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I ducked behind a barrel, seated back-to-back with Tait, and took the knife from my mouth, the cutlass from its sheath. The twins slunk around coils of rigging. Like a dark wave, the others spilled over the rail.
Tension crackled in the air. No signal, no word, I abandoned the barrel and stepped into the cracked skeins of moonlight. In a fluid motion the edge of my knife swiped over a burly sod nursing a flacon of sour rum. The man crumbled with a wet grunt and drowned in his own blood.
One by one, our blades met flesh of the unsuspecting, a phantom dance of gore. Sander covered a mouth, Jonas slit the liver. Tait kept low, gutting men with his violent way of twisting his daggers. I preferred slicing once, muting their cries, then watching their eyes go wide with recognition of their king before I filled their necks with my steel.
Our steps carved in the blood across the deck. From the shoreline, a glimmer of rolling mist drifted nearer to the township. The princess, illusionist that she was, seemed to be proving quite useful indeed.
“Dammit.” Gavyn hissed when he rammed his knife in the chest of a sleeping man with a dark, patchy beard, only to realize the lump of cloaks next to his corpse shifted.
A brute, thick as stone, woke. With a wash of horror on his face he took in his bloodied companion.
It was enough time for the man to send out a whistle, shrill and deafening, before he slumped over, a knife rammed through his ear in a desperate strike.
But the warning had been given, and Hesh’s crew took to the fight.
Steel glided free of leather. Shouts for our heads rattled thelaths. Somewhere near the bow, a burst of fire sparked in the night, a flare, a warning to the fort on the House of Blades.
On cue, bells rang across Hesh’s stone walls, shouts of his guards rolled over the beach.
Do your part, Earth Bender.
I slammed my sword into the soft belly of a man who rushed me, his cutlass foolishly raised overhead, allowing me a perfect place to strike. Another blade found me. I parried, kicked his knee. He was dead by the time I moved on to the next sod.
Jonas and Sander kept close to each other. Eyes black, the twin princes danced around a cluster of sobbing men, pleading for the horrors to cease.
Whatever they’d implanted in their heads was rotting them from the inside. With direct strikes, both princes put them out of their misery, then moved on to the next.
Tait was surrounded by five men, but a grin split over his face. Before the first could strike, Gavyn appeared from the damp on the deck. He stabbed his dagger into the side of a throat, then faded into the water again. Tait stepped in, killing one stunned fool, only to have Gavyn appear again and slaughter the next.
A man swung a wooden club at me. I twisted under his arm, the rod whistling close to my face. When I righted again, I swiped my cutlass against his middle, watching him fall at my back. Within the moment of respite, I unsheathed my knife, and gripped the blade, squeezing blood between my curled fingers.
Two men challenged me. Knife tossed, hand bloodied, I met their strikes. When blades crossed, I covered my opponent’s mouth with my wet palm.
One after the other, they dropped, coughing, spluttering, black veins coating their necks.
My limp grew more pronounced. I didn’t stop.
Five paces ahead was the captain’s chamber. Three men stood guard, but there was a glint of fear in their eyes. The center guard, he would breakfirst.
The bastard raised a trembling hand, voice rough as he said, “M-My King, we did—”
I never learned what they did. I cut him down before he could utter another sound. To the man at the right, I covered his mouth and nose with my palm, pinning him to the door of Hesh’s chambers as his body succumbed to my poison.
To the man on the left, I snarled. “Open this door, or you meet the gods, followed by your mate, your mistress, and any of your little bastards. I will not stop until your blood is wiped from the Ever.”
He blinked, took a breath to scan the chaos on deck, the bodies heaped over rails and ropes. His fingers shuddered as he jabbed a brass key through the hole.
I kicked the door open, ignoring the white-hot shock that rolled up my thigh. “Hello, Hesh. Were you not expecting me?”
Lord Hesh rose off his cot, half-naked. A woman tucked her bare breasts beneath the quilts, whimpering.
“Bloodsinger.” Hesh spoke as though simply irritated I’d interrupted.
“Ah, am I no longer your king?”
He scoffed, taking up his cutlass from the table in the center of the room. “Boy, you know the answer to that, or you would not be here. Alas, you have wasted your time.”
“Killing you will never be a waste of time.”
