Jenna Helland: The Fanged Crown

Harp’s family.

Perched on the top of the railing, Kitto spotted Harp and raised his hand in a silent offer of help. Harp shook his head slightly, and Kitto nodded. The boy turned and walked along the narrow railing as the rhythm of the choppy waves rocked the ship up and down. His arms hung loosely at his sides while his body effortlessly adjusted to the motion of the Crane . Harp had known Kitto since he was small and scrawny, indentured on the Marderward . Even then, the boy had had an uncanny sense of balance and coordination that amazed Harp.

Kitto had been with him the night they’d fled the Marderward with Liel, an elf who was being held prisoner by the brutal captain. It was Kitto and Liel who had rowed the little skiff away from the burning ship. Delirious from pain, Harp curled up on the bottom of the boat with a broken hand and a split face watching the showers of hot cinders spark across the night sky. Kitto had been with him during the halcyon months hiding on the Moonshae Isles when the three of them—Kitto, Harp, and Liel—had lived in a safe haven and formed the closest thing to a family that Harp had even known. Then he’d lost both Kitto and Liel.

It was several years before he saw Kitto again, when the boy miraculously showed up in the derelict port town where he and Boult had found lodging in the months after they were released from the Vankila Slab. The sight of Kitto’s small, dirty face on his doorstep made Harp weep. Finding the boy was the first thing he’d planned to do, just as soon as he had enough coin to buy a ship. Harp never got the full story on how Kitto managed it: an eleven-year-old kid walking barefoot from Tethyr with just Harp’s name scrawled on a piece of paper.

Kitto gave his last coin to the beggar on the corner who pointed him in the direction of Harp’s decrepit hovel, just one of many in a street of hovels. He’d been so quiet that it had taken Harp and Boult a tenday just to get him to talk about the weather, or the gruel, or anything at all. Those were the days when a strong wind could split Harp’s scars open, and he wondered if he’d ever stop feeling like a walking dead man.

At least they had a plan: to buy the Crane . The ship had given them a singularity of purpose, probably the last time in Harp’s life that was true. Every night after smashing rocks or killing rats or whatever petty job they took instead, they counted their gold and went to sleep hungry under a roof that provided only slightly more shelter than sleeping rough under the stars. They might have lived out their days in the waterfront district, never earning enough to get out—the plight of most of the denizens that shared the refuse-slick streets with them.

But the day Harp showed up at the dingy tradeshop with his latest payment on the ship, the owner of the Crane met him at the door. The man must have been the last honest person at the port, because he refused Harp’s coin and gave him the writ of sale, saying a mysterious benefactor had paid the debt. He wouldn’t say who had done them such a favor, not even when Boult, suspicious of the good deed, returned to the shop and offered him a reward for the information.

They sailed away from the port on the Crane that very day, with Boult, who had never been on a ship before, heaving into a bucket. Harp leaned on the railing beside Kitto, who was actually smiling at the sight of the wretched city disappearing in the distance. The scars on Harp’s arms had split that morning, and there he stood, leaking blood onto the boards. As long as he never saw the inside of another prison or had anything remind him of a copper-haired elf named Liel, maybe everything would be all right.

But it hadn’t been, of course. Boult and Kitto had hauled him out of more than one cell where’d he’d been tossed after a night in the wrong pub or the wrong bed or the wrong whatever he couldn’t remember. And Liel was the first thing he thought of when he woke up in the morning and, unless he was drunk enough, she was the thing he couldn’t put out of his head at night.

Some days, he burned with anger at Liel for letting Kitto set out on the road by himself, although there was little she could have done to stop the boy if he had his mind set on it. But she had promised to take care of Kitto even after she married Declan Cardew. Hatred didn’t come naturally to Harp. He’d give a man more chances than he deserved. But the power-hungry, ambitious Cardew had been a thorn in Harp’s foot for years. No, that was too gentle a comparison for the role he’d played in Harp’s life. Cardew was poison in an already mortal wound.

“What a dump!” Boult’s voice came from behind him.

“Nine Hells!” Harp swore. Engrossed in thought, Harp had wandered down to the lower deck, moving aimlessly between crates and barrels as if answers would be waiting for him in plain sight. He was so distracted that he hadn’t heard Boult come down the ladder into the hold. “Who knew dwarves could sneak like cats?” Harp said.

“I could’ve cut your throat, and you wouldn’t have seen me coming,” Boult said. “Lingering in the past like a pig rolling in slop. You get that look in your eye, you’re thinking about a certain ambitious, underhanded elf named Liel. When are you going to start using your head?”

“I’ve made it forty-two years so far,” Harp replied. “No use starting now.”

“Did you find anything?” Boult asked, lifting the lid of one of the crates and closing it quickly when the smell of rotting meat drifted into the air. “Bitch Queen, spare us. They must have been waiting here a long time.”

Grates in the low ceiling allowed light into the stuffy space, and they could hear rodents scurrying in the dark spaces along the edge of the hull. Harp brushed aside a coil of thick rope hanging from the ceiling. There was a door at the far end of the hold. Covered in gilt-leaf, the door was surprisingly ornate compared to the rest of the ship and glowed faintly in the dusty light. “That must be the captain’s quarters,” Harp said.

“My, the captain must have been a man of fine taste,” Boult said, jabbing his finger at the gaudy decoration.

“Nothing says high class like shiny foil,” Harp agreed as he gingerly pushed the door open. Glass lanterns hung from the ceiling, and their low flames cast swaying shadows in the dingy, sour-smelling room. There was a cot bolted into the floor, a large chest against one side of the room, and a table with papers and brass navigational scopes. It looked very much like Harp’s quarters back on the Crane . Only bigger.

“Laws of pillage say she’s ours now,” Harp said as he moved into the room to check the maps tacked to the wall.

“We sail her to Nyanzaru and sell her, chances are we make more coin than doing the job we came to do,” Boult said.

Harp looked over his shoulder at Boult. “We can finish the job and still sell her at the port. I committed to Avalor.”

“And what exactly did you commit to?”

“You’re not going to let it go, are you?” Harp asked. “It might not even matter.”

“We’re here because of Liel, and that doesn’t fill me with joy and hope,” Boult said.

“You’re wrong about Liel,” Harp told him, pulling the maps off the wall. He rolled them up neatly and laid them on the cot. In his early days of pirating, Harp learned that if you could only take one thing from an enemy vessel, you should take the maps. “And it’s not like you to even think about reneging on a job.”

“And it’s not like you to lie,” Boult said. “Especially not to me.”

“Since when?” Harp asked. “Our friendship would be so much less interesting if we only told the truth. I’m pretty sure you lie to me all the time.”