Chapter Text
They were twenty days out on the sea — halfway to Shamal. Things were getting tense on the Mollymauk .
They’d taken on new crewmen in Darktow. One Ambroz Schläger, notably, to replace their boatswain whose wife had just borne them their first child, and a few other hands who came along with him.
Ambroz was the person who allegedly first brought up the tall tale about treasure in the Hespet Archipelago. Kingsley’s quartermaster, a rather shadowy halfling that he got along with but who spoke little and emoted even less, had objected to the stories being told and said they were nonsense. The quartermaster had told him that the new recruits specifically were telling stories and talking back about their veracity in a way that made it seem as though the quartermaster was the irrational one for refuting them. Somehow this revelation really upset Kingsley — he couldn’t remember why, but it was enough for him to call Schläger into his cabin to discuss it.
Ambroz Schläger was a Zemnian, broad-shouldered and barrel chested from a life of carrying ropes and adjusting sails farther and farther away from home. He had one good eye, but it wasn’t that great — murky green in color and deep set in a face lined from decades of sardonic grins. The one he’d lost he kept covered with an eyepatch that bore a silver pin in the shape of a woman’s face.
He stood with his hands on his hips in front of his new captain’s desk — Kingsley was balancing a pen, nib-down, on his finger like a dart as he spoke.
“I hear you talked back to the quartermaster considerably during your meeting with him before your shift today. You’re a seasoned sailor, you know his word stands in for mine if I’m not present, so it ought to have been for a good reason for you to do so. Would you care to tell me your side of events?”
“He kept telling me to stop talking about Sfux. He wouldn’t hear me out.”
“And what is Sfux to you?” Kingsley had already heard the spiel from other crewmen, but had yet to hear it from the originator. Schläger took a deep breath.
“Sfux is the lost city in the Hespet, off from Glintshore. A Nurari tribe built it entirely of diamonds after surviving the floods in the Calamity. It’s said to be the greatest treasure the Ozmit Sea has to offer, and I want to alter course to go look for it.”
Kingsley got up from his desk and walked in front of it to stand in front of Schläger. His tone was even — uncharacteristically serious and direct.
“We all have our vestiges and legends that we want to chase; it’s a byproduct of being on the ocean. But I’m not altering course for what is absolutely a myth. I’ve been around Glintshore many times, as has your quartermaster. We neither saw nor heard of any such city of diamonds.”
“It’s hidden, it’s carefully hidden—”
“Where’s your proof? Do you have a map? Anything other than a story?”
“I know it’s near Glintshore, but…no, I have nothing to show.”
“Because it’s a fairy tale, Schläger. Locals don’t speak of it, Marquesian sailors don’t speak of it. Think about it — it doesn’t make any sense. How on Earth would you build an entire city out of diamonds?”
Schläger didn’t move from where he was standing — seething under his heavy eyebrows.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But the Hespet is a dangerous place to sail through. Even if there were probable cause to look, I’d hate for us to run into the wrong people in the process.”
Word amongst those in the stronghold of Lord Dreadmoor was that the intruder had resisted interrogation and hadn’t said a word for an impressive two days – she’d been apprehended wearing one of the rough, gunmetal colored woolen cloaks that marked her as a member of the Grey Mist, and the upper crust of the Tempest Fang was humming with excitement about potentially having their hands on valuable information on…anything about them. Like their namesake, their membership had a miraculous ability to obfuscate and take what they wanted – usually merchandise – before vanishing completely.
Lord Tiberius Dreadmoor, a tooth in the Jawbone of the Tempest Fang, was a bronze Dragonborn standing at over seven and a half feet tall and was easily four hundred pounds. The underling had heard from whispers in the mess that he was in a foul mood – summoned away from his home in Shamal in order to address the intrusion, away from his Callista and, worst of all, his darlings Scintilla and Lux. An oil painting of the four of them hung over a too-large fireplace in Lord Dreadmoor’s office, greeting anyone who entered as the door opened to the right and encouraged those coming in to do so from the left. When the door opened, the underling had to step aside for another faceless, anemic type to exit. The warlord was writing something when the underling approached the large desk, boots digging into the expensive rug. The sight of him made Lord Dreadmoor’s blue eyes light up for half a moment. Regardless of temper, Lord Dreadmoor’s voice never raised above a conversational tone – always soft, always fatherly.
“Morning, lad. Can we still call it that?”
“Who was that?”
“Someone from the Clasp about that shipment to Tal’Dorei we… intercepted that went missing. They said something about being sent by someone from the Claret Orders after being directed here by Scoria; all that blood talk is a bit beyond me. You’re from the north, what do you know of it?”
“Little, Lord Dreadmoor.”
The warlord sighed and rubbed his temples. He set his big clawed hands on his desk and stood up to stretch out his shoulders like a panther.
“I work so hard that my daughters hardly know who I am anymore,” he griped. “The woman should have been brought up by now. Go down the hall and see if that’s so; I’ll join you all in a few moments.”
“Aye.”
The underling thought it was a little excessive to have both an office and a throne room on the same floor of the building, but the underling had never been so privileged or in possession of enough blood money as to construct his own keep in the Hespet. He made the walk down the hall, ignored the suits of armor and framed pictures of pirates dead and gone, and pulled the heavy oak door open with a flex of his shoulders.
In his mind, he’d constructed a picture of the vigilante as tall and deathly pale, thin – some sort of witch, with a constitution fortified by some sort of unnatural pact, short hair for mobility. Like the vigilante group’s namesake, a grey pallor would be cast across her skin.
None of that was the case. If he had to guess, she was barely over five feet tall. Her hair was a wreck, falling in tangled ropes past her shoulders – one half of her head blonde and the other black. They either hadn’t given her the opportunity to change out of her leather armor or she had resisted doing so alongside giving them information. Her brawny arms were buckled securely behind her back while a dwarven guard’s foot kept her held in a bowing position toward Lord Dreadmoor’s empty chair.
“Yeln, is that necessary?”
Her head snapped up to look at him – he caught grey eyes, a tattooed face. Her eyes rounded out in recognition of something. In this poor light the underling could make out that both her eyebrows were scarred, the line cutting through one of the five stars inked over each. Why she would look at a grim shadow of a man like him that way was beyond him – he’d never seen her before and had been tied to his post since he’d first been unchained in name a year back. Perhaps in her desperation it was a relief at seeing a new face instead of the gallery of torments she’d been subjected to since arriving; if he’d been forced to stare at Yeln for forty-eight hours, he probably would have looked at himself the same way.
He heard the door open again behind him as Lord Dreadmoor stalked out from behind the throne to stand in front of her, hands on his wide hips. He was very faintly shaking his head in disapproval at her.
“Had to leave my wife back in Shamal for this, so I’d like to know who you are to take a father away from his woman and little girls?”
“I could ask you the same, slaver,” said the woman. Given the surprised look on Yeln’s face, this was the first she’d spoken since they’d first encountered each other two days prior.
Tiberius tipped back his head and laughed. It was genuine, admissory. So was the steel toe he sent barreling into her chin, knocking her face upwards – the underling could hear the woman’s teeth crack as her mandible collided with her upper jaw. A spray of blood flew from her mouth.
“You are only as valuable as what you give me,” he said, gentle, disappointed tone unwavering, perfectly clear as it echoed against the high stone ceilings. “When things don’t have value here, they go away .”
The second time Lord Dreadmoor’s boot collided with her head, it was the leather-wrapped heel to the back of her skull, knocking her face back down to hit the floor. Hard.
For no more than half a second, the underling could have sworn that she had tried to budge her shoulders to reach out to him.
She lifted her head to show off a freshly broken nose. Blood dripped down her chin to puddle on the marble floor, the red stark against the white. She coughed, then stared up at the warlord and sat in defiant, cultivated silence. She spat out more blood at his feet, dirtying those pretty boots of his. Lord Dreadmoor kept shaking his head, this time in disgust – too early in the day for murder, far too late for mercy. He looked up at Yeln, foot pressed down once again between the woman’s shoulders.
“Get her out of here.”
As Yeln obliged, the Dragonborn turned to the underling and extended a claw to point towards the arc of blood at his feet.
“Would you clean this, lad?”
The underling, like everything else about what Lord Dreadmoor told him to do, had little choice but to gratify him. As he knelt to wipe up the blood with a handkerchief, the warlord addressed him.
“Go downstairs and talk to her in about an hour’s time. I think we got her attention, and the women always talk to you.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything at this point. She’s said not a word for two days.”
He tucked the bloodied handkerchief into the back pocket of his trousers and decided to make himself scarce until his next assignment.
Tiberius Dreadmoor’s stronghold held the colloquial nickname of the Snarl – most thought it was in reference to the facial expression, one that Dreadmoor had never worn personally. That wasn’t true. It was because the three disparate buildings were connected by an intricate network of service tunnels, each leading into one another and allowing for staff and merchandise to move quietly and quickly away and towards the docks, within the keep, and throughout the grounds. Any investigation into anything untoward would be directed at Tiberius’s residence and the staff housing; the third building was carefully hidden in the cliffside along with the anthill all three sat above.
Of course, all of this precaution that he’d taken was practically a joke at this point – most navies in Marquet came to Dreadmoor for galley slaves, so no one could recall the last time any sort of police inquiry had been conducted as to his business practices.
What this meant was that with enough experience it was just as easy to navigate the keep as it was to vanish in it. The underling had spent so much time lurking in the service tunnels, learning exactly what led where, that he hardly ever went outside – it had left an odd effect on his complexion, making him paler than he ever had been while a free man. Seeing the woman’s freckled, tanned skin had reminded him of what walking in the sunlight felt like, and for one more of countless times he found himself missing it.
She had her legs crossed when he arrived, a faint smile on her face as if waiting for a friend who was running late. Unfazed by the chains and devices that sat around them, and uninterested in the straps and keys that jingled from the underling’s belt. He shut the door behind him and turned to face her. The broken nose was gone – who the hell had healed her? Whoever had done so hadn’t bothered to wipe the dried blood from her face or neck.
“Well, woman–”
Her eyes flicked up sharply to meet his, the light dropping from her expression near instantly and replaced with a flash of what he’d seen in the throne room – something far more imposing. Somehow, the faint smile did not budge.
“You call me Daïna until you learn my name, if you’re so lucky,” she said. “Surely in breaking their henchmen they don’t also break your good manners?”
“Hard to say. I never had many to begin with,” said the underling with a smirk of his own. “Very well, Daïna, let’s get started, then–”
“You’re not going to get any of the information your lord would want out of me even if I had it, and even then, you were too slow on the draw. Whatever I know of the Mist is likely not true anymore.”
He didn’t know why she, clearly the one with none of the power in this interaction, thought she had the ability to make any sort of calls or talk this way in her position whatsoever. Not that he had much say in the matter, either, but the directness was a shock to the system. While he knew he didn’t have to entertain it, he did anyway.
“That so?”
“Afraid it is.”
He pulled the chair back and sat down at long last, sighing in some sort of mock resignation.
“Well, they won’t let me leave till you tell me what they need to hear about you, or the Grey Mist, or something that rhymes with it.” He produced a small carton of something out of his coat pocket. “So you’re stuck with me regardless of what you know or what you share. Would you like to play some Scorpion to pass the time?”
Her eyes narrowed. At closer inspection, the carton was indeed a pack of playing cards.
“I have to confess that I don’t know how to play, Kingsley.”
The underling stopped shuffling the cards. Coughed. The unease he’d been feeling upon getting a better look at her spiked into a dull throb that coiled lazily around his guts.
“How do you know my name?”
“Lucky guess. You look a bit regal,” she said, still not losing the little smirk. “And Yeln said it before he left.”
He breathed a sigh of relief before he smiled crookedly and resumed shuffling of the cards. All in his head.
“At any rate, Daïna, everyone knows how to play Scorpion.”
“I learned how long ago, but haven’t played it since. It can go awfully long, if I recall.”
“Only as long as you’d like for it to,” he said, gesturing at the table between them. “Much like an interrogation.”
Her nose wrinkled, warping her smile to show her eyeteeth. Two wild animals trapped in a cage together, making small talk while subtly glancing down at the other’s claws.
“Ah. Refresh me on the rules, please.” Looking at her, he was surprised someone as young as she looked would choose for him to call her that over Daïnina – like him, she appeared to be of an age where she had the luxury to choose: no more than thirty.
“You have six cards,” he began. “Each has a numeric value – the poet is worth one, two through ten are worth their numbers – four of daggers worth four, two of moons worth two and the like, plus warrior, priestess, and monarch worth ten. Your six cards need to total as close to – but not exceed – one hundred as possible. Two of one type of card is called a bite and it doubles the score of the pair – a two of thistles and a two of acorns would be worth eight instead of four, for instance. Two bites makes a sting. Four of one card is a swell, and doubles the score of your entire hand. You draw and discard one card each turn. When you think you’re at your best you’ll ever get, you put your deck down, say scorpion, and we tally who’s the closest to one hundred and such. You can’t call it till you’ve had five rounds.”
“Easy enough.”
“Famous last words,” he said with a faint smile. Done with shuffling, it was time to deal.
“Where are you from in Wildemount?”
“How the hell’d you know that?”
There was the slightest hesitation before she spoke, one that he couldn’t quantify.
“The accent to your Marquesian is undeniable .”
He went quiet, to which the woman pressed her lips into a line and began to wonder if she’d crossed a line that she shouldn’t’ve. His own parted and he pressed out a long sigh from between them.
“North,” he admitted. “Near the Quannah Breach. Ever been?”
“No,” she replied. He didn’t know if he believed her. “How long have you been kept here?”
He paused again, looking back down at his cards and drawing the one that the woman had just discarded: poet of acorns.
“And who said I was kept here?”
“You said you’d been broken earlier. And nobody from the north comes to the Espeton and stays on purpose. You’re either born here or forced into it.”
She wanted to dance, fine. Two could play at this game.
“And which are you, Daïna?”
“Born,” she said, noting how he didn’t answer her question and saying nothing of it.
“And to which ancestor do you owe the Nurari bloodline?”
Now it was her turn to stop and stare at him, distracted momentarily from the near-swell of sixes she was breasting.
“The tattoos on your forehead, your cheeks and forearms. They’re Nurari, right? And your accent in Marquesian is either Swavain or of someone whose mother tongue is Genla. The Swavain Isles are too far away to merit someone saying they were born here. And then just now you said the Genlan name, Espeton, instead of the Marquesian Hespet. I’ve never seen anyone with those markings, so I’m curious – what do the ones on your face mean?”
He could see the cogs turning behind her eyes, trying to press whatever vital information an answer of hers might contain into a souvenir shape – beautiful, superficially meaningful, transactionally useless.
“The ones above my eyebrows mean I’m my father’s daughter; the ones in front of my ears mean I’m a jana.”
Jana…jana, where had he heard that word? Based on her tone when she said it, it seemed to have some kind of arcane quality. He leaned back and narrowed his eyes, looking at her. One didn’t get a build like hers mixing potions or drawing sigils — or even adjusting sails. The rumors he’d heard about the fight she’d put up before being apprehended also seemed to imply there was more to her than spellcasting.
“I was surprised when I first saw you because I was told that the Nurari were all dead or dying,” he baited, drawing a warrior of moons to make a bite with his warrior of thistles. “That you were seafaring folk long ago and had fighters with swords made with bronze and enchanted glass, but that those folk’ve long since been killed off by pirates.”
The look on her face got less amicable by about an eighth. “Hardly. People just stopped looking,” she said flatly. “If they let you out of this compound, maybe you’d understand.”
“Perhaps. So, then, what’s a decidedly commonplace Nurari woman like yourself doing taking a stroll around the likes of Lord Dreadmoor’s castle? Far from home, aren’t you?”
“A lady can’t take a night walk?”
“A lady can’t take a night walk in full leather armor with two sabers on her person past two gates, three patrols, and one very vigilant gatemaster to the Lord’s residence, no. And especially not through the treetops. Not without cause, I don’t think. Do you?”
When she didn’t respond, Kingsley decided to try and be a little more direct about what he wanted to know.
“Who sent you?”
“No one,” she said, picking up the four of daggers that Kingsley had rejected. “I came of my own accord.”
“That’d be stupid, and you don’t look stupid to me.”
“Look harder.”
Kingsley, in spite of himself, laughed. The sound made her give him a big grin in response – a sight that made something twist inside him, but he didn’t know what for. He chalked it up to her being pretty and a little unsettling and dismissed it.
“Alright, so let’s say you’re very stupid; stupid enough to try and come here of your own accord, no provocation, to take on a warlord of the Tempest Fang and his armada on your own. Why?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I could think of several reasons, all of them being more people. Just to start.”
“It’s funny that you say 'no provocation’ as if the nest of a trafficking ring being in your backyard doesn’t qualify as a threat.”
So you live nearby, then.
“You don’t bother them, they don’t bother you.”
You say them rather than we. Why?
“You don’t sincerely believe that, do you?”
A bead of sweat traveled down the length of his spine. He felt her direct that strange gaze down to his hands – appraising the burn scars that blistered a path from his knuckles up to his wrists, marring his tattoos. Up his bare, scarred arms – there were pale marks from manacles, leather straps that had yet to fade after being out of them for only a year.
“Scorpion,” she said, putting her cards down. A swell of sixes, one warrior of daggers, one priestess of moons. Eighty-eight. He dropped his cards: a bite of monarchs and a bite of warriors to make one sting of eighty, one poet of acorns, a four of thistles. Eighty-seven.
“You win,” he said. “Beginner’s luck. We’ll have a rematch next time.”
He gathered up his cards back into their packet and stood up to leave. That serene little smile was still settled across her face. Before he left, he turned back to her.
“A little tip: they don’t do stalling here. They’ll break you regardless if you don’t give them anything at all.”
“Nobody can take you away from you,” she replied coolly.
The arches of Kingsley’s feet began to tingle and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Don’t tempt fate like that, Daïna, not unless you’re ready to kill for it. He thought of the flash in her eyes when she’d talked back to Lord Dreadmoor. When he’d called her woman.
Maybe she was.
“Keep telling yourself that, Daïna.”
“Giada.”
“Sorry?”
“My name. It’s Giada. In case the curiosity was burning you alive.”
“It wasn’t,” he lied. “Until next time.”
She gave him a nod and the door closed behind him. He took a breath for what he felt was the first time in ages.
He did what he always did when he felt like he was going to die and walked upstairs towards the mess, towards his preferred smoking balcony of the three total that serviced a staff of seventy-two.
Half the staff was out on a sweeper run – picking up more unfortunate souls to bend and morph into perfect, silent, devastated galley rowers, lackeys, concubines, gladiators. He thought back to the question Giada had asked him before he’d left: you don’t sincerely believe that, do you? No. Of course not. He flicked out the little sheaf of rolling papers from his pocket and curved it expertly between two fingers, tiny box of brightleaf in his other hand. He grabbed a filter and held it down with his thumb, tapping the three on the ledge to even it out.
He sniffed the leaves before he licked his cigarette shut, dried out to the point of being near powderlike in their consistency, and grimaced. Cut with dagroot – again. A year and a half in and he still didn’t know who he had to suck off to get some good brightleaf on this forsaken rock. He thought back to the first cigarette he’d ever personally had on the deck of the Heroez; he’d made a solemn vow to only ever have them when at his lowest, his most anxious, or his most railed. This is for stress and delight, Orly had insisted. Strong stuff. Too much is bad for the heart, cher.
They’d all be ashamed of you , he thought, eyes fixed on the horizon. There was a part of him that wanted to see a familiar set of sails coming towards the Snarl – riding in to bail him out. He had no idea if he could ever face Fjord at this point. Were it today, he would sooner throw himself from the rooftop. He should’ve just died when they tortured him – what he hadn’t known then was that giving into it was a fate far worse. Now, unlike his previous incarnations, he had to live with himself. He took off his boots and rubbed at the arches of his feet, holding the unlit cigarette between his teeth.
While he grabbed for his matchbook he heard a creak below and looked down to hear the grunt of someone hauling something heavy to dump. There it was — another poor wretch who didn’t make it, their shattered body thrown out to splinter on the rocks before sliding into the water. The process either broke your soul bad enough to kill you or it broke something else. Many experienced the former, especially within the first week. After decades, the disposal process for the rejects was down to a science.
It started with the secondary ripple after the corpse stilled in the water: the acknowledgement of an offering. The lull between this and the initial thrashing was no more than one second — one, two, three of them, often more, would twist around their newest acquisition with gusto, tearing and snapping with yellow-brown teeth like needles. Red on dark blue made black; the water stayed inklike for easily half an hour after the corpse was adequately consumed. The gulls were happy to accept the leftovers, patiently waiting on the calcified, salt-crusted bones that made up the rock beach that ringed the jagged shoreline.
“Pining, lad?”
Kingsley’s head snapped back to look at Tiberius leaning in the doorway — it never ceased to amaze him at how such a large man could move so quietly. He turned back to the water beneath them, looked down at the rocks and the not-rocks, and dreamed of the feel of a helm in his hands.
“Getting some air. Not much of that in those cells.”
“What’d you get from her?”
“Next to nothing,” he said. “Her name is Giada. She’s from the Hespet, born and raised, Nurari–”
“She’s a fraud,” said Tiberius dismissively. “Those kinds of tattoos were distinct to the southern tribes, and they’ve been extinct for at least a hundred years. The Glistern made sure of that.”
“The Glistern?”
“One of the old pirate networks the Fang ate up before you were even born. The islanders were getting in the way of their business…alas, different times.”
Kingsley had heard all sorts of different stories – most bordering on fables – but he’d never heard the pirate gang responsible named specifically.
“Did you see her sabers? Were they made of bronze and glass?”
“Yeln stashed them in the armory for when the blacksmith gets back from leave in a few days,” said Tiberius. “I didn’t check, nor did anyone say anything remarkable about them. Neither here nor there. What else?”
“She said she’s a jana. Is that also some kind of Nurari thing?”
“Aye, but that I know nothing about. That’s interesting. Well done.”
He found himself tasting metal at the idea that her fate might be decided based solely on how firm she was in not cooperating. That didn’t stop him from admiring her for it.
“What do you plan to do with her?”
“She’s certainly no candidate for the Vivarium looking the way she does, and if she got on the water I’ve no doubt that she’d find some way to skip out or worse and I’d have to issue a refund for an irate customer…or a condolence note to a new widow. But from what I heard of how she fought, she’d be great fun in the Tidepools. Think I’ll let Titus know he has a new champion on the way within the next few days.”
In the year that he’d been in Tiberius’s employ, Kingsley had gotten very good at hiding feelings like fear, or sadness, or abject disgust. All Tiberius saw was a flat, polite smile and a prim nod in response. But the thing about being polite is that if not done carefully, it can give the impression of being unafraid, or worse: familiar.
Tiberius didn’t like the vacuum that his process left in those who came to him for adjustment — distasteful towards the gentility it seemed to leave in its wake, he preferred to give his men a sting periodically to remind them of whom they must respect and what he could do to them if they got any idea as to otherwise. Many a father feels entitled to the occasional spanking:
“The pointy one downstairs will be sent as well.”
“You mean Felaun? He’s hardly in fighting shape.”
“Bait, then, for the beasts. But we’ve spent enough time and space on him.”
“He didn’t–”
“Do anything? Exactly. What did I say about things that don’t do anything in this keep, lad?”
“They go away.”
“Aye. No special treatment. And he’s gotten that plenty as it is . ”
“When was the last time you went to a gladiator fight at the Tidepools?” Kingsley wanted to know if he knew exactly what he was sending captives to. Kingsley knew, deep down, that regardless of his answer Tiberius had long since stopped thinking of the enslaved as people and instead thought of them as work – cattle to brand, milk, slaughter as he saw fit.
“Years – not to my taste, personally, nor Callista’s. I get plenty of word back, though. Honestly, I can’t be arsed to make the voyage. Titus is so cagey about us using his teleportation circle and sailing’s such a bore.”
“You don’t miss it, pirate lord?”
“No, can’t say I do. Too old and too much going on for me shoreside. Sea doesn’t call me anymore — just waves.”
Kingsley looked back at Tiberius, who gave him a smile that showed far too many teeth, and the warlord turned away.
“You’re going to give both of them their last meals before they go for conditioning. Let the Mist girl know it’s the best she’ll be eating for a long time. She still has enough in her head to complain about it.”
Conditioning? Even for Felaun? Kingsley trotted down to the bottom floor while wringing his hands, tail waving agitatedly behind him.
Felaun, it was believed, had decided that it was better to take the impact of bondage like a great stone statue as opposed to blown glass the way Kingsley believed he had; he had been locked in the solitary confinement chamber for the better part of six months in a last ditch attempt to get him to become compliant. He was a sorry sight when Kingsley opened the door to his cell, straw blond hair matted with sweat and the long, thin scar that cut across the bridge of his nose turned pink from the heat. He had been round-faced for an elven sort when he and Kingsley had been thrown into the same cell eighteen months prior — now he was gaunt, hooded eyes sunken even further back into his skull to the point of being wraithlike. His tail — he had a plumed tail like a lion’s, Kingsley had promised himself he’d figure out why the hell Felaun had a tail someday — thumped in acknowledgement against the floor when the door closed behind them. When they’d been shackled, they had held tails until one of the guards had moved them to sit at opposite sides of the cell.
“You’re going to be shipped off to the Tidepools as monster bait.”
The only way Kingsley knew that Felaun had moved his eyes was by how his head tilted — they were overshadowed by his brow, giving the impression of ghastly black circles where hazel eyes had once rested. Kingsley put both of his scarred hands on his friend’s thin shoulders.
“They’re gonna fucking kill you if you don’t start doing what they say, Felaun. I can’t help you anymore.”
Felaun’s lips parted, tongue pushed to the roof of his mouth to form the first word Kingsley had heard him say in over a year:
“Now.”
Kingsley felt his throat begin to close up, thought to the woman above them and to the countless people who had filtered under the bridge he felt he had sold his soul to stand upon. He understood, nodded, and turned around to walk back up the stairs, wringing his hands behind his back.
He’d thought about this for months, and what he’d decided was this: he’d needed to wait till the Snarl was understaffed and disorganized, and he’d need a few prisoners who still could fight if given the chance. He did have both now.
There were twenty cells on the main floor – each with a maximum of three occupants. Half the staff was gone, leaving a staff of thirty-five guards total versus sixty-one people. Not all of them were going to fight, many were going to run, as they ought to. If he and Giada fought, that would be eighteen to a person. If one more joined them, twelve. It seemed farfetched, but he’d heard songs sung about people doing more with less.
For the ease of moving people around and cleaning out cells, there was an automated crank that opened the cell doors at the alcove where the guards usually sat when they kept their watch. Like a drawbridge, it was activated with a lever. If Yeln was working a double tonight to impress, he’d be exhausted and would certainly be out cold by ten o’clock; it usually took a good ten minutes of consistent shoving for Kingsley to wake him up when he took over at midnight. He could knock the lever easily, unleash hell, and it would take at least five minutes for Yeln to even realize something had happened. Most of the other guards were stationed downstairs with the wilder bunch in the conditioning chambers – as they came running up, he could run down and grab Felaun and run for the docks with whoever saw fit to join him. He’d rather not pilot a whole ship on his own, but if he was motivated enough to do so and it was small enough…he probably could.
But Kingsley, you’re enslaved, so by policy you’re unarmed and not paid, and you have all the élan of a wet lapdog. How are you going to fight your way out?
Delighted that you ask! Guess fucking what?
He reached into the slit he’d torn into the straw mattress he slept on every night and pulled out a lidded box made of intricately carved, burnished black metal. The packaging had said something about Hupperdook – he’d heard the rumors of odd booty and snuck the package into his coat the moment he knew the guard had been changing, stealing out the back door of the armory and taking the back staircase to the barracks. He’d long since burned the packaging to hide the evidence; all that remained was the case within. He flipped open the lid to be sure they were still there.
Two long, silver pistols of a type he’d never seen before rested on cherry red velvet cradles. One pistol had a rose engraved along the barrel, the other bore the path of fate is sacrosanct in Infernal; the former had more climbing roses and leaves embossed in the leather of the handle, the latter a nest of briars. The note tucked in the case between one of the pistols and the plush velvet padding bore a seal shaped like a vine-wrapped halberd in dark purple wax.
A briar and a thorn for the scarlet rose of the Claret Orders, the note read. A new design, easier than one of your flintlocks. For hemocraft, hold the burr on the hammer when you cock it to prick your thumb – one prick fuels five rounds. Slide the latch back to release the cylinder to reload or empty it.
When there was no one around in the barracks, he would slide the cylinder in and out to look at the bullets. Ten in each. He had good aim from fighting with a whip for years; he was hoping that it could translate to a firearm; maybe he could use these to get back to his Lash.
“Take what you can carry,” he said aloud to himself. These? These, he could carry. Whether or not he knew how to wield the pistols, though, was a different story. Tonight, he resolved. There was one last thing he needed to do to try and put his plan into action. Do or die, and he’d already done plenty of dying.
It was the guns and one other thing that everything depended on, which was the one article he’d managed to keep on his person from before he’d arrived here. Kingsley spent the entire long walk down to Giada’s cell rehearsing his little speech, the flow of each piece to say budding into the other. When she looked up as he unlocked the cell door with her food, he spoke quickly, fluidly, all the while feigning nonchalance. Her life depended on it.
“You’re going to the Tidepools in a few days to become a gladiator,” he said. “You’re headed to be conditioned in the morning, where they’ll wipe you clean and break you more for safekeeping if they haven’t broken you already – or even if they have, they’re not very discriminating. I’m sure after they punch holes in your brain that they’ll throw you to the blue doors to strap a cool sword on you or something. And, thus, I’m afraid that as things stand, I won’t be able to play any more Scorpion with you. Perhaps there’ll be time to play solitaire in conditioning,” he tossed his deck of cards to her with a clink . “Check by midnight when I’m out – I’ll be around then if I left a card or two out of the pack, but I won’t know if you don’t look and tell me. Be sure to count them.”
She nodded silently, taking the tray of bread and water and holding the roll with both hands. He tipped his head to her and turned back around.
She waited for his footsteps to recede before opening the deck of cards to see that the carton was empty except for what looked like a tiny spyglass charm on a silver chain. She took the charm and pulled it out to expand into a lockpick. She collapsed it again and hung the chain around her neck. Midnight, when I’m out. I’ll be around then.
If she really strained to listen, she could hear the clock chiming the hour in the mess upstairs. She looked at the light filtering from outside and stuck her face to the vent, sticking her fingers out to try and measure how far the sun was from the horizon. Probably four hours, if she had to guess.
This had to be a setup, one last ploy to get her to reveal more information to save herself. Did she care? No. If she was armed and he tried anything, he wouldn’t stand a chance. She was ready to ensure it. She sat up straight and tied her hair back.
She was thankful that she was kept in one of the few rooms that had a proper lock, for the first time – kept alone, lest she taint any of the “merchandise” or give anyone ideas.
Late at night, probably more than half an hour after she heard the clock chime eleven times, she heard a howling at the other end of the hallway – the guards, bored at a time like this with so little to do, seemed to make the decision to all go look at who was upset and why. She heard the oiled clickclickclick of all twenty cell doors opening simultaneously upstairs as she picked the lock. She opened the door and crouched, crawled out into the hall; she figured there was only a matter of seconds before the guards noticed and realized that someone was where they weren't supposed to be. Blue doors for a cool sword . She glanced to her left – so they were, sea-blue at the end of the hall, no more than twenty paces away. Thank you, Kingsley. She sprinted and grabbed for the doorknob – unlocked, she assumed by Kingsley too – and flung herself inside the armory, slamming the door behind her. She could hear shouting, motion.
Move. Quickly .
There they were, her beloveds, leaning in the corner in their leather scabbards – they’d been so kind as to leave her sword belt and woven sash alongside them. She wrapped the sash tight around her midriff as she listened for louder footsteps. The copper chain that hung from her belt jingled as she fastened it around her waist. The sound of boots pounding down the hall towards her filled her ears as she wrapped both hands around the grips of her sabers.
The door opened – six guards were met with the sight of the Nurari woman standing alone in the corner, bronze and green glass blades drawn, face twisted into a grin as her eyes and tattoos glowed white. Rage – the cleanest burning fuel there ever was.
Let’s go.
Here’s the thing about the Snarl: there is just enough time between pulling the lever and the backup arriving for one to drop into a corner and watch as those who want freedom run for it and those who want blood stay for the show. By the time Yeln awoke and the guards from downstairs had run up, nearly everyone who could move had already done so. Kingsley had stolen to the nook between the third cell and the fourth, horns brushing against the sconce where the torch would have been if he hadn’t removed it earlier in the day.
Something that had occurred to him earlier as he’d walked down to raise hell was that firing a gun makes noise. This meant, then, that the moment he used his weapon he would give his location away. The nature of his weapon also meant that he had to wait for the guards to leave their posts to deal with the prisoners before he could make a break for the stairs; if he had only twenty bullets for heavens knew how long, blowing through most of them on the first night seemed like a terrible idea.
As he heard bodies start to hit the ground in the armory downstairs and as more guards crashed up the stairs to try and find the escapees, he heard rattling – someone was stuck in one of the cells near him, trying to get out of their chains.
He needed to go – it was now or it was never. The service exit with its two-pronged tunnels to the conditioning chambers and the docks beckoned as the rattling got louder.
What’s it all for, King?
He didn’t have an answer when he darted instead towards the cells, skeleton key in hand, to release the half-elf who hadn’t quite figured out the catch to his chains. They nodded at each other, Kingsley jerked his head towards the service exit, and the newly free man started running. He drove the burr into his thumb, winced, and cocked the gun. As the blood flowed into the transparent chamber, he saw the rose along the barrel glow red. Here goes nothing .
So he was staying? Who else was there? He stuck out his head and looked just as the door opened and another heat of guards came running up in a frantic wave. He recognized one of them just as he lifted the gun, pointed it, and fired.
The kick to the pistol wasn’t one he was accustomed to. It knocked his wrist back in a way that made him flinch. As the bullet left the chamber, he saw the rose darken faintly – that radiant light followed the bullet out, wrapping tightly around it to make the world’s smallest comet. He watched it kiss the guard’s forehead before burrowing deep, the guard’s flesh flying out of the way to escape the impact. Kingsley didn’t have enough time to marvel before he had to cock the gun a second time and fire again. This time the bullet buried itself into his second target’s gut, having managed to pierce the flimsy leather armor they were all given.
There were still six more people running at him – a miracle, maybe, would be nice? Panicking, he took the gun and whipped a third person across the face, hearing the bones crack and wincing again. He took a kick to the back and felt it in his kidneys.
Even in the commotion, he heard a faint jingle in the distance.
“Come back,” he heard a woman’s voice call up the staircase – transformed, somehow, low and guttural. He saw a faint glow that was only getting brighter as the footsteps got louder. Giada came barrelling into the hall with a white-hot beam of rage pouring from her face and two drawn sabers – bronze and glass, Tiberius be damned – “I’m not done with you.”
He emptied another bullet into another guard’s face, Giada carving her way through two more. He knocked another one out with the butt of a pistol; Giada turned when Yeln came running at her, finally conscious, brandishing his handaxe in one hand while extending the other in something trying to resemble diplomacy:
“Stand down , you’re not–”
Before Kingsley could even track that Giada had raised a hand to him, the dwarf’s head went flying off his shoulders – an arc of blood spattering both them and the stone wall behind him as his body slumped forward.
“NOT WHAT?” Giada roared, flicking the blood off her sword as she sheathed it and went running towards the window at the end of the hall. Before she could jump out and certainly fall prey to whatever lay lurking in the water below, Kingsley called out for her; she froze.
“Follow me,” he said. She didn’t move towards him. The glow flickered out – she blinked.
“Please,” he said, feeling the nape of his neck growing cold. “Please. ”
She looked at the window, then back at him. He held up his hands, one still wrapped around a pistol.
“Trust me. You don’t want to do that. If it worked, there’d be a lot more people washing up on other islands, wouldn’t there?”
She closed her eyes, breathed, and followed him down the staircase from whence she’d come.
“Where are we going?”
“Down and out. There’s someone I need to grab.”
She followed him closely, keeping watch as he unlocked the familiar cell downstairs; Giada realized that this could have been the very cell where the prisoner was howling earlier. Was he in on it too? Must be.
Take what you can carry, Kingsley reminded himself as he slung Felaun across his shoulders.
“Let me out!”
Once again, he had to go, but Giada had other plans – running down the hall to pick at the lock to the prisoner’s cell. She saw two women when she flung open the door, both strapped to tables: a half-orc and a halfling. She quickly snapped the leather holding them prone and helped them up.
“Can you run?”
“I think so.”
“Keep up or fall behind,” she said, running back towards Kingsley and quickly getting overtaken by the half-orc with the halfling on her back.
The service tunnel that led to the docks was deliberately made as complex and as confusing as possible in order to thwart exactly what the five of them were doing and vice versa – anyone looking to liberate a captive would likely get caught before they even made it to a staircase. Kingsley, who had dedicated so much of his free time to figuring out exactly what led where, was in the unfortunate position of carrying a person that was taller than him and also being required to lead the pack. By the time he saw the moonlight hitting the waves, he felt like his lungs had been shredded to pulp by his ragged breathing. They made it to the docks – five ships, every other one out on the sweep. The furthest away from them on the dock was a little cargo vessel. Nimble, nondescript. Perfect. As they approached, Kingsley turned to call back:
“Giada!”
She caught up to him.
“Can you sail?”
“Of course–”
“Take him and get ready, I’ll take the back and buy you all some time.”
He tried to hand Felaun off to her; when she tried to hang him over her shoulders the way Kingsley had, his feet dragged on the ground. Rolling her eyes and sheathing her swords, she held him in both her arms instead and started to run up the gangplank.
Seeing that all of them had made it onto the weather deck, he caught the halfling’s attention as she dismounted from her larger companion. He pointed to the anchor and made a hoisting motion; the halfling struggled before the half-orc reached over her and pulled up the anchor, heaving with her big arms while Kingsley redirected his attention to the four other boats still parked alongside theirs.
Gods, this was fucking stupid – he didn’t have time to do any ropework or set anything on fire, this was his best option. He ran down the line and fired one bullet into the hull of each ship, blasting a hole roughly the size of a melon into each one. As they began to sink, he heard the shouts coming from the tunnel: they’d finally caught up.
Sprinting back towards the cargo vessel, he unmoored it and threw the rope into the water. He planted his boot on the hull and shoved the boat into motion before leaping to grab onto the railing, watching the gangplank fall into the water and breathing a sigh of relief before having to quickly extricate himself to avoid the arrows being shot at him. As he scrambled over, he saw that Felaun had saved just enough energy and had stood up to grab for the helm while Giada had run below deck to check for stowaways and see the inventory. He turned back to the half-orc.
“Can you sail?”
“I don’t know anything ,” said the half-orc, shaking her head. Fuck, that was right – he had no idea how much they’d been conditioned.
“Look, just take this rope and hold on tight, okay? Point it that way. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes.”
He could hear the halfling praying for wind. Silently, he followed suit. He looked up just as the sails began to swell and sighed in relief, feeling the give of the water against the wood and the rock of the hull and feeling like, maybe, this could work.
Ten yards. Twenty. Forty. Eighty. She was small, but she was fast.
He climbed up the mast to get a better look at the Snarl; every light was ablaze in every window. Available fleet scuttled, all they could do was seethe as the five of them vanished into the horizon. He closed his eyes and offered a little prayer for any of the escapees who might not be as adept at vanishing into the woods or sailing off on a raft as others might be.
He had been prudent enough to wait for them to get out of the range of the arrows before asking them a more casual question.
“What’s your name, do you know that much?”
“Tess.”
“I’m Penny,” said the halfling.
“Well, Tess, Penny, I’m Kingsley. The long one is Felaun, the…” Kingsley was about to say short before he made eye contact with Penny. “...tattooed one that just went downstairs is Giada.” She was no more tattooed than he was, but he was confident in their ability to tell the two of them apart. He walked up to Felaun and relieved him, pointed him down to the captain’s quarters for his well-deserved rest.
He didn’t know if it was a trick of the light – either from the water, the lanterns, or the moon – but after looking back one last time, he swore he saw a massive silhouette that shone bronze, standing right at the gap their ship had left behind.
“It’s not urgent, but where’s everyone sleeping?”
“I’ll take the captain’s cabin with Felaun,” Kingsley began. “We’re both restless sleepers. I think it best for us to be quarantined together until he’s well and can choose where to go.”
“Penny, you and I can sleep in the storeroom?”
“Sure.”
Kingsley thought about his time with Fjord and how being an officer on the ship had meant his own room; a part of him wanted Felaun to recover quickly so that he could, after a year and a half, return to his passion for sleeping in the nude.
“Tess, can you hang onto the helm for a little bit? Just hold it still. I’ll be right back.”
He ran downstairs and opened one of the doors to storage, hoping to catch Giada alone – an error, he realized, at the exact moment he opened it. He drew a pistol when he heard the running sound of a saber leaving its scabbard; her eyes were steady, perfectly level with his. She was still slightly out of breath from running, both of them cold with a faint dew of sweat. The edge of the blade dug ever so gently into the soft skin at his jaw, opening it just enough for a trickle of blood to wet the metal. The barrel of his gun pressed against her throat with the same restraint.
“Easy, Giada,” he said, only the slightest of tremors to his voice. “Here to talk about an agreement.”
She still remained silent, but the look in her eyes changed enough to make him decide he could keep talking without risking his life.
“You’ll navigate, take me where I tell you to go,” he continued. “You know this place best.” Pause. “And you’ll be my quartermaster until Felaun is well. Do we have a deal?”
“If I think for a moment that my freedom is to be revoked, you’ve seen how good I am with this saber. And if I seem to betray you, feel free to let me eat whatever metal’s in the chamber of your gun. And yes.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
“Aye.”
“Yes.”
Both arms lowered, both gazes did not. He took two steps away from her, still facing her as he reached for the doorknob and opened the door once more. Her eyes softened – not much, but enough for him to notice.
“I’ll be up to take the helm in ten minutes’ time. Go rest.”
“Good night, Daïna.”
“Good night, Captain.”
Kingsley went up to resume his post until Giada came back up and took it from him. He went to the captain’s quarters, looked at Felaun sprawled across the bed, and decided to grab a blanket and take the desk chair.
When Kingsley awoke the next morning, the ship was anchored – when he looked out the window he saw rock. It seemed Giada had found a sea cave big enough for them to hide in. He saw that Felaun had managed to get up and walk out of the cabin of his own accord. When he followed suit, he then saw that the rest of the crew were having breakfast on the weather deck.
“Slow bites, easy, you’ll get sick otherwise,” said Penny, feeding Felaun tiny pieces of dry sausage like a dog under the table at tea. Felaun didn’t seem to mind; Kingsley could make out the faint change of shadow under his eyes that meant he was batting his eyelashes at her.
Giada had visibly relaxed since the night before; the smile was back, saying something to Tess while handing her some more of the food that they’d liberated from downstairs. Tess was rubbing a big pink hand along her shaved head, only recently grown into a dark peach fuzz, when she saw Kingsley and gave him a nod.
“What’s the plan? Is there one?”
Kingsley’s face was blank, set serenely as he cradled his cup of water in his hands. In the morning light, Tess could make out a faint spatter of dark purple freckles across his nose that was previously obfuscated by shadow and a thin layer of grime.
“I want the entire Jawbone to go up in smoke. Not reformed, not reworked, dead and torched.”
He grabbed his pen and leaned over the map he’d grabbed from the desk, straightening it out so that the others could get a good view of what he was moving them towards.
“Along with Tiberius, there are five other warlords of the Tempest Fang. There used to be sixteen in total, but they came together and killed off the other ten. ”
His voice was steady as he circled and named each spot on the map and the warlord who operated it. He had been meditating on this information for a long time. Tess had to follow his voice and the curve of his hand on the paper in order to accurately read his handwriting.
“We just left Tiberius on an island he likes to call Moorcove but every map known to man calls Palau, no matter whom he pays. Then there’s Jaine Hawke, the bootlegger at the Lotus in Vasta, here on Diador. Kirké Florakis, the madam at the Vivarium in Gallu, a little further south. Titus Procella, fightmaster at the Tidepools even farther south in Olvia. Scoria Benatar, who runs the black market out of Mount Arcade in Bosa. And last, there’s Maxima, who the rest of them seem to answer to and who I have no idea where she might be.”
“Are we going back for Tiberius?”
“We are absolutely going back for Tiberius, but we’re not ready for him yet.”
“Suppose it makes sense that we should leave the eight foot tall lizard man for another day,” said Tess. “So who are we ready for?”
“Tiberius mentioned that nobody’s heard from Hawke in some twenty years. I want to check there first to see if he’s dead or not. Then I think we’ll go for Kirké.”
“There’s an outpost near Gallu — Ganatar, here on Rixta — where we can stop for food and supplies,” said Giada, pointing to the crescent-shaped island labeled Rista on the map. “There are a few people who’ve escaped the Vivarium living in Ganatar now who might have observed some important things. And I know there’s someone there who can look at your new toys, Kingsley, so that you can figure out how to reload them and with what.”
“Good idea.”
He looked up to Tess.
“Are you and Penny in?”
“I’m no fighter,” said Penny. “Honestly, I’d prefer to head to Ank’Harel the minute this one is feeling well enough to help you all.” Was Felaun looking bashful?
“I follow where she does,” said Tess.
“Well, there are healers and such in Ganatar,” said Giada. “We can revisit there once we have a better idea of what kind of recovery he’s in for.”
“One more question: what do we call this ship?”
“We’ll call her…hmm.” This wasn’t the Mollymauk. He’d get a bigger, better ship for that. “The Second Wind, ” he declared.
“I like it,” said Penny.
While Tess went to pull up the anchor, Kingsley stood up to take his turn at the helm, pointing them towards Vasta. Tess pushed off from the rock to launch them, a gust catching them as they exited. He took a deep breath, exhaled. The wind grabbed him by the head, put its seven fingers through his hair and ruffled it affectionately.
He was back. Better remained to be seen.