by Brent Weeks
Then, a shouted order, and the slaves stowed their oars with unhurried precision.
With the crash, Gavin was thrown out of his reverie. Wood screaming on wood. Oars snapping like kindling. Men shouting in pain and fear and rage. Muskets rattling. A cannon booming. The stench of black powder and fear. Men thrown off their benches. Gavin found himself staring at a gap-toothed sailor in the other ship. The man was standing up, having been thrown down by the collision. He had a slow match in hand, and was right behind a charged cannon.
Gavin flung out a hand, willing a spike of blue to fly into the man’s eyes.
Nothing.
The man looked at him quizzically, then an oar cracked his face. He dropped, but someone else grabbed the slowmatch.
The ships continued their slide past each other, and the cannon boomed. Wood exploded, tearing the steps off and filling the slaves’ deck with burning hot blinding smoke. The Bitter Cob’s cabin boy staggered past Gavin’s bench in the smoke, twisted metal protruding from his back.
Another cannon boomed, tearing a hole upward, letting dazzling sunlight in, illuminating the roiling black smoke. The very air seemed on fire. All the slaves were coughing, lying down, abandoning their task of stabbing their counterparts with the oars.
Gavin heard the clatter of the grappling hooks at the end of the boarding nets as they were thrown across the now widening gap between the ships. Pirates were shouting, and the distinctive crack of Captain Gunner’s musket sounded with a frequency that shouldn’t have been possible. Shouted orders, and the clatter of feet across the decks over their heads, and the pirates boarded the other ship.
Then, abruptly, the Bitter Cob was quiet. The wind blowing through the oar-holes and the two big holes from cannon fire began dispersing the smoke. The slaves began sitting up, assessing the damage, even as screams for mercy and shouts of rage sounded from the other ship just paces away.
The cabin boy was dead, or unconscious and on his way to dead, lying in the center aisle. A young kid, and not possessed of good looks or virtue, but not deserving this, regardless.
The stairs up to the second deck were half torn off. Half a row of slaves had been pulverized. Blood slicked the deck in the back rows.
Before Gavin could even complete an inventory, someone swung down from the boarding nets and dropped in through the hole the cannon had blasted. He clambered for a bit, almost losing his balance. Any of the slaves nearby could have knocked him into the sea, but they were all frozen with surprise. The man was light-skinned, blond, dressed richly. Gavin didn’t recognize him immediately as one of the crew. Worse, it didn’t look like any of the other slaves did, either. He wasn’t one of the Bitter Cob’s sailors, and he had a sword.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “If you’ll row for me, I’ll free you.” He let that sink in for a second, then said, “I’ll free you now if you’ll help me throw off the boarding nets. But quick!”
With his voice, Gavin placed him immediately. The young man could only be Antonius Malargos, a cousin of Tisis Malargos, who had become the Green briefly, before Gavin had deposed her, and a nephew of Dervani Malargos, who had become a god briefly, before Gavin had killed him.
“Who’s with me?” Antonius asked.
A slave raised his manacled hand, and Antonius’s pale skin lit with red luxin. He filled the lock with red luxin and then set it alight, burning it out. It burned the slave’s wrist, too, but he was free.
“Quickly! We have only moments,” Antonius said. “Most of the pirates are on the other ship. We kill the few men still here, cut the boarding nets, and push off. I’ll free you all, I swear it on Orholam’s name.”
It was a decent plan, if a desperate one. The other galley didn’t have any oars on one side. If Antonius could seize the Bitter Cob and throw off the boarding nets, he’d have a good chance. If he made it ten paces, he’d probably make it back to port.
And as a Malargos, he had no reason to make sure Gavin made it home alive. In his place, Gavin didn’t think he’d bring Antonius home. His family’s mortal enemy, delivered into his hand. Gavin’s heart despaired.
He saw Leonus had fallen between two slaves’ benches. The man had struggled to his hands and knees. He was bleeding a stream from his scalp. Looked worse than it was: scalp wounds bleed heavily. But he did look woozy. Should Gavin warn Antonius?
A slave behind Gavin raised manacled hands. Antonius sighed with relief that another slave was taking his offer. He began walking back toward him. His eyes fell on Gavin, then moved on. No recognition. The Prism was dead. This bearded creature in rags and filth was nothing.
Gavin felt sudden hope that he might live, and a sense of the most profound divorce from himself he’d ever known. Antonius had seen Gavin in person before, and seen his face reproduced in a thousand paintings, etchings, and mosaics. And he didn’t see him. He saw a slave. Gavin had thought himself inseparable from his power, from his title, from his position. He wasn’t even inseparable from his own face.
Antonius stopped. Looked at Gavin again quizzically. His eyes widened. Gavin missed whatever happened on the boy’s face next because he was looking at the boy’s raised sword. So much revenge for the Malargos family, that close.
Gavin knew death, and he watched it coming, unblinking.
Antonius dropped to his knees. “Your Holiness? You live!”
Gavin’s eyes snapped back to the boy’s. Far from thirsty for vengeance, if anything, Antonius looked on the verge of tears. Tears of worship, adoration, hope.
A child, not bound by what his parents hated. An innocent, putting his faith in a man he’d never met.
“Your Holiness, let’s get these chains off you!”
How long had it been since Gavin had seen such goodness? How long since he’d felt it himself? Too long, and now it was too—
Too late, Gavin saw the movement. Leonus lurched to his feet behind Antonius. Gavin’s hand shot out to stop him—and was jerked short as he reached the end of his chain, the manacle biting into his wrist, bloodying it. Worse, stopping it. But all Gavin saw was Leonus, crashing into Antonius’s back, blade first. He tackled the young man into Gavin, stabbing repeatedly. Gavin was carried off the back of his bench by their momentum, the bench cutting his knees out from under him. The oar overhead and his manacles kept him from falling all the way to the ground, as his oarmates first were caught unprepared, and then tried to help drag Gavin out of harm’s way.
Gavin couldn’t move fast enough. He pulled the bandages from his hands, unraveling them as fast as possible, and lashed out with a knee. He missed because he was held too far away, then he kicked out with one bare foot at Leonus. Somehow, he hit the man in the throat.
Leonus rolled back on his heels, gasping. It gave Gavin a split second, and he used it to drape his bandages down around Leonus’s neck. Once, twice, Gavin wrapped them, and then he yanked. It pulled the man off balance toward him.
Instantly abandoning his plan to strangle the man, Gavin hugged Leonus’s head against his chest. With his twisted spine, Leonus’s neck had grown thick as a bull’s with muscle. Gavin whipped his torso left and right, left and right. He couldn’t hear any crack of the neck breaking, didn’t feel it, so he whipped back and forth until he was certain Leonus wasn’t moving. He was a beast, and the rage was all.
And he was too late.
He released Leonus, unwrapped the bandages, and heaved his foul body into the aisle. He looked at Antonius’s body lying between the benches.
Lying between the benches … and blinking up at Gavin. “I think I owe my aunt Eirene an apology,” the boy said, very much alive. He spread one of the cut gaps in his tunic, showing a coat of the finest Ilytian mesh-steel beneath it. “She gave me this for my birthday. I asked for a racehorse. I complained.”
“F-fuck,” Fukkelot said, impressed.
Antonius jumped to his feet, shaking it off. He began patting his pockets, looking for something. “My spectacles. My red spectacles! Where are they
? I can’t burn open your manacles without them!”
The slaves began looking around furiously. Suddenly, freedom was this close—and with Leonus dead, it suddenly seemed real.
“Ah!” someone cried out. He lifted a mangled frame, the red lenses shattered to dust and tiny bits nowhere near big enough to draft through. There was blood on the deck—could it be enough? No, there wasn’t enough light. To Gavin’s eyes, it was a black pool.
Then Orholam stood. He lifted a hand. He held the manacle key.
Chapter 31
Arys Greenveil rose from the bed where her new lover lay spent. She drew a silk robe around her heavily pregnant belly. Child number thirteen didn’t seem to want to leave her womb yet. Stubborn, like his mother. Her own mother had taught her that lovemaking would help convince a child to come to the light, and Arys had no baseline to say her mother was wrong—she’d tried it with every pregnancy. With her third, Jalen, her climax agonies had melded directly to labor pains, and Jalen was the sweetest of her children by far.
But this boy, number thirteen—the number of Orholam added to the number of man—he was going to be special, she knew it. Just as she knew it was going to be a boy. She moved to her desk and began reading her correspondence. The correspondence never ended for Arys Sub-red. Letters from her satrap, of course, but also letters from family begging favors, from family friends begging favors, from friends of family friends begging favors. There were people asking favors for things she couldn’t control in a hundred years. Her secretary, mercifully, separated all the beggars into stacks, and usually did an excellent job of it, but there were things a woman had to do herself.
Arys kept her own lists of favors granted and favors owed, and when she could, she matched those back and forth, trading up favors so that the right people would owe her for times such as this. Her home satrapy, Blood Forest, was going to be invaded, perhaps within weeks. The news wasn’t encouraging. Against orders, General Azmith was preparing to make a grand stand at a town named Ox Ford on the Ao River. Her sources didn’t think much of the man, or of the plan.
Atash had fallen as fast as a bard’s pants, barely slowing the Color Prince’s advance. If this wild gamble at Ox Ford didn’t work, her own people were next. Arys would do anything she had to do to save her people.
She looked at one of her personal letters. It was from her sister, Ela. Ela was at least as passionate as Arys, and not half as wise. Ela claimed that Gavin Guile had seduced and murdered her daughter, Ana. She begged, demanded, ordered, and begged again that Arys do everything in her power to avenge her niece.
Not that Arys had been sitting still. As soon as she’d heard Ana had died, she’d begun investigating. Of one thing she was certain: Gavin hadn’t seduced Ana; Ana had been trying to seduce Gavin. According to her roommate, Ana had tried half a dozen times despite increasingly firm rebuffs. The roommate had also said that Ana had been under intense pressure from her mother Ela to seduce Gavin, though that had taken some prodding to get out of the frightened girl. Whatever had happened in that room, Ana, the damned fool girl, had gone there of her own accord, and she shouldn’t have been there. The Blackguards on duty had sworn, at least three times, that Gavin had screamed in fury at the girl and she’d jumped off the balcony in terror.
Ana had been a pretty girl, and love her though she did, Arys had thought she was spoiled horribly. When people had less than half a dozen children, they always spoiled them. Ana had probably never had a man scream at her in her life. And yet, jumping off a balcony?
Was Ana that stupid? Arys didn’t think so, but there was no way to prove it, was there? There were three witnesses, and they all said the same thing. Arys had hired the most beautiful courtesan she could find, and paid the woman a ruinous sum to seduce one of the young Blackguards who’d been there, a Gill Greyling. The courtesan had seduced him, got him drunk, and asked him about the event. His story hadn’t changed. The courtesan said she thought he was lying, but if a man wouldn’t let go of a lie when drunk and blinded by lust, there was no shaking it from him. It was a dead end, a sadly literal one.
Damn you, sister. What was the worst that could be true of Gavin Guile here? That he got furious at the daughter that you’d sent to seduce him repeatedly, and when she’d succeeded in getting into his bed and nearly ruining his relationship with Karris White Oak, whom everyone knew he’d loved for fifteen years, Gavin threw her off the balcony? If that was what had happened, Ela was as responsible for it as anyone.
Not that Arys wouldn’t make Gavin pay for it, too, if she ever found out that was true. Family was everything. The Greenveil motto was Fásann Ár Gciorcal, Our Circle Grows. ‘Circle’ was understood to be family, and territory, and friends, and influence. Orholam knew that Arys had done her part on that account, and more. But anyone shrinking that circle would pay—damn it, Ana. Arys had liked the girl, mostly, though Ana had tried her luck seducing men who had been interested in Arys herself. Shooting high, and sometimes artlessly. How, though, was one to object to will in a drafter? Ana had been pretty enough to mostly go unpunished.
And found punishment too great by far.
But Gavin Guile was out of reach for the time being. Someday, Arys would ask him herself. Certainly she would before she voted his way ever again—but it wouldn’t affect her vote in the end. She was practical, eminently practical. As practical as any sub-red had ever been, she liked to think.
And knowing that she was always laid up for a few days at least after a birth, she quite practically moved on to her stack of must-read letters.
Another from her satrap, Briun Willow Bough, telling her things she already knew. Urgent, help immediately, you serve for such a time as this, et cetera. What did he think Arys was doing here, anyway? At the end, the letter asked if she needed to be replaced because she was too pregnant. Arys saw red. Too pregnant? That upjumped son of a carter was questioning her? She’d rip his squinty right eye out, pound it flat with a meat hammer, pan fry and feed it to that slobbering stupid piece of—
She breathed slowly. Easy, Ary.
The sub-red was close, always close these days. Two more years, Arys. You can make two more years if you’re careful.
She put that letter down in a different stack. She’d have to answer that when she was no longer furious. Sometimes she hated her work. She caught a glimpse of her lover stirring in her mirror.
The work did have its perquisites, though, she supposed.
With her unfashionable red-red straight hair and freckles, many other women of thirty-five years would find it difficult to procure lovers. She did what she could to darken her skin and hide the freckles and the worry-lines, and few would guess that she’d had twelve children (though, honestly, most would guess she’d had one or two), but even dressed well, Arys’s beauty was not the type of beauty that was celebrated at the Chromeria. Her blue eyes were her best feature—everyone loved blue eyes. But she’d had a lover—in her younger days, before she figured out how to pick men who knew the proper use for their tongues—who, immediately after they’d made love, had told her that her freckles were a tragedy. That otherwise she would be a beauty men would praise to the stars.
She’d been young, and not so good with her impulses as now. She’d grabbed his stones and tried to rip them off. She’d broken all of her nails, but his scrotum had torn in her hand. And then he’d beaten her fiercely.
It was easy to forget when you had so much power that sometimes the only power that mattered was the power of muscles.
It had taken her a minute to even remember she could draft while being battered and thrown against the wall by that screaming, terrified, furious man, holding his torn scrotum in one hand and making a fist with the other. And then, drafting at long last, she’d burnt him to a husk. She’d lost the baby she was pregnant with at the time, and had never known if it was from the beating or from the huge amounts of heat that she’d drafted. Either would have been sufficient, she supposed.
She was at peace with he
r relative good looks now. Power made up for it. Pretty men and boys sought her out. Mostly, though, she preferred those who were not too pretty, but were instead strong enough to bring good blood to the Greenveil family, either drafters, or intelligent, or charismatic—they had to have some excellence, when she was looking for a father. Her current lover was probably a short-termer, though. Elijah was terribly interesting with his amber eyes, and wonderfully willful, a skilled lover, intelligent, and there was something oddly dangerous about him. But she wasn’t sure she wanted him to be the father of child fourteen. She doubted she would keep him for another six months. But in the meantime, she planned to enjoy herself.
Drafting a little sub-red, she inhaled deeply. The sub-red blew on the coals of her lust.
“Elijah?” she said.
He sat up on the bed. He was exactly what she liked at this point in her life. Lean and muscular, with some interesting scars on his arms and chest, he kept his orangey-red hair cut close to his skull, his freckles were faded on his face and arms, his skin was ruddy, and he had beautifully white teeth. He looked at her—pregnant as she was—with undisguised desire. Having a man who would worship your body when you were hugely pregnant and awkward was perhaps the greatest luxury a woman could have.
But as she stood to go to him, she felt the familiar tightening in her belly. She hesitated. She’d been having practice labor pains for months, and she wanted to be sure.
Elijah stood and walked over to her, naked. “Is it time?” he asked. He held her from behind, kissing her neck and cupping her swollen breasts in his hands.
She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Her stomach felt as tight as a drum.
“Yes,” she said finally, pushing his hands away. “I have to prepare myself. If there’s time between cramps, I may need you again. Get dressed.”
“Do you need me to summon your slaves?” Elijah asked.
She hesitated. The pain passed. “Not yet. It may be hours yet. Maybe you can put on that cloak of yours and nothing underneath,” she said. Truth was, she couldn’t imagine making love now that she’d actually started labor. But if it was false labor, she wanted him here. She could fuck out her frustration.