For a moment, Bo’anem’s harbor holds its breath.

  On one side of the shattered quay: Naci, cloak torn, braids crusted with salt, Horohan and Borak and Lang and the Banners clustering behind her, the wrecked Moukopl junks groaning against stone.

  On the other: Shan Xi with her pirates, white coat soot-streaked, sabre at her hip, broken fan tucked through her belt. Tomoe half a step off her shoulder, naginata upright, Baekjeon marines fanned behind like a very polite threat.

  The fort’s guns have fallen silent now that the range is dagger-close. Any volley here would kill friend and foe in the same red spray.

  Naci steps forward until there’s only a few strides of blood-slick stone between them.

  “Captain Shan Xi,” she says. Her voice carries over the hiss of surf and the soft keening of a dying junk. “You look busy. Burning cities. Stealing fleets. Killing my general.”

  Shan Xi spreads her hands, as if to show they’re empty. Her knuckles are still stained.

  “Naci Khan,” she replies. “You made good time. I was beginning to think the winds had taken offense.”

  They look at each other for a heartbeat. Wind whips ash between them like someone’s trying to blur the picture.

  “Why?” Naci asks.

  Shan Xi tilts her head. “Because I hate forts,” she says. “And kings. And the way they rhyme.”

  “Do not play, Shan Xi.” Naci’s eyes flash. “Eight years ago, you gave me your hand. You took our coin. You brought me ships and gunpowder and that arrogant smile. We said we were pointed in the same direction. That you would help me break an empire. Now you plant your flag in my mouth and blow up my men. Why?”

  Behind Naci, Bimen flinches. Pomogr’s absence is a fresh hole in the air.

  Shan Xi’s smile thins. “Eight years ago,” she says slowly, “I thought in smaller circles. I looked at the Moukopl emperor, fat on stolen oceans, and I thought: if I must suffer a crown in my sky, let it at least be new and strange. A queen of the steppe instead of another groomed little sun-bastard.”

  She flicks a glance at Horohan. “A woman Khan. Exotic. Disruptive. A lesser evil, I told myself. Help her set the grass on fire, and the empire will choke on the smoke.”

  “You were right,” Horohan says dryly. “About the fire, at least.”

  “I was wrong,” Shan Xi says.

  The words land with the quiet weight of a dropped anchor.

  She takes a few steps along the quay as she talks, sabre tip scratching idle lines in the soot: circles, crosses, crowns with their points scored out.

  “I thought the end might justify the means,” she goes on. “I thought if the end was bright enough—no more Moukopl chains, no more Seop tribute fleets—the little compromises would fade in its light. A Khan is better than an emperor, I told myself. A she-wolf is better than a pig.”

  She looks back at Naci.

  “I have since learned,” she says, “that all crowns cast the same shadow when the sun’s low. The heads under them always start to tilt the same way.”

  Naci’s jaw tightens. “You think I am the same as them.”

  “I think you stand on the same hill,” Shan Xi says. “You wear rougher furs, you swear more, you actually ride your horses—but it is still a hill built from other people’s backs.” Her gaze flicks to the wreck of the junk Pomogr boarded, now just wreckage staining the waves. “And you still throw men at cannons and call it history.”

  “You lit the powder,” Bimen snaps, unable to hold his tongue. “He went under because you packed that ship like a stove. And you sacrificed the crew that was on its deck too.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” Shan Xi says lightly. “But these were girls with a death wish. I only granted it to them.”

  Naci lifts a hand and Bimen bites down on the next word.

  “You say all crowns are the same,” she says to Shan Xi. “Do you truly believe in a world with none? A world where no one stands higher? No one commands? Where everyone sits in a circle and agrees nicely what to do next?”

  She lets some scorn drip into it. “You have met people, yes?”

  A pirate snorts. Even Tomoe’s mouth twitches.

  Shan Xi looks out over the harbor, toward the burning city and the fort squatting over it like a stone answer.

  “I don’t believe in that world,” she says. “Not yet. I have seen too many councils that called themselves new and came out wearing old faces.” Her eyes are distant for a moment. “Men and women elected ‘for the people’ who spent their first night in office rewriting the tax codes for their cousins. Judges who swear to be blind and somehow always bump into the rich first. Guild masters who hold two ledgers—one for the market, one for the magistrate—and swear both are true.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “A Senate that burns prisons and then quietly builds bigger ones out of paper. A Republic that puts new names on the walls and calls it revolution while the same hands count the coin.”

  Tomoe’s jaw ticks.

  Shan Xi looks back at Naci. “There is no system yet built,” she says, “where a few won’t gather everything they can reach. There is no law so clean it cannot be bought a little dirty at the edges. We scribble new words on parchment every generation and call it progress, but the poor still die in the same places and the powerful still sleep in houses that don’t leak.”

  “Poetic,” Horohan murmurs. “If a little depressing.”

  “Just observant,” Shan Xi replies. “I think—maybe, far out where our great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren stop counting—there could be a world where people live without kneeling first. Where the idea of a king is an old ghost-story that makes children laugh.” Her gaze dips to the cobbles. “But here? Now? In this century of cannons and grain shortages and men who will sell their sister for a title? No.”

  She spreads her hands, blade catching the gray light. “This world is crooked and unfair and cheering for the bully. Putting a kinder voice at the top does not make the tower less high.”

  Naci listens, expression unreadable. Smoke swirls around her like a cloak.

  “Then why not stand with me,” she says. “If you know we are trapped in ugly weather, why not choose the least poisonous umbrella? You have said yourself: I ride with my people. I bleed for them. I am a lesser evil in a field of fat ones. Why throw your rope at me?”

  Shan Xi actually laughs, short and bright.

  “Because I am not an umbrella,” she says. “I am lightning.”

  Borak, under his breath: “Of course she says that.”

  Shan Xi goes on, ignoring him. “I am a pirate. That is not a profession. It’s a refusal. When I say ‘all kings must die,’ I am not auditioning to take their seat. I am saying: the act itself has worth. The knife raised against the throne has value even if ten new thrones grow from the blood.”

  She taps the hilt of her sabre against her chest. “This,” she says, “is not a tool to carve a better empire. It is how I answer a world that will never hand justice down the proper channels. I rob the rich caravans instead of petitioning the tax office. I burn the prison ships instead of trusting a committee. I do not plant anything durable. I merely make room, in the choking weeds, for other wild things to grow.”

  “Until someone fences them,” Lang mutters.

  “Until someone fences them,” Shan Xi agrees. “Then some other idiot with a stolen boat and a mortally injured sense of fairness will knock that fence down, and so on, forever, until maybe, one day, the habit of obedience wears thin.”

  She looks at Naci, eyes very clear.

  “You build,” she says. “You dream of patrols and granaries and schools and treaties. I admire that. Truly. It is important that someone tries. But your work requires compromise. It requires you to say, ‘This slaughter is acceptable so the border stays quiet. This famine is the price of that fort.’ You cannot wash that blood off, Khan. You can only rearrange it.”

  She nods toward the wreck where Pomogr vanished, toward the dead and dying along the quay.

  “And I,” she says quietly, “do not want to be part of any throne that calls this an unfortunate necessity.”

  Naci’s fingers curl around the haft of her musket until the knuckles crack. For a moment, emotion blurs her vision: Pomogr laughing on the training ground, Pomogr proudly presenting her his sons and daughters, Pomogr’s shoulders vanishing in the explosion like a torn page.

  Shan Xi sees it. She doesn’t look away.

  “I killed your uncle,” she says, not gently.

  Bimen flinches as if stabbed himself.

  “And I will carry his face,” Shan Xi adds. “With the others. I’m not asking you to see it as right. I am saying: this is what I am. I am the woman who will scuttle her own ship under your feet rather than let it become your royal escort.”

  For a heartbeat, Naci is tempted.

  Because there is a wild, fierce beauty in that: the idea of living with your blade pointed always up, never down. Of refusing to trade your anger for an office, of never having to write regret in the margin of a census notebook.

  If Shan Xi had not just turned Pomogr into sea-foam for a philosophy point, Naci might even call it noble.

  Instead, she feels a slow, cold fury settle in her bones.

  “So that is your honesty,” she says. “You admit you will kill princes, admirals, men with steady shoulders, whoever touches the shape of a crown. And you call me what? Tyrant? For wanting stables and roads? For promising my people they can sleep without listening for hooves?”

  Shan Xi’s eyes sharpen. “I call you a hypocrite,” she says softly. “You wade through blood to your saddle and then snarl at me for splashing. You burn cities in the name of peace, Khan. You drive other people’s children into spear-lines and say ‘for the future.’ You sit in a tent and decide which villages will live and which will be trampled because the grass there is tactically unimportant. Do not pretend your hands are only stained because someone else pushed you.”

  Naci’s mouth twists, but she doesn’t look away.

  “Don’t talk to me like you’re cleaner, Shan Xi. I know exactly what I am doing. Every village I burn, I ride through the ashes afterward. Every girl I send to die, I know her name, her horse, how her mother braids her hair. I write them down. I pay their family. I carry them in my sleep.”

  She taps her own chest with two fingers.

  “I am in up to the throat. I build things that crush people and things that save them, and I know which is which when I sign the orders. That’s the difference. Not that I’m better. That I don’t lie to myself about the price. If the world is a hypocrite,” she says, “then you and I are standing on top of the mountain of honesty.”

  Shan Xi snorts. “Mountains don’t clash,” she says.

  “Mountains do clash,” Naci says.

  She steps closer. The pirates tense. The Banners behind her shift their grips.

  “When they argue,” she goes on, “the spirits in them grind against one another. Deep where no one can see. Stone against stone, old bones against older bones. They talk in a language slower than rivers.”

  She plants the butt of her musket on the cracked quay. The impact sends up a tiny puff of dust.

  “Down there,” she says, “when they disagree strongly enough, the whole world shakes. They earth quakes. Temples fall. Palaces slide into the sea. Little walls and new laws crack like thin ice.”

  She looks Shan Xi in the eye, unwavering.

  “You and I,” Naci says, “are those mountains today, and when we’re done arguing, the world will be changed forever.”

  For a heartbeat after Naci’s words, the world really does feel like it’s holding its breath.

  Then she moves.

  She brings her musket up with practiced speed, thumb snapping the pan open, powder already in place from the ship.

  Shan Xi sees the motion and actually laughs.

  “Oh, of course,” she says. “We monologue and then you shoot me in the face. Very—”

  The musket cracks like thunder.

  Shan Xi is no longer where her mouth was.

  She drops sideways, coat flaring, yanking the nearest pirate with her. The ball rips through the space where her skull was a blink ago, shatters a chunk of harbor stone, and keeps going, hitting some poor bastard Baekjeon marine in the shoulder behind her. He spins, howls, drops his musket, staring at his own red-slicked fingers.

  “Damn it!” Shan Xi snaps from the ground. “You didn’t count to three!”

  “Two is plenty,” Naci growls, already ramming a new ball down the barrel with ruthless efficiency. “One: talk. Two: die.”

  Everything breaks at once.

  Pirates surge forward with a roar, knives and pistols and boarding hooks flashing. Baekjeon marines advance in disciplined lines, muskets leveled, Tomoe’s calm hand cutting through the air in precise signals. Banners and Tepr riders and Moukopl sailors spill off the wrecked junks like hornets from a smashed hive.

  The first volley of Baekjeon guns slams into them.

  Lang swears in Seop as the air fills with lead and splinters. A Banner beside him jerks as three balls punch through his shield, armor ringing; he staggers but doesn’t fall, snarling something impolite about Republic marksmanship as he keeps moving.

  “Shields up! Close!” Lang roars. “Forward, damn you, forward!”

  Naci fires the musket again. Shan Xi is already on her feet, using one of her own pirates as a moving wall; the poor girl yelps as the bullet grazes her shoulder and then laughs, wild, “Close! You’re getting closer, Khan!”

  “Stop flirting with the artillery!” Tomoe snaps without looking, because she’s busy.

  Horohan is on her like a thrown knife.

  The Tepr ice queen hits the Baekjeon line with a howl, blade flashing. Tomoe swings her naginata up to meet her, long steel kissing shorter steel with a shriek that sets teeth on edge.

  “Finally,” Horohan says through her teeth.

  Tomoe’s eyes are flat as river stone. She pivots. The naginata sweeps in a low arc. Horohan leaps, cloak snapping, boot landing on the shaft to pin it for half a heartbeat. Her sword darts for Tomoe’s throat.

  Two Baekjeon marines step in on reflex, crossing their bayonets. Steel clashes, Horohan’s point skidding off. Tomoe twists, yanking the naginata free, the move knocking Horohan’s foot out from under her. Horohan rolls with it, coming up on one knee, grinning.

  “Good,” she pants. “I was afraid you’d be boring.”

  Around them, Banners slam into marines and pirates both.

  There are not enough of them. It doesn’t matter. For the first minute, it looks like it might.

  Five to one odds mean nothing when one is a Banner. They move like they share a spine, filling gaps before they open, swapping shields without speaking. One goes down with a spear in his gut; the man to his left steps into his place, catches the falling shield, and uses it to break a pirate’s arm in the same motion.

  A Seop marine screams as a Tepr rider—dismounted now, horse already dragged away wounded—hooks his ankle with a lariat and yanks him off his feet, finishing him with a short, ugly thrust. Another Banner grabs a Baekjeon by the collar and headbutts him so hard his helmet goes one way and his soul the other.

  Borak has picked up a long pole—a wicked staff with a hooked blade at the end—and wields it with cheerful brutality, sweeping legs, hooking necks, knocking muskets aside. A battered musket is slung over his back for when he wants to be rude at a distance.

  Above him, eagles wheel and scream.

  “Left!” he shouts, and one dives, claws raking across the eyes of a pirate who thought he was being clever by flanking. The man drops his knife, hands flying to his face, screaming. Borak steps in and introduces him to the pole-end of his argument.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Right!” he hollers.

  Another great bird stoops like a thrown stone, slamming into the side of a Baekjeon officer’s head. His helmet rings, his balance goes sideways, and Lang’s sword takes him under the arm before he can recover.

  “Good boy!” Borak whoops. “Equal pay for birds!”

  A third eagle lands on the shoulder of a panicking Moukopl sailor and starts savaging the ear of anyone who gets close. The sailor screams, “Not mine, not mine!” even as he stabs a pirate who made the mistake of laughing.

  Bimen has a sword in one hand, though it’s not entirely clear he remembers why. He hovers behind a chunk of fallen mast, peeking out now and then to swipe his blade at anyone unfortunate enough to trip over his cover.

  A pirate rolls into his hiding spot, bleeding from somewhere important. Bimen yelps, then, realizing the woman is already dying, awkwardly pats her shoulder.

  “Excellent work,” he says shakily. “Very brave.”

  The pirate wheezes, “Who are you?” and dies.

  Bimen ducks as a stray musket ball smacks into the mast above his head, showering him with splinters.

  “I am too old for land,” he mutters. “Ships. Ships are civilized. Ships at least sink in one direction.”

  He jabs his sword blindly around the mast edge. It meets something soft. A Baekjeon marine shrieks, “My leg!” Bimen freezes, horrified.

  “Oh spirits, sorry!” he blurts.

  The marine, limping and enraged, lunges around the mast, bayonet raised. Bimen squawks and trips over the dead pirate, accidentally tackling the marine at the waist. They both go down in a tangle, sword and bayonet skittering away.

  Bimen’s hand lands on a dropped pistol. He doesn’t think. He pulls the trigger.

  The shot goes off two inches from the marine’s ear. Both of them scream. The marine crumples, unconscious from the noise alone. Bimen lies there panting, ears ringing, hair full of powder smoke.

  “I am never,” he gasps to nobody, “getting off a boat again.”

  Out on the main line, Naci abandons the musket after the third miss.

  The barrel’s too hot, the smoke too thick, and Shan Xi is doing her best impression of a lightning bolt in human shape—one moment behind a pile of crates, the next vaulting over a fallen cannon, the next somehow standing on a Baekjeon shield being carried by two men who absolutely did not sign up for this.

  “Hold still!” Naci roars. “You’re not a fish!”

  “Then stop throwing hooks!” Shan Xi calls back, laughing, even as she slashes a Banner’s spear haft in half and kicks him in the chest to get him out of her way. She uses his falling body as cover from a musket, rolling over his back, coming up behind the shooter, and hooking his ankle so he goes down swearing.

  Naci slings the musket onto her back and draws her spear.

  The haft is scar-smooth in her palms, familiar as her own teeth. She plunges into the press, Banners automatically shifting to give her space where they can.

  “Left wedge, press! Right, refuse! Keep your backs to something that doesn’t move!” she barks between thrusts.

  She feints high at a pirate with a machete, then drives the spearpoint into the man’s thigh instead, dropping him. “Lang! Get your people behind that overturned hull! It’s cover and height—use it!”

  Lang hears her even through the clash and smoke. He snaps an order. Seop Banners and a few Moukopl gunners scramble onto the sideways junk, using its ribs as firing steps, musket fire raking down into the pirates trying to flank the main line.

  Horohan and Tomoe’s duel carves its own vicious orbit through the chaos.

  Tomoe uses her marines like extensions of her weapon, pivoting around their shields, darting in with the naginata’s long reach to cut at Horohan whenever the Tepr queen over-commits. Twice Horohan narrowly avoids having her legs scythed from under her by leaping onto a crate or a fallen cannon.

  “You move well for someone raised on flat ground,” Tomoe says, breath not even hitching.

  “You talk a lot for someone currently losing,” Horohan pants back, even though they both know neither of them is losing yet. They are trading inches of advantage and lines of blood, not victory.

  A Baekjeon marine lunges at Horohan’s back. Tomoe, without looking, snaps the shaft of her naginata sideways, thwacking the marine across the helmet.

  “Not now,” she snaps.

  Horohan barks out a laugh even as she parries. “We agree on something at least.”

  “Don’t get sentimental,” Tomoe says. “I’m planning to kill you.”

  “Likewise,” Horohan says cheerfully.

  Pirates and marines flow around the wrecked junks and broken cranes like water, filling every gap, climbing fallen masts to shoot down into the Banner ranks. Pirates toss clay pots filled with shrapnel and powder that bloom into murderous blossoms of fire and nails. One Banner takes a pot full in the shield; it explodes, tearing the wood to splinters and peppering his arm with iron. He keeps going anyway, shield now a jagged ring.

  “Who keeps giving them ideas?” Borak shouts, batting a second pot aside with his pole so it explodes in midair instead of in Naci’s face.

  “Shan Xi,” Naci grunts, driving her spear through a pirate’s lung. “Of course.”

  “She has too much time,” Borak says.

  Pirates try to drag Banners off balance with grappling hooks and nets. One manages to snare Naci’s spear haft, yanks. Naci simply lets go with one hand, steps into the pull, and headbutts him. His nose crunches audibly; he drops the rope.

  Still, step by step, the line buckles.

  They are being pushed back toward the broken edge of the quay, toward water and wreckage and no room to maneuver. Bodies pile up—pirates, marines, Banners, sailors—all mixing into the same ugly carpet. The harbor stones are slick enough that men slip more on blood than on sea-spray.

  “Back two paces!” Naci commands, not because she wants to retreat but because she wants her people standing on slightly higher, less treacherous ground. They obey, grudging, faces set.

  A pirate with too many teeth grins at her across the gap. “That’s right, Khan,” she jeers. “Step back. Plenty of room in the sea.”

  “Only for corpses,” she says, and drives her spear through her chest.

  Her shoulders burn. Her lungs feel like she’s been breathing cannon smoke for a week straight. Somewhere to her left she hears Borak roar as he takes a cut to the thigh and punches the offender in the throat.

  “We’re thinning,” Horohan calls over, between clashes with Tomoe. A marine lunges; Horohan kicks him away. “Even your madness won’t hold this forever.”

  Naci knows it. She can feel the numbers pressing, the weight of sheer bodies. She does the arithmetic in the back of her skull like a bad habit: this many Banners, this many pirates, this many marines still fresh at the back. The result is ugly.

  Tomoe, catching her glance, reads it too.

  “You can still surrender,” the admiral calls. “I’ll give your men decent treatment. I might even let you keep one horse.”

  “Generous,” Naci says. “I’ll pass.”

  Shan Xi whistles, shrill. A cluster of pirates to the right suddenly peel off, darting around a crane’s base, vanishing from immediate sight.

  Naci’s stomach drops. “They’re going for the flank,” she snaps. “Lang!”

  “On it!” he yells, already redirecting precious few bodies to plug yet another hole.

  It’s like bailing out a ship with holes in its keel.

  For the first time since she set foot on the quay, Naci feels something like true doubt.

  She can hold. She can drag this harbor into a mutual grave if she wants. But holding long enough for anything else to matter? For the Slump to survive, for Puripal’s cavalry to—

  A sound threads through the chaos.

  At first it’s just a tremor, something her bones notice before her ears: a distant, rhythmic thudding that doesn’t belong to cannons. Then it swells.

  Hooves.

  Naci’s head snaps up.

  From the inland side of the harbor, up where the stone road widens into a plaza stacked with warehouses and tax offices, dust and smoke billow. Through that gray curtain, something dark and fast moves.

  Then the first horse bursts out.

  Yohazatz cavalry pour down the broad steps toward the harbor like a piece of the steppe broke loose.

  They come in a wedge, tight and disciplined despite the city’s cramped bones: riders low in the saddle, armor patched, faces grim. Spears tilt like a small, moving forest. Behind the first rank, more follow—Slump volunteers on stolen mounts.

  At the point of the spear, banner snapping over his head, rides Puripal.

  His hair hangs loose, dark against the pale sky. There is blood on his coat and smoke on his cheekbones, and something in his eyes that is not quite the boy who once poisoned a pavilion and not quite the man who thought he could play kings like stones on a board. It is something harder, narrower, and terrifyingly focused.

  Dukar is a half-length to his left, teeth bared, spear couched, Notso somehow keeping pace at the side like a demon made of fur and stubbornness. Temej rides the other flank, bow already in hand, an eagle screaming above him like punctuation.

  “Down!” Naci bellows, even as Borak starts to laugh.

  The pirates closest to the ramp turn too late.

  The cavalry hits the harbor like the second impact of a comet.

  Horses slam into men and muskets with all the elegance of a landslide. Spears punch through pirate coats, sabres glance off Banner mail. A Seop marine goes under three sets of hooves at once; when the horses clear, there’s nothing left but red and a helmet.

  Temej borrows a spear in his good hand, knuckles white. The rider to his right shoves a militia man away with a shield, opening a perfect line for Temej’s thrust.

  He lunges. The spear bites—but his body wants the follow-through his ruined arm used to give him. The old habit jerks the bad shoulder. Pain explodes down to the fingers that no longer feel.

  He gasps, grip almost loosening. The spear wobbles instead of driving home. The militia man staggers, wounded but not dead, and another pirate drags him out of the way, howling.

  Temej curses.

  A Banner horse barrels past close enough that its flank brushes his knee. Temej pulls back, teeth bared, and does what he has always done when the gods take a piece of him: he uses what’s left.

  “Left break!” he yells, standing in the stirrups. His whistle shrills. “Drive them to the wall!”

  Puripal hears him and adjusts like he’d already been thinking the same line.

  “Dukar, with me!” he shouts, then points at Borak. “You, hook right! We’ll cut them off from the fort!”

  He is a second sun on this battlefield, but where Naci burns in straight lines, Puripal’s light bends—catching angles, reading gaps. He sees where the pirates are thinnest, where the Baekjeon marines still hold formation, where the ruined junk blocks retreat.

  “Second wedge, through that crane!” he calls, voice cutting through clash and scream. “Spears low! Leave the ones that fall—others will trip on them!”

  Dukar growls agreement, already pivoting his horse. Notso races beside them, snapping at ankles that get too close.

  “Banners!” Dukar bellows over the thunder of hooves. “With me!”

  Battle cries answer him and then the second wave slams into the pirate flank like a fist.

  Borak, thigh bleeding, pole in hand, throws himself into the densest knot of enemies he can find.

  “Come on then!” he roars, smashing a musket aside. “Who wants to be a heroic cautionary tale?”

  An eagle screams above him and stoops, ripping a strip out of a pirate’s exposed scalp. The man howls, grabbing his head, leaving his belly open. Dukar’s spear finds it on the next pass.

  The Banners, already fighting like something carved off a war god, feel the shift like a new wind.

  A Banner with three arrows in his shield starts laughing, actually laughing. “You see?” he shouts to nobody in particular. “The idiots really came!”

  “Which idiots?” his friend wheezes, blocking a cut.

  “All of them!” he crows, and drives his spear into a pirate’s chest.

  Ta watches it all from the shadow of an overturned capstan, teeth clenched, bandage dark at his neck.

  Sen is in front of him like a furious sparrow, both hands on his chest.

  “You move, I stab you,” she says.

  “With what?” he rasps. “Your hairpin?”

  She pulls a little metal cylinder from her belt, the kind that clicks ominously when she squeezes it. “With this,” she says. “It makes teeth fall out.”

  Ta believes her.

  “I can still stand,” he argues.

  “You can still bleed,” she snaps. “We have enough red on the ground.”

  He opens his mouth to argue again. A cannonball screams overhead, smashes into the quay three paces away, spraying everyone with stone chips. Ta flinches so hard his stitches twinge and white pain flares down his shoulder.

  “Fine,” he croaks. “I’ll… delegate.”

  “Good boy,” Sen mutters, already turning away to shove a clay grenade into a Slump kid’s hands. “Throw this at people who look important. Not at our horses. Or me.”

  “How do I know which is which?” he asks.

  “The important ones shout more,” Sen says. “And have better hats.”

  She is not fighting, but she is turning fear and scrap into weapons with both hands: nail-bombs, smoke jars, little spring-loaded blades that pop out of sleeves. Slump warriors—shoeless, rag-wrapped, eyes wild—snatch them up and hurl themselves at Baekjeon lines like they finally have something sharp enough to match their anger.

  Through all of it, Lizi moves like someone caught between two storms.

  She sees Shan Xi across the chaos—white coat, black hair, sabre flashing—and something in her chest twists. And she walks toward her as if the battle has narrowed to a corridor with only one door at the end.

  Shan Xi sees her coming.

  For a moment, something like relief flickers across the pirate captain’s soot-smeared face, cutting through the fighting focus.

  “There you are,” she says, stepping back from a Banner she’s just disarmed. She slits the man’s hamstring almost absent-mindedly, dropping him, never taking her eyes off Lizi.

  Lizi stops at the edge of sword’s reach, the portable cannon in her hand. Smoke curls between them, carrying ash and the copper tang of blood.

  “Come back,” Shan Xi says.

  No banter. No joke. Just those two words, stark as a blade.

  Lizi’s throat works. “To what?” she says. “To watching you pick which boy dies next? To dancing on decks while the world burns?”

  Shan Xi’s mouth tightens. “To family,” she says. “To people who actually understand you. To a ship where your name always makes sense.”

  Lizi’s fingers tighten on the cannon’s grip. “I am no longer a pirate,” she says. “I’m a Banner.”

  The word sits between them like a thrown stone.

  Shan Xi swallows it. For once, her smile doesn’t come.

  “You’re serious,” she says.

  Lizi nods once.

  Shan Xi looks suddenly older, as if someone pushed a decade onto her shoulders in a heartbeat. “I tried not to break you,” she says softly. “Of all of them. I sent you away from certain jobs. I let you keep soft things.” Her eyes flick, just once, toward where the Slump smokes on the horizon. “I thought maybe you’d outlive me. That was my great act of mercy. And now you… volunteer to stand in front of cannons for a queen with a pretty face.”

  Lizi’s mouth is dry. “You spared Ta. You spared the cause. You didn’t spare Yotaka. You didn’t spare Hanae. You didn’t spare Aram. You never spared children, you just picked which ones were useful.”

  Shan Xi flinches at the names. Barely. But Lizi knows her tells.

  “That’s not fair,” Shan Xi says.

  “None of this is,” Lizi replies.

  “Lizi,” Shan Xi says. “Little rabbit. You’re not a mountain. You’re not meant to hold this weight. I am. Let me. Come back. I will still have you. We can argue on deck about which kings to cut.”

  Lizi raises the cannon.

  “No,” she says. “I’m done following the lightning. I follow the storm now.”

  Shan Xi’s eyes close for a fraction of a heartbeat.

  When she opens them, they are bright and hard.

  “Well,” she sighs. “It was worth a try.”

  Lizi pulls the trigger.

  The recoil kicks her shoulder like a mule. The ball shrieks across the short distance and slams into Shan Xi’s shoulder, spinning her half around. Blood sprays, dark and sudden.

  Pirates gasp. A cheer starts along the Banner line.

  Shan Xi staggers, looks at the hole in her coat, then back at Lizi.

  “Ow,” she says mildly.

  She lunges.

  Lizi barely gets the cannon up in time to block the sabre. Steel screeches along brass, sparks spitting. The impact numbs her fingers. She ducks under the follow-up cut, swings the cannon like a club, catching Shan Xi in the ribs. The pirate grunts, laughs, comes back twice as fast.

  Naci catches the movement out of the corner of her eye.

  “Lizi!” she snaps.

  “I’ve got her!” Lizi calls, breathless.

  “Idiot,” Naci mutters, and drives a pirate backwards with her spear to clear a path.

  The cannon is heavy, awkward; Lizi’s knife is a sliver compared to Shan Xi’s sabre. She survives the first flurry on reflex and past practice—duck, sidestep, let the blade slide past, feel the wind of it on her cheek. Shan Xi presses, expression unreadable now, all the softness burned off.

  “Good,” she pants. “You kept your footing. You’re not completely ruined by those hill people.”

  “They feed me,” Lizi snaps back, parrying with the cannon’s body, her arm jarring to the elbow. “That’s more than your ships ever did.”

  “Oh, please,” Shan Xi says, kicking at her shin. Lizi skips back, swearing. “You had first pick of the stolen oranges.”

  An opening. Lizi jabs with the cannon, firing point-blank.

  The ball tears a furrow along Shan Xi’s thigh instead of taking her knee. She doesn’t scream. She just snarls, slashing again, faster now, sabre a blur.

  Naci comes in on Shan Xi’s blind side, spear thrust aiming for the ribs.

  Shan Xi twists. The spear skates along her coat, drawing another line of red instead of a killing blow. She yields ground, grinning fiercely now despite the blood slicking her side.

  “Oh good,” she says. “We’re doing the thing where heroes gang up on me. Very traditional.”

  Lizi’s knife flashes as she darts in to cut at Shan Xi’s sword arm.

  The sabre catches the knife, pushes it aside. Shan Xi kicks Lizi in the stomach. Breath whooshes out of her; she stumbles, vision swimming.

  “Careful,” Shan Xi says, eyes never leaving Naci now. “You step in the way, you’ll get trampled.”

  “Good,” Lizi wheezes. “I want you to see me when you die.”

  For a while there is nothing else. Just the three women, locked in a vicious triangle: Naci’s long reach and drilled precision, Shan Xi’s unpredictable angles and pirate footwork, Lizi’s darting, desperate jabs whenever she finds half an opening.

  Around them, the battle follows its own math.

  Puripal’s cavalry work like needle and thread, stitching Banner lines back together, yanking pirates off flanks. Dukar and Borak stand almost back-to-back at one point, batting away advancing marines like flies.

  “On your right!” Dukar shouts.

  “I know!” Borak yells, pole snapping out to hook a bayonet and fling it aside. “On your left!”

  “I know,” Dukar says, spinning his spear to knock a pistol aside and butt the wielder in the face. An eagle swoops down, clawing at a Baekjeon officer’s eyes, and Notso takes the opportunity to clamp his teeth around the man’s calf.

  Temej, forced off his horse when his arm gives out again, stands on a chunk of broken quay, shouting formations like curses.

  “Anchor your shields there! There! That rock! If you fall, fall forward, you’re worth more as an obstacle!”

  A Slump girl with a spear laughs breathlessly as she obeys. “You’re a terrible uncle!” she calls.

  “Good!” Temej roars back. “I’ll keep you alive out of spite!”

  Ta, from his half-shelter, lifts his head, eyes narrowing as he watches the way the lines bend. He sees the pirates flagging, the Baekjeon formations fraying, the Banners tightening around Naci and Puripal like iron knitting.

  “We can win this,” he croaks.

  Sen, wrestling with a stubborn fuse, glances up. “We are winning,” she says. “Which scares me more than losing. The universe gets twitchy when we start doing well.”

  On the quay, Naci finally bats Shan Xi’s sabre aside hard enough to open her guard.

  She steps in, spear haft snapping forward, butt catching Shan Xi in the jaw. The pirate staggers, teeth clacking, blood spattering her lip.

  “Down,” Naci says.

  Shan Xi spits red to the side. “Already,” she says.

  She feints toward Naci, then whips around fast, faster than she has any right to move with her thigh and shoulder both bleeding. Her sabre comes up in a brutal arc, aimed not at the Khan but at the girl beside her.

  Lizi’s eyes go wide.

  She’s still off-balance from the last exchange, knee in the wrong place, weight pinned to the wrong foot. She sees the edge coming and knows there is nowhere to go.

  For a microscopic moment, there is no battle noise. No cannons. No eagles. Just the bright, implacable line of steel heading straight for her neck.

  Shan Xi’s face, in that instant, is stripped bare.

  “I loved you,” she says, almost conversationally. The words cut deeper than the blade. “You were the only thing on my ship I didn’t steal.”

  The sabre strikes.

  Naci moves.

  She throws herself bodily between them, spear dropped, shoulder slamming into Lizi’s chest to knock her back. Shan Xi’s blade scrapes along Naci’s cuirass, sparks spitting, then bites into her upper arm instead of Lizi’s throat.

  Pain flares white. Naci snarls.

  “You are not,” she growls through clenched teeth, “killing another Banner under my watch.”

  She lashes out with her free hand, gauntlet crunching into Shan Xi’s nose. Bone cracks. The pirate reels, eyes watering.

  Lizi hits the stones on her back, wind knocked out of her. For a dizzy heartbeat she just lies there, staring at the sky, tasting metal.

  Then she rolls, scrambling back to her feet, cannon hanging uselessly from its strap.

  “Naci—” she starts.

  “Stay behind me,” Naci snaps.

  “Don’t talk to my crew like that,” Shan Xi says thickly, pinching the bridge of her bleeding nose. “She’s sensitive.”

  “She’s mine now,” Naci says. “Get a new idiot.”

  “Not a problem,” Shan Xi mutters, bringing her sabre up again. “The world keeps making more.”

  The fight tilts.

  With Puripal’s cavalry carving up the rear and Sen’s inventions small-exploding anyone who looks too organized, the pirates and Baekjeon marines begin to give ground in earnest. They are tired. They are outnumbered. Even Shan Xi’s wild charisma and Tomoe’s stone-calm presence can’t hold forever.

  Tomoe, bleeding from a cut above her eye courtesy of Horohan, glances toward the center as she parries yet another murderous thrust.

  “Shan Xi!” she calls. “We are losing!”

  “Of course we are,” Shan Xi shouts back, ducking under Naci’s spear and slashing at her side. “Look who we picked a fight with.”

  “Then we should withdraw,” Tomoe says.

  “Soon!” Shan Xi says. “There’s one more thing to try!”

  “A plan?” Lizi demands.

  “Worse,” Shan Xi says. “A hope.”

  Naci feels it too: the battlefield tilting, the enemy’s rhythm fraying. They can end this here. If she drops Shan Xi, the pirates will scatter, the Baekjeon marines will fall back to whoever is still giving orders, and the harbor will be hers.

  Puripal feels it from his saddle. He sees the pattern—the knot of resistance around Shan Xi, the way every pirate’s eye flicks to her in the gaps.

  He also sees the city beyond the harbor: the roofs, the alleys, the dark smears where smoke is starting to rise again from the direction of the Slump.

  He spurs his horse closer, cutting down a pirate who stumbles into his path without even looking at the man’s face.

  “Naci!” he shouts.

  She doesn’t look away from Shan Xi, but she tilts her head a fraction, enough to show she’s listening.

  “Finish it quickly,” Puripal goes on. “Because Act Three is coming, and I do not want to meet it still arguing with your ex-pirate.”

  “What do you mean?” Naci demands, stabbing at Shan Xi’s leg. The pirate hops back, limping a little now.

  Puripal’s eyes flick to the city again: the higher streets, the line of the inner wall, the distant glint of something metal being wheeled into place on the ramparts above the Slump. He doesn’t answer directly.

  Naci drives forward, spear a blur. Shan Xi is good—spirits, she’s good—but she’s bleeding from three places now, shoulder sagging, thigh dragging, nose broken. Her sabre work is still precise, still vicious, but the edge is dulled by pain.

  Naci batters through her guard via brute stubbornness, forcing her step by step toward the splintered edge of the quay.

  She draws back for the finishing thrust—

  —and the sky screams.

  A sound like a hive of metal hornets tears across the harbor. Dozens—hundreds—of streaks of fire arc out from the inner wall above the Slump, trailing smoke.

  For a heartbeat they are almost beautiful, painting lines across the pale morning, all at once.

  Then they start to fall.

  Naci’s head snaps up. Her eyes widen.

  “Down!” she roars.

  The first rockets slam into the broken quay behind her, exploding into fountains of splinters and flame. Another cluster hits the half-sunk junk, turning its ribs into a cage of fire. Men and horses go down screaming as burning bolts punch through armor and flesh.

  More hwacha bolts hammer into the seaward edge of the harbor, cutting off retreat, then into the crane where Lang’s shooters had perched, shattering it apart in a shower of charred planks and bodies.

  Through the smoke and fire, marching in tight, terrible order, comes Baek Miju.

  She strides down from the inner gate with militia at her back: Baekjeon-kai in immaculate ranks, hwacha crews already reloading, musketeers moving like one creature. On a pole above her head, something swings grotesquely.

  Miju smiles, katana at her hip, coat unburned, gaze fixed on the chaos at the quay.