The command staff reacted violently when the door burst open. Swords and knives were drawn despite the cramped environment. They had a moment to register the empty corridor. It threw them off. Confusion stalled them for crucial seconds. Then it was too late.

I drew Erid’s dagger from behind, snaked it around to her jugular, and released my cloak. Erid jumped at my sudden appearance, but managed not to accidentally slit her own throat.

“I’m supposed to do some kind of speech here,” I said in a bored tone. “Something something I can kill you any time I want, it’s a mistake to threaten me, whatever. Honestly, I don’t really give a shit. This whole dynamic is stupid. So let’s just say if you kill me, I’ll kill you back harder. We good with that?”

“I let you live, didn’t I?” Erid drawled, hiding all traces of the tension I knew was hiding beneath the surface.

“Bullshit,” I said, disentangling myself from her. I offered her the knife, hilt first. “You fucking stabbed me.”

“Fat lot of good that did.”

The command staff were all packed into one of of the few cabins that wasn’t carrying wounded. I’d been able to gather some information from context on the way here, and it seemed the Perseverance had gone down with a smaller proportion of our soldiers than of our bunks. Everywhere was just a little more crowded now.

Pellonine had made it out after my diversion during the battle, which was good to see. The other officers were women I recognized: some had positions of martial authority, and others directly reported to the captains of our other ships. I squeezed myself into the corner and sat down on a trunk.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Heard it before. Pellonine! You survived!”

The other commander of this expedition was watching me warily, but answered my smile with a polite, cautious one of her own.

“Please accept the gratitude of the Trade Fleet for your intervention in the battle.”

“Captain!” exclaimed one of the other people in the room. “Are you just going to let her get away with that?”

“Who, Danou?” Erid said, flashing a toothy smile at me. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Me and her, we go way back, don’t we?”

Right. I’d undermined her authority as captain with that performance—which was entirely necessary, mind you, I don’t just let people try to kill me whenever they feel like. I decided to play ball.

“Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s all in good fun. I just gotta keep her on her toes, that’s all.”

“If I were actually worried about this waif, I’d have tossed her off the ship myself,” Erid said easily. “She makes a really funny noise when you do that.”

We exchanged dagger grins. Nothing to see here—just two dangerous women with a shared objective. Let’s just let all that drama from earlier slide into the dustbin of history.

Pellonine jumped in with a change of topic. “Now that Danou has… recovered,” she looked uncertainly at my face, “perhaps she could share any information she possesses about that storm.“

“Totally. Give me a moment.”

I scanned through the Face Sponge’s updates from the battle.

“Right. So, looks like the storm is following us, but my people managed to get it distracted for a bit. There was another fleet in the area. It spent some time smashing them up, and now it’s back on our trail.”

Erid narrowed her eyes. “I was told we didn’t have more ships to spare.”

“We don’t.” Pellonine said. “Danou, how have you come by this information?”

“I told you before—I have my sources. Is there another power in these waters who can field a fleet of seven?”

“Parmad,” Erid and Pellonine said simultaneously.

“What are they doing here?” Erid added. “We’re off the main trade lanes. There’s nothing out here but Baros, and without a map, the island’s protections would drive them away.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Dal Salim!”

Footsteps approached, and my ex-pirate lackey poked his head around the corner.

“Was he listening this whole time?” demanded the officer who’d spoken up earlier.

I ignored her. “Who’s your god of trade?”

“There is only one god in Parmad,” he replied. “Oru, the Lord of Gold.”

“Gold. Got it,” I said. “Okay, thanks.”

“Theological consultant,” Erid muttered under her breath as he ducked out of sight. I took the high road and flipped her off.

What I wanted to do was slap a hand over my forehead and bemoan how stupid I was. This was very much not the time for it. I had to try to hold onto some scraps of mystique, after all.

The point of this operation was to signal to Varas that Horcutio was weak. We hadn’t considered that she might have multiple power bases in the region. Now the narrative was at stake: instead of the Estheni wiping out the pirates and their way of life, we risked this campaign becoming a conflict between two regional powers, with the Horcutians—Horcurtiites? Whatever, the pirates—caught in the middle. That wouldn’t be enough. It had to be targeted.

But of course the Trade Fleet bigwigs were going to be more concerned about the peer military in their waters than the ragtag association of underdog freebooters. I had to find some way to shift their threat assessment without leaving them unprepared for a potential challenge from the Parmedi.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Wait. That was it.

“You saw what that storm did to the Perseverance,” I told the assembled women, trying to come up with a suitable lie. “The Parmedi aren’t the concern here. We need to disrupt Horcutio’s centers of power, give the angel fewer things it can draw power from.”

“Like the ocean?” Erid drawled.

Well, damn. I walked into that one.

“We’re heading to Ethelios next, right?” I said. “I’ve got contacts there. We can fight it on the island.”

“No, you can’t,” Pellonine interjected. “As the senior Trade Fleet representative on this campaign, I categorically forbid you from disturbing the Magistrate’s Peace on Ethelios.”

“I don’t answer—”

“I don’t care who you answer to,” Pellonine snapped, standing up. “If an agent of the Estheni Coalition engages in violence on the shores of Ethelios, it will violate crucial treaties with Parmad. War will be almost certain. Hundreds of thousands will die. You can swear right now to keep your blade sheathed, or you can get off this ship.”

“Damn,” I said approvingly. “Yeah, sure. For now.”

Pellonine glared at me. “Swear it.”

I rolled my eyes and casually drew my knife, holding it out in front of me like a crucifix. “In the name of Eifni Voriksson, I’ll be nice until the angel shows up and reminds all of you that gods don’t recognize treaty terms.” I temporarily disabled my translator. “Eileif hak to pejolr mubarosk.”

“What was that?” Erid asked.

“The language of my people,” I replied. “It’s what we say after an oath. Means something like ‘let it be so.’”

What I’d said more accurately translates to something like ‘just kidding, motherfuckers, I’m crossing my fingers,’ but they didn’t need to know that. Eifni would have approved, I’m sure. He was a sneaky guy.

*

The hilarious part about a ship getting chased by a storm angel is that the pursuit actually made us faster. We made Ethelios in a day and a half or so.

The first thing you noticed about the island was that you couldn’t see it. Every available inch of space had been built over, a mad hodgepodge of heterogenous construction that tottered skyward in a cacophonous symphony of wood, stone, and clay. The overall effect was about as mixed as that metaphor.

The next thing you noticed were the docks, sprawling out from the island like the fins of a plesiosaur sunning its belly. We’re gonna pretend for this analogy that the plesiosaur has like sixty fins and they’re all sprawling out into the sea with a bunch of random boats tied to them. These were all hurriedly being weatherproofed in the face of the coming storm.

I jumped happily off the Fool’s Errand, landing with a loud thud on the dock. They hadn’t finished securing it, but Erid was being uppity and Pellonine had been shooting me suspicious looks every time we crossed paths. I wanted off. Dal Salim watched, bemused, as I gave him a jaunty wave and set off into the city.

“I’ll be back!” I promised him.

I drifted past harried dockworkers and businesslike sailors, heading for the ramshackle urban jungle that was Ethelios. A familiar-looking group of three awaited me.

Val was the same as he always was. He was kind of iconic like that. He’d greased back his hair, exposing his widow’s peak, and apparently he’d seized on the opportunity afforded by international waters to get rid of his facial hair again. A hint of a smirk drifted over his lips.

Aulof stood casually with an arm around Markus’s shoulder. He was ethnically Estheni now, but he wore his hair in messy locks that went down past his shoulders. Between the hair, the haphazard goatee, and the loose sailor’s tunic he was sporting, I felt jarringly like I’d encountered a member of an Estheni rock band. He raised a hand in greeting.

Markus was beaming like a loon. He’d acquired a shawl that was clearly too short for him, exposing an underwrap tight enough that his ridiculous abs were visible. He’d chosen a matching skirt that barely hit his knees, and from the bracelets around his ankles, it was a deliberate choice to show off his calves. Exhibitionist dork. As I drew near, he shrugged off the commander and wrapped me up in a bear hug.

“Welcome back!” Aulof said, reaching around our muscle guy to pat me on the arm. “Things are getting more complicated, it seems.”

“Kives is fucking us again,” I said, patting Markus to get him to set me down. “Varas is active on both sides of the sea. Do you know the deal with this Magistrate’s Peace or whatever it’s called?”

Val looked out over the harbor as he thought. “Obviously I can’t prove anything in the moment, but I suspect that we can thread the needle on Luchenko even under these conditions. That seems to be Kives’s game. As long as events continue to resolve in our favor, we have less of a reason to target her over the more actively hostile gods.”

He nodded to the storm. “Case in point.”

Hocutio’s angel of vengeance was a dark smudge filling the horizon. Lightning flashed, illuminating the depths of the cloud. For a second, I thought I saw a human silhouette in the center of the storm, but that was impossible. Even my eyes weren’t that good. More than likely, my brain was just imagining it.

Especially if I’d imagined it staring back.

“Not much we can do if she keeps positioning herself as the second-biggest threat,” Markus said. “Val, you got a plan for that one?”

“The Face Sponge held up adequately,” Val said absently. “I have to disagree with their tactical assessment, however. On paper, the Ragnar is a match for an angel of that power, but the storm is generating a lot of etheric chaff. Disruptors are entropic weapons; this particular angel is already swimming in entropy. We would need to engage at close range and expose our own shielding to its weaponry.”

“Like how fire only does half damage to magma elementals in video games,” I contributed helpfully.

Val fixed me with a classic Val stare, which I gleefully ignored.

“Ragnar’s rated for like a hundred sixty tetrons, right?” I asked. “We can take him.”

“Not without wiping out the city,” he said, as though discussing the weather. Technically speaking, I guess he was. “There’s also the possibility of another divine manifestation. We’re not rated to dogfight Horcutio. We should set up an ambush instead.”

“Let me know if you need help with that,” I said. “I think at this point they believe me when I tell them something needs to happen, but Erid’s definitely on guard in case I use her as bait. Which, you know. Fair enough.”

“On the Magistrate’s Peace,” Aulof said, stretching his arms above his head, “there’s some good news and some bad news. It’s against the law to bear bladed weapons on the island. Knives don’t count.”

“Whose law? I thought this island was neutral.”

“Magistrate Filorius. She’s a benevolent dictator of sorts. Secured her position by weaseling through the gaps between the various Estheni-Parmedi ceasefire treaties over the years. If you see anyone wielding a large cudgel, they work for her.”

“Got it,” I said. “Are they any good?”

Aulof’s lips quirked. “At using them?”

“What else would I be asking?” I laughed.

His face broke into an open smile. “Pretty good! But it’s easier for me to get a new disguise than you, so don’t test them on it.”

“I am the very soul of subtlety,” I promised sincerely, placing a hand on my heart. I couldn’t keep a straight face, and pretty soon all of us were laughing.

“Welcome back,” Markus said, thumping me on the back. “We found this great street vendor on the other end of the island. Want to grab some food?”

“Please. I’m begging you. Save me from boat food. Oh, and Erid wants me to steal some documents while we’re here.”

“Food first,” Markus said, nudging me along. “Skulduggery later.”

Arm in arm—well, Val was off to the side, but you know what I mean—we entered the city.