Leaping backwards with a mighty reverse frog, Joslyn grabbed the last sword from the barrel — her own.
The pirates were probably better fighters than the sailors, but the element of surprise was on their side. One pirate had already fallen. And even as she pulled her sword free from its scabbard, the Captain felled another.
Two down. Thirteen to go.
She charged past the Rizalt and his line of men, letting the ship’s crew stall them. Joslyn had a more important target: the five grappling hooks that connected the carrack to the pirate longship below. Joslyn felt relatively confident that the fifteen pirates currently on board could be defeated, especially since she would have the help of the ship’s fighters. But she needed to cut the grappling hooks before the seven pirates still on the longship decided to come to the aid of their companions.
She severed the rope attaching the first grappling hook, spun to parry a dagger from an oncoming pirate with dancer’s grace, then drove her sword into his belly with viper striking. He moaned and crumpled to the deck. He wasn’t dead, but Joslyn knew he would be before the battle ended.
Three down.
Joslyn cut free the second grappling, spun again to slit the throats of two more pirates with one arcing swing of her sword, then turned back to the grappling hooks and cut another free.
Five pirates dead or incapacitated.
A cry drew her attention away from the hooks, and in her peripheral vision, she saw the Captain collapse to his knees under the weight of the Rizalt’s hacking sword blows. The Captain was not a weak man, but the Rizalt was a brute.
The Captain was not going to last much longer against the Rizalt. Joslyn hesitated for the briefest of moments, doing a quick warrior’s math as she glanced between the pirates in the longship below, the carrack’s sailors atop the masts, and the Captain who’d been driven to his knees.
With a mighty, axe-like chop of her sword, she severed the remaining two grappling hooks, sending the pirates who had started to scramble up them towards the carrack into the sea with yelps of surprise. Once the last grappling hook had been cut free, the carrack’s sailors, the non-fighters who had scrambled up the masts, freed the ship’s sails. They unravelled with a whoosh of snapping canvas, and, like a gift from from the sea gods, a puff of wind inflated the sails a second later. The wind was no mighty gust, but it was enough to make the ship lurch, and the ship’s lurch was enough that the Rizalt’s kill stroke against the Captain faltered.
Thrown off-balance by the unanticipated movement of the ship, the downward arc of the Rizalt’s sword jumped six inches to the left. Instead of splitting the Captain’s skull in two, the Rizalt’s sword cleaved through his weapon arm, taking the hand off at the wrist.
The Captain’s sword, along with the hand that had been gripping it firmly, both clanged to the deck.
The Captain screamed in pain, the keening sound of it so shrill and panicked that it reminded Joslyn unpleasantly of the pig Cookie had made her slaughter some five days earlier. The Captain immediately seized his wounded wrist, desperately trying to stem the fountain of blood gushing forth from it. The Rizalt was merely annoyed that his first blow hadn’t landed, and lifted his sword for another attempt at the kill stroke.
But Joslyn was faster than the Rizalt. She charged forward, side-stepping one pirate’s blade, dropping to both knees and throwing her torso backwards like a Negustan contortionist when a second blade tried to take off her head. She sprang back up in the next instant, and with the quick flick of reverse swooping hawk, her sword sliced through the back of the Rizalt’s legs, hamstringing him.
This time, the bellow of pain came from the Rizalt himself. The arrogant pirate toppled forward, nearly bowling over the Captain as he did.
The sound of their leader’s scream, combined with the sight of him falling incapacitated to the carrack’s deck was too much for the pirates who still fought. Two of them dropped their weapons and fled at the sight of the Rizalt’s fall, dashing to the starboard railing and leaping over it, splashing into the waves that waited below. Another pirate hesitated a moment at the sound of the Rizalt’s fall, and the hesitation gave the sailor fighting him the opening he needed to drive his sword into the man’s chest.
Eight down.
With ruthless efficiency, Joslyn plunged her sword into the Rizalt’s throat, freeing her blade from his flesh just in time to slam it into another man’s side who had rushed over to help his leader.
Ten down. Five more to go.
Joslyn kicked the dying man off her blade, not caring where or how he fell to the deck. Blade dripping red, the ship’s deck rolling with waves beneath her, she paused long enough to assess the battle’s current condition. She heard the sound of fighting coming from the quarterdeck, and turned to see two sailors trying to take down a single pirate. The pirate held his own, but Joslyn knew what a fighter looked like when he was exhausted. He wouldn’t outlast the assault of his two assailants.
Where were her last four opponents?
A yell and a cry of pain behind her answered the question. She whirled around in time to see two pirates cutting through a group of sailors like farmers scything through wheat. Joslyn rushed to their defense, but three sailors fell to the deck before she arrived. She took off the arm of one pirate near the shoulder (eleven), parried a blow from the second, then spun with dancer’s grace to slice at the third. But the third pirate was nimble, and Joslyn’s sword refused to cut deeply. He jabbed out with a counter strike, forcing Joslyn to leap backwards, and then he charged before Joslyn could properly regain her footing. She threw herself down, barely avoiding his wild swing at her head before regaining her feet behind him with inhuman speed. At last she downed him, thrusting her sword into his back and through his heart (twelve). The remaining pirate on the quarterdeck gawked at Joslyn and his downed companions with wide eyes, then promptly hopped to the quarterdeck’s railing and dove into the sea (thirteen).
Two sailors remained with Joslyn on the quarterdeck, panting, blood-spattered. Their eyes rolled white like panicked horses.
“It’s too late for them,” she said calmly. “But there are two more pirates somewhere on this ship. You avenge your friends by finding them and killing them.”
One of the sailors set his jaw and nodded curtly. The man beside him glanced first at him, then at Joslyn, and swallowed.
“They’re probably belowdecks,” the nervous one said, but he didn’t move towards the ladder. He probably didn’t enjoy the prospect of fighting a skilled pirate warrior in the dark, cramped quarters of the carrack’s bowels.
“Then let’s go,” she said, and turned to descend the quarterdeck’s ladder.
After a tense search, they found the last two pirates hiding in the ship’s hold. One was bleeding badly from a gash in his arm, the other appeared uninjured. Joslyn prepared for a final battle in the dark, dank hold, but the uninjured pirate dropped his sword and lifted his hands in the air.
“We surrender,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.
His bleeding friend hesitated a moment, then dropped his own sword. He said nothing. Joslyn and the two sailors walked them back up to the main deck, but still kept their swords at the ready.
“Execute them,” the Captain snarled when she presented the last two pirates to him. He sat on the ship’s deck with his legs splayed out like a child’s. Beside him, Cookie and another sailor were bandaging the bleeding stump of his wrist.