always has been.” Unlike the boy, she wanted to say, but she did not dare. She would not bring that thief into this precious moment when she had her Shepherdess to herself at last.
The Lady pet Nara’s head like a cat’s. Remember, she said. Crush this island and its defenders. Break them utterly. I want them desperate.
“It will be done, Lady,” Nara said, clinging tighter than ever. “I swear it.”
The Lady smiled one last time and vanished, her body slipping through a white line in the air. Nara fell forward, collapsing on the couch where the Lady had been. As always, her absence left Nara reeling, and she lay gasping on the silk cushions, her eyes shut tight against the hateful darkness that remained when Benehime was gone.
When the weakness finally passed, Nara pulled herself onto the couch and opened her soul a fraction. A wind answered at once.
“Tell the front line commanders to fire as soon as they’re in range,” the Empress said. “I mean to make an example of this island. Tell the wizards to use every war spirit we’ve got. I want Osera burned to ash.”
“Yes, Empress,” the wind whispered, spinning away.
Nara smiled. She wasn’t sure what the island had done to deserve the Lady’s displeasure, but it was a boon to her. An absolute victory here could be enough to make the Lady remember at last who her true servant was. That thought made her sigh in happiness, and Nara sank into the pillows to watch the show as the first of her palace ships hit the Oseran fleet.
The Oseran runners darted between the palace ships, the flagship shooting ahead as arrows rained down on them from the enemy decks.
“Hold steady!” Josef cried, cutting an arrow out of the air just before it landed in the rower behind him. “Are the others in position?”
“Right behind us!” the captain shouted.
Josef looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, the other runners were coasting right on their tail with their clingfire already lit in the throwers. Josef grinned and pointed the Heart at the palace ship on their left. “Bring us up right next to the hull.”
The flagship surged forward, cutting through the breakwater until they were an arm’s length from the palace ship’s cliff-like side. Josef set his feet on the bucking deck and held the Heart in front of him, closing both hands on the wrapped hilt. He closed his eyes with a deep breath and let his thoughts go. His mind cleared like the sky after a storm, leaving only the sword in his hands. He could feel the Heart’s presence resonating with his own, and the image of a mountain appeared behind his eyes. An enormous, sharp peak, cutting the clouds. A sword cutting a ship.
The cut would have to be perfect, a niggling voice whispered. Any amount of drag and he would crash his own ship before the enemy’s. Josef snarled and pushed the doubt away. He gripped the Heart until his hands ached, letting the sword’s weight anchor him as the rest of the world fell away, leaving only the feel of the wind and a profound stillness. As the quiet settled, he could almost feel Milo Burch standing in front of him, his old face smug as ever as he spoke the first truth of swordsmanship.
A sword cuts whatever its swordsman wants it to cut.
Josef gripped the Heart tight, relaxing his body until the Heart was part of it. Part of him.
A sword cuts whatever its swordsman wants it to cut? Josef smiled. Time to test the limits.
Giving himself fully to the weight of the mountain, Josef opened his eyes, and the world rushed in.
The palace ship’s hull was right beside him. He could smell the tar on the wood, feel the iron strength of the enormous black beams. His body moved with the buck of the sea as he braced the Heart in his hands and lifted the blade, its scarred face a black hole in the afternoon sunlight. And then, in the emptiness between one wave and the next, between the breath let out and the breath inhaled, he struck.
The Heart flew in his hands, moving like an extension of himself. He did not feel the wood as it passed. Did not feel the nails as he cut them. All he felt was the will to cut swelling through his body and into his sword. The Heart sang as it struck, a great iron gong vibrating through the sea.
Josef’s knees buckled as the blow left him. He fell into the boat as the runner turned midstroke and began to race away from the palace ship. The sailors were rowing with all their might, arms straining as they pushed the runner faster and faster. For a moment, Josef couldn’t understand why they were running, and then he looked back at the palace ship, and he saw.
The palace ship was carved open, its great side split just above the water, starting at the ship’s middle and running all the way to the stern. The cut was perfectly clean, slicing through the wood without so much as a splinter, and wherever the wood was cut, the ship was bowing. A great creaking sound drowned out the waves as the palace ship’s side began to slide, pushed sideways by the ship’s own enormous weight. The ship groaned as the sundered boards ground together, and then, with an earsplitting crack, the wooden supports snapped, and ship’s side began to fall open.
Suddenly, Josef could see the inner decks and the sailors running through them, scrambling for cover as the metal skeleton that held the ship together folded under the pressure of the unsupported hull. Already the water was flooding through the crack to fill the lower decks, soaking the sailors who scrambled for the pumps as the entire ship began to tip. But then, just before the hull cracked completely and began to crumble into the sea, the falling wood stopped. For a breathless second, the ship hung frozen, the collapsing side poised in midair. And then, with an ear-splitting crack, the wood shuddered and began to pull itself back together.
“Now, you idiots!” Josef screamed. “Do it now!”
His voice shot across the water, and the crews in the assist ships stopped gawking and began to scramble. The air was filled with the sound of snapping rope as crews hit their clingfire launchers and a rain of ever-burning fire shot out from the Oseran fleet into the palace ship’s closing breach. The clingfire exploded when it hit, sending sticky, burning pitch flying in all directions. Everything it touched caught fire, no matter how wet. If it could burn, it did.
The moment they’d launched their fire, the runners peeled away, darting across the water as arrows from the other palace ships chased them. The blobs of clingfire had been small, and only half the runners had shot on this attack, but the damage was done. As the fire spread through its belly, the broken palace ship began to groan. Even Josef heard the agony in the sound as the hole that had been pulling itself together began to slip once again, the great beams falling into the water as the hungry sea rushed in to fill the void.
The palace ship was leaning at a thirty-degree angle now. Sailors slid overboard as the enormous deck tilted, their bodies vanishing into the churning waves as the sea surged through the broken hull. Through the ship’s cracked side, Josef could see sailors flinging water at the clingfire, but it did no good. Clingfire could burn for three days underwater so long as it had fuel. The ship would keep burning even after it sank.
When they were safely over the shallows again, the flagship slowed, and the oarsmen turned to survey the destruction.
“It’s a miracle. That’s what it is,” the captain muttered as the palace ship began to sink in earnest. “A bleeding miracle.”
“No,” Josef said, pointing out to sea. “That’s the miracle.”
The sailors’ eyes followed his gesture. A few hundred feet away, the Empress’s fleet had ground to a halt. Several of the palace ships were dropping lifeboats as men jumped from the sinking ship, and the whole fleet seemed to be turning in on itself. In toward its own, and away from Osera.
“And that’s how one runner fleet stops the Empress,” Josef said, leaning on the Heart as Nico helped him to his feet. “And the longer they stay like that, the closer we get to low tide and the real miracle. Now, bring us around. Those ships may be stopped, but they’ve still got their bows, and we’ve more palaces to sink.”
The captain blinked, eyes wide. “Aye, my king.”
Josef just nodded and pushed off Nico to resume his position on the prow as the runner turned to join the others already darting between the stopped fleet.
Den the Warlord hung over the railing of the palace ship, watching with an enormous grin as the ship ahead of his begin to sink. Beside him, the captain was throwing a full-on fit.
“We cannot lose a palace ship before we’ve even reached land!” the man was screaming. “Get the wizards on deck and take out those blasted fishing boats!”
There was more, but Den ignored it. He was watching the man standing on the prow of the fastest boat, the man who had just sliced open a palace ship. Den breathed deep, savoring the anticipation. Now there was the kind
