’t the only one the raed commander was talking to. A boy of about twelve knelt before the Waeld chief and his wife and presented a pearl-handled boot knife and a boiled leather breastplate.
The boy’s spoils looked pretty scrawny next to Lathe’s mountain of coins, precious stones, inlaid daggers, officer’s chains and swords, and one full shirt of gold-plated chain mail, but Dragaar and Kalaset declared the boy a raedr proven, the same as Lathe.
Dragaar’s eyes glimmered with pride as Kalaset pierced Lathe’s ear for her second cuff, the one that signified her first successful raid. Down the rail, the boy’s mother was piercing his ear, too.
“You have found your place, Daughter of Steel,” Kalaset said when Lathe rose, enfolding her in a silky, spicy-smelling embrace. “The ocean rewards you for choosing to remain at sea and take the treasures the God of the Waves has put in your course.”
“I ain’t staying, me,” Lathe tried to tell the old gal.
But the noise from the pirate boy’s mother and passel of sisters was too excitable. Then somebody struck up a rollicking tune on a set of pipes, and another joined in on a skin drum. The Saltspray’s raed commander dragged the boy to the center of the deck while he described the bravery and strength the boy had shown in his first raid, matching his every word with the time and swell of the music.
When the dancing started up, it was too much fun, Lathe had to join in. Let Kalaset and everybody else think what they wanted. They would figure out reality soon enough.
***
Reikr was on deck that night, making Throatcuttr ready to sail.
Lathe frowned over the side of the greatship at the crew below. Nobody had told her they were leaving to sink another city.
“Trying to sneak off without me, Raed Commander?”
The wily, gray-eyed dog shook his head. “Presenting a choice. You have proven that you are an exceptional fighter, fearless and vicious, without hesitation born of uncertainty. Sail on Throatcuttr as my marshal.”
“Or what?” She leaned a hip against the rail, adjusting her steels to the new position. “Don’t choices usually have at least two parts?”
“If you are still set on returning to land, then let Throatcuttr deliver you.”
“Kalaset wants me to get myself hitched to a pirate and make a bunch of pirate babies.”
“Which you will not do.”
“’Course not! How’m I gonna do that when my sister and my brothers need me? Nah, I gotta go back.”
There was a stiffness to Reikr’s nod. “You would make a poor wife.”
“Wrong. I’d make a rich wife, and I’d make my husband rich while I was at it. But I got a lot I have to buy with that plunder; I can’t be wasting it on some pretty pirate.” She fixed him in her good eye. “You know, mostly I don’t prefer blonds, but you’re all right lookin’.”
Reikr’s expression didn’t change, but he shifted feet and stared out over the waves. He tucked his long hair behind his ear so it would stop blowing in his face.
“I gotta get back to land, me,” Lathe said. “But you already knowed that. That’s how come you’re out here loadin’ up for another run away from the greatship. Not because you figure I’ll become your marshal.”
“I hoped that, having been rescued from the cursed earth by the God of the Waves, you would make your life at sea,” he admitted. “But I thought it more likely you would stubbornly sail the course you have already set for yourself.”
“Take me to Siu Carinal, and I’ll be your marshal ’til we hit land. How about that?”
e
