We climbed the hull, angling for the ship’s prow, on a shifting ladder of four knives. As soon as Ruc’s weight was off of the lowest, he would stretch down into the darkness, yank it from between the planks, straighten, then hand it up to me. It was slow work, especially as we were trying to be quiet. In one way, at least, the guards’ vigilance was working for us. They assumed any attack would come up the ladder, which meant they didn’t budge from that spot. They couldn’t have expected to find us inching up the glistening hull.
None of which made our job any easier. If I drove the knives in all the way to the hilt, Ruc had trouble pulling them out again. On the other hand, he was heavier than me. Whenever he would reach up to grab the handle of the blade on which I was standing, I could feel it flex beneath my bare feet, threatening to tear free of the soggy wood altogether. I had no doubt that we could survive the fall, but Quen’s guards weren’t likely to ignore the loud smack of bare skin against wet mud, mud that would hold us motionless while they filled us with crossbow bolts. I had no objection to dying in Ruc’s arms, but I wanted to survive long enough to fall in love with him, to pass my Trial.
When I was finally able to toss a hand over the ship’s top rail, I let out a long, quiet breath, then pulled myself up slowly. The deck was a wreckage of smashed crates, downed spars, the remnants of what might have been long-abandoned tents, canvas rotted and shredded by the wind. Lady Quen’s guards were well out of sight behind the piled trash. I pulled myself over the rail carefully, then reached back down for Ruc.
He was bent double, prying the lowest knife out of the wood. When he had it in hand, he passed it to me, stepped up onto the next knife, caught my hand, then tried to hurl me headfirst over the ship’s rail and into the mud below.
That was what it felt like, anyway.
It took me half a heartbeat to realize that the knife beneath his foot had torn free, that he was dangling in the darkness, one hand wrapped around the handle of the last remaining blade, the other caught in my grip. The fallen knife landed with a quiet thunk in the muck below. For a few moments I didn’t move. I was bent halfway over the rail, the wood grinding into my ribs, my breath searing my lungs. Sweat dripped the length of my arm, weakening my grip on Ruc’s hand. I reached down with the other arm, caught his wrist, and tried to haul him in.
He grimaced, then gave a tiny shake of his head.
Somewhere off to my right, I could hear the guards talking to each other, grumbling in the way men with a boring post are wont to grumble. I tried to breathe even more quietly.
“Just hold,” Ruc mouthed.
I nodded, redoubled my grip.
His eyes locked on mine, he let go of the last blade, caught my wrist, and for a moment all his weight was on me. To my shock, he smiled. Then he tossed his foot up onto the handle of the remaining knife, shifted his weight over it, and he was up. I didn’t let go of him until he’d stepped over the rail.
“It’s a good thing,” I whispered, “that I brought a lot of knives on this mission.”
He leaned in so close I could feel his lips as he murmured in my ear. “And how does this compare to your other missions?”
I squelched a wild urge to laugh, turned my head, slid my lips over his cheek’s stubble to his ear. “Sort of boring, actually.”
He pulled back just enough to look in my eyes. “I’ll have to find some other way to keep you entertained.”
A delicious ache opened inside me.
Yes, I thought, meeting his shadowed eyes. Yes, you will.
*
Whatever thrill had come over me on the ship’s deck evaporated inside the hold.
We’d managed to drop down to the first level through a dilapidated hatch near the bow. I’d expected near-perfect darkness, but a bloody light seeped up through the cracks in the boards beneath our feet. It was easy enough to follow it half the length of the hold—moving slowly to avoid tripping over the shattered lathes of broken barrels, the dusty remnants of various nests, all the rest of the garbage littering the inside of the ship—to another hatch, this one with a ladder sticking up from below.
I put an eye to a gap in the decking and peered down.
The narrow chamber beneath was illuminated by candles, dozens of them, far more than necessary to light the small space, some standing on the floor, others perched on the wooden stays running between the ship’s ribs. Blinking against the sudden light, it took me a few moments to understand what I was seeing.
Six bodies lay across the wooden floor, each bound at the wrists and ankles. Black hoods obscured their faces, but it was obvious enough from the sizes that two were children, maybe eight or ten years old, while the others were adults. Regardless of age, the clothes they wore bordered on rags—scraps of cast-off cloth tied at the waist and shoulders mostly, bits of sail canvas repurposed into pants or vests. Only one of the six wore shoes, and those were little more than decomposing sandals.
Beside me Ruc made a low sound in his throat, almost a growl.
At the far end of that low-ceilinged compartment stood the Asp, two guards, the priest we’d followed from the bathhouse, and a graceful swirl of a woman who could only have been Lady Quen. Like her servants, the lady had made some effort to be nondescript. Unlike them, she had failed. Her gray silk cloak might have blended into the night’s shadows well enough, but by the light of the candles it was obviously cut from cloth that only Dombang’s richest could afford, tailored to her form in such a way as to draw the eye rather than avoid it. She was striking, even regal, and stood like a woman enduring the supplication of a suitor she knew to be beneath her, dark eyes sharp, hawklike; black hair streaked with gray, drawn back from her temples, and held with a silver clasp; her lips pressed together in silent disapproval.
“Lady,” the priest said, bowing low. “It is a great offering you make.”
“I did not expect to be making it so late,” she snapped. “The sun will be up by the time this is done.”
“Apologies, lady,” the Asp murmured, staring deferentially at the floor. “Annurian eyes are everywhere. I wanted to be certain we were not followed.”
Quen bared her teeth, gave a quiet hiss of vexation. “A day will come when they will no longer dare.”
“Indeed, lady,” the priest said, nodding his head sagely. “Indeed. But it is we who must hasten that day through our struggle and our sacrifice.”
“I’ve been hastening it my entire life. For all the good that’s done.”
“Have faith,” the man replied, his eyes aflame with reflected light. “Red hands have risen to pull the city down. The day of the prophecy is at hand.”
One of the figures on the floor, one of the children, twitched, then began to thrash.
Quen shook her head, rounded on the guards. “They were supposed to be sedated.”
The man bowed almost to the ground. “Apologies, lady. Deepest apologies. The child is small. I did not want her to die before her time.”
Memory lashed me: memory of a rope binding my hands, of my face pressed against the hull of a boat, of mud, blood, terror. A memory of eyes slitted like a cat’s, but belonging to no cat, of a woman stronger than any woman.