As the sun rose, two fair-haired pirates with bristly beards dragged Lathe up on deck. They were tough-looking and strong like her brother Twenty-six, but unlike him their beards covered their face and were almost long enough to touch their chests. Twenty-six’s beard had only started to fill in his cheeks when Lathe had last seen him.

  At least her pirate brother had sense enough to cut his hair short after that scrap where she’d latched onto a fistful of it. The men dragging her along the deck let their long hair fly free. Anybody could’ve reached out and snatched a bald spot on them. Anybody who wasn’t half dead with exhaustion, anyway.

  The crew on deck worked to attach a netlike sling to the arm of a massive trebuchet. Lathe recognized the machine from drawings and lectures on siege engines. They hadn’t had one at Thornfield to demonstrate, but old Master Joachin, who’d lived through at least a dozen sieges, had said with big enough rocks loaded into the throwing-arm, one of those fiends could devastate a wall in just a handful of shots. Lathe couldn’t imagine what the pirates were going to do with one on the open ocean. Where were they going to find rocks to hurl?

  She forgot all about the trebuchet when she caught her first sight of home in three years.

  Lathe had never seen Siu Carinal from out on the sea looking in. The pale colors of the rising sun painted the Jewel of the Delta in a surreal dreamy light. There was the river mouth she had grown up next to, gushing muddy water into the ocean, while ships and barges and riverboats jostled and skirted around one another.

  Up on the hill sat the rich folk’s fancy townhouses, shoulder to shoulder and painted every color in the world. At the very top the lord’s mansion stood looking down on everything else, all eight of its chimneys blowing smoke against the cool spring air.

  Down below, the warehouses blocked her view of the promenade, the squat, ugly commoner’s houses, Market Street, and River Street. The brown swirling water flowed high as Lathe could ever remember seeing it, hiding the docks and swamping riverside storehouses.

  Flood season could be some awful bad medicine. While she watched, an old granary collapsed on the east bank, the rushing waters pulling its stones apart one at a time and then in big chunks, until its roof floated on nothing.

  She shivered.

  With the water that high, the Closes under the city would be full to the top. Had Pretty got aboveground before the floods came rushing in? Or had she been too scairt, crying and scooting up their tunnel, pressing her back to the worn brick of their little sleeping spot, while the freezing spring melt climbed higher and higher? Neither Pretty nor Lathe knew how to swim.

  Hot tears burned cheeks chilled by the icy wind while Lathe prayed silent, desperate prayers to the Cormorant to save her twin.

  A strange sound caught her attention. The pirates were rolling a big iron ball about half as tall as a man to the trebuchet.

  That answered the question of where they would get their ammunition. The thing must have been hollow, because as it rolled, something hissed along inside.

  What was it that pirate gal had said? Black sand? Seemed to Lathe a shot that big would do more damage if it was solid metal, not hollow and full of sand.

  Hand signals flew back and forth between the pirates, but no one said a word. All that quiet in the eerie morning light made Lathe’s skin itch. Together, six of them hooked the iron ball into the trebuchet’s sling. More pirates rolled over another ball to load when the first had flown, and at the bow men cranked a capstan, slowly raising a third huge shot from a hold belowdecks.

  The smell of spices drifted down from upwind. Lathe twisted her neck to see the pirate gal, Soromet, climbing down from a higher deck to the one the rest of them were standing on. She was wearing red and orange silk that day, woven in more of those eye-bleeding patterns.

  Soromet passed by Lathe as if she weren’t there and inspected the trebuchet’s arming. Her dark blue eyes raked Siu Carinal’s colorful skyline.

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  “Have you got the gauge of it yet?” she asked the pirate at the trebuchet’s lever. “We must attack before we’re spotted.”

  “She’s sighted and ready.”

  “Fire.”

  At the word, the pirate threw his weight into the lever. The lock kicked free of the gears and the arm swung. The entire ship rolled with the heft of the swing. As the trebuchet reached the sudden stop at the end of its arch, the ship pitched violently. Lathe would have been bucked over the rail into the water if those two pirates hadn’t been holding her between them.

  Soromet didn’t act like she noticed the vicious rearing of the deck beneath her feet. She and every other soul aboard watched the great metal ball arc through the sky toward the lord’s mansion.

  It was going to fall short, Lathe realized. The shot started its downward curve too early, sinking toward the market, and disappearing behind the tops of the warehouses.

  Fire and debris exploded from where it had disappeared, stone and wood and water and even what looked like the dismembered head of a donkey or ox. Lathe yelped in surprise, jerking against her captor’s grips. A heartbeat later, thunder boomed across the waters so loud Lathe felt it like a punch in the chest.

  A whole section of the houses and stalls on Market Street were gone. Black smoke billowed from the structures surrounding the empty crater. In seconds, flames licked the sky from the rooftops.

  “Pretty!” Lathe screamed. Her weak heart pounded, and black spots tried to suck her into unconsciousness, but she stole energies from the pirates by the gulp. “Pretty!”

  They were cranking the trebuchet arm back for another shot.

  Soromet turned to Lathe. “When your evil king slaughtered the Raen, he did it in the black smoke of blood-drinker death. In return, the Waeld will raze every city and settlement within range of our weaponry, along with every dirter ship that touches our waters in the fire and smoke of the black sand.”

  Lathe felt sickness pushing at the back of her throat. She didn’t have anything in her guts to empty out, but her stomach heaved all the same. She couldn’t hear the screaming from the city, but she could imagine the folks hoopin’ and hollerin’ and running for their lives.

  Sand hissed inside metal as the pirates loaded another enormous, deadly ball into the trebuchet.

  “Sighted,” a voice called.

  “Fire,” Soromet said.

  The arm swung again. The ship quaked beneath Lathe’s feet, and her legs buckled.

  This time, the ball struck the fine uphill houses, leaving a fiery hell where bright greens, oranges, and maroons had stood. Lathe was sure this time she’d seen bodies in the debris, folks all smashed to pieces. The boom of the explosion made her ears ring.

  Gears cranked as the trebuchet arm came back again.

  As if someone else were doing it, Lathe realized she was cussing the pirate gal and her weapon to every torture ever known.

  Soromet ignored her. None of the pirate’s expressions changed.

  Lathe choked on the gall of it. They were killing her home, wrecking everything she’d ever known and everything good she wanted to give her twin, and not even that big pirate who’d said he would laugh his head off was batting an eye.

  The third shot crashed into the warehouses on River Street, close to the Mean Tributary, turning the gaol, the sheriff’s house, and the surrounding buildings to a crater of burning, smoking rubble.

  By then, pieces of the destruction were flowing into the river and bobbing out to sea on the muddy currents. Bits of house. Bodies. Produce. Fish swarmed at the river’s mouth eating what came out, boiling clouds of little ones, and slicing fins of big ones.

  And the trebuchet gears cranked again.

  Soromet turned to face Lathe full-on, her dark blue eyes empty of the victory she should have been gloating over.

  “Dirter, you serve the blood-drinker king who wages unrighteous war against the Ocean Rovers. Your people seek to steal our waters, and you abetted a known traitor to the slaughtered tribe of Raen, First Among the Ocean Rovers. Have you any evidence to present in your defense?”

  Lathe hocked a wad of tear-thickened phlegm and spat it on Soromet’s silky veil.

  The pirate gal’s eyes narrowed in disgust. “Then by the honor of the deceased raed commander Chaelon and the Waeld Tribe, Third Among the Ocean Rovers, you are sentenced to death by the black sand.”

  Soromet drew a cudgel from inside her sleeve.

  Except it wasn’t a cudgel at all. It was some kind of metal tube on a thick wooden hilt. Soromet dropped a metal ball the size of a plum pit into it. One of the pirates handed her a smoldering stick.

  Acrid smoke stung Lathe’s nose as Soromet pointed the metal tube at Lathe’s face. The burning end of the stick inched toward the hilt, while the black hole of the tube glared Lathe down like a single, hateful eye.

  Impulse shrieked. Lathe didn’t know what made it speak up just then, and she didn’t care. She’d never been one to question Impulse.

  “I gotta have the test of steel, me!” she hollered, squirming in her captors’ grip. Their hands clamped down on her arms, but she was too weak to break free anyway. She felt the world slipping into darkness. “Demand it… test of steel…”

  Black squeezed the edges of her vision, but Lathe had just enough time to see Soromet’s eyes widen with shock. The pirate gal pointed her metal tube upward as it spit fire and sent that tiny ball skirling into the dawn sky.

  Then Lathe passed out.

  (^-^)

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