Pretty had spent all sixteen flood seasons of her life on the river. Every year, when spring came to Siu Carinal, the rush of melt and runoff roared through the Closes under the city, washing away the refuse that had built up throughout the rest of the year and the bodies of close-rats that had escaped the dead temperers’ notice, and leaving behind the fresh smell of silt, cold water, and new mud.

  This year, the flood was worse than it had been in all of Pretty’s seventeen years. Muddy currents swamped River Street and the allies and side roads that crossed it, rising to cover the stoops and soak the ground floors of the dwellings on the high edge of Market Street. Most times of year, barges and riverboats tied up at the docks that lined the delta’s edges. During this flood season, the docks were under twelve feet of water.

  The barge that would carry the demigoddess upriver was moored instead at the edge of the grounds where the Carnival of the Dead was held each year. The dockworkers and common folk who saw her spread tales afterward of a stunning beauty who’d been tempered for the last Carnival rising from the river unbidden and gliding onto an otherworldly craft bound for the ghost cities.

  The wealthy merchants and gang lords who happened to be in the area that night recognized the demon demigoddess from their own attempts to have her. The opulence of the barge Seleketra boarded, the magnificent breeding of the tow-horses, and the legion of servants aboard had salved the wounds of rejection. Even the most uphill man in the Jewel of the Delta knew he could never compete with the royal coffers.

  Seleketra disregarded the lustful stares and smoldering envy with the indifference of a demigoddess slumming on Earth, but Pretty imagined the little brick tunnel that sloped up to the child-coffin-sized chamber, that warm safe darkness filling with icy water, the bodies of two drowned close-rats washing away with the river.

  Would anybody who called the Closes home live through this flood season?

  As the ropes were thrown off and the massive black horses strained in their harnesses to start the barge into motion, Pretty bid goodbye to her home. All its ugliness and beauty. The uphill townhouses and colorful promenade where the fancy folk showed off their finery and flaunted their placements. The alleys where beggars fought strays and urchins for scraps and dockworkers knifed each other over women and games of chance. The gaol where she’d last seen her twin. The wailing delta music, the rancid mud, and the shining ghost city with its ghostly river flowing through the center and off into the nothingness of endless night sky.

  Tears stung her ghost-lit eyes.

  It was the second time Pretty had had to leave behind everything she knew and step into the unknown. Repetition hadn’t made it easier.

  ***

  A shout went up at the bow of the raed ship.

  Soromet, Wife of Chaelon, Raed Commander of the Waeld, Third Tribe of the Ocean Rovers, strode to the fore to assess the threat. As she cast her dark blue eyes over the waters, she prayed to the God of the Waves that this interruption would cost them no more time or lives.

  On a far swell, gulls squalled and dove at some floating food source. Too small to be the corpse of a whale or other porpoise.

  “Bring Darkwind around,” she ordered.

  The raedrs hurried to obey, tacking the small ship so she cut across the waves toward the mysterious object.

  There had been some discussion of Soromet’s authority in the aftermath of their most recent battle with the dirters’ chaser ships, while Chaelon still clung to life. Four days he had suffered while the wound in his abdomen worsened. On the morning of the fifth, the God of the Waves took good Chaelon into His hand and washed him clean in the sun and the salt, and Soromet had stepped on deck and told her crew that they would complete the task they had been sent to carry out, raed commander or no.

  It was not how Soromet had not foreseen her sixth year of marriage ending—so abruptly, so violently, and so childless. But Darkwind would sail on. For Chaelon’s honor. For the Raen, First Tribe of the Ocean Rovers who the blood-drinkers had destroyed. For the seas the dirters sought to steal.

  Since then, Darkwind had been tracing the deadly coast of the blood drinkers in territory that not long before only the Raen had dared to sail. According to Chaelon’s charts, they were near their destination.

  As they sailed closer to the object in the water, it became clear that the thing was human.

  “Blood drinker?” Ojiin asked.

  Tangled with a seaweed mat and a length of driftwood, the corpse wore filthy roughspun fabric like the dirters did, but there was no way to tell from this distance whether he was a blood drinker or a sun-breather. Neither could be trusted alive.

  The Darkwind came upon corpses often these days, those souls rejected by the God of the Waves to float until the scavengers picked them apart.

  But Soromet smelled no decaying flesh on the breeze, the stench of which would have pervaded even the silks and perfumed oils she wore.

  Absently, she touched her veil. It was said that the silks the Ocean Rover women covered their faces with had protected them against the dirter’s first blood plague attacks. If that was true and this body was diseased as well, then as the only woman aboard, she might well be the only one who survived.

  Left alone on a ship of the dead. A chilling prospect, but no less than she would deserve if her decision had brought them within range of the plague.

  A strange notion surfaced.

  Soromet signaled for a harpoon. Taking their cue from her, the rest of the crew switched to the silent language of Ocean Rover signs, though they had not much to say now. Fierce, strong raedrs watched her, wondering at her bizarre request.

  Soromet pretended not to notice their stares. It was for women to assess and men to act—every Ocean Rover knew that from childhood—and a woman who listened to her own niggling self-doubt over the prompting of the God of the Waves was not a woman worth sailing with.

  Harpoon the dirter, she signaled to Loerr.

  The broad-shouldered raedr raised the iron and timed his throw with the plunge of the ship. Line hissed from the coil at his feet as the Waeld-forged harpoon flew toward the corpse.

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  Before the barbed head could pierce the dead man’s chest, a pale hand shot out of the water and snatched the iron from the air.

  No raedr flinched nor face twitched, though Soromet knew they must be shocked. Ocean Rover men did not show emotion. Ocean Rover women covered their faces to conceal their emotions. Thankfully, Soromet hadn’t audibly gasped when the body moved, and none of her crew had seen her eyes go wide because they had all been watching the harpoon.

  On the waves, the hand dropped, clutching the iron weakly across its chest.

  Haul it in, Soromet ordered, as if everything had transpired exactly as expected.

  The dirter they dragged aboard was not a man at all, but a woman—as made obvious by the clinging shirt and trousers—with her hair cropped short.

  The raedrs glared down at the strange creature. She could have been aboard a dirter ship that sunk, flotsam from another tribe’s attack. Or she could have been thrown overboard by her own people. There were few offenses great enough for an Ocean Rover woman to be drowned, but for dirters—barbarians who made slaves of one another, raped, murdered, and waged unjust wars—it might be that no cause was needed for drowning a woman but entertainment.

  Soromet knelt at the dirter’s shoulder and adjusted the gaping shirt to give the woman some degree of modesty. Dirters cared nothing for that virtue, but an Ocean Rover had higher sensibilities than those animals.

  The dirter was young, of an age when a woman would be preparing for her wedding rite. Beneath the weeping sun-blisters and pecking from seabirds, she had the pale skin of a blood drinker, but her face and features showed the sharp, elfin cast of the sun-breathers.

  Out of curiosity, Soromet pushed back the close-cropped brown hair, expecting to find a sun-breather’s pointed ears. Instead, the dirter’s were rounded like a clamshell.

  Blood drinker, Soromet signed.

  There was some shifting of feet behind her and a passage of signs. The hands that did not speak settled on weapons.

  Ojiin knelt where Soromet would see his gestures. A quick death or throw her back to the mercy of the God of the Waves?

  She understood his eagerness to be rid of the dirter. Having one of those filthy creatures aboard sullied Darkwind’s deck with every drip of tainted saltwater that ran from her clothing. But Soromet could not allow something the God of the Waves had brought to her husband’s ship to be so impulsively cast away. Such an act would be a stain on Chaelon’s honor.

  Soromet signaled for her husband’s marshal to have patience.

  There was no apparent sign of plague on the woman’s pale skin, nor was her face drawn by illness. Soromet pressed a hand to the dirter’s cheek, throat, then chest. No fever lurked in her flesh. No warmth at all, in fact. The cold seas had stolen it away.

  If Soromet hadn’t already seen proof that the woman was alive, she would have taken the catch of the harpoon for some blood drinker witchery. She felt at the woman’s chest for a heartbeat. With a deep click that made Soromet shudder, the breastbone shifted. It was broken.

  The raedrs looked away while Soromet inspected beneath the sodden shirt’s lacings.

  An ugly, waterlogged scab festered over the dirter’s heart.

  Soromet prodded the wound with her fingertips. Pus oozed.

  That pale hand grabbed Soromet by the wrist. The dirter’s wet, pruny flesh looked even more corpselike against the Ocean Rover’s healthy sun-browned skin. Despite the wound’s infection and deathlike cold, her grip was strong.

  The dirter’s eyes fluttered open to reveal irises the oily brown of rotting mud. Her gaze rolled to Soromet. The dirter’s dark brow furrowed.

  “Haints?” Her voice was barely audible. Her blue lips hardly moved. “Pirate… hell?”

  The muddy brown eyes fell closed once more.

  The hand dropped to her stomach and began to twitch weakly.

  Shocked stillness enveloped the ship as the fingers moved.

  A dirter was making Ocean Rover signs.

  Raen.

  Lost.

  Cursed.

  God of the Waves, forgive me.

  ***

  Shamasa Redoubt stood on the much-contested northern border, a night’s ride west of the Salt River. Like most fortresses from its time, Shamasa boasted steeply sloping talus walls. Four dour drum towers guarded the corners of the battlements, two barbicans fortified the gate house, and a smaller flanking tower stood near the center of the longest wall, which faced the Kingdom of Day. From the bottom of the stronghold’s northern talus, snow-covered open ground stretched for nearly a mile before butting hard against thick, dark forest.

  The northeastern watchtower was Shamasa’s highest point, the least slumped by time and the heaving of the wet ground’s cycles of freeze and thaw. Standing there, Queen Jadarah felt as if she could almost touch the ethereal green tower of ghostlight stretching down to her from the ghost city above.

  The tower had once had a wooden roof to protect from the elements, but over the centuries the covering had been destroyed by harsh northern winters, heavy snows, and the occasional enemy bombardment.

  Jadarah leaned over a crenelation, heedless of the inches of snow piled on top or her thin summery gown through which it began to melt. The icy wind rattled the bone beads in her hair as she looked out at the nearest Helat encampment. Stuck beyond the pale glow of the ghost redoubt, tiny orange dots flickered in the moonless night, huddled along the deeper darkness of the woods.

  The Helat did not attack during the night. They were a strange people, these offspring of that ancient betrayer. In her youth, Jadarah had heard that the Helat feared the dark and worshipped the sun. The king’s brother, the heretic, had laughed at her for that. But he had not laughed long. Jadarah grinned. No, laughter was the first thing to stop when the inquisition got their hands on a heretic.

  “They haven’t attacked since before Winterlight.”

  The voice came from Shamasa’s commander, a man close to her own thirty-five years, but where her hair flowed in black silky ringlets, his was sprinkled with wiry gray. Where her body was taut and her face flawless, the commander’s barrel chest had begun its descent to his belly and his eyes sat in sagging pouches. Upon her arrival, Jadarah had immediately dismissed him as not even worth remembering his name, and yet he was still following her around.

  “It’s like they’re waiting for something,” he said, looking out across the snowy field with her. “It has all the men strung as tight as harp strings.”

  Jadarah liked the sound of that. In a small army of men, such tension would spread like a plague. She had Thorns to keep her entertained, but after a month of hard travel with nothing but the same four toys every night, a girl needed variety. There must be a beautiful soldier or two in Shamasa’s barracks stretched past the point of endurance and ready to snap. Teikru would not have brought her to this far-flung end of the world without leaving a present like that waiting for her.

  But that would have to wait. Jadarah had a high place to prepare. In less than a month, that crippled lord would marry her Little Nothing in this very stronghold. And where would they take their vows if Jadarah didn’t get to work?

  She slid off the crenellation and turned her back on the Helat camp.

  The priests she had brought north were snuffling around the watchtower, some of them drooling through the elongated snouts of their leather masks. They could smell the blood and death of centuries soaking the stones. Their ragged, gore-spotted black robes flapped in the icy spring wind, making it look as if they were flitting from place to place.

  The ugly commander watched them with one hand on his sword.

  “The strong gods love Shamasa,” Jadarah told him. “So much fear and blood and lust has been spilt here. It screams with the worship of centuries.”

  Jadarah hugged her bare arms beneath her snow-covered breasts and embraced the creature growing in her womb. Not big enough yet for a sacrifice, barely developed enough to have more than a heart and stumpy limbs and a head bulbous with blind eyes. Most women wouldn’t even know they carried a life yet, but the queen had grown so many that she knew within days when a man’s seed had taken.

  The babe didn’t yet have enough blood to make a worthy sacrifice, but then perhaps she wouldn’t sacrifice this one at all. It would be a deliciously sharp hook to sink into the flesh of a certain Josean-blessed prince.

  The priests felt the shift in the icy night air. They stopped their search and gathered, their long, dripping masks looking to the queen.

  Not bothering to hide his uneasy disgust, the ugly commander twisted his upper body to eye the dark shapes at his back.

  “This will be our high place,” Jadarah purred. “Tonight, we begin anointing it.”

  In a flutter of ragged robes, the priests descended on the ugly commander. He pulled his sword, but the strong gods never sent a few priests where more would do. Ceremonial daggers glinted green and the commander’s blood poured black under the light of the ghost city.