“However we can,” Matsin says grimly.
“It’s barred?” I ask, shifting my grip on my knife. My bone knife, that won’t cut my skin, but will slice through meat and bone as easily as butter.
Matsin nods.
“You help with the children. Let me try something.”
“What is it?” he asks, glancing from me to the hatch.
“I think my knife can slip between the wood up there.”
“It’s not going to cut through a wooden bar, kelari.”
“It might,” I say. “It’s Fae-made.”
His eyes widen, and he casts a glance upward again. “Can you brace yourself up there well enough to try?”
I look up and know he’s right. Maybe if it were just my foot I had to take into account, I could manage it. But my arm still throbs from my clumsiness earlier, and I know I won’t be able to hang on with one hand and saw with the other.
“Take it,” I say shortly, and turn back to the children.
Matsin scales the ladder again, moving silently. He pauses, listening. One of the soldiers gestures to me, and I move the children a few feet back and crouch down with them. The faint creak of footsteps sounds off toward the stern, perhaps near the stairs to the rear deck.
Matsin reaches up, slides the bone knife into the gap between hatch and floorboards, and works it silently up and down. We wait what feels like a lifetime, the children gathered beside me, the first two plus a third little boy and two young girls behind him, eleven or twelve years of age.
Matsin’s men gather at the foot of the ladder, waiting. One with his arm bound by a strip of cloth; the others unharmed. And Diara’s men all dead. These men, the most elite of all the guard, are terrifying.
Matsin leans back, studying what he can see through the crack, then descends once more. “That’s all it can reach, but you were right. It cut through the wood like butter. We might be able to break through what’s left of it now.”
“Shall I try?” one of the soldiers asks. If Matsin is tall, this man is built like a bull, huge and burly and made of muscle.
Matsin nods. He hands me back my knife as he tells the man, “Expect an immediate attack. Bring them down with you. I’ll go up when you go down. We fight our way out from here.”
“And the children?” I ask, because clearly these words aren’t meant for us.
“You stay,” Matsin says tersely. “My men and I go up first. When I give you the all clear, you bring the children up and send them straight to the docks—to your carriage. You stay with them, and if I give you an order, you follow it.” He turns his gaze on the children. “All of you do what the lady says.”
I nod and say, “Yes, kel,” and a small, wavering chorus of voices rises up to echo me.
Matsin looks back at me, and it’s as if he can see right past my facade of calm to the roiling horror beneath. “If we end up fighting, don’t watch. Make yourself move. Get these children to safety. That is your fight.”
I nod again. “I understand.”
The burly soldier climbs up, and Matsin follows after him, scaling the back of the ladder so that he’s ready to swing around and up as soon as the way is clear.
It takes three massive thumps for the hatch to give. The burly guard hurls it away, to the sound of shouting above. He draws his dagger and takes the final step up, his head clearing the hatch, and then he ducks back down, the dagger swinging up. It smacks against something flashing silver. The guard’s other hand swings out, grabbing his attacker’s wrist as he drops off the ladder, twisting to send his attacker flying down past him to slam into the planks underfoot.
Diara shouts as she hits the ground, but she’s already moving, rolling and shoving herself up, one hand reaching for her dagger—and then a sword cuts straight across her neck, held by one of Matsin’s men.
I scream, twisting away, my arms going around the two boys beside me, hands reaching to cover their eyes. The burly soldier spares us half a glance as the other man shoves Diara’s flailing body backward, blood pouring from her throat. Oh God. I look up only to see that Matsin has already made it out, and another guard is on his way through the hatch, dagger in hand. There is shouting above now, the clang of weapons, and a moment later a ragged scream.
I force myself to look to the children. My responsibility. I gesture the girls closer, ring all the children around me. “Listen carefully,” I say, and tell them what to expect above deck, what our carriage looks like, that they’re to get in it and stay in it. “We will get you back to your families,” I promise. “But we need your help.”
I pair them up, an older girl for each of the boys, the youngest boy for me.
“Now,” I hear Matsin shout. “Amraeya, now!”
“Up!” I push the first boy forward. He climbs quickly, the girl he is partnered with clambering up nimbly behind him. “You next,” I say, and the next boy and girl go up.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I promise the last boy, but it’s a lie. He’ll be faster than me. “You keep going, stay with the others,” I tell him, and climb as fast as I can after him, grasping the hilt of my knife tightly.
Matsin stands with a scarlet-rimed sword just before the hatch. “Go,” he says before I can even take in the bloodshed before me. There are two sailors facing him, but one is wounded, and the other glances around desperately, as if seeking an escape.
“Amraeya, move.”
I do, past a fallen body, this one a river guard. I catch up to the little boy who is mine to watch over as he stares
