His face was as placid as ever.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“A mountain is rooted to the earth,” he answered.
“But… how?”
He drew in another long inhalation, held it, let it out slowly through his mouth.
Joslyn balled her hands into fists. That didn’t answer her question. She wanted to tell him that, too, but she thought better of it.
She mimed his stance. Mimed his breath —
“No,” he said sharply. He came out of mountain, took a step towards her. He tapped a big toe against the top of her foot. “You are trying to form mountain from here, with your feet. With your legs.” He reached out a hand, and Joslyn shrunk back automatically before forcing herself to relax. Gently, he placed the palm of his hand on her sternum. “Mountain forms from here.”
“From my chest?” Joslyn said, confused.
He shook his head, tapped her chest with a gnarled finger. “Inside. From the energy you draw in, the energy all around you. The energy is what forms mountain. Not the chest. Not the feet.”
Joslyn’s brow wrinkled in confusion. He’d said all of this before, and she’d heard him. She heard everything her ku-sai said; she hung on each word. But she was beginning to realize that although she could hear his words, it didn’t mean she understood them.
“Again,” he said. “Connect to the energy.”
Energy, energy. He always spoke of connecting to the energy, but Joslyn didn’t feel any “energy.” She just felt the cool, crisp mountain air as it stirred the leaves on the birch trees that surrounded his hut. She felt the sun falling and evening approaching. After evening would come night, and another futile attempt to rest soundly in the nest of blankets that served as her bed on the hard ground outside her ku-sai’s cozy, warm-looking hut.
But frustration didn’t mean Joslyn was anywhere close to giving up. So she put her right foot in front of her left, turned her toes out, closed her eyes, took a deep breath in…
And felt something. It was subtle, like the electrical charge in the air before a summer rainstorm, like the heat that radiated off a person’s body after a dip in a stream.
Joslyn’s eyes flew open in astonishment just as Ku-sai swept her feet out from beneath her. She crashed to the ground.
“Better,” he said. “Again.”
~ NOW ~
Joslyn assumed the position of mountain as the pirate captain walked up and down the line of the ship’s assembled men. The rolling ship made it harder for the energy she sent through her body to anchor itself to anything, so she kept her feet stationary but switched her breath back to the more fluid, flexible stance of panther prepares to spring.
The eight fighting men chosen by the Captain all stood in a line to Joslyn’s right. Normally, she would prefer to be in the center of such a group, with four fighting men on either side of her. But a woman in the center of a group of sailors would seem odd. It would stand out. And standing out was the last thing any of them wanted at the moment.
Which was why Joslyn lowered her gaze and put the tension of anxiety into her face as the pirate captain slowly inspected the ship’s crew.
“You have a sorry lot and a sorry ship,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.
The Captain merely nodded.
“Three pigs, eight sheep, two horses, and a handful of chickens below decks, Rizalt,” a pirate said, hopping down the stairs from the quarterdeck and onto the main deck where the sailors stood assembled.
Rizalt was the Adessian word for captain, and one of the few Adessian words Joslyn knew. The pirates spoke mainly in the Empire’s common tongue, though, probably in the hopes of intimidating the ship’s crew.
The Rizalt quirked a skeptical eyebrow at the Captain, stroking his short, braided goatee. The goatee was the only hair on the massive man’s head; everything else had been shaved down to the scalp. It made the lines of the blue-black star tattoos around his left eye stand out even more.
Joslyn assessed the Rizalt with a sidelong glance as he stood before the Captain. He was a broad wall of muscle, with more tattoos rippling across his bare, coffee-colored chest and arms to indicate the fights he had won, the lives he had taken. Joslyn didn’t know enough about Adessian tattoos to read their specifics, but she understood the general drift: This man was a lethal killer.
But in wearing only loose, ankle-length trousers, bare feet, and with heavy golden rings pulling down each earlobe, Joslyn understood other things about the Rizalt. He was arrogant, for one. No warrior would enter a potential battle free of armor and wearing his wealth in his ears. Such carelessness betrayed overconfidence, confidence that his presence alone would end any resistance from the carrack. The sword whose curved blade hung casually from one hand was mainly for show; he didn’t plan to use it.
Another pirate emerged from belowdecks. “Five barrels of meravin mushrooms, Rizalt,” he called cheerfully. “We found them in a hidden compartment.”
This caught not just the Rizalt’s attention, but the attention of all the other pirates still above decks. They paused in their respective duties and turned as one body towards the pirate who’d mentioned the mushrooms. Two of them laughed. The Rizalt let out a long whistle.
“Hidden meravin mushrooms!” he said to the Captain. He reached out, pinched the Captain’s cheek as if the man was a favorite nephew. “So you have a bit of the pirate in you after all, Captain. And something of value to give me besides your sailors.” He added something else in Adessian and patted the man’s cheek.
The Captain pressed his lips together, and it pleased Joslyn to see him following her command to say nothing, even though it was clear he itched to respond. The more the crew appeared to be cowed, the greater the advantage of surprise they would have when they attacked.
The news of the mushrooms, combined with the silence of the Captain, considerably brightened the pirates’ mood.
Joslyn counted them discreetly. Eight pirates stood at the ready behind the Rizalt; the other seven who had boarded the ship had been sent to inventory their loot. The last seven of the twenty-two had stayed aboard their longship, watching the slaves and waiting in reserve.
The cargo ship’s crew numbered thirty-six, and Joslyn couldn’t help but feel disdain for the fact that they could outnumber the pirates on board by nearly two-to-one and still be so prepared to surrender.
Joslyn waited for the pirates who had reported in to their Rizalt to move back towards the ladders that would take them below decks to continue their inspection. When the Rizalt turned to talk to one of the men behind him, she shouted “Now!”
The crew was ready. The non-fighting men scattered, scampering up the ship’s three masts like monkeys, so fast that most of them were a third of the way up the masts before the unsuspecting pirates even realized what was happening. The ship’s nine fighting men pulled forth the knives and daggers they’d hidden in their trousers and boots before the pirates had boarded; three of them, including the Captain, grabbed short swords they’d hidden in a barrel lashed to the main mast.
Some of these sailors would die today, Joslyn knew. But not all of them. And she took comfort in that.
The art of the sword master is death.
In the single, fluid motion of rising stork, Joslyn snatched the throwing knife from her boot and flung it into the back of the Rizalt. He jerked, then bellowed in pain and fury. The dagger wouldn’t be enough to take him down, she knew, but it would cost him blood, and it would weaken and slow him. More importantly, because his back was turned when she threw it, he wouldn’t guess that it came from her, the crew’s sole woman. She wanted him to be as arrogant and overconfident as ever when they finally faced off.