Lathe drifted. She was sick to death of all that bobbing, but she couldn’t do anything to stop it. Whenever she tried to move or even just open her eyes, tiredness like a mudslide covered her back up and she was gone again.

  Sometimes she dreamed. Wild adventures fighting side by side with Four and Twenty-six in impossible battles against endless armies of brightly garbed haints. Giddy visions of presenting Pretty with silks and townhouses and an uphill placement where everybody in Siu Carinal had to cheer wherever she went.

  Sometimes Lathe dreamed of a man whose face she couldn’t see telling her to demand the test of steel. He was made of blackness, like a moonless night sky cut into a man-shape, with tiny fires shining through pinholes all over him. If she looked at one pinpoint of light, it grew and grew until it blinded her.

  “That’s because your right eye isn’t used to the light,” he told her.

  “Cuz it’s blind, ya fool.”

  Lathe had the idea the man of night and fire was laughing, but it didn’t feel like the snotty kind of laughter where you had to bust somebody in the teeth. This was a good laugh, like poking fun at your brothers.

  “No, not blind,” he argued in that friendly way. “It just needs practice. Try it.”

  “Hey, it is working!” She waved a hand in front of her bad eye, making the fire flash. “This’n ain’t seen nothing in a while.”

  “It will if you’ll trust me.”

  But whenever she woke up, her right eye was blind again. Getting her full sight back was just more dream stuff.

  “Do you know the Cormorant?” she asked the man of night and fire the next time she saw him.

  “I do.”

  “I figured so, me. If you see him, tell him I been smart just like he said.”

  More of that friendly amusement. “Remember what I said about the test of steel, Lathe.”

  But everything got slippery when she bobbed close to the surface of waking up. The man and whatever they had talked about slipped away, forgotten.

  ***

  Soromet strayed below frequently to check on the dirter quartered in her cabin.

  None of the raedrs wanted the job. Uncovered as the dirter’s face was, it made them uncomfortable. Perhaps they felt as if they were being unfaithful to their wives—those of them who were married—looking upon a woman without a veil. With that possibility in mind, Soromet did not feel right ordering one of the men to stand guard over the prisoner. She did it herself instead.

  The dirter’s sun-blisters closed and her burnt flesh healed quickly, returning to its original shade of pale. The festering sore in her chest cleared of infection without aid from salves. Within days, it had scarred over.

  Blood drinker magic saved the dirter’s life. Painlessly. Effortlessly. Meanwhile good Chaelon had suffered and gnashed his teeth against the screams, not showing weakness even in his agony, until finally the God of the Waves had mercy and took him to paradise.

  “Your people stole my husband from me,” Soromet told the sleeping dirter. The venom in her words surprised her. What surprised her more, however, was that she went on. “I would love to cut open your belly and toss you over the side of the Darkwind for the scavengers. You filthy abominations deserve worse than that. Much worse.”

  Her silken veil stuck to her cheek. Soromet realized tears were pouring down her face. She blinked, trying to clear her vision.

  “You cannot fathom what you have taken from me. What you have taken from us. And now you would float to my ship, crying for mercy from my God?” There was a noose around her throat, a harpoon in her chest. “From my God on my ocean. Why did he not drown you? Why did he not let a thousand tiny drill-worms eat you alive? Why did he not send a leviathan to swallow you whole and digest you while you screamed for rescue?”

  Soromet sank onto the stool from her husband’s chart table, the strength disappearing from her limbs.

  “Why did the God of the Wind and the Waves take my Chaelon and let you live, you stinking dirter?”

  In Soromet’s berth, the dirter stirred. Her dark eyes opened to slits. After a moment, she worked her mouth. Nothing emerged but a dry cough.

  Soromet rose and opened the small keg of rum-laced water in the corner, removing the dipper. She returned to the bunk with it and trickled some between the dirter’s cracked lips. The woman closed her eyes as she swallowed.

  “Pirate scum,” she croaked before dropping off to sleep once more.

  Soromet choked a laugh, but within moments, the laughter changed shape in her throat and shook her body with painful, silent sobs.

  ***

  Nights left little for Soromet to do above. Between the occasional check of the stars to make certain of their course, she left the men to their sleep or their watch and went below to her cabin.

  The dirter was making Ocean Rover signs again. Sometimes they were the same words as on the day she had been dragged out of the sea, and other times they were gibberish.

  God of the Waves, forgive me.

  Anger rose unbidden. Soromet grabbed the dirter by the shoulder and shook her.

  The woman grunted and opened her dark eyes a sliver, wincing at the soft light of the stormlamp.

  “Where did you learn to make our signs?” Soromet demanded.

  “Brother,” the dirter rasped.

  “Where did your brother learn them?”

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  The dirter squinted at Soromet. “I never knowed a haint to talk, me.”

  “Why were you in our waters?”

  “Brothers throwed me in.” Her voice was a breathless whisper, as if the small effort of speaking tired her. Her cracked lips looked a bloodless violet in the lamplight. “I was dead, far as they knowed.”

  “From the wound in your chest.”

  “If you’re no haint, then you got a name.” The dirter let her eyes sink closed. The backs of the lids were tiny maps of oceanic currents rendered in thin blue veins. Long black lashes feathered her cheeks. “What is it?”

  “The God Who Owns the Waves on a Thousand Seas will tell you my name when he sends you to hell with the rest of your dirter friends.”

  The dirter gave a faint, derisive snort.

  “Never knowed a haint to be so gronchety.” Her whisper grew weaker with every word, like fog drifting apart on a breeze. “Must be… a… pirate… gal…”

  ***

  Between dreams, Lathe felt medicine passing close by. She stole a drink of energy from this body or that one, doing what she could to heal up. Sometimes big medicine passed by so close she felt like she could reach out and grab it. When that came, she gulped it down.

  Blood would do her better, but wasn’t nobody bringing her skins of that. Even when the pirate gal who liked to play at being a haint drifted close, stinking like exotic spices, Lathe kept herself from reaching out and snatching hold of her. For one, she didn’t have the strength to hang on yet. For two, might be this gal would have to be her sister a while. That was the whole point of having somebody else around; so they could keep a look out when you had to close your eyes.

  It was an uncommon feeling, biding time. Lathe wasn’t used to it. Most of her life, when Impulse hollered, Lathe jumped into action. Now she couldn’t even jump down somebody’s throat.

  She just had to lie there and do nothing.

  It was even worse than lectures, because at least in lectures you could stir up something. Give somebody a flick or whisper to whoever was sitting close or squeak your chair until that vein beside the corner of Fright’s eye started throbbing. Even scullerying was better than lying around feeling like your bones were going to crawl out of your skin.

  The king had said her brothers needed her. How was she supposed to help them if she was stuck on some pirate ship?

  For that matter, how was she supposed to get gold from being a Royal Thorn if the grafting hadn’t worked? Without gold, she couldn’t buy an uphill placement for Pretty, and without a placement, Pretty might never get out of the Closes.

  It wasn’t safe down there for a girl alone, especially when she got older and started growing all the parts Lathe tried to keep hidden. Close-rats who’d lived through enough of the bad stuff could turn dangerous real fast if they saw somebody else they could take it out on. Worse, some of them got into taking a pipe or the dust, and then twenty sheriff’s men couldn’t stop them, let alone somebody small and scairt like Pretty.

  A parade of battered corpses danced through Lathe’s dreams. Some were girls and women she’d seen left dead in the alleys and the Closes, others were invented by her imagination. Most wore shreds of the threadbare dress and greasy headscarf she’d last seen Pretty wearing.

  “Your people murdered my sister,” a deep voice cut through the dream. “She was aboard the Raen greatship waiting for her raedr husband to return when your filthy soldiers attacked.”

  “Maybe your sister oughta learnt herself how to fight,” Lathe murmured without opening her eyes. “Didja ever think of that?”

  “I have never shamed myself as you dirters do, but when your land is holed with craters from the black sand, I will laugh in the open for all to see.”

  Lathe couldn’t understand half of what the man was saying, but she knew an insulting tone when she heard one.

  “Come laugh over here, howabout. I’ll spit in your eye for ya.”

  “Leave us.” The pirate gal was back, bringing her smell of spices with her.

  Lathe could’ve eaten a whole plateful of spices by themselves right then, she was hungry enough. Before the grump slipped out the cabin door, she took a hefty swallow of medicine off his energies.

  When they were alone again, the pirate gal asked her, “Who made the wound in your chest?”

  “I don’t answer folk who won’t tell me their names,” Lathe said. With the infusion of stolen medicine, she felt awake enough to open her eyes.

  The bundle of silks whispered onto the stool beside the bed. Tonight, the wrappings were a blue and purple so bright they were hard to look at.

  “Names are sacred. We do not give them lightly.”

  “That’s what Twenty-six said. He told me I ought not to tell anybody my name ’til I knowed for sure it was mine. He was a pirate scum too. You know him?”

  A thin strip of sun-browned face looked out at Lathe from the top of the bundle. The pirate gal’s eyes were shades darker than the blue of her veil.

  “Were you a criminal sentenced to execution?”

  “Thorns can’t be criminals.” They had learned that plain as night in legal sciences. Under the property codes, a Thorn was considered a weapon, not a man; as such, a Thorn’s actions were the legal responsibility of his master. Lathe hadn’t listened when Master Risk was trying to teach them the Old Khinesian term for that law, but she had listened long enough to catch that much. “And I was purt near a Royal Thorn, so I for sure can’t be.”

  “You are a dirter, yet you know the God of the Waves?”

  “I never seen him, but I heard the pirate scum talk about him. And Four was always goin’ on about the strong gods, but I didn’t no never-mind them neither. The only god a close-rat prays to is the Cormorant.”

  “But you know the sign for the God.”

  “This?” Lathe wiggled and twisted and pointed her fingers.

  “You are ignorant of the signs, then.”

  “I know some signs,” Lathe growled. She wanted to flare up, but she was too blamed tired. “I seen the pirate scum makin’ ’em when he took sick from a fell miasma, and I’m a fair study, me.”

  “This man, did you meet him as a prisoner aboard a dirter vessel?”

  “No, I never been on no ship afore this. I met him at Thornfield with Four. That’s how come we’re brothers.”

  “You do not know the signs, you only mimic what you have seen.” Dark blue eyes glared out of the brilliant silks. “I will enlighten you to their meanings.

  “This means Cursed. It tells me that the man you speak of was taken ashore, cut off from the God of the Waves, and it corroborates what you say of not having been aboard a ship. You say that he befriended you and another dirter. Meaning that, rather than choose honorable death, he crawled on his belly in the filth, groveling in exchange for a life on your dead earth.

  “This is a plea to the God of the Waves for forgiveness.” The pirate gal’s eyes were dagger-sharp on Lathe’s face as her fingers flew through the signs. “Forgiveness that man will never have in this life or the next, for now I know of whom you speak. His tale circulated as fast as the blood plague that returned without him three raed seasons ago.”

  The bundle of silks rose from the stool, the pirate gal scowling down at Lathe.

  “He was a son of the tribe Raen, which is signed like this. That man has no name. He is of no tribe. He is a coward and a disgrace, and there is no cleansing the stain he brought upon himself when he forsook his people to serve your dirter king. The man you call your brother is filth.”

  “You don’t dare talk about our pirate scum like that!” Lathe snagged a fistful of the dizzying silks, fast as a viper striking.

  The wrap pulled free of the pirate gal’s head, revealing straight red-gold hair and tanned, flawless skin stretched over high cheekbones. Jeweled piercings sparkled in her fair, shocked brows.

  One sun-browned hand caught hold of the veil, trying to tug it back into place, and the other clamped around Lathe’s wrist, nails digging viciously into her arm.

  Normally, Lathe would have snapped the gal’s nose with a headbutt, but even that tiny outburst had cost her too much energy.

  Black spots hovered in her vision, eating away at what she could see. The smooth fabric of the veil slipped through her shaking fingers. Sucking air and sweating like it was her first day training with heavy swords, Lathe fell limp on the bunk.

  The pirate gal stepped back out of reach. With practiced hands, she began smoothing her hair and re-wrapping herself in silk.

  “Soromet, Wife of Chaelon, Raed Commander of the Waeld, Third Tribe Among the Ocean Rovers,” she said proudly. “That is the name of the woman whose husband’s raed ship you are quartered in. That is the name of the woman who has decided your fate. You called that coward dirt-lover your brother, naming yourself a servant of the same blood-drinker king whose boots he licks, and proving yourself an enemy to the seas.”

  Soromet drifted to the door, then stopped.

  “Tomorrow the Darkwind reaches her destination, and the weapon new-forged by the Waeld will be unleashed upon your people. I tell you my name because even a dirter should know the one who has pronounced her death. Tomorrow, you will die by the black sand.”

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