Kindred laughed and nodded.
“I guess the captain still ain’t back from that meeting.”
“Did you get good prices from Legate?” Kindred asked as she began storing away the various supplies Little Wing had brought back.
“Good enough,” Little Wing said, taking a few practice swings with a pair of new curved swords like silver crescent moons. “He was so excited to see someone had harvested some giant stalk and prairie smoke that he about started blubbering. You know how he gets about plants, on and on about how beautiful they are and how powerful they can be and all that. He gave us some serious coin, even with the new taxes from the Collective.”
There it was again, Kindred thought. Cantrev’s shadow organization that used to be nothing more than a few blowhards blowing. She really needed to tell Captain Caraway about the strangeness with the water purchase before The Errant set sail and left her wasting away the time on Arcadia.
“I had the same thing happen with Mick,” she said. “Cantrev’s even reached him. Mick charged me more for water and—here’s the really strange thing—he was acting weird about it all, like he’s terrified of Cantrev and mad as hell about it.”
Little Wing cut the air with her swords, slicing a low hum into being with each cut.
“Cantrev. He’s going to be running this whole damn island soon. I say we relocate to the Mainland and start harvesting there. They have almost triple the space of flattened grasses to harvest. Sure, there’s worse prices and those damn barons to deal with, but a place without Cantrev pays for itself quick enough. And we wouldn’t have to deal with the pirates always waiting, getting closer every year. Fucking inhuman monsters.”
“We kill them, too,” Kindred said, not sure why she was defending pirates, but feeling like those words—inhuman monsters—smacked of Cantrev’s grease and sweat.
In Little Wing’s hands, the swords described complex, dangerous patterns in the air.
“You remember The Blue Sky? Big boat, one of the newer ones. Pirates hit it a few years back. My best friend growing up was the boatswain. The crew fought off the pirates that boarded, but in the fight my friend lost an ear, an arm, and got stabbed twice in the stomach.”
Little Wing jabbed herself in the stomach with her thumb, twice, hard. Her face was stony.
“I didn’t know that, Little Wing. I’m sorry.”
“She died as The Blue Sky made it back into port. I was there. When I finally saw her, the blood had all dried and she was cold.”
Kindred swallowed and looked down at her feet.
“A couple of years back,” Little Wing continued, her tone flat, “pirates attacked a dew-skimmer crewed by a family with six kids, three sisters and three brothers. The pirates killed the parents, sailed the boat out into the Roughs, and then left the kids to starve or sink. By the time a rescue boat found them, only two of the kids were left alive.”
Silence filled the deck.
“We don’t do that,” Little Wing said after a moment, her tone softer. “We do our fair share of bad shit, but we don’t do that.”
Kindred nodded, and as she thought of how to respond, she saw a few guards in bright, new uniforms walking down the dock, marching with purpose. She didn’t know what was so familiar about their uniforms, at least not until she thought again of Low, her habit brand-new, which was an oddity for priestesses of the Water Wight.
Except maybe not an oddity when a senator like Cantrev had you on the payroll.
“Those are Cantrev’s guards,” Kindred said, turning around.
Little Wing looked over and squinted down the dock.
“Yeah, so what?”
Kindred opened her mouth but shut it just as quickly.
Odd.
She considered the other oddity of that morning: barrels too large, workers terrified and acting strange.
And her stomach dropped away into nothing.
“No, no, no, no.” She rushed to the ladder and climbed belowdecks with Little Wing following her. “No, no, no.”
She slapped at the first water barrel she found there, pushing at it to pull it away from the others, but it bore no markings on its edges or top.
“Help me with this,” she said, and with Little Wing’s help, pushed the barrel up on one rim, enough for her to peek underneath, to see the name burned into the wood.
She heard Mick’s wheezy bellows in her head. Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Caaaaaaaaaan. Treeeeeev.
“He must have stolen it, that idiotic bastard.” Kindred looked up at Little Wing. “Mick gave us water from Cantrev’s private stores and Cantrev knows.”
* * *
Back up on deck, Kindred looked down the dock. The guards were getting close, eight or ten of them in all, each one armed and ready for a fight. Swords flashed in the morning light like promising smiles.
Had Cantrev discovered Mick’s theft? Or had Mick willingly turned The Errant over? Kindred tried to push away the suspicion burrowing through her. It didn’t matter either way—the guards were coming, and they obviously knew.
“They must have already picked up the captain at that meeting,” Little Wing said, her voice dropping low, a predatory growl. Her new swords moved with purpose now, their hum a constant thing.
Kindred tried to think, but the strike of the guards’ boots on the dock was loud now, and she could hear them talking. Which, Kindred realized, probably meant they didn’t know she or Little Wing was aboard.
“We need to get off this boat,” Kindred said, pulling Little Wing portside, away from the dock, their movements still shielded by the rise of the forecastle.
“Yeah, but how?” Little Wing asked. “There’s only one dock and they’re on it.”
Kindred looked around the deck for anything she might use, for any bit of inspiration. They had weapons, but two of them against so many of Cantrev’s guards would not end well, especially given how little time Kindred spent swinging a sword.
They could hide, Kindred thought—belowdecks was full of shadowy spaces that might conceal them. Even the crow’s nest might be left unsearched if they could scale the mainmast without being seen.
But what then? Even if they successfully hid, Kindred realized, they would only have succeeded in trapping themselves if the guards were going to occupy the ship, unable to help the captain—just as useless as giving themselves up to Cantrev’s guards.
No, they needed to get off The Errant.
“I can take four of them, maybe five,” Little Wing muttered as Kindred shook her head in frustration. “I’ll do my best to draw them to me and you make a run for it.”