Chapter 21 The Serpent
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SERPENT
Whorls of bubbles popped around me as, one by one, those following the Ever King sank into the tides. I swam for the dark hull of the Fire Storm, dead ahead.
Soon, if Celine and Stormbringer did their duty, they’d pull back the storm, just enough to reveal the crimson sails, enough to set the pulses of the House of Blades racing.
I dug and kicked through the current, at ease, at home.
Tait pulled ahead and touched a palm to the hull first. Jonas, Sander, the warriors in our wake, were a breath behind.
To see underwater was hardly a feat for sea fae.
Perhaps vision was a bit distorted, but it never ached, never burned.
Tait gave a nod, his signal he’d keep on my flank.
Arms out, palms open, I hummed, calling the sea to lift us up. The roll of the currents answered their king, and the water line gently rose, up and up, until I surfaced and could hook an arm over the rail.
Under the cloak of night, we crept onto the deck with predatory precision.
Damp pieces of hair slid from my headscarf, cascading water over my curled lips, the knife between my teeth. Hesh’s crew shuffled about. Tunes of the sea flowed over the deck. Blades were stacked, some sharpened, others unpolished and tarnished in old blood.
I ducked behind a barrel, seated back-to-back with Tait, and took the knife from my mouth, the cutlass from its sheath. The twins slunk around coils of rigging. Like a dark wave, the others spilled over the rail.
Tension crackled in the air. No signal, no word, I abandoned the barrel and stepped into the cracked skeins of moonlight. In a fluid motion the edge of my knife swiped over a burly sod nursing a flacon of sour rum. The man crumbled with a wet grunt and drowned in his own blood.
One by one, our blades met flesh of the unsuspecting, a phantom dance of gore.
Sander covered a mouth, Jonas slit the liver.
Tait kept low, gutting men with his violent way of twisting his daggers.
I preferred slicing once, muting their cries, then watching their eyes go wide with recognition of their king before I filled their necks with my steel.
Our steps carved in the blood across the deck. From the shoreline, a glimmer of rolling mist drifted nearer to the township. The princess, illusionist that she was, seemed to be proving quite useful indeed.
“Dammit.” Gavyn hissed when he rammed his knife in the chest of a sleeping man with a dark, patchy beard, only to realize the lump of cloaks next to his corpse shifted.
A brute, thick as stone, woke. With a wash of horror on his face he took in his bloodied companion.
It was enough time for the man to send out a whistle, shrill and deafening, before he slumped over, a knife rammed through his ear in a desperate strike.
But the warning had been given, and Hesh’s crew took to the fight.
Steel glided free of leather. Shouts for our heads rattled the laths. Somewhere near the bow, a burst of fire sparked in the night, a flare, a warning to the fort on the House of Blades.
On cue, bells rang across Hesh’s stone walls, shouts of his guards rolled over the beach.
Do your part, Earth Bender.
I slammed my sword into the soft belly of a man who rushed me, his cutlass foolishly raised overhead, allowing me a perfect place to strike. Another blade found me. I parried, kicked his knee. He was dead by the time I moved on to the next sod.
Jonas and Sander kept close to each other. Eyes black, the twin princes danced around a cluster of sobbing men, pleading for the horrors to cease.
Whatever they’d implanted in their heads was rotting them from the inside. With direct strikes, both princes put them out of their misery, then moved on to the next.
Tait was surrounded by five men, but a grin split over his face.
Before the first could strike, Gavyn appeared from the damp on the deck.
He stabbed his dagger into the side of a throat, then faded into the water again.
Tait stepped in, killing one stunned fool, only to have Gavyn appear again and slaughter the next.
A man swung a wooden club at me. I twisted under his arm, the rod whistling close to my face.
When I righted again, I swiped my cutlass against his middle, watching him fall at my back.
Within the moment of respite, I unsheathed my knife, and gripped the blade, squeezing blood between my curled fingers.
Two men challenged me. Knife tossed, hand bloodied, I met their strikes. When blades crossed, I covered my opponent’s mouth with my wet palm.
One after the other, they dropped, coughing, spluttering, black veins coating their necks.
My limp grew more pronounced. I didn’t stop.
Five paces ahead was the captain’s chamber. Three men stood guard, but there was a glint of fear in their eyes. The center guard, he would break first.
The bastard raised a trembling hand, voice rough as he said, “M-My King, we did—”
I never learned what they did. I cut him down before he could utter another sound. To the man at the right, I covered his mouth and nose with my palm, pinning him to the door of Hesh’s chambers as his body succumbed to my poison.
To the man on the left, I snarled. “Open this door, or you meet the gods, followed by your mate, your mistress, and any of your little bastards. I will not stop until your blood is wiped from the Ever.”
He blinked, took a breath to scan the chaos on deck, the bodies heaped over rails and ropes. His fingers shuddered as he jabbed a brass key through the hole.
I kicked the door open, ignoring the white-hot shock that rolled up my thigh. “Hello, Hesh. Were you not expecting me?”
Lord Hesh rose off his cot, half-naked. A woman tucked her bare breasts beneath the quilts, whimpering.
“Bloodsinger.” Hesh spoke as though simply irritated I’d interrupted.
“Ah, am I no longer your king?”
He scoffed, taking up his cutlass from the table in the center of the room. “Boy, you know the answer to that, or you would not be here. Alas, you have wasted your time.”
“Killing you will never be a waste of time.”
“Kill me, and you will never find her. Leave me alive, and I will never guide you to her. It is better for you to forfeit your crown, spare us all a bit of bloodshed and embarrassment.”
Gods, the way I would make him scream. I could practically taste his cries on my tongue. “I think it would be in our best interest, at least for your house, if you revealed this key you have to the isle where he is keeping her.”
Hesh’s brow arched. “So, you’ve learned a few things.”
“More than you know.” I spun my blade in my grip, stepping to the left when Hesh mimicked my motion. We circled each other, two beasts looking for the weakest place to strike.
Despise me as he did, my uncle had insisted I learn the blade with more skill than I knew to walk. I yanked the dagger strapped to my lower back free of its sheath and threw it across the chamber.
Hesh roared, one hand on the hilt protruding from his hip. Strategic. I did not want the bastard dead. Not yet. He made a desperate swipe of his blade. I blocked with the edge of my cutlass and twisted his grip free of his sword.
“You were the best choice my father had for the blade lord?” I let out a derisive sigh. “What a disappointment.”
The woman in his bed screamed when I fisted a handful of Hesh’s thick, sun-lightened hair and dragged his bleeding ass onto the deck.
“Drop your blades,” I shouted over the din. “Or you watch your lord meet the hells, then you next.”
Bound by blood, what was left of the Fire Storm crew hesitated.
Blades dropped in heavy thuds. The men tortured by Jonas and Sander sobbed as the two princes lightened their eyes to moss green.
Tait ignored my halt, slit the throat of the man he’d pinned, then returned a smug sort of grin in my direction.
Gavyn crouched in front of Lord Hesh, teeth bared. “I know everything you have done, traitor. I’ve found her. Freed her from that room.”
Hesh’s eyes went wide. “Not possible.”
“Perhaps you should not have tossed your lot in with an imposter king.” Gavyn patted Hesh’s cheek with condescension, then rose.
“You say you found her, yet you are here without her.” Hesh chortled but winced when the blade still lodged in his hip shifted. “Discovered there is no escaping that place for the little earth fae, did you?”
I slammed the hilt of my dagger against his head. “Speaking of earth fae, they heard rumor that you had some grand delusion you would claim their realms. I think you’ll find they have no plans to let you.”
Before he could shirk me away, I ripped the dagger from his hip and pinned his back to the deck. One knee on the blade lord’s chest, I forced his arm to stretch out, then rammed the point of my blade through his wrist until the tip dug through bone and flesh into the deck of the ship.
Hesh cried out his anguish.
I propped one boot on the hilt of the dagger. Hesh squirmed and hissed his pain. “Better for you to admit your defeat and spare everyone a bit of blood and embarrassment.”
“Go to the hells, Bloodsinger.”
I shrugged and pulled the dagger out of his wrist. “I wonder what the people of your house will think knowing you brought this upon their heads.”
Tait and Celine helped hoist Hesh up against the rail of his ship, facing him toward his own shores.
Behind me, one of my men whooped into the night. It didn’t take long, mere moments, before an ember spear boomed, blasting a cinder stone at the shoreline of the House of Blades.
“Hardly frightening, I know,” I muttered close to Hesh’s ear in a low snarl. “Don’t worry. That was only the signal.”
Along the shoreline, the night shimmered. It faded like sea mist and revealed the truth hidden behind Mira’s illusion. The Ever Crew battled the guards at the gates and forced frightened folk in their night clothes to the shoreline.
“Watch that man.” I pointed to the place where a figure knelt on the ground.