of sea and the salt-slick deck of the Linkmaster, towards its helm. ‘Thusly, all we need to do is keep them from chasing us.’
Quillian’s eyes went wide as the shict’s plan dawned on her. The glistening tip of her arrow was aimed directly at the filthy man at the Linkmaster’s wheel, blissfully unaware of her aim as he hurled abuse at Argaol.
‘Like so,’ Kataria finished.
‘Wait, you idiot!’
Quillian’s hand snatched an arm already hanging at the shict’s side, having loosed the arrow long before the Serrant could even reach for it. With painful slowness, Quillian stared as the arrow hummed with an almost casual speed towards the pirates’ helmsman. No heads looked up, far too embroiled in their current battle to foresee the impending disaster.
Quillian’s breath caught in her throat as the arrow caught in the helmsman’s. He jerked slightly, then stiffened with a curious look on his face, as though unaware of what had just happened.
‘There,’ Kataria said, shrugging the Serrant’s hand off. ‘What’s so bad about that?’
The slain helmsman answered.
He slumped across the wheel, his body dragging it into a full spin. The chain connecting the two ships went slack as the Linkmaster veered suddenly, driven by the corpse’s weight. The screams of pirates tumbling off their now-unstable bridge were punctuated by splashes of water. Cries of alarm rose up from the deck as fingers pointed towards the black-timbered titan now careening towards the Riptide. The pale-skinned creatures clinging to the hull in mid-climb croaked a collective chorus of terror.
Then, all sounds died in a great wooden scream.
The two huge ships collided, bows splintering. The Linkmaster’s momentum sent the Riptide spinning as their hulls ground together. Particularly unlucky pirates and pale frogmen were reduced from hostile invaders to smears in the span of two breaths.
The fighting on the deck ground to a halt as the ships did, the sudden shifting sending all combatants sprawling to kiss the salt. Eventually, the spiralling, the screaming and the splintering stopped, leaving two floating behemoths bobbing with unfitting calmness.
Kataria took the opportunity to stagger to her feet, gripping the edge of the crow’s nest. She glanced down at the carnage: dizzy men struggling to rise and find their weapons, uttering prayers to various human Gods, flattened chunks of red and pink tumbling into the waters as the hulls eased apart. In the funerary wake of sound, a stray wind caressed her hair, sending her feathers fluttering.
A smile creased her face, breaking into a peal of laughter that was long, loud and unwholesome.
‘How many do you think that was worth, Squiggy?’ She cast a glance behind her, spying nothing. ‘Squiggy?’
When she discovered the bronze-clad fingers clutching at the nest’s edge, she had to fight to keep her laughter from overpowering her. She couldn’t say at that moment why the sight of Quillian dangling by one stubborn hand was so amusing to her. Perhaps it was her expression, the mixture of fear and outrage at having been hurled from the nest by the force of the collision. Perhaps it was simply the rush of having scored so many Kou’ru with one shot, the woman’s humiliation being merely the punctuation of a squeal-filled giddy sentence.
Or perhaps it was the opportunity dangling before her.
‘Help me up.’ Quillian’s voice had not even the slightest hint of request.
Kataria’s own hand lingered on the rail, her gaze contemplative. There was no real reason to watch the Serrant fall, she realised, but was hard pressed to think of a reason to haul her bronze-clad bulk back up.
And yet, something stayed her hand, a mere finger’s length from the Serrant’s own reaching gauntlet. Here was a human with genuine hate reinforced with swords, cross-bows and blind zeal. Here was a human who saw notched ears as a target.
She had seen such hate before, but only in the eyes of those not content to revile her people and wallow in deluded myth about the tribes. This hate, the undiluted foulness behind Quillian’s eyes, was reserved for those who had seen shicts. Seen, she thought, and killed.
Her suspicions were confirmed, at least as much as she needed them to be, in the grit of the woman’s teeth and narrowing of her eyes. She could not disguise her loathing, even as she dangled above the already blood-soaked deck. Even for the sake of her life, Kataria realised, this human couldn’t commit the fraud of repentance.
‘If you’re going to kill me,’ the Serrant hissed, ‘then cease drawing it out.’
Kataria made no reply besides a careful, contemplative