After a moment, a small boat plopped into the water with a singlerower. Even across the distance, Geneva could make out the same muslin covering that she herself had worn about her face for a decade.
As the rowboat advanced, Geneva gathered her things—pilfered blades, pilfered food, pilfered clothing—and disembarked to the beach. This sand was not soft nor beautiful. It was rocky and sharp, as if it did not want company, which was part of the reason she’d been able to spend the night here alone and waiting. The other reason was that she had a connection to its owners.
When the little boat was close enough, the rower jumped into the water, hauling the vessel straight up onto the sand. More polite than Geneva expected—she’d already made peace with the fact that she may have soggy boots for the next several hours.
As the boat shuttered to a stop, the rower stood, bowed once, and pulled back the fabric about her face to reveal it—smiling, feral, familiar.
“Hello, Geneva. You haven’t aged a day—that scarf did you well in all that blasted sunlight.”
This was a compliment to the woman herself as much as it was to Geneva. She’d been the one to give her the scarf, after all. Moreover, this was their game and had been for much of their lives—Alasne punching up, Geneva stomping down, and the two of them meeting in the middle as the sisters they never were.
Accordingly, Geneva answered with hands on her hips and a tip of her chin. “I will take the compliment, Alasne. You look like leather left out too long.”
The woman’s lips lifted in a lopsided grin that tested the resilience of her tough, burnished-yet-freckled skin. “Come now, sweet talk like that is unseemly for a woman of your stature.”
They hugged then, a proper hello.
Alasne smelled of lemons, salt water, and a distaste for soap. But she was solid and real and it had been far too long. She’d last docked and come into the Warlord’s camp five years ago, and even then had only stayed a couple of weeks. It wasn’t enough to last them all the time between, or all the time they’d spent together before the word “Warlord” entered their vocabulary.
Alasne pulled away and straightened herself with a glance back at her ship and whispered to Geneva, “Not another embrace until we’re in my quarters. My crew is most definitely watching and I can’t afford them to believe I’ve grown soft.”
“No one would ever think that of you.”
“Anyone who ever dared to has already walked the plank.” Alasne had the sort of crooked smile that ran on reflex—she wielded it often, quickly, without so much as a second thought. “You’d be surprised, the idiots seeking a life on the sea.”
Geneva coughed out a laugh and swiped at a few tears threatening to tumble down her cheeks. The two of them filled the boat with her gear and then shoved off to the ship.
Out of pure curiosity, Geneva cocked a brow as Alasne righted her oars. “You really have them walk the plank?”
“Well, we both know I’d prefer a method involving fire, but that isn’t advisable on a wooden ship, unfortunately.” Alasne had been the Warlord to institute the firepits. An extreme gesture in the beginning that became a rote one over time. Deadly, terrifying, expected. Useful. Now, Alasne rolled her eyes. “Instead, I am a very basic pirate, I suppose.”
Geneva allowed an uptick of camaraderie to her lips. “There’s a reason the plank is a stereotype—it’s efficient and uses the strengths of the environment.”
“Indeed.” The pirate laughed as her stroke gathered steam and the beach grew smaller in Geneva’s periphery as the ship’s flat black profile loomed larger. Then, Alasne smoothly shifted to the reason they were together in this particular moment after all these years—one Warlord and another. “We’ll be ashore at the rendezvous point by noon.”
Geneva sucked in a hopeful breath. “And the numbers?”
“Good, so far as I can tell—men, women, horses, steel—they’re all prepared and steaming mad.”Good, indeed.“I would be, too. Quite embarrassing that the wolf cub was able to topple an empire with a single fight and our own flames.”
That tick of familiar camaraderie fell away as Geneva’s miscalculation was trotted into the sunrise. That was an error she would repair if it was the last thing she did.
Geneva allowed cold anger into her voice, the truth as much as it was a hint that Alasne should feel steaming mad, too. “He will not get off so easy when we next meet.”
The weight of that promise sat neatly between them, and for a moment they succumbed to the relative silence of the sloshing water,the creaking oars, and the stark wind barreling across the Divide, as angry as a fishwife shorted her gold. Alasne was working against the current now, her strokes powerful but hindered by the natural flow of the water. It made for a choppy ride, and finally, once they were to the ship and the ropes lowered to haul them up, Alasne rekindled their whispers.
“And Talmage? What of him?” The pirate’s hushed words were barbed, thick with the thorny past they shared. He’d abandoned his achievements as quickly as he’d made them. Left it all to women to maintain, fortify, grow.
Geneva sighed. “He’s disregarded two birds. I sent a third before you arrived.”
“How disappointing.”
“It is. But perhaps he won’t disappoint us when the time is right.”
Alasne’s thick fingers scrabbled for her scabbard and choked the hilt of her weapon. “He’d better not or on my honor, he’s a dead man.”
It was a story very few living people knew—how Talmage had given Alasne the title of Warlord. He’d passed it to her, yes, but it wasn’t truly a gift so much as it was consolation for a broken heart. Her leader and her love abandoning her under the cover of night, the yolk of responsibility to nourish what he’d built hanging about her neck.
It was no wonder Alasne chose fire for dissenters not long after.
