Aisha was screaming at me. “You killed him?”

“I assure you, he not only was perfectly alive when he left this ship, but also when he escaped their ship. Further, he is alive right now,” I said. I had brought a chair from the captain’s cabin to the back of the ship and kicked my feet up on the railing to watch the approach of the Aillesterrans.

Aisha wanted to tear her hair out, all because I had passingly compared Lucius’ sorry state to the day I healed his arm. I had fully meant it when I said he would get it back himself. By throwing him off the cliff, his stigmata was forced into full swing. He was in one complete piece, hairless as a newborn, by the time we hiked down and found him. No harm, no foul as they say.

“You make a habit of this, don’t you?”

“A habit of what?” I asked.

“Abusing his life.”

“It’s not abuse if he’s not in danger.”

“He’s in pain!”

“Pain is temporary.”

“Shepherd save me, you fucking monster!” She threw up her hands and stormed off.

It gave me some few minutes to enjoy my pipe and watch the sea roll by, before I was interrupted again. Captain Bodin marched over, arms crossed and scowling. “We can’t bring this out any longer. We’ve had the strangest luck, but it has effectively run out.”

“I wouldn’t say our luck has been particularly abnormal. We simply compensated.”

I knew he thought it strange we had gone a full day between the sea lanes without mishap, but people have a tendency to think bad events are more common than they are. “If we go any further, they won’t need to follow us to find Hearth Bay. We’re about to come across fishermen. Local traders. Yachts. They’ll have their pick of who to follow, and when to slip away with their knowledge.”

“Let them. They’d only go back the way they came, and perhaps their luck won’t be so good on the way back. That was always one option.”

“If we let that happen, we’ll be hanged as traitors.”

That gave me pause to think. It would take a fair amount of time for such a thing to come back to bite Vassermark, and frankly it was a miracle no one had snitched and sold out the sea lanes by now. If the Aillesterrans were willing to send exploratory ships like this, they had aims on the capital, perhaps establishing trade with Skaldheim by sea after suppressing the Vassermark navy. That would cut Jarnmark off and cripple the entire economy.

But, I had back up plans to seize control of other kingdoms that I could enact, and the expectation was the king would give Lucius an assignment at the frontier. He would have to be summoned back for a trial of that sort, and that’s if they didn’t find out by the arrival of a naval siege. It was the commoners on the ship that would get executed as a show of force, not our problem.

“The real problem,” I said, “Is that Lucius is about five miles south of us, having his toes nibbled by fish. If that stigmata user on the pirate ship throws another storm at him, he doesn’t have much to hold onto.”

“So, we have to circle round,” Captain Bodin said, scratching his chin. Stress seemed to be making some of his hair fall out, or perhaps gave him a shaky hand with his razer that morning. It was hard to tell the difference.

“Indeed. Even without pirates on our heels, I think you’d cripple your own career if word got out that you abandoned your primary passenger to Saphira’s embrace.”

He scowled at me, and began barking orders at his crew. To their dismay, the Sea Bird’s Rest began a slow curve through the ocean. We must have caused some surprise aboard the ship, perhaps as much as Lucius’ ill-fated escape. By us turning back to meet them, we forced the decision to them, be it to fight or flee with what knowledge they had. We couldn’t have caught them, damaged as our ship was, if they chose to flee.

They met our turn with a turn of their own, swerving to one side and gently cutting in to meet us. Sailors on both ships grimly got to their weapons, their spears and their bows. Evidently, they had enough motivation to reach Hearth Bay that they accepted our challenge.

Once my pipe burned out, I slipped it down my sleeve and rose. “Honung, get the bait barrel ready, would you.” I had given the alchemist my share of the ship’s rum, which he had used to swamp his thoughts. Any less, and he might have begun questioning his obedience to the temples, the goddess, to his own learning. What we had done was assuredly blasphemy. Still, he got the repurposed barrel ready. Originally there had been provisions of food in it, now it had sea serpent viscera to chum the waters with.

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As our ships began to draw close, I walked to the prow of the ship, for better viewing. Aisha was there too, peering at the pirate vessel. “They have a woman aboard,” the redhead said.

“She’s the one with the storm stigmata. It’s a shame.”

“What? That she’s a woman?”

“That I won’t be able to study her ability in any detail. I may never see it again. The fact that we aren’t currently in a storm is ample evidence that she can’t use it freely, or at least not quickly, and I doubt we will be taking prisoners.”

She sighed and leaned on the railing. The ships were still quite far apart, the fact that she had been able to spot Kasumi was quite remarkable, but her mind went elsewhere. “I don’t think I know a single woman who owns a ship in all of Giordana.”

“No reason to think she’s the owner of that ship.”

“No, but it does happen, doesn't it?”

“Aillesterra is quite fond of gambling. It’s not unheard of for a woman to end up in possession of quite large fortunes. Ships included. Mercantile fleets are a form of gambling themselves.”

“And Vassermark?”

“Captaining tends to get outsourced to men looking to make a name for themselves. Women stay in the cities and manage the affairs. There are perks to their more… expansive marital families.”

“How sisters stay family?”

“Yes. It makes men somewhat more disposable than you would think. It’s like having a harem in a sense, and yet notStill, if one man wants to go off and make a fortune in the Ashfall Mountains for instance, he can be confident that his wives are taken care of by the other husband. Should he make that fortune, all rejoice. So, captains tend to be men, and the ship owners tend to be their wives. Wealth accrues like that.”

“Wasn’t exactly looking for an economics lesson.”

“Then you shouldn’t have asked.”

“Your plan is going to work, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. Would you like an explanation?”

“No.”

And so we left it at that, and I was truly beginning to like her. She was different. Or maybe I was just tired of the doctor boy latching onto my brain like a lamprey. Her and I watched the two ships approach in companionable silence. After I refilled my pipe, Captain Bodin thought it necessary to harangue his crew. They had the sails set just right, everything tied off and the rudder set, and so he marshaled them to the deck. Not one man slept below deck.

“Listen up, men. This is more than just a fight. This is the kind of pivotal moment that could determine the fate of nations, of kingdoms and wars. It’s one of those tiny moments that no historian will remember, but will shape history nonetheless. It’s something you’ll brag about to Shepherd, whether you meet her today, or forty years later with grandkids running about you.”

The sailors didn’t grin. They stared back with scowls and tight frowns. The larger men, who had been aboard with the captain longer, nodded with his words. It reassured the younger crew. A necessary show of courage like they were defenders at a city wall. The spears they had seemed shorter than most, which I figured made them for throwing rather than forcing off boarders. They had enough to do both however, many of them holding one in either hand.

“This fight is on our terms however! They’re the ones coming to us. They have to board our ship, and are we going to let them do that?”

“No!”

“That’s right. These foreign pirate bastards, we’re gunna send them to wet graves today! Might even take their ship ourselves. Wouldn’t that be something? Who wants to be a captain?” That shocked the men. “Whoever brings me that captain’s head, he gets the ship! How’s that sound?”

The crew threw up their weapons and roared, filling the sea with their vigor.

I cocked an eyebrow at Aisha, who just shook her head and sighed. Then I gestured to Honung at the back. The pirate ship had nearly twice as much sail out as us, and was cruising in fast. Before they overtook us, we could see them furling sails to match speed, some few oars scraping at the waves to modulate their speed. Their captain, Minato, seemed to be haranging his own men, prepping them for the assault.

Then Honung kicked the barrel of inscribed gore off the side of the ship. It struck the water like ink. Blood exploded through the water impossibly fast. Captain Bodin shouted something about preparing for attack, but my focus was on the depths. Water surged up, rocking us to the side as we sailed away from the organic bomb. The pirates sailed right at it, directly into the growing roil.

Then the giant sea boa leapt out of the water. It hammered the side of their ship with its head, jolting them to the side harder than striking rocks. The pirates screamed in panic as the serpent circled around them. I believe from the very start, it snapped their rudder off by a constriction. The sailors rallied to fight if off, weapons already in hand, as the serpent crawled over top the deck to bind around it.

They loosed arrows, barbed and vicious but unable to pierce the creature’s blubber. They slashed with swords, hardly breaking scales, and they stabbed with spears too few. Before they could even open the wounds Lucius had left upon it, the creature had entwined itself with their ship and broken their masts. Oars splintered like branches on a falling tree.

The very nature of the ship which made it so much faster than the Sea Bird’s Rest left it as fragile as an egg within the serpent’s grasp. Men were still trying to wrangle the rowboats to safety when it twisted and broke their keel.

I confess, I was laughing as I watched. It didn’t engender me to the crew who had just stoked themselves into a battle frenzy and puffed their chests out on aspirations of captainhood.