Chapter 1
Zala
Cold wind whipped across the white-capped waves, wailing like a vengeful ghost. The rallying cry of the pirates who swung from precarious ropes below, drowned its howl.
Neither could compete with the cannon blasts.
Zala went stiff with panic, her knees locked and elbows held tight. She always froze before the jump. It wasn’t the fear of death that had the soles of her feet planted to the decking of the Titan’s crow’s nest, it was fear that one of those death calls below might be that of her husband.
A break in the thick fog below, however, showed him engaged with a merchant, who clearly didn’t know the first thing about swordplay. Zala forced a calming breath. There was nothing to fear. Jelani was doing his job; she needed to do hers. It was her fault they were out here in the first place.
It’s only a merchant ship, she reminded herself.
The ominous fog, stretching wide atop the ocean’s waves, didn’t help her unease as it cloaked the enemy vessel in its thick, creeping cloud. If she jumped now, there’d be no telling where she’d land. Dew streamed across her skin, cold bumps rising from her bare arms and ankles.
Maybe there was a little fear of the jump after all.
No use standing here pondering the worst, Zala thought as she took another deep breath. Her palms clutched at the coarse rope.
“You’re not gonna stand there all day, are you?” laughed a small, airy voice from within the fog. A figure appeared through the cloud, a lithe slip of a woman with the fluttering wings of a butterfly. Zala smiled at the woman—or rather, the aziza.
“I was waiting for you.” Zala gave her a half smile.
Fon rolled her eyes. “You always say that.”
“That’s because I’m always waiting for you.”
The two women could hardly have appeared more different. Fon barely came up to Zala’s waist, with pointed ears and brown skin that seemed to glow, a tree-bough tattoo set across her forehead. Zala was short for a human woman, with skinny legs and small arms topped with subtle shoulders, all the complexion of an ebony shade. Where Fon’s hair was long on one side and braided on the other, no strand out of place, Zala’s was cut short, left alone to coil and tangle naturally atop her head.
“Jelani go ahead already?” Fon asked as she turned her head to the ocean mist.
Zala frowned. “On Kobi’s orders, yes.”
“Don’t worry.” Fon tapped Zala’s knee with her four fingers. “Jelani’s a big boy—he can take care of himself.”
“So he keeps telling me,” Zala said, unconvinced.
“Come on, pirate, let’s get over there before those dikala find all the good loot.” Fon put on a tough face, squinting one eye and pursing her lips like an angry scoundrel. Zala couldn’t help but smile at the glint of humor in the aziza’s eye. The facade just didn’t fit Fon. Even as she withdrew a long, sharp dagger, which looked more like a sword in her tiny hand, she could never quite shake off that disarming charm. After giving the Titan’s signature salute, Fon lifted from the deck and soared toward the enemy ship.
Zala’s brows creased her forehead. Fon was right. The longer she waited, the less loot she’d have for herself. She couldn’t afford second pickings. In an ideal world, the crew would divide the loot equally, but she knew the others were taking more than they should. It was just the way they did things around here.
Zala gathered her strength, readjusting the sword at her side and the bow on her back.
“Here we go again,” she mumbled before she gripped the rope and leapt into the air.
Her heart raced as she swung the distance between the two ships, wind rushing past her ears like a kongamato’s wail. But she knew as soon as she jumped that she had timed it wrong. She stuck out her feet to meet the enemy ship’s platform, or a ratline, or even the side of the ship—she couldn’t tell which. She found nothing but fog. Her leap hadn’t been strong enough. She’d been too nervous that she might drop, too nervous about the clashing swords, too nervous that she might fail.
Look where that got you, Zala thought to herself angrily.
Berating herself with a string of swears picked up from moons spent at sea, she reoriented her body at the apex of her swing and cast her weight back toward her crow’s nest where she caught her perch clumsily with one arm.
She took a moment to settle her shaken nerves and centered her mind back onto the task. She climbed back up onto the nest’s ledge, and, with another deep breath, jumped once more into the unknown.
This time she listened for the sound of steel on steel, the grunts and groans of battle. When they sounded loudest beneath her, she let go of the rope, tensing her calves as she descended onto the ship. Her bare feet met damp wood with a dull thud as she landed.
Even on the ship’s deck, the haze of the mist hid all. Zala could barely make out the glint of swords cutting their teeth against one another. The cry of the blades and their wielders raked against her senses.
The first figure—someone from her crew?—met an even murkier shape of a person she couldn’t define at all. All around her, pirates and merchants alike traded insults between their clashes.
When would Kobi learn? Taking on ship after ship like this was taxing the crew to breaking point. They were getting sloppy, and it would only get worse.
In that moment, it didn’t matter. All she needed to know right now was friend from foe.
The pirate crew wore no uniform clothing, but she could usually make out her fellow crew members by the way they fought. They had that sway about them—the “wine dance,” as Jelani called it.
Zala withdrew her sword, identifying the figure ahead as an enemy, and struck the unsuspecting foe in the back. The figure let out a guttural yell—a man’s yell—as he keeled over. The sound sent a shiver down Zala’s spine. He was not her first, not by a long shot. But she’d never grow used to the sensation of steel cleaving through bone and sinew. Or rather, she hoped she wouldn’t. It made her insides turn.
The man fell at her feet, his simple tunic soaked through with blood.
He was just a merchant… not a soldier at all.
Familiar guilt filled Zala’s gut, but she shook herself of its weight. If the man had made the choice to fight pirates, he’d brought his death upon himself. His captain should have surrendered when her’s gave him the chance. It was unfortunate, but it wasn’t her fault.
“Good looks, chana,” the pirate Zala had saved said. The woman threw up a hand signal that Zala had come to learn meant “thanks” among pirates. “Didn’t think you’d ever save me,” she finished with a back-handed compliment.
Zala recognized the woman as Nabila, the gull-shifter Captain Kobi used as a scout. Zala tried her best to ignore the wound running down the pirate’s arm. It looked deep. Instead of letting her eyes wander, Zala took her index finger and thumb and shaped them into a circle at her eye. If she recalled correctly, the gesture meant “I’ve got your back.”
When the pirate smiled, Zala knew she’d gotten it right. She was barely acquainted to Nabila—though she barely knew or even recognized a lot of the crew. Kobi had taken on many new members over the past fortnight. Learning their names and faces rarely mattered when they were all dead by the week’s end, whether by blade or by sea.