Rib towering overhead, wondering if she should purchase her son an apartment in there for a wedding gift, just as the silver phial about her neck began to tremble.
She put her hand to it, hoping she was mistaken, praying for just a few more hours’ peace … but no, there it went again, shivering under her palm. The old woman sighed, placed her cup and saucer aside. Lifting the phial from around her neck, she broke the black wax seal, tipped the contents onto the small table beside her rocking chair. The blood welled, thick and red on the polished teak.
And of its own accord, it began to form itself into shapes.
Letters.
Drusilla pieced the letters into words. Then the words into a missive. Her old, worn pulse ran just the slightest bit quicker.
Cyprian ran up to her, breathless, his eyes alight with his smile.
“Come play with us, Grandmother.”
“Another turn, my dove,” she sighed.
The Lady of Blades stood slowly, leaned down to kiss his brow.
“Grandmother has work to do.”
CHAPTER 27
FEED
It turned out being queen of pirates wasn’t quite the job Mia imagined.
Perhaps she’d read too many tawdry ha’-beggar tales as a child in her tiny room above Mercurio’s Curios, but in the thirty or forty seconds Mia had considered the role before she stabbed Einar Valdyr to death, she’d imagined being a pirate queen might involve a fair bit of … well, piracy. Buckling of swashes and wenches most buxom and swinging from chandeliers with a knife between her teeth. But by the second turn of her reign, Queen Mia Corvere had come to a disappointing realization.
“I’m bored shitless,” she sighed.
“I did warn you,” Ulfr Sigursson said. “Valdyr was half-mad with it.”
“Valdyr wore a greatcoat made of human faces, Ulfr,” Mia said, putting her boots up on her desk. “I don’t think half-mad quite covers it.”
“Speaking of,” her first mate said, eyeing her up and down, “do you want me to find you something that fits a touch better?”
Mia glanced at her reflection in the window. She’d washed Valdyr’s blood from her skin and hair, but she still wore the former monarch’s greatcoat, which hung on her slender frame like a shroud. Black leathers hugged her legs and hips, wolfskin boots on her feet, her gravebone longblade sitting within easy reach. She’d bathed and combed her long black hair, trimmed her fringe into a line sharp as razors. The twin circles of her slave brand on her right cheek and the vicious scar curling across her left lent her pale features a dark cruelty. Her stare was black as coal, hard as iron. She didn’t look a queen many would love.
But she did look a queen most would fear.
“No, I’m fine wearing this,” she told Ulfr. “It makes people nervous.”
“Would you like an undershirt, at least?” the man asked. “When you move about, you tend to show off your—”
“No,” Mia said, lighting a cigarillo. “My tits make people nervous, too.”
“As it please you.” Her first mate sniffed. “I confess I never saw much appeal in them myself.”
They were sat in the upper level of a tall limestone tower within the Scoundrel’s Hall. Leadlight windows looked out across the Sea of Sorrows, and a broad, char-stained fireplace was stocked with logs of cherry-oak, burning merrily and filling the room with a perfumed warmth. The floors were covered in wolf furs, the walls with charts of the surrounding seas, the long oaken desk with parchment and scrolls and missives. Since she was abdicating her role in a handful of turns, Mia hadn’t bothered acquainting herself with any of it, but from the look of things, being the Scoundrel King had involved rather more paperwork than she’d expected.
She glanced at her first mate in his black leathers and wolfskin pelt. His expression was somewhere between wary and cavalier.
“And how are my loyal subjects?” Mia asked, breathing gray.
“Well, Obelisk and the Cinnamon Girl are fermenting a rebellion against you,” Ulfr sighed. “Though Marcella and Quintus hate each other like poison, so I can’t imagine that coalition will last long. Goliath, Imperium, and Gravedigger all spoke out against you in the Hall of Scoundrels earlier in the turn, but they’re little fish. The bigger crews are waiting to see what you do next. Valdyr scared the shit right out of them. So being the bitch who hacked his head off lends you a certain … gravitas.”
“And the wulfguard?” Mia asked, dragging on her smoke. “How fare my crew?”