Douglas Hulick - Sworn in Steel

I sat in the darkness, listening to the slap of the waves against the side of the boat, and watched as the outline of Ildrecca loomed toward me.

Even with my night vision, the sea wall on this side of the Imperial capital was too vast to take in. It stretched off into the distance in either direction until my magically tinged sight gave way to the night. The city was a great, hulking mass: an irregular black line drawn against the star-speckled horizon. A city I was now having to creep back into.

My city.

I brought my eyes back down to the scale of men and the forest of narrow spires that seemed to grow from the waters of the Lower Harbor. Lights flickered among those masts, swaying and bobbing like nautical will-o’-the-wisps-ships’ running lights moving in the soft breeze off the sea.

“I still say you should have killed him,” said Fowler Jess.

I looked back over my shoulder. The Oak Mistress was crouched amidships, scowling like an unhappy cat at the water that surrounded the narrow caïque. She had both hands out, gripping the gunwales as if she might keep the craft from capsizing by force of will. Her green flat cap was jammed down on her head, but that hadn’t stopped the breeze from setting stray wisps of blond drifting and dancing about her head, giving her an amber-gold halo in my night vision. With her fine features and normally bright eyes, it would have been an enchanting image, if not for the smudges of dust and mud and old blood on her face and collar. Well, that, and the dark circles under her eyes that had come from days of hard riding and little sleep.

Not that I was doing much better, mind. My thighs and ass had stopped being able to feel anything other than pain nearly three days back.

“We’ve already been over this,” I said, reaching down and running an absent hand over the long, canvas-wrapped bundle at my feet. Reassuring myself for the fifth time in as many minutes that it was still there.

“Yes, we have,” she answered. “And you’re still wrong.”

I glanced past her to the figure of the boatman standing in the stern, working his long oar with slow, easy strokes. He was chanting the Nine Prayers of Imperial Ascension to himself, partly to keep time for his work, and partly to assure us he wasn’t eavesdropping. Boatmen who hired out to run the Corsian Passage at night without bow or stern lights knew better than to risk overhearing things. “Fine,” I said, leaning forward and dropping my voice down to a proper whisper. “Let’s say I’d done what you wanted and dusted Wolf: what then? What happens when word gets out that I broke my deal with him? What happens when people learn he kept his part of the bargain and I broke mine?”

“There’s a hell of a lot of difference between keeping your promise to a bandit and honoring your word to another Gray Prince.”

“Is there?”

“You damn well know there is!”

“On a good day, maybe, but now?” I pointed south, across the Corsian Passage, past the lights of the tiny harbor at Kaidos and the dark smudge of the hills beyond, toward the disaster we’d fled in Barrab. “With a fellow Gray Prince lying dead three days behind us, my dagger in his eye? With me being the last person, the last Kin, to see him alive?” I shook my head and barely managed to keep the rest of me from shaking along with it. Even now, the thought of the news coming up the Imperial High Road from Barrab made my stomach queasy.

I ran my hand over the canvas-wrapped sword at my feet again. It had been worth it; it had to have been worth it.

“No one besides us has any reason to think Wolf was involved with Crook Eye’s murder,” I said. “All anyone on the street is going to know is that two Gray Princes met, and one walked away. Me. What kind of story does that tell?”

“But with Wolf you could’ve always-”

“No, I couldn’t,” I said. “Because if I kill him, it looks like I’m trying to cover my tracks. If the street hears I dusted the bandit who snuck me out of Barrab past Crook Eye’s people, it won’t matter what else I do or say, the story will be set: Drothe dusted Wolf because he knew too much. At that point, I might as well take credit for Crook Eye’s death and be done with it.” I settled back on my seat. “No, as much as I hate to say it, Wolf does me more good alive than dead right now.”

“So he just walks?”

“He just walks.”

Fowler spit her opinion of that over the side of the caïque.

I turned back around and watched as the base of Ildrecca’s city wall resolved itself into the dark jumble that made up the Lower Harbor. A couple of centuries ago, it would have been alight and busy even at this hour, with wine and spices and grain weighing down the docks until they groaned, the air rich with the shouts of men and the thump of tonnage and the smell of trade. But that had been before the empire decided to expand the landings on the north and east sides of the peninsula that held Ildrecca; now the richest vessels made their way around the city’s horn to Little Docks and the Pilings and the merchant pier that had been added to the Imperial naval docks, called the New Wharf. The Lower Harbor, once the hub of Ildrecca’s trade, had become the haunt of timber merchants and fishermen, salvage traders and night soil barges. And, of course, the Kin.

Barely two-thirds of the docks in Lower Harbor were in regular commercial use anymore, which left the rest for us. Smugglers, spies, and the occasional small-craft pirate-along with all the people and industries that catered to them-were the stock-in-trade of the cordon that had come to be known as Dirty Waters.

I hadn’t left by this route on my way to meet Crook Eye, and I certainly hadn’t planned on using it to sneak back into the city I called home. Then again, I hadn’t planned on being framed for his murder, either. Not after I’d sworn the Prince’s Peace, promising to keep my steel sheathed and my people at bay for the meet, just as he had. The criminals of the empire didn’t expect much when it came to Gray Princes and our promises, but honoring the Peace was one of them. Without it, there was no reason to expect truces to be made, territories respected, negotiations offered, or Kin wars prevented. The Prince’s Peace kept the legends of the Kin from slaughtering one another on the rare occasions they met, which in turn kept the blood and the chaos from trickling down to the streets. It kept us, if not civilized, then at least careful.

But more importantly, it kept things from getting out of hand. Because if things got out of hand among the Kin, that’s when the emperor took an interest in us. And no one wanted that.

Our boatman grew quiet as we approached a set of water stairs, their steps leading down into the harbor. I’d barely felt the scrape of the keel on stone before Fowler was clambering up and over me, making for the stairs even as she sent the caïque to rocking. The boatman cursed. Fowler cursed. I grabbed the bundle at my feet and made it unanimous.

A moment later, the Oak Mistress was on the steps, scrambling up toward the quay as the boat settled.

I reached into my purse and pulled out a pair of silver hawks, then thought better of it and added three more, making sure none of them were clipped. The boatman stepped forward, easy and sure in the craft, and I placed a week’s worth of work in his palm. To his credit, he nodded and pocketed the windfall without comment.

I turned and considered the slime-smeared steps, the rocking of the boat, and the canvas-wrapped bundle in my hands. I bent my knees, took a breath. .

“You want I should throw that to you?”

I blinked and looked back over my shoulder. “What?”