Tress of the Emerald Sea

There’s an opposite force in life to the avalanche Tress was feeling. There’s always an opposition, you see. A Push for every Pull, an old adversary of mine always says. Sometimes the moments in our life pile up and become an unstoppable force that makes us change. But at other times they become a mountain impossible to surmount.

Everyone misses shots now and then. But if you become known as the person who misses—if you internalize it—well, suddenly every miss becomes another rock in that pile. While every hit gets ignored. Eventually you become Ann: arm shaking, sweat pouring down your face, clutched by the invisible but very real claws of self-fulfilling determination. Then you start missing not because your aim is bad, or your eyesight is poor, but because your arm is shaking and sweat is pouring down your face.

And because missing is what you do.

Dreading what she’d once loved, Ann raised the stick to the side of the cannon. A calm voice interrupted her.

“Hold your fire, shipmate Ann,” Laggart said, one hand on the forestay rope to keep his balance as he squinted at the shore.

Ann hesitated.

“Three degrees to aft and one up, shipmate Ann,” Laggart said, his voice calm and firm.

She hesitated only a moment, then began cranking the cannon as he indicated. The ship continued to rock in the shallow waves of the bay, moving alongside the shore.

“Hold,” Laggart said as she put the firing rod in place. “Hold. FIRE!”

An explosion of spores and force blasted the cannonball on its way. As she’d imagined, it hit one of the metal men in the chest and knocked it down, but didn’t destroy it. However, the vines that burst out grabbed and enveloped all the metal men nearby.

They, in turn, were completely flummoxed. On the ship, Ann took one step toward her mountain and found it quite a bit smaller than she’d imagined.

“Reload and reset,” Laggart said.

“Reloading and resetting, sir!” Ann said, moving with an efficiency that would have impressed any naval officer.

“Two degrees up,” Laggart said.

“Two degrees up!” she said. “And one to port!”

“Aye,” Laggart said, surprised. “And one to port. Now hold. Hold…”

“Fire!” Ann said at the exact same moment he did.

This shot flew true as well, catching another group of metal men.

“Reloading and resetting, sir!” Ann cried before he could give the order. She had the next blast off in quick succession. She looked to him, breathing quickly.

“Damn fine shooting,” Laggart said, with a nod. “Damn fine. Assistant Cannonmaster.”

And standing there on the summit of her mountain, Ann wondered at how tiny it suddenly seemed.





THE HERO





Back in the tower, Tress was still a captive.

It was humiliating, yes, but somehow…also gratifying? In that this was what she had expected to happen.

From the moment she’d launched from the Rock, she’d anticipated grand failure. She had gone not because she’d assumed she would succeed, but because something had to be done. And though many things had gone wrong on her quest, she’d somehow always managed to make them go right too.

She had found her repeated success almost uncomfortably consistent. In the same way that if you keep rolling sixes, you start to worry that something is wrong with the dice. Failing here, getting captured, being immobilized and unable to help…

Well, she wasn’t happy about it. But a part of her was relieved. It had finally happened. As it should have. She wasn’t a King’s Mask or a pirate. She was a window washer. With hair that really needed to be pulled back into its tail, because she could barely see through it at the moment. Unfortunately, the Sorceress’s bonds had locked her hands in those glowing bands of light, pressed to the wall.

Through her hair, she was able to watch the Sorceress’s annoyance as the cannons completely immobilized her troops. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She had designed the men to withstand cannon fire. She’d designed them to be unstoppable. They could march right out into the ocean, and even had grappling hooks that let them climb aboard ships—often spearing them from underneath first, puncturing the hulls.

They were impervious to basically every weapon available to a preindustrial culture. Fearsome, destructive, deadly.

They didn’t know what to do about vines though.

Even a semi-self-aware construct like an Awakened soldier relies on its instructions. They’re far more versatile than something running on a traditional computer program, but they’re also not fully alive. And these, confronted by vines holding them down, were baffled.

Their instructions told them not to be afraid of weapons brandished by interlopers. So they kept trying to march forward. The cannonballs continued to explode around them, causing more vines to spring out. When immobilized, the metal men had instructions to call for support. Normally that was a valid line of programming.

In this case though, it sent the entire group into chaos. They’d alternate from trying to march on the ship to trying to free one another, to locking up as they tried to decide what to do when neither was possible.

In short, the cannonballs worked.

Blessed moons, they worked.

Despite her situation, Tress couldn’t help grinning as she saw her designs incapacitating an entire legion of supposedly unstoppable foes.

Charlie climbed up her leg, clinging to her trousers as the cat prowled below. He was puffing from exertion. “I…am having a little trouble with the beast.”

“It’s all right, Charlie,” Tress said, still watching the cannon fire.

“Hey,” he said, “don’t you cry. There’s a maritime law against that.”

“Sorry,” she said as another cannonball exploded, vines reaching out like some unholy hybrid of an octopus and a bag of lawn clippings. “It’s just…they’re beautiful.”

A short time later the crew was on shore, running past the immobilized troops—Fort leading the charge, and carrying me overhead. I’ll pretend it was in a dignified fashion.

But if Charlie didn’t open the door, they’d be trapped outside the tower. And the story would end there.

Tress looked to Charlie. “I’m sorry. That in the end, we got captured. It’s like we said would happen, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “But Tress,” he said, “I remember another part of that conversation. Something about shining armor.”

“I don’t think they make armor in rat sizes, Charlie.”

Charlie saw something on the floor. His eyes narrowed. “Distract her,” he said. Then he drew upon every ounce of courage he had remaining—it wasn’t much, but when you’re in such a small body, courage (like booze) goes further than you expect.

Charlie leaped. The cat gave chase immediately, bearing down on him as he dashed for something lying on the floor near the stairs.

A large pewter tankard.

The Sorceress was turning her attention to the tower’s defenses. She might well have figured out what was happening if Tress hadn’t done as Charlie asked.

“Sorceress,” she said, “have you heard those stories? About the fare maiden who gets captured?”