No. Nothing in this world made sense, and come floods or hell-waters, Vivia had to make peace with that. Stix wasn’t coming back. Merik wasn’t coming back. Her title was gone. This was her life, salmon-suited and rejected at every turn.
She reached the central table of her quarters. Charts were stretched and weighted, while miniature ships had gathered against the table’s raised rim. Unmagicked. The expensive Aetherwitched miniatures she’d wasted a tiny fortune on had been lost or destroyed or Noden only knew by Merik.
Vivia waited until Sotar had closed the door into her cabin. Vaness would likely sequester in her quarters belowdecks, where she often hid, and Cam would be organizing the crew to set sail.
“Has the blockade cleared your departure?” Sotar asked. He joined Vivia at the table, watching as she lined up ships outside the Veñaza City harbor upon a chart. Thirty-four warships, letting no one in and no one out without approval from the Doge.
“No,” Vivia said. “But our names got us through the blockade. They will get us out.”
“Are you certain?” Sotar lifted cool eyebrows, and once more, the similarities to Stix …
Vivia’s throat clenched tight. She chewed her lip several beats before nodding briskly. “They cannot stop us. We are a queen and an empress, even if they refuse to help us reclaim our thrones.”
She grabbed a second set of miniatures, painted rich, iris blue. One she placed in the harbor, west of the blockade.
“Us,” she said. Then she plopped down the remaining two. “Our ships.”
One she placed in Lovats, useless and destroyed. The other she set near Lejna. “I sent out three ships two months ago under the Fox banner. One was captured in Saldonica.” And sent back to Lovats filled with seafire. She did not say that part aloud. Sotar knew; Sotar had been there. “One we now sail, and the third…” She glanced at Sotar. “I ordered them to hide in the Hundred Isles, and they have been awaiting orders ever since.”
Sotar’s lips pursed. Contemplative, perhaps. More likely disapproving. He had known of Vivia’s attempts at piracy and he had looked the other way. When he spoke again, it was to say simply, “I see, Captain. Shall I tell Cam to fetch the banner then?”
“Not yet.” Vivia matched his grim expression. What she had done two months ago, she had done with no pleasure—but she had also jumped in too quickly. As desperate as she’d been for food, for weapons, the bounty had not been worth the price.
Sometimes little foxes were run into holes with nowhere to hide, while other times they had to turn and face the danger before it was too late for themselves, for their cubs, for everything they’d ever loved.
If that moment ever came, then Vivia would raise the Fox flag.
“The Nubrevnan iris will do,” she told Sotar, referring to the banner now flapping against the mast: a blue iris on a checkered field. “For now, we are the Royal Navy, and I pray that is enough to get us through.”
FIVE
Stacia Sotar had endured her fair share of bad smells, but the Pirate Republic of Saldonica was a new winner. It beat all the various spots in Lovats: Hawk’s Way where boats dumped trash; the Skulks where too many people had been forced into squalid, single-room homes; and even the Cisterns that were literally filled with the capital’s shit.
Saldonica smelled worse.
Maybe because the sailors and raiders and gamblers who made up this makeshift port thought baths were for cowards, or maybe because sulfur seeped up from the swamps all around, leaving even the cleanest person unable to escape the stink of rotten eggs. Or maybe it was because all those smells were compounded when one entered Baile’s Slaughter Ring. Built in the ruins of some forgotten fortress, the base of the arena was ancient stone, the rest wooden scaffolding that stretched upward. Eight towers. Thousands of seats, and so very little breeze to sweep away the stench.
Ryber held a bundle of dried lavender beneath her nose. Stix regretted not buying one of her own when they’d set off for the Ring that morning. In her defense, it hadn’t smelled this badly in the Baedyed district where they were staying. In fact, their little inn was surprisingly immaculate for a port run by pirates.
Except for the rotten eggs, of course.
The wooden bench beneath Stix rattled. A rat scuttled over her boot—the fourteenth of that day—disturbed by the stochastic drumroll of feet as viewers watched the day’s winner depart. Once a year, a massive, violent fight filled the ring, drawing people from across the continent. Baile’s Slaughter Ring, it was called, with hundreds of prisoners pitted against each other.
Stix was glad she’d missed that event, and she was glad that today’s more standard fight featured a willing participant who entered the Ring for coin and glory. Not that it changed the fact that hundreds of prisoners were currently trapped beneath the Ring, waiting for next year’s Slaughter and guilty only of working on a ship when raiders had come.
The day’s winner, a Stonewitch called the Hammer, pumped his arms in victory as he strode off the dusty Ring floor. One of his arms was made of stone, though he didn’t always wear the stone limb outside the Ring. Sometimes he didn’t wear it inside either, for whatever the Hammer fought, the Hammer clobbered. He was the Ring’s reigning champion, and the money that changed hands over his fights was enough to feed Stix’s old crew for a month. Ten of Stix’s old crews.
Today, he had destroyed a horde of crocodiles, each as long as a galley and almost as wide too.
Despite her new spectacles, Stix had to squint to watch him depart with any sort of clarity. He aimed for one of the three wooden boxes that led out of the Ring. And though Stix couldn’t quite discern the woman waiting for him on the other side of the open door, she knew who it was: the reason she had come here today.
Stix nudged Ryber beside her, and Ryber nodded. She had far keener eyes and a Sightwitch’s gift: Once seen, never forgotten. Once heard, never lost. “Let’s go,” Ryber murmured, and as one, she and Stix pushed to their feet. A single plait pulled free from the rest of Ryber’s braids—at least the tenth that day, though she tried to keep them pulled back. The heat in Saldonica was just too intense for any human to deal with long hair. Stix kept her own pulled into a low bun.
Ryber’s skin was a cooler brown than Stix’s, reminding Stix of a burnished silver mirror she’d loved as a child. And although coltish in her figure, Ryber had muscles hidden beneath her loose tunic and breeches. Meanwhile, behind her magically silver eyes, she had the sharpest mind Stix had ever encountered.
They had spent a week in the Pirate Republic trying to find a way into the Ring. Not because Stix or Ryber cared about the fights below (Stix had wagered on one fight with the Hammer, gained a tiny fortune, and never wagered again), but because it was the only way for them to gain access to what rested beneath the Ring: ruins from a thousand years ago. Ruins that called to Stix with voices that never seemed to relent. Come this way, keep coming. Stix had followed those voices across the Witchlands because it was the only way she knew to make them shut up.
And that was all Stix wanted—silence. No more screaming memories that weren’t her own. No more doing as the voices commanded. No more following them like a fish on a line. Once she had done what they desired, seen whatever it was they wanted her to see, then she could leave this rotten Hagfish hole and go home again. Back to Vivia’s side, back to where she belonged.