They were going to be rightly livid with him. After all their training, the Mighty had reached a rough equivalency with each other, a working strength. Adding Tisis to the Mighty’s war party would be like adding a fifth leg to a dog. They couldn’t help but trip over her, have to compensate, slow down, and get tentative as they had to protect her.
But here he was.
He opened the door to a bright shining noon, good wind and few clouds. He acted nonchalant, as a young groom would be after a wild night of connubial exertion. Just a twinge of smugness as he walked astern toward where the Mighty were working to create a skimmer.
The captain, a black-haired, fair-skinned Blood Forester with long mustache and beard like a lamprey attached to his face, grinned at him as he walked past.
“Finally found the pearl button, huh?” he asked, slapping Kip on the back and laughing.
The what? But Kip just blushed ruefully, accepting the teasing as if he didn’t think the man was an asshole.
“Day five!” the captain said. “Ha! We had bets going. You won me two danars. Seems like a smart lad, I said, and that’s one eager lass he’s got there if I don’t miss my guess. Won’t take him a whole week, I said. I was drunk. You done me right, though—and you clearly did her right last night. How many times was—”
“Hey, hey,” Kip said, putting a hand out to stop the man. “That’s my wife, huh?”
It had been four times. Four times, lying side by side, throwing their bodies around to make the bunk squeak and Tisis crying out while Kip grunted and groaned and then they tried to muffle the sounds of their laughter.
‘Four times?’ Kip had asked Tisis. ‘Isn’t that a lot?’
‘Not really. I mean sometimes when I…’
In sub-red, Kip could see the heat of her blush spread through her face despite the darkness. ‘When you…?’ he’d asked.
‘Uh, when I’ve heard people talk about lovemaking,’ she’d said.
Even though he’d had the impression that wasn’t what she was talking about, he said, ‘I always thought those were exaggerations, bragging, because then I’d hear the older Blackguards joke about not being that young anymore.’
‘But we are young,’ Tisis had said.
Young enough that neither of us knows how many climaxes in a night is believable, Kip had thought. So they’d faked four for her and three for him, and laughed and plotted until the early hours. He’d had as much fun in bed as you could have without having as much fun as you want to have.
Apparently they’d hit the correct number to be believable for their age, though, because the captain raised his hands in quick surrender. “Didn’t mean no disrespect.” He grinned. “Quite the opposite. Good day, my young lord.”
Pearl button?
The Mighty were deep in discussion at the stern, where they were building the skimmer. All wore their blacks, with the insignia of the Mighty at the collar: a powerful figure with arms outspread, radiating power, but his head downcast as if in prayer or concentration or grief. No matter how many times Kip saw it, something about that figure stirred something deeper than memory in Kip. How had Andross Guile picked this emblem? Surely that scorpion had a soul insensitive to art.
“Breaker!” Cruxer called out. The Mighty’s leader was tall and slender, confident and handsome. A blue by nature as well as by the thin luxin streaks in his brown eyes, he was serious but not humorless. He always did the right thing, and he always did it quickly. It made him a great leader. Believing the best of others, he somehow brought it out. “Breaker, would you get over here and tell Ben-hadad that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is?”
Kip had expected some gibes about ‘sleeping in,’ but, of course, that he’d dodged gibes for the moment didn’t mean they wouldn’t come later. But when the squad teased him, it didn’t bother him. They’d given up everything to be here with him and with each other.
“What are you destroying now?” Kip asked, joining the circle between muscle mountain Big Leo and Ben-hadad, who’d had to hop around on a crutch with one knee bound in a splint since his injury during their escape from the Lightguards at the Chromeria.
Ben-hadad said, “I’m destroying suddenly obsolete methods of shipbuilding. And maybe sailing, too. I’m destroying old strategies of naval combat.” Struggling to handle his crutch, he took off his yellow-and-blue hinged spectacles and alternated between gesturing with them and rubbing the lines they left above his ears from how tight he wore them.
“Breaker, he destroyed the skimmer,” Big Leo said. “Literally.”
“Wait? What?” Kip asked. “I thought it was—” He peered over the side into the water, where he’d expected to see the skimmer they’d been building for five days. There was nothing there.
“Look! Look!” Ben-hadad said, half-apologetic, half give-me-achance-to-explain. “It took me a few days to intuit the principles of hydrodynamics.”
“Hyd-what?” Ferkudi asked. Not quite an idiot, nor quite a savant, Ferkudi was the guy you could count on to snort fire pepper paste on a dare. He was the guy who’d be openly picking his nose for the next six weeks, happy to have the excuse. He was also the guy who’d throw his dopey bulk in the line of fire for you without a second thought. With an affable roundness only accentuated by his shaven head, he was their best grappler, a blue and green drafter, and solid in every sense of the word.
“The way water moves, Ferk,” Kip said.
“Duh, it moves downhill. You smart guys sometimes…” Ferkudi shook his head.
Ben-hadad ignored him. “It’s not an original design, it’s just I didn’t understand how—”
“It’s not a design at all!” Big Leo said. “You destroyed our skimmer!”
“I meant the next one. And that skimmer was garbage!” Ben-hadad said.
“You designed it! You said it was the best skimmer ever built. And I helped build it. Probably drafted two years off my life,” Big Leo said, pointing to the red rising like floodwaters a quarter of the way up his dark irises. “I worked my ass off on that thing!”
“Still got a way to go before you’re assless,” Winsen said quietly, giving a significant glance at Big Leo’s haunches. Whereas Big Leo was by far the biggest of the elite athletes, Winsen was by far the smallest. Slight and unremarkable except for the bars of yellow luxin staining his cold blue eyes, he was the only member of the Mighty one might not be afraid of if one met him in a dark alley.
And that would be precisely the wrong reaction. Not only was Winsen the slipperiest killer of them all, Winsen simply didn’t care. With his longbow, he took shots that none of them could make, and he took shots that none of them would make, because they’d be worried about the consequences of hitting civilians or friends. Winsen seemed incapable of worrying about consequences.
“True! And I was right,” Ben-hadad said, soothing Big Leo. “But skimmers are a new invention. Gavin Guile just discovered them. That’s what makes them—look, trust me! Look. I’ll do all the drafting myself.”
“No, I forbid it,” Cruxer said, speaking up. He usually let them sort things out themselves, so when he intervened they instantly shut up. “We trust you, Ben-hadad. But you’re not drafting it alone. You can’t burn yourself out. We share the burden of making the new one. But next time, you ask me before you destroy what belongs to the squad, understood?”
“It was my design—”
“And the squad’s work,” Cruxer interrupted. “We all throw all of what we have into the pot. For some of us, that may be just muscle—”
“That would be me,” Ferkudi volunteered. Unnecessarily.
“—on a particular project, but we all give our all. Right?”
A brief moment passed, and Kip wanted to rush in and try to make things better. Cruxer and Ben-hadad butted heads constantly. Cruxer saw everything in black and white, and Ben-hadad saw relentless shades of gray possibility.
For Ben-hadad, his life and honor were the Mighty’s, but his creations were his own. He valued himself for his brilliant inventions, and that—that one thing—he didn’t want to share, and he didn’t see keeping that little bit as being too much to ask of a squad he gave everything else.
For Cruxer, you were either in or out.