He could have cut the man down—these days he knew exactly where to drive the blade, how to end a life—but instead he forced the cloth against the man’s nose and mouth, held his own breath as the plume of dreamsquick clouded the air with the force of the struggle before all the fight went out of him.
The body slumped in Kay’s arms, and he lowered it to the deck as a second Veskan spilled out of the doorway and came to an abrupt halt, taking in the scene: the two masked figures and the legs of the man they’d drugged jutting out from behind a crate. But he didn’t see Tav, in the shadow by the door, not until he was on him, slamming the cloth over the Veskan’s mouth. He should have gone down in seconds, but he didn’t. He thrashed, and struggled, clawing at Tav, who was half his size and having trouble staying on. More than once he nearly flung Tav off, even as one knee finally buckled, and then the other, the fight only going out of him when his head pitched forward onto the deck.
For a moment, no one moved.
Tav rocked back on his heels, chest heaving from the effort. Lila cocked her head, and Kay held his breath as they waited for the third Veskan. But there was no sign of them. With any luck, they’d left the others to stand guard and gone to bed, would never know that they were there.
Tav rolled up to his feet. “Could’ve helped,” he muttered, dusting himself off.
“Oh, I would’ve,” whispered Lila, as she turned toward the hold, “but it was too much fun to watch.”
As they went down into the hold, light bloomed in Lila’s palm, and his own hand prickled, a phantom longing in his fingers. He tried to put it from his mind as Tav tossed him an iron bar, and he used it to pry open the nearest crate. The nails groaned, and the wood gave with a crack, and Kay paused, listening for sounds above. None came. He shifted the lid off the box. Inside, he found spirits in thin stoppered bottles, amber vials of tark, a liquor that went down like honey but landed like stone. He had tried it once, at Rhy’s behest, and woken the next morning with no memory and wet hair, only to learn he’d gone swimming in the Isle. In winter. Without any clothes. Now he cringed at the sight of the tark, but Tav swiped a vial and pocketed it before he could put the lid back on the box.
Nearby, Lila let out a small whistle. He turned and saw her elbows-deep in a carton, and a moment later, she emerged holding her prize aloft: a blade. Kay rolled his eyes. He knew there was no point in telling her to put it back. It had already disappeared inside her coat.
Tav snapped his fingers, calling them over to a third crate.
It was full of paper lanterns. They were folded almost flat, but when he held one up, it bloomed open into a pale white moon. Kay frowned, the sight of it tugging on something in his mind. A memory he couldn’t place. He held the lantern up in the hold’s thin light, and saw the ghost of spellwork on the inside of the paper shell. It was small, and tight, and he was still trying to read it when a voice rang out overhead.
“Oster? Han’ag val rach? Oster?”
Oster, he guessed, was one of the men now napping on the deck, lungs full of dreamsquick.
Metal glinted at the edge of Kay’s sight. Lila had drawn one of her knives. He shook his head, and swept past her, up the steps.
“Ag’ral vek,” he called out in Veskan as he reached the deck. I’m right here.
It was a poor impression, but it wasn’t meant to hold, only to make the man on deck hesitate, which he did, right until he saw the masked figure standing there, swathed in black. The man squinted at Kay, as if trying to make sense of the stranger on his ship.
“You’re not Oster,” he grumbled, the words muffled by drink.
“No,” said Kay. “I’m not.”
For a moment, nothing happened. And then—everything did.
The man flung out his hand and Kay felt the Crow’s deck slant drastically, the water shifting beneath the boat. But a blade, he’d learned, had one distinct advantage over relying on the elements: it was far quicker to summon. His sword sang free of its sheath before the wave crested the side of the ship. He surged forward while the Veskan was still calling the water to him.
He spun and slammed the hilt of his sword into the Veskan’s temple as the water rose over their heads. The light went out of the man’s eyes, and he folded, hitting the deck with a thud. As he collapsed, so did his hold on the wave. Kay dropped to one knee, bracing himself as the torrent crashed down on top of him, sudden and shockingly cold.
He rose to his feet, soaked through and shivering, but victorious. Beneath him, the ship bobbed once, violently, as the water settled, but it had been a large wave, and he watched as a ripple carried down the docks, setting all the other ships rocking in their berths.
Sanct, he thought as lanterns lit on half of the surrounding boats, and a handful of sailors took to their decks to see who’d been foolish enough to mess with the tide in the bay.
“Really?” hissed Lila, halfway out of the hold. “You couldn’t have just—”
But then she cut off, head whipping to the right. He heard it at the same time. Stross, too loud, on the dock below, asking someone if they knew the way to the Merry Host. Too loud, and too late, as boots came thudding up the ramp. Several pairs of boots.
The crew of the Crow had come back.
He flicked his fingers, a silent signal, and Lila and Tav retreated a step, back into the shadow of the hold. Kay turned and pressed himself against the mast as three more Veskans stomped onto the deck.
“Oster?” they called out. “Aroc? Esken?”
They began to mutter amongst themselves, and they might have thought the two they’d left behind had gotten bored, or bitter, had gone to entertain themselves.
They might have. If not for the body lying in the center of the waterlogged deck.
Kay swore to himself as he heard them rush to the fallen sailor. He drew his second sword and stepped out from behind the mast to face the new arrivals.
Two men and a woman, tall as houses, their hair ranging from blond to white. Their gazes were steady and sober. Either they hadn’t been drinking, or they knew how to hold their liquor. The two men drew weapons—one a hatchet, the other a broadsword—while the third spread out her arms, the air filling with the scent of magic. The water on the deck rose up, freezing to ice around her hands. She flicked her wrist, and a shard shot like an arrow across the deck.
At him.
Kay’s blade came up just in time, and the ice shattered against the steel. The sound rang out like a starting bell, and the bodies on the deck surged into motion.
He danced back, cutting down the next three shards, then ducked as the hatchet buried itself in the mast where his head had been. It freed itself from the wood, returning to the Veskan’s hand. Two magicians, then.
The deck froze beneath his feet as he leapt up onto the nearest crate, landed on dry wood, and found himself face-to-face with the largest man, who was easily a head taller, and three times as wide, the broadsword raised over his head.
Kay twisted out of the way just before the sword cleaved a trench in the ship’s deck. It lodged, buried a foot into the wood, and he swept his blade across the man’s bare throat—or meant to. The Veskan’s arm came up to block the blow, and the steel met armor instead, hard enough to make the blade ring in Kay’s grip.
Tav and Lila were on the deck now—out of the corner of his eye, he saw them, going head-to-head with the other two sailors, Tav quick on his feet, slicing the ropes that bound the sails so they fell in heavy sheets, covering the icy deck, and Lila, fire licking down her knives as she melted a path through an ice-made shield, and kicked the wielder back into the rail hard enough to make it splinter.
She was grinning.
Of course she was grinning.
The woman sagged onto the deck, and—