Lathe was accustomed to training for hours on end. She knew how to sweat and suck wind and get hurt and keep going. But fighting for your life was something different. Surviving bout after bout with no rests between chewed through her stamina, even with the blood magic boosting it. Her hands cramped around the hilts of her swords until she couldn’t have let go even if she’d wanted. Sweat turned the leather grips slippery while it was running, then when she ran out of sweat, the drying moisture turned them to glue. Gritty salt coated her skin and stung her sunburns.

  Halfway through the raed commanders, her heart squeezed like a fist and she stumbled. A dagger whistled toward her blind side, and only throwing herself to the deck saved her. She came up with one shaking sword to the pirate’s groin and the other poking through his beard to prick the underside of his jaw.

  The pirates got craftier as she went, too, thanks to that fool Reikr. They formed a little knot around him now, talking strategy. They backed her into obstacles, forced her to climb and jump and spin away from their attacks, while her heart crashed around inside her chest fit to die and she force-fed it blood magic just to keep it pumping.

  Sometimes she caught Reikr pointing at something she did in the midst of a fight, but most of the time she just watched him watching her and conspiring with his buddies.

  “You want another crack at me, you schemin’ dog?” she hollered at him after she beat what had to be her nineteenth or twentieth opponent. “Come on yourself! I ain’t scairt to whup a pirate twice!”

  But Reikr was like her brother Twenty-six—he didn’t rise to her taunting and his calculating glare didn’t flinch.

  Of course, she probably didn’t look very intimidating by then, slumped sidelong as she was in a net of ratlines, hair matted with drying sweat, face flushed by the sun and exhaustion, and gasping like a fish on the sand. He probably figured she’d be lucky to get through one more fight without keeling over dead.

  Lathe felt like she didn’t even have that much left in her, but when the next raed commander raised his knife and belaying pin, she dragged herself upright and took after him.

  She should’ve had all the advantages—reach, speed, agility, invisibility—but halfway through the fight, she burnt up the last of the medicine she’d stolen from that leviathan just trying to keep her exhausted heart working.

  Her knees buckled, and she turned visible against her will. The raed commander pivoted on the spot and swung that big wood pin. It smacked across her aching shoulders and neck. Stars exploded in her vision.

  Had she thought those twinkling, sparkling things were stars? They weren’t. They were flames, so blinding they hurt to look at it.

  “Listen to me, Lathe,” the man of night’n fire told her. “If you don’t try the other eye now, you’ll never get the chance. Open your blind eye and look.”

  “You got river water in your ears?” she muttered, her voice slurred. Her bad eye was already open. It did whatever the other one did, except for seeing. “It can’t…”

  The raed commander sliced his off-hand knife toward her. The blow should have come in fast, but it looked like it was barely moving. It would be years before that blade touched her. Centuries.

  Past the raed commander, she saw that schemer Reikr’s fingers moving, trading sluggish hand signals with his pals like they were all trying to see who could sign the slowest. He blinked, his eyelids moving like frozen honey.

  All around the deck, pirate gals’ vivid silks froze in ripples like waves of sand on an untouched beach. The ratlines that had been whipping in the breeze stopped where they were, halfway between tight and loose.

  Other than a muffled hum, Lathe couldn’t hear anything, not voices, not the scream of gulls or whistle of the wind or the lap of swells against the ship. Nothing.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her heart squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Once it let go, she knew it didn’t have enough strength left to contract again. She needed blood, but she was too fatigued to grab somebody or some creature. She couldn’t even sip energies anymore.

  The blistering afternoon sunlight dimmed around her.

  “Open your eye and look!” the man of night’n fire insisted.

  It started out as a pinprick just like the flames on the man of night’n fire. Far away, lost in the dark. But when Lathe focused on that tiny dot, it blazed up and the whole world burned.

  Pirates, ropes, rails, forges, cutlasses, her own knuckles wrapped around her sword hilts—all of it was limned by orange-blue flames. Some spots and lines shone brighter than others, and some near blinded her, but Lathe could tell they were all only reflections in the darkness.

  She raised her head and blinked up at a sky of fire. The hottest, brightest rays were coming from a flaring, glinting, blistering purple-white ball of life and death. Everything else just caught the light it shed.

  Impulse said to drink up that fire and flame, so Lathe did.

  It wasn’t like blood or energies. Those put a hot, coppery feeling in Lathe’s mouth. The flame tasted like spices. It burnt in her chest.

  Power surged through her, stronger medicine than she’d ever had, stronger than the last drop of blood from somebody she hated, even stronger than what she had sensed boiling inside the Cormorant in that spur alley off River Street. She drank and drank, until she couldn’t drink any more, and still she had barely touched a drop of that purple-white orb. Her heart kicked up a fuss, rushing to make up for the beats it had missed.

  Grinding out a shout between gritted teeth, Lathe knocked the longknife out of the raed commander’s hand and lurched back to her feet. Her longer steel chopped into his belaying pin and stuck, spraying splinters.

  The raed commander’s surprised grunt brought sound back into the world. Suddenly everything was moving fast again. He went to yank Lathe off balance, but by then she already had the point of her shorter sword poking him between the ribs, right where a shove would slide it into his heart.

  Gasps erupted from behind fluttering, flapping veils, and muttering rumbled through the crowd like distant thunder. The pirates had been hoping she was done for.

  “I can swallow the sun, me.”

  Nobody heard her over the grumbling and discussion.

  Lathe closed her good eye and surveyed them with her blind one. Blackness broken up by stony pirate scowls and silk veils edged by tongues of flame.

  While they stood there yakking, she swallowed more. The spicy heat soothed her battered muscles and replenished the fire in her belly. Her heart thumped out a steady rhythm, drinking down the sun as she breathed it in.

  Every drop of medicine in the world really is mine.

  Grinning, Lathe opened both eyes again. The darkness and fire disappeared, replaced by sunlight and color.

  She smacked her steels together with a gratifying clang.

  “Who wants whupped next?”

  ***

  The last seven bouts lasted longer than the other twenty put together, but drinking down the sun kept Lathe striking and spinning and dodging. She puffed and laughed and chopped like this was her first day with a sword, finding out how dangerous she could be all over again.

  Even that Reikr couldn’t out-scheme her new medicine. She mirrored her shadow, then she mirrored her image, then just for fun she cast full illusions of herself over yon while she snuck up on her opponents and knocked them flat.

  The last raed commander hit the deck an hour before sunset. She knelt on his chest with her swords scissoring his throat.

  Silence spread through the pirates.

  Panting, shaking from fatigue and elation, crusty with dried sweat, hungry enough to eat the greatship ropes and all, and thirsty enough to drink the ocean if only it were fresh water, Lathe stood up and sheathed her blades.

  The pirate chief Dragaar and his wife Kalaset came forward.

  “Daughter of Dirt,” the old man intoned in a voice that carried across the swells. “The God Who Owns the Waves on a Thousand Seas brought you to the Waeld and by the test of steel proved you worthy of joining her mighty fleet. Kneel and speak the name you would take to your tribe.”

  Wearily, she dropped to a kneel. The dull pain that flared in her knee at the impact settled in among the hundred other scratches, bruises, and strains she’d sustained over the course of the test.

  “My name is Lathe,” she croaked out of a dry throat.

  “Daughter of Dirt no more,” Dragaar announced. “Rise Lathe, Daughter of Steel, Adopted of the Waeld, Third Tribe Among the Ocean Rovers.”

  Convincing her body to get back up was harder than getting it to drop, but she staggered to her feet.

  After all the fuss, Lathe expected an uproar from the gathered pirates, but turned out they weren’t much for hoopin’ and hollerin’. The crowd broke up, and they went back to the forging, sewing, writing, and fish-gutting they’d been working on before the test.

  There was more talk than there had been before, but not much of it sounded happy.

  “Come,” Kalaset, the chief’s wife, said, holding out her hands to Lathe. “Share the table of Dragaar and Kalaset. There is much to discuss.”

  Hostile glares followed Lathe as she let the chief’s wife lead her below—Reikr’s and Soromet’s the coldest of all—but Lathe brushed them off.

  If they didn’t like her winning, they should’ve whupped her themselves.