I scan the wide waterfront lit by flaming torches placed in intervals around the bay. About thirty-five blue-sailed ships pock the water.
Not nearly as many as I was thinking.
Shit ...
We’ll be down on numbers, and I won’t get the privilege of sinking any remaining ships as a silentscrew youto Cainon.
I look behind, making sure Cindra’s waving the flag for the others to hold back while we cut through the water toward a thick, stubby pier jutting from just beyond the point, the end illuminated by twin torches.
Seven armed men stalk toward us.
“This is going to be interesting,” Cindra murmurs at my side as Rowell drifts the ship against the dock, somebody else throwing down a rope to one of the waiting guards—each of them looking up at us with pinched brows, glazed eyes, and flushed cheeks.
One of them hiccups.
“I think they’redrunk.”
“Any excuse for a bender,” Cindra muses, and I hum in acknowledgement, tucking a string of oily black hair behind my ear—my fiery locks slathered in a mix of coal dust and lard that makes me smell like the rotten mop below deck. Messy, but necessary.
Drunken guards mean they’re less likely to see through my disguise.
The crewmen lower the gangplank, and I’m the first across it.
One of the soldiers squints at me a little too hard, like he’s picking apart my sooty disguise. I smell the alcohol on his breath before he says, “Who the hell are”—hiccup—“you?”
Relief fills me.
The man at the front with a barreling chest and heavy lines at the corners of his flint-blue eyes lifts his hand without looking back at the man, a quiet command for him to shut it. “What’s the meaning of this?” he barks, nose scrunching as he leers up and down my body, then does the same to Cindra.
My skin crawls.
I pull a squashed scroll from the beeswaxed pocket of my cloak, thankful to see no water has seeped through from our sodden journey.
I hand it over, and he unravels the parchment, frowning as he reads it. “The High Mistress’s dowry, aye? No cunt is worth that many ships.”
I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds, hand twitching to reach for my blade …
“First I’ve heard of this load of krah shit,” he grumbles, then hoicks a wad of spit at the pier.
Unsurprising.
“Be that as it may, it was prearranged. We’ve been instructed to escort as many ships as we can up the coast.”
Tension cuts the air as he looks up from the scroll, folding it; pocketing it. “You’ll have to wait until the morning. Once I can confirm with theHigh Master,” he says with a condescending lilt. “I’m sure you understand.”
I’m sure I don’t.
“Sir, these are direct orders from your newHigh Mistress.”
He spits a bubble of laughter. “She could be a cow’s udder for all I care. I answer to no female. Never have—never will. So you can either sleep on your ship and wait till morning; fuck right off back the way you came in that shit heap you sailed here in; or go inside that building down there”—he jerks his thumb over his shoulder—“get on your back, spread your thighs, and make yourself useful, you over-assuming cun—”
A whistling sound pierces the air and a warm splash kisses my cheek before the guard’s head slides clean off his shoulders, thudding to the ground by the tip of my boot.
His body quickly follows.
“I reallyfuckinghate that word,” Cindra bites out, kicking his head over the edge of the pier. “Men like him are the sole reason I swore them off for good.”
The other men draw their swords, bellowing in confusion.
