“Sit,” the Queen said again, unhurried, and NightSwallow did not sit.
The pane held on the chamber below-decks, dry in the middle of a storm that wanted to eat the ship, and I sat on my own throne with rain running into my collar and watched her smile at a scout she couldn’t possibly see.
Except she could.
She turned her head, and her eyes came to rest on the exact coil of rope NightSwallow had folded herself behind, and she found it on the first try. No line of light from a staff. No diviner’s trick. She just looked.
“There you are,” she said. “You needn’t hide from me, sister. I always know where the dark is. It’s the one thing light is for.”
NightSwallow said nothing at all, which meant she was feeling a great deal.
The Queen rose from the black throne. She didn’t hurry that either; she was probably stalling for time for us to fail.
She stood in her pale ivory silk with the runes running down the sleeves and the single dark stone at her brow, and she spread her hands as if to show they were empty, which they were, because she had six elite guards and two ritual mages to hold things for her.
“They gave you so many names,” she whispered. “I heard them up on the mountain before the sea. Princess of Shadows. Princess of Death. All the little titles you keep behind your teeth because you’d die before you said them out loud.” Her smile widened, and there was nothing cruel in it, which was worse. “I say mine at breakfast. Lady of the Light. Princess of the Sun. Dawn’s own daughter, and I don’t whisper a word of it, because the whole point of me is to be seen.”
The pane gave me NightSwallow’s face in the pale green torchlight, and it was still, and I knew by now that the stiller she went the more of her was on fire underneath.
“We’re the same thing, you and I,” the Lady said. “Made from the same stuff and pointed opposite ways. You built a life out of never being looked at. I built one out of never being unseen. And here we are, in a little room in a storm, and only one of us gets to leave it a person.” She tilted her head, and the circlet caught the torches. “So. Put them down, sister. I won’t enjoy the other way.”
NightSwallow drew her second dagger.
“…No,” she said.
That was the answer, and The Lady sighed.
A light came up out of the pale silk and the dark stone at her brow and the runes on her sleeves all at once, white and clean and everywhere, and it filled the low-beamed room until there was not one honest shadow left in it. The coils of rope cast no shadow. The carved timbers threw no shadows. NightSwallow, wedged into the angle she’d trusted, sat suddenly in a corner made of noon.
I watched the shadow-skin fail.
Sit still. Sit still, Charlie.
And down in the noon-lit box, NightSwallow got her second back.
She stood up out of the crouch. She rolled the fear off her shoulders the way Lucy rolled off a hit. And then she smiled. Not the flat thing she gave the world. The one I’d only caught twice.
She pointed at the Queen with her dagger and grinned. She’d been told the shadows wouldn’t open for her tonight, and she’d decided to kill everyone in the room.
“Guards,” the Lady said, and her serenity had thinned. “She won’t be reasoned with. Take her.”
Six halberds came off the deck.
NightSwallow put two fingers to her mouth and whistled.
Up on deck, Lucy was losing her mind, and it was the best thing I’d seen all hour.
The left pane threw it at me full: the waist of the flagship, three Empire hulls lashed to her now by their own grapples, and my captain standing in the middle of it with her coat blown open where the fire had opened it and her arms wide like a woman conducting weather.
She was not surviving the battle anymore. She had stopped surviving it some minutes ago. She was winning it, and she was winning it wrong, and the wrongness was the total joy of her.
“BOARD THE FOURTH!” Her voice went out across the water, amplified to the size of the storm. “SHE’S RIGGED HERSELF TO THE THIRD LIKE A DRUNK TO A LAMPPOST, SO WE’LL HAVE THE PAIR OF ‘EM! DON’T CUT THE LINES YER FESH—THE LINES ARE OURS NOW! EVERYTHING’S OURS NOW! I’M IN AN ACQUIRIN’ MOOD!”
She’d promised NightSwallow a road six hulls long, and she’d built it.
But somewhere in the building she’d stopped spending the Empire’s ships to make chaos and started keeping them, and the copied crew she summoned out of the pockets of her ridiculous exploiter’s class poured across each new deck and did not leave it, and behind her the Empire’s own formation was folding into hers, hull by hull, like a hand of cards being collected by the winner.
She caught a fireball on the crossed forearms, laughed at it, and kept walking.
“THAT ALL?” she bellowed at the ship still trying to fight her. “I’VE HAD ROUGHER MORNINGS! I’VE HAD ROUGHER HANGOVERS! COME ABOARD AN’ MEET YER NEW OWNER!”
She wasn’t supposed to capture the ships.
The voice came into my skull, and there was a note in it I hadn’t heard before, under the smugness, a small crack where the smugness used to be seamless.
The scenario permits her to sink them. To burn them, break them, spend them for advantage. She was to thin their line until the assassin could work. The voice paused, and the pane showed me Lucy pressing her palm to a new gash and grinning it closed. She is collecting a navy.
I grinned.
I sat bolted to a throne I wasn’t allowed to leave, soaked to the bone, forbidden to lift a single finger to help any of them, and I grinned so wide my face hurt, because that was my paladin down there, breaking a test built by a mountain, and the mountain had just noticed.
She’s MY knight, the exploiter, I told it, in my head, in case it was listening the way it clearly was. You handed her a loophole and told her it was a leash. That’s on you.
The voice didn’t answer.
On the left pane, Lucy threw back her head and howled a laugh into the rain, and three Empire ships flying no flag at all pitched and rolled at the ends of her stolen grapples, and she looked, for all the world, like a woman who had finally found the party she’d been dressed for.
Back near the enemy Queen, the whistle was still fading, and the shadows were answering it.
They came down the hatch she’d taken, the hatch she’d cleared and left open behind her. Four of them, then a fifth, dark leathers and low hoods and the shadow-sleeves on their blades, her scouts. They dropped into the noon-lit chamber the Lady had made.
It became a knife-fight in a lit box.
The Lady’s guards were elite. I could see it in the way they moved, proper guards, clean recoveries, six of them working as one, halberds keeping the assassins at a range assassins hate. Reach against speed. Discipline against ambush, in a room with nowhere to ambush from.
And NightSwallow, stripped of the one thing that made her her, fought them as… Luna.
She was good. She was not built for fighting in the open, and she was good anyway, and watching her I understood for the first time exactly how much of her record came from never being seen and how much came from simply being fast and unwilling to lose.
She caught a halberd-haft on both crossed daggers and rode it instead of stopping it, similar like she’d ridden the axe on ship four, and used the guard’s own reach to swing herself past his guard and open the back of his knee.
He went down.
Her squad took him the rest of the way.
The second guard she lost ground to. He was better than the first, and she gave three meters of carpet to learn it, and one of her assassins died buying the meters back, a halberd through the chest.
The enemy queen was like me, not fighting. And a queen who didn’t fight was a queen running out of guards.
Third guard: NightSwallow slipped a thrust, stepped inside the halberd’s arc where the reach turned useless, and put a dagger up under the jaw.
Clean.
Fourth guard nearly had her.
He read the inside-step, met her there, and his gauntlet caught her across the temple and slammed her into a carved timber hard enough that I felt my head ring in sympathy. Her HP went to half just from that.
She dropped a dagger.
And in the half-second she had nothing in her right hand, her squad closed over the guard like water closing over a stone, and when they pulled back, he was down and her dagger was in her hand again and she was breathing through her teeth.
Two left, she said.
The last two guards backed toward the mages.
She and four assassins hit the last two guards at once, from four angles, and it worked because the guards had spent the whole fight learning to watch her and forgotten there were others.
Both guards went down inside two seconds.
One assassin went down with them.
That left the mages.
The mages ran. Casters always run when the wall between them and the knives comes down, and these two turned from their unfinished circle and bolted for the far door, and NightSwallow let her squad have them because she had somewhere better to be.
She walked up the green-and-gold carpet toward the throne.
The Lady of the Light watched her come.
“Sister,” she said, and the serenity had a thread in it now, a small human wobble that the light couldn’t cover. “Sister, wait. You feel it too, don’t you? We could —”
NightSwallow reached the throne.
“—sister of the ni—”
She killed her mid-word.
Two daggers, one under the jaw and one at the base of the skull, and the Lady of the Light folded forward off her black throne with the last syllable still unsaid, and the white light went out of the chamber all at once.
I let out a breath I’d apparently been holding since the whistle.
On the throne, where the Lady had been, two daggers lay across the black lacquer.
They were white. NightSwallow stood over them, both her own blades still wet in her hands, and looked at them for a long moment.
Then she sheathed her daggers and picked the white ones up, one in each hand, turning them to the torchlight.
Queen, she said in my head, and the flat little voice had a thread of its own in it now, a smaller cousin of the wobble that had been in the Lady’s. It’s done. She’s dead. A pause. She had 6-marvel daggers.
The world fell apart.
The storm went to pieces around me, the last thing the panes gave me before it went, both of them at once, side by side in the rain—
Every hull Lucy had taken.
Three she’d lashed to the flagship, and the others past them, the whole folding armada she’d collected instead of thinning. On every one of them, up the mainmast in the teeth of the dying storm, a flag ran up that hadn’t been there moments before.
The Rimebreak naval ensign.
My colors, my crest, and Lucy standing in the waist of the first of them with her hat off and her arms up, screaming something the amplification carried away before it reached me.
Then the sea flattened all the way. Into a floor. Into white.
The throne let go.
I felt the bolts release, felt the deck stop being a deck, felt the rain stop mid-fall and simply not exist, and I was standing in a room the size of a cathedral, and every surface was white.
A soft, unfinished white, walls and floor and a ceiling so high it gave up on being a ceiling.
Lucy stood a few feet off, dry, blinking at the white like a woman surfacing from deep water. NightSwallow stood past her, dry with a white dagger still in each hand.
“…Huh,” Lucy said, which was the best any of us managed.
I rolled my shoulders. They came loose. I’d half expected the not-being-allowed-to-move to have set into my bones, and it hadn’t. “We passed,” I said, mostly to hear it out loud.
“We passed,” Lucy agreed, and then the grin arrived, all teeth. “Majesty. Majesty, did ye see it. Did ye SEE what I—”
“I saw it.”
“Ten sail. TEN. An’ I kept the lot, I didn’t sink a one, I—” She spun a slow circle, and spread her arms at it the way she’d spread them at the storm. “Can we do it again? Straight off? I’m not even tired. I’ve never been less tired. Point me at another sea an’ I’ll bring ye back a second navy, I’m on a—what’s the word—I’m on a HEATER.”
“You are not doing it again.”
“I could do it again.”
NightSwallow, off past her, turned one of the white daggers over and made a small giggle. She just held the two blades up a little, into the soft white light, and looked at them.
“I have these,” she said. “So it must be a reward.”
“Yours,” I agreed. Nobody was going to argue with her about it.
“An’ where’s mine?” Lucy rounded on the white room, hands going to her hips. “I did the SEA. I did the whole sea. She got the pretty knives an’ the Night Princess got her murder an’ Her Majesty got to sit an’ look regal, which, fair, that’s the job—but the sea was MINE, an’ I want to know what a man gets for a clean sweep of ten sail. Well?” She addressed the blank white air as if it owed her rum. “WELL? Ye watched. Ye were smug about it. Ye’ve gone awful quiet now the collectin’ plate’s come round. What do I GET?”
The voice came, one last time and a little sulky.
Go outside.
Lucy looked at me. I looked at Lucy. NightSwallow was already walking toward the door. “…Right,” Lucy said. “Outside. Aye. I can do outside.”
We went outside.
The temple let us out onto its broad pale steps, and the mountain air hit clean after an hour of storm that hadn’t been real at all, and below us the valley opened up, the lake spread flat and enormous at the mountain’s foot, the new town smudging its thumbprint of smoke at the far shore.
Except the lake wasn’t empty anymore.
Ten ships-of-the-line sat on it. Dark Empire hulls, tall-masted, arranged in a loose and slightly smug crescent just off the pale shingle where we’d grounded the rowboat a lifetime ago.
And every one of them flew our flag.
“THEY’RE REAL! MAJESTY, THEY’RE REAL, THEY CAME WITH ME! I BROUGHT ‘EM HOME! LOOK AT ‘EM! LOOK AT THE STATE OF ‘EM! THAT’S A FLEET! THAT’S YER FLEET! I WON YE A FLEET!”
NightSwallow chuckled, and then we followed the captain down off the mountain toward the water and the rest of them.
The others were waiting where the road spilled back down to the stele, and they’d clearly watched the whole descent, because Yuki was already vibrating.
“There are SHIPS,” Yuki announced, as if we might have missed them. “On the lake. There are—Queen, there are warships on your lake, and they weren’t there a moment ago, and they’ve got your crest on them, and I have so many questions about the displacement alone, that water can’t be more than—”
“Later,” I said, and she folded the questions up with visible pain.
Lucy told the story.
She told it the whole way down the last of the road and half the walk to the water, in the accent, at full sail, and I let her, because she’d earned the telling and because the version she gave was better than the one I’d watched.
In her mouth the cascade was a plan she’d had from the first grapple. The stolen chain-sets were seamanship. The four extra boarders she’d conjured from nowhere were ‘reserves, always keep reserves, first thing they teach ye’.
The moment the flags ran up the masts, she informed us, had been a personal gift from the sea itself in recognition of services rendered.
“—an’ the wee voice,” she finished, thumbing back up at the temple, “the wee spooky voice, it got all sniffy about it. Ye could hear it. ‘She wasn’t SUPPOSED to —’” She did an impression, reedy and put-upon, that was nothing like the voice and better than the voice. “Wasn’t supposed to. Ha! There’s no supposed-to, is there, John. There’s just what ye can carry off before someone stops ye.”
I winced at John, but I nodded at her. “There’s really not,” I agreed.
“So.” She jammed the hat back on and looked at the crescent of hulls riding at anchor with the frank, hungry, sizing-up look she’d given the first temple. “They’re mine to poke, aye? The fleet? Just to check the holds. See what the Empire packs. Purely professional.”
“Go on,” I said. “Check your fleet. Don’t sail it anywhere. Don’t sail it anywhere, Lucy, I mean it—the town has enough to argue about without a navy turning up unannounced and then leaving.”
“I would never.” She was already backing toward the shingle. “I’ll bring ye an inventory. A proper one. Like Lola! With columns.” And she was gone.
That left the mountain, and the two temples on it still sleeping, and the choice of who climbed next.
Llama stepped up before I’d finished thinking it. Shield still on his arm, chin down.
“I’ll go second, Majesty.” He didn’t phrase it as a question. “Whatever it puts in front of me, I’d rather meet it fresh than wait and watch three more of these and get clever about it. Waiting sours a guard.”
I looked at Yuki. “It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll go last.”
“Thank you, Yuki. Behind or at max beside,” Llama said, looking at me. “Not in front.”