Lucy’s ship sat at the dock as if it owned the place, which, technically, it did.
The Royal Navy now owned part of the harbor and a strip of land along the coast, and I’d signed the requisition forms myself, somewhere between a tax dispute and a very long nap.
Dark timber, brass fittings polished to a glare, and a flag snapping overhead in colors no real navy would ever have approved. I leaned on the rail and let the harbor noise wash over me, gulls and rope and someone two piers down losing an argument about fish, and tried to enjoy my last few minutes of solid-ish ground.
Lucy planted herself beside me, hammer slung across her back, hat at an angle that defied both wind and dignity.
“Y’know, Yer Majesty,” she said, and I braced, because nothing good ever followed Lucy starting a sentence with y’know, “I been thinkin’. Leavin’ that whole sorry business with Nathan behind—best decision I ever made. Best one.”
“You’ve mentioned.” About four times since boarding. “Loudly.”
“Ain’t meant to sit behind a desk, Charlie.” She gestured at the harbor with her whole arm, taking in the masts, the water, and the gulls.
“You were a tester of Rimelion,” I pointed out, at which she only laughed.
“Been cooped up. Drinkin’ stale coffee, countin’ other people’s coin. Test me this, Lucy. Our boss was a creep!” She spat like a fishbone. “And now? Now I get to pirate—”
I turned my head.
“—command,” she corrected, smooth as anything, “Her Majesty’s glorious Royal Navy. Honest work. Hardly any plunderin’ involved at all.”
“Lucy.”
“Salvage,” she said. “Lola told me it’s legally distinct.”
I let it go, mostly because the shouting ring I’d lent her threw every word into the next district, and I didn’t have the energy to win an argument that loud before breakfast. She was happy, though. Genuinely, ridiculously happy, hand resting on a ship she got to call hers, and there are worse things to fund out of a royal treasury than that.
A new voice drifted up the gangway before its owner did. It was so pleasant, amused, and unmistakably Phèdre. “—you squeaked, ma chérie. Twice. I counted both.”
“That was not a squeak, that was a perfectly normal vocalization under acoustic—”
“It was a squeak.”
“—the bass was very loud, anyone would have—”
“Mmhhh.” she purred. “And the dancing? You will tell me that the dancing was a ‘perfectly normal vocalization’ also?”
Yuki let out a strangled noise. I looked over the railing.
Phèdre came up the gangway as if she’d been invited to a different, far more elegant event, coat hanging off her shoulders, every step unhurried. Beside her, trailing by half a stride and losing, was Yuki, pink-faced, three tails of dawn-light whipping behind her in open mutiny against whatever composure she was attempting. Her fox ears were flat. Her hands were doing something complicated and apologetic in the air.
“No notebook, you said,” Yuki was insisting. “I respected the no-notebook clause. I’d like that noted.”
“It is noted. You were magnificent. You only stepped on my feet four times.”
“Five,” Yuki said miserably, and then she saw me, and her face flipped, ears up, tails forgetting to be embarrassed, a grin breaking through like sun off the water. “Charlie! Oh—wait, I wanted to ask, why—why are we here? On a boat? Is this a boat thing? Is there a historical—” She caught herself. “Focus, Yuki. Why are we here?”
I opened my mouth.
Shadow pooled at the edge of the deck where no shadow had any business pooling, and then NightSwallow stepped out of it, already on one knee, head bowed, daggers sheathed, both hands flat on her thighs.
“Lady of the night, ready for the mission, my Queen.”
I will never get used to that. Her flowery speech, the kneeling, the… appearing. One second empty planking, the next a professional assassin folded into a bow at my feet like she’d grown up out of the deck.
“You don’t have to kneel,” I said.
The bow didn’t move. “Ready for the mission, my Queen,” she repeated, her polite way of telling me to leave it.
I left it. She rose, crossed to the rail without another word, set her forearms on it, and went still to listen, pretending very hard that the kneeling had been strictly necessary.
Then footsteps on the gangway, two sets, unhurried, and Llama came up onto the deck with Luminaria’s hand in his.
It was a strange thing, just a man walking up a gangplank with his fingers laced through the Lumi’s, looking, for once, like he didn’t have a single correction to make. Then he reached the top and looked down at the planking. “This dock,” he said, by way of greeting, “is a structural liability.”
“It’s held this long,” I offered.
Yuki interrupted, “It was re-built seventy-two years ago by the order of Grand—”
Llama didn’t look impressed. “That is not reassurance. That is luck running out on a schedule.”
Luminaria patted his arm. He let her. She swept a little bow at the deck at large and earned a delighted “ARRR!“ from somewhere up in the rigging.
I spread my hands at the assembled chaos. “So. This is my team.”
Yuki’s ears perked. “Team for what?”
“Okay. So.” I leaned back against the rail. “The army’s not ready. Won’t be for a while. Mila’s still rebuilding the front line, reorganizing again. Nobody’s marching anywhere until the supply lines stop pretending to be optional.” I waved a hand. “But that doesn’t mean we sit on our hands. The Tower’s solved. That whole mess with Altandai—done. Which meant that for the first time we’ve got a clean road straight to where the new capital’s meant to go.”
“And we are sailing to it,” Phèdre said.
“Sailing toward it. Sailors drop us there, and they start building a dock, and when we’re done, we return to the first building in the new capital.” I tipped my head up at the crow’s nest.
“Har! In and out, smooth as a greased eel,” Lucy declared, to nobody’s comfort.
“Done with what, though?” Luminaria said, eyes already gleaming.
“That’s the fun part.” I crossed my arms. “Cloudy won’t just hand over the world fragment. Before it’ll stabilize and binds, the system wants it cleared, properly cleared. There’s a dungeon sitting inside, made just for us.”
“What’s in it?” Luminaria leaned in. “What are we facing?”
I shook my head. “No idea. That’s the catch with this; it doesn’t generate until we’re standing at the door. We won’t know what’s down there until it’s too late to back out.” I shrugged, going for breezy and almost certainly missing. “But it’s ready. It’s been ready. I’ve wanted to go for a while, honestly. Lola pushed back.”
I glanced around, paranoid enough that Lola was hiding behind a barrel. “She isn’t here, though.” I spread my hands again, bright as I could manage. “So. We set sail.”
NightSwallow’s forearms came off the rail.
“We’re moving against Lola?” Her voice stayed flat, but flat from her meant she’d caught something the rest of us were being polite about.
“No!“ My head shook hard enough that the harbor probably saw it. “No, no—never. I would never—” A cleared my throat. “...almost never. She knows. Mostly. She knows we’ll be gone, she knows we’ll be missed, and she knows this beats waiting a few weeks for an army that might not get here in time.” I exhaled. “I talked her around. Eventually. There were concessions. I agreed to—”
I bit my lip and glanced to the side. “Anyway, we’re sailing.” And I felt good about it. Lola hadn’t said yes so much as stopped saying no, but with Lola, that’s practically a parade.
“So,” I looked around the deck. Yuki bouncing on her toes, Phèdre serene, Llama already cataloguing exits, Luminaria glowing, NightSwallow a patient shadow at the rail. My team. Gods help me. “Everyone ready?”
A chorus came back.
Yuki’s eager “Ready!”, Lumi’s grin, Llama’s curt nod, Phèdre’s lazy “Évidemment,” and from the rail, quiet and certain, “Always.”
“Good enough.” I turned toward the crow’s nest. “Lucy—whenever you’re—”
I didn’t get to finish.
“CAST OFF, YE LAZY BARNACLES!“ Lucy’s voice tore across the harbor, loud enough to scatter gulls three piers down, the shouting ring hurling every syllable into the next kingdom, precisely as designed and precisely as I regretted lending it. “Loose them lines! Trim the sails! We sail for glory, treasure!”
“Lucy!” I yelled back.
She glanced down at me and corrected, “And at least one’s legally sanctioned errand! HEAVE!“
The crew exploded into motion. Ropes sang loose, the great sails dropped and filled, and the rotting dock groaned in what I chose to interpret as relief as the ship pulled off it and swung her nose toward open water.
We were going.
We slid out of the lake by midmorning and into the river’s mouth, and Lucy put us upstream, south, against a current that grumbled under the hull but didn’t argue too hard. For a while, it was almost peaceful. Yuki narrated the geology of both banks to anyone who held still. Phèdre held still, mostly to watch Yuki do it.
Then a wet, burbling slap echoed off the starboard hull, and something heaved itself over the rail and flopped onto the deck in a smear of river slime.
I knew that sound. Gods help me, I knew that smell.
“Oh, come on,” I said.
[Floater Lv.25]Type: 1-common | HP: 236/236
[Elite Floater Lv.30]Type: 1-common | HP: 316/316
A dozen more hauled themselves aboard behind it, all bulging fish-eyes and lipless snarls and fin-limbs slapping wet against the boards. “Thirty,” I muttered. “At this rate, they’ll out-level me by next month.”
“INTRUDERS!“ Lucy bellowed from the nest, delighted. “Slime-bellied gutter trout! Off me deck, ye gargling bilge-warts!”
It was barely an inconvenience.
Luminaria’s hands came up, and a fork of lightning split three of them at once with a crack that left my ears ringing and a scorch mark Lucy was definitely going to bill someone for.
Llama didn’t even draw; he caught the nearest one’s lunge on his shield, folded it into the deck with one clean drop of his weight, and put a boot through the next without changing expression.
NightSwallow was simply elsewhere; then a Floater came apart along two neat seams, and she was elsewhere again.
Yuki skated a mirror of dawn-light across the planks and herded four of them into a tidy, panicked cluster, and I froze the cluster solid and let Phèdre tip the whole frozen lump over the rail with the toe of one boot.
Llama nudged a stray frozen Floater with his foot. “Easy experience,” he said.
NightSwallow flicked slime off a dagger. For a moment she said nothing, then smiled. “Luna would’ve loved this. She’d have thrown herself off the bow to reach more of them.” She sheathed the blade.
“We’ll bring her next time,” I said. “She’ll level up near the Altandai fields anyway.”
“Mm, she’ll manage,” said NightSwallow. “Luna is the lady of the moon.”
I blinked and decided not to comment on that.
The last Floater was killed by Lucy’s hammer as she hollered something victorious and probably defamatory after it. We kept going upstream, south; the banks sliding past green and slow, and I went back to pretending I wasn’t seasick.
The river narrowed.
The banks crept in, green giving way to gray-green giving way to something older and darker, and within the hour the open sky had pinched down to a ribbon overhead, then to scraps, then to almost nothing.
Trees leaned over us from both sides; huge, ancient roots clawing down into the water, branches knitting so high and so thick that the light came through green and dim and underwater-wrong.
The current went quiet.
The birds stopped.
Lucy, for once, dropped her voice. “Cozy,” she said.
“This is it,” I whispered; the forest felt like the place that was listening. “From here on, it’s all like this. Dense, the entire way south. No more open water, no more seeing trouble coming from a mile out.” I scanned the darkness between the trunks, the still black water, the places where the bank climbed up into shadow. “So watch the banks. Watch the canopy. If anything down here decides it doesn’t like us, we’re going to find out at close—”
An arrow punched out of the dark on the bank ahead and buried itself in the deck rail a hand’s-width from my hip, still singing with the force of it.
“Oh, come on!”