“A bow. Oh, dear. Eadaz should have warned you that you cannot kill a witch with a splinter of wood. Or fire.” Kalyba kept striding toward her, naked, eyes wild. “I should have expected this defiance from the seed of Neporo.”
With every step Kalyba took across the deck, Tané took one away from her. Soon she would run out of ship. The bow was useless—her enemy could shape-shift away from an arrow in a heartbeat, and it was clear the sword could transfigure with her. When it was in her hand, it was like another limb.
“I wonder,” Kalyba said, “if you could best me in combat. After all, you are Firstblood.” Her mouth curved. “Come, blood of the mulberry tree. Let us see who is the greater witch.”
Tané set down her bow. Planting her feet apart, she let her siden rise like the sun into her hands.
71
Abyss
On the Reconciliation, Loth stood guard beside his queen in the shadow beneath the quarterdeck, surrounded by twelve of the Knights of the Body.
One of the topsails was afire. Bodies strewed the decks. Cannons hawked barshot and chainshot, cut with cries of Fire from the boatswain, while siege engines from Perchling hurled grappling hooks that tangled around legs and wings.
It was all the gunners could do to avoid the Eastern dragons. Though some of them were in flight, strangling the fiery breeds the way snakes crushed their quarry, others had adopted a different way to kill. They would dive beneath the waves, then swim up with all their might and breach. One clap of their jaws, and they would drag their prey back to the deep.
Water streamed from their scales as they soared over the Reconciliation. Fires sputtered out beneath them.
Sabran kept one hand on the Sword of Virtudom. They watched the pale wyrm transform into a woman and land on the Defiance.
Kalyba.
The Witch of Inysca.
“Ead will go to her,” Sabran shouted to him over the clangor. “Someone must distract the witch so she can strike.”
The Draconic Navy was drawing closer by the moment. A square-rigger with red sails bore down on the Reconciliation.
“Hard to port,” the captain bawled. “Gun crew, belay last order. Fire on that ship!”
A terrible shriek of wood and metal. The ship rammed straight into the nearby Merrow Queen.
“All right,” Loth called to Sabran. “To the Defiance.”
The Knights of the Body were already moving. Keeping Sabran between them, they struck out across the deck. As they ran, they shed their heaviest armor. Breastplates, greaves, and pauldrons clattered in their wake. Cannons ripped into the enemy ship.
“Swords!” The captain drew his cutlass. “Get Her Majesty to the boat!”
“There’s no time,” Loth shouted.
The captain gritted his teeth. His hair clung to his face. “Take her, then, Lord Arteloth, and don’t look back,” he replied. “Hurry!”
Sabran climbed over the side of the ship. Loth joined her, and she took his hand.
The waves swallowed them all.
Tané hurled fire at Kalyba across the Defiance. Flames danced along the deck, catching in pools of Draconic blood. When the witch countered the attack with lurid red fire of her own, so hot it roasted the moisture from the air, Tané gripped the rising jewel. Seawater crashed onto the ship, which pitched beneath them, and the fires were smothered.
Every soldier and archer had fled from the duel. The ship was their battleground.
Kalyba moved lithely from bird to woman, quick as lightning. Tané screamed in frustration as a beak ripped her cheek open and a talon almost took out her eye. Each time the witch changed, Ascalon changed with her. When she was in her human guise, she swung with the sword, and when Tané parried, and their blades locked, the rising jewel sang in answer.
“I hear it,” Kalyba breathed. “Give it to me.”
Tané slammed her forehead into hers and struck with a concealed knife, catching the witch across the cheek. Kalyba reeled, eyes flared wide, red lacing her face. Then antlers erupted from her skull, and she was a bleeding white stag, ghastly and massive, and the sword was gone again.
Tané used the jewel to throw back a cockatrice. The siden sharpened her senses, made her limbs move quicker than she would have thought possible as the stag thundered across the deck. She saw that one of the antlers was tipped with silver, and as it lowered its head to skewer her, she brought her sword up, severing it.
Kalyba collided with the deck in human form. Blood jeweled from her shoulder, where a chunk of flesh had been hacked away, and Ascalon lay beside her, glazed with ruby. Tané lunged for it, but the witch already had fire in her hands.
Tané threw herself behind the mainmast. Red fire blazed off her thigh, so hot—like molten iron on her flesh—that it made her cry out. Eyes full of brine, she crushed the pain and struck out across the deck. She was almost at the stern when she stopped in her tracks.
Queen Sabran was on the Defiance. Loth stood beside her, broadsword drawn, and twelve bodyguards fanned out around them. All of them were dripping wet.
“Sabran,” Kalyba breathed.
The queen gazed at her forebear. Their faces were identical.
“Your Majesty,” one of the guards stammered. All of them were looking between their queen and her double. “This is sorcery.”
“Stand back,” Sabran said to her guards.
“Yes, do, gallant knight. Do as my offspring decrees.” Kalyba curled her fingers around the flame in her palm. “Do you not see that I am your Damsel, foremother of Inys?”
The knights did not move. Neither did the queen. Her left hand strangled the hilt of her sword.
“You are an imitation of me,” Kalyba said to her, venomous. “Just as your sword is a cheap imitation of this one.”
She held up Ascalon. Sabran flinched.
“I did not want to believe Ead,” she replied, “but I see that my affinity with you cannot be denied.” She stepped toward Kalyba. “You took my child from me, Witch of Inysca. Tell me, after you went to so much trouble to found the House of Berethnet, why would you destroy it?”
Kalyba closed her first, and the flame was snuffed.
“One shortcoming of immortality,” she said, “is that everything you build seems too small, too transient. A painting, a song, a book—all of them rot away. But a masterwork, made over many years, many centuries … I cannot tell you the fulfilment it brings. To see your actions, in your lifetime, made into a legacy.” She lifted up Ascalon. “Galian lusted after Cleolind Onjenyu the moment he laid eyes on her. Though I had nursed him at my breast, though I gave him the sword that was the sum of all my achievements, and though I was beautiful, he wanted her above all things. Above me.”
“So it was unrequited love,” Sabran said. “Or was it jealousy?”
“A little of both, I suppose. I was younger then. Caged by a tender heart.”
Tané saw a flicker in the shadows.
Sabran moved a little to the left. Kalyba circled with her. Here, on this stretch of the ship, it was as if they were in the eye of the storm. No wyrms breathed fire near the witch.
“I watched Inys grow into a great nation. At first, that was enough,” Kalyba confessed. “To see my daughters thrive.”
“You still could,” Sabran told her softly. “I have no mother now, Kalyba. I would welcome another.”
Kalyba paused. Just for a moment, her face looked as naked as the rest of her.
“No, my lykyn,” she said, just as softly. “I mean to be a queen, as I once was. I will sit on the throne you can no longer hold.” She walked toward Sabran. The Knights of the Body pointed their swords at her. “I watched my daughters rule a country for a thousand years. I watched you preach against the Nameless One. What you failed to see is that the only way forward is to join with him.
“When I am queen, Inys will never burn again. It will be a Draconic place, protected. The people will never know you are gone. Instead they will rejoice to know that Sabran the Ninth, after reconciling her differences with the Nameless One, was blessed with his immortality. That she will reign forever.”
Sabran tightened her grip on her sword.
She was waiting for something, Tané realized. Her gaze flicked past her forebear, toward the bow of the ship.
“I misbelieve your grand talk,” the queen said, her tone pitying. “I think that this is simply the last act in your revenge. Your desire to destroy all trace of Galian Berethnet.” Her smile was pitying. “You are as beholden to your heart as you ever were.”
Suddenly Kalyba was right in front of her. The Knights of the Body started toward her, but she was already too close, close enough to kill their queen if they moved against her now. Sabran held very still as the witch pushed a wet strand of hair from her brow.
“It will hurt me,” Kalyba whispered, “to hurt you. You are mine … but the Nameless One will bring great things to this world. Greater things than even you could bring.” She kissed her forehead. “When I give you to him, he will know, at last, that I cherish him above all things.”
Sabran suddenly wrapped her arms around the witch. Tané stiffened, taken aback.
“Forgive me,” the queen said.
Kalyba wrenched away, eyes flared. Quick as a scorpion, she turned, fire igniting in her hand again.