Golzin leaned on her crutch.
“You cannot do that, I am afraid.”
“I am a shipwife of the fleet. I can—”
“You are a disgraced woman, on a ship of the dead.” Golzin laughed, quiet but real, and her amusement sparkled in her eyes like light from Skearith’s Eye on the water. “I fought a fleet ship of fifteen years as deckholder, until I had a leg broken by a spar.” She tapped her left leg. “This ship is my reward and my word is law upon it, Meas Gilbryn. I need not listen or bow to what a woman like you says.”
Meas did not flinch at words loosed to wound. “You are a merchant shipwife, and I am a fleet shipwife. Ship of the dead or no you must still bow to my commands.” This said with the pleasant air of two Kept discussing the latest fashion in shoes, though her next words bit. “And you will listen and bow if I command it. Do you understand?”
Golzin reached inside her stinker coat – never a piece of clothing more aptly named to be worn on this ship – and took out a small scroll of birdleather.
“I will not, nor will I let you below, Unlucky Meas, and I do it on the word of your own mother. Here, read.”
Meas took the scroll and unrolled it. On the back was an imprint of children bowed under the weight of the Hundred Isles throne. Meas scanned the words and passed the scroll to Joron.
On pain of death, and by Command of Thirteenbern Gilbryn, this ship is to be given safe passage and left to itself. None are to interfere or interrupt. All assistance needed must be given to this crew.
Below, the watery swirl of a signature.
“Such things can be forged,” said Meas.
“These were not. You would think your own mother’s writing would be easy for you to recognise.”
Meas rolled the note, tapped it against her chin.
“Where do you fly for?” she said.
“Well, I am sure you would like to know, but I am afraid knowing that, I would say, comes under the remit of you interfering.” It did not escape Joron’s notice that the members of Golzin’s crew were encroaching on them, and more were coming up from below. At the rump of the ship two small gallowbows were being untrussed. Meas glanced at Coughlin, who gave her a small nod, turned his head to Berhof and exchanged a look.
“Out here, in the ocean, Shipwife,” said Meas, “there’s no way to check if you’ve forged that or not. So I think I should check your cargo anyway. I am sure my mother will understand, she has always respected thoroughness.”
Golzin stared at her.
“Out here in the ocean, Shipwife Meas,” she said, “anything can happen, and I am also sure your mother would understand if it did.”
And on one side or another a signal was given, Joron did not see it made. He only heard the result, the drawing of blades, the command to spin the bows and, like a bolt fleeing a gallowbow, he felt the release of tension among the merchanter’s crew.
Saw the dangerous smile on Meas’s face.
Reached for his precious gifted sword.
Shipwife Golzin stepped back and her crew came rushing in. At the same time Meas drew her sword, shouting, “Coughlin!” She dodged the slash of a curnow blade from one of Golzin’s crew and ran the women through with a leisurely thrust. Then she pulled one of the small crossbows from the tethers on her jacket and loosed it at Golzin before retreating to where Berhof and a small group of Coughlin’s men had locked their round shields. The leader of the seaguard had taken three of his men and was running up the deck of the ship in a desperate race to reach the small gallowbows before the crews could lose the cannisters of rocks they were loading. Had they been a fleet crew Joron had no doubt Coughlin and his men would have been cut to ribbons by a hail of sharp stone, but they were not, and the seaguard fell upon the deckchilder like sankrey on their prey.
The violence aboard Maiden’s Bounty was sudden and total. One moment Joron stood and waited, the next he was thrusting and slashing with his shining steel blade. There was little skill to it; Meas had, for months now, been teaching him to use a straightsword like hers, and he had proven more apt then he had dreamed of, but here on deck there was no time for such dainty fighting. It was about brute force and quick reactions, both of which the seaguard had in abundance. A blade from the front, one of the seaguard caught it on his shield and Joron thrust the tip of his sword into an unprotected neck. A woman lifted her curnow to slash at Joron’s flank and Anzir struck out with a club, smashing a leather hat into the skull beneath. The deckchild to landward of him fell, a curnow cutting through her ribcage and Farys, screaming, struck back at the man who had killed her friend. Further down the line Meas stood, and only she seemed not to be taken up by fury, her thrusts and ripostes almost leisurely. A man jabbed at her with a wyrmpike, its great reach making him a real danger, but where Meas went so did Narza. The small woman ducked beneath the wyrmpike and slid her body down the shaft, impaling the wielder on a bone dagger and putting herself amid a knot of the Maiden’s Bounty’s crew where she was a whirlwind of black hair and razored edges.
Oh, the crew of Maiden’s Bounty were a world-worn and hard-looking lot, and Joron had no doubt they would happily have stabbed him in the back as soon as blink, but this sort of fight was not for them. The deckchilder of Golzin’s ship had little stomach for the fight and they broke upon the discipline of Meas’s women and men, backing away, dropping their weapons, muttering, leaving the dead and the maimed to bleed upon the slate. Meas strode forward.
“Your shipwife, where is she?” No answer. Narza darted forward, grabbed the smallest of the deckchilder and dragged her over to Meas with a knife at her throat. “Where is she?” said Meas again. The woman stared. She was missing an eye – not a wound, just another defect of one born in the Hundred Isles. Her good eye was wide, terrified.
“Tell me where she is or I will have Narza take your other eye,” said Meas, and Joron suspected it was not the threat in her voice that frightened the woman – it was the offhand, matter-of-fact way Meas put it, as if blinding her enemies was something she did each and every day.
“Her cabin,” stuttered the woman, glancing toward the rump of the boat where a ramshackle building of varisk and gion stalks was lashed in place. A small chimney on top was bleeding smoke to be quickly whipped away by the wind.
“Hag’s breath,” spat Meas, “she burns her charts.”
Then they were running for the cabin. Finding the door locked against them Meas kicked it until it burst open, and there they found Golzin, leaning against one of the varisk uprights, a small brazier smouldering before her. All it contained was ash.
“You may have burned your charts, Shipwife, but I will find out what you were doing here and I will take the knowledge from your body if I must.”
Golzin shook her head, a slow and painful motion.
“I think not,” she said, coughed, spat on the deck. An attempt had been made to whitewash the floor of the room, to make it look like a real shipwife’s cabin, but the white was scuffed and scratched, though enough remained to show Golzin spat blood. “You’re a good shot with that crossbow,” she said. Coughed again, more blood. “But, unlike you, I am loyal to the Hundred Isles.” She was struggling to get the words out, each one coming slower than the last. Golzin fell to her knees, looked up at Meas. “Loyal,” she said, and fell forward to show the crossbow bolt in her back that had taken her life.