The waves of the black northern sea were freezing, but they were nothing compared to the ice in the hearts of the men who held me down. I was just a nameless cabin boy, a starving orphan deckhand whose only purpose on the great warship The Black Leviathan was to scrub the blood from the timber planks and take the beatings meant for others.
They thought I was nobody. They thought I was garbage thrown away by the sea.
But tonight, the storm was howling, and the crew wanted blood. First Mate Robert dragged me out of the dark cargo hold by my hair, his heavy leather boots kicking me across the wet deck. They forced me into the iron storm cage—the death trap hung over the roaring ocean where they punished men for amusement.
The crew laughed. The guards spat on me. And high above on the quarterdeck, the feared Pirate King watched coldly, waiting for the sea to swallow me whole.
But as the wind ripped my shirt open, exposing the ancient burn mark on my neck, the laughter stopped. The Pirate King’s iron cup hit the deck with a loud clang.
Read Chapter 1 below to see what happened next…
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CHAPTER 1
The salt water always tasted like old blood when the northern wind blew hard enough to rattle the iron rivets in the hull. I lay face down on the freezing oak planks of the lower deck, my fingers clawing at the splinters just to keep from sliding into the dark scuppers where the bilge water gathered. I was fourteen years old, though my bones felt like they belonged to a man facing his winter grave. To the ninety-six battle-hardened killers who manned the oars and manned the heavy iron swivel guns of The Black Leviathan, I had no name. I was simply “Boy.” Or “Rat.” Or “The thing that breathes our air.”
For three long winters, my world had been bounded by the damp, weeping timber of the ship’s cargo hold. My days began before the cold northern sun could even crack the horizon, washing the dried blood and salt crust from the quarterdeck with a heavy block of stone and a bucket of freezing sea water. My hands were permanently raw, the skin split into deep, weeping red fissures that never had time to heal before the next bucket of brine was dumped over them. I ate the hardtack that the older sailors threw on the deck for the bugs to find, and I slept on a coil of wet hemp rope that smelled of rot and dead fish.
But the physical pain was a small thing compared to the absolute, suffocating weight of being utterly powerless. On The Black Leviathan, a ship that belonged to the lawless outer reaches of the Great Naval Warlord Alliance, a boy without a family crest or an iron sword was lower than the barnacles clinging to the rudder.
On this particular night, the sea was an angry, black monster. We were sailing through the jagged teeth of the Broken Reach, a treacherous stretch of ocean where the waves rose as high as the pine trees of the old country, crashing down upon the deck with enough force to snap a man’s spine. The air was thick with freezing spray, and the sky was as dark as the inside of a coffin.
Down in the great mid-deck hall, where the torches flickered against the damp beams, the air was heavy with the stench of cheap ale, roasted seal meat, and the sweat of men who had spent their lives murdering for gold. The crew had been drinking for hours to keep the fear of the storm away. And when pirates grew drunk and fearful, they always looked for something small to break.
First Mate Robert was a man carved from the worst elements of the sea. His face was a map of old violence, dominated by a jagged purple scar that ran from his left temple down into his thick, unwashed black beard, pulling his mouth into a perpetual, snarling sneer. He was a massive brute, nearly seven feet tall, with arms as thick as the ship’s main mast and a reputation for crushing the skulls of disobedient rowers with his bare hands. He had hated me from the moment the tide had washed me up on the docks of the black port three years ago, a starving orphan with nothing but a silent tongue and a torn shirt.
“Bring the rat!” Robert’s voice boomed over the roar of the timber and the howling wind outside. His heavy leather boots, studded with iron nails, stomped across the deck toward the corner where I was trying to dissolve into the shadows behind a barrel of salt pork.
Before I could even draw a breath of the foul air, Robert’s massive hand shot out, wrapping around my greasy, matted hair. With a cruel, mocking laugh, he yanked me off the deck. A sharp, white-hot pain flared through my scalp as he lifted me off my feet, my toes barely scraping the wet wood.
“Look at it!” Robert roared, thrusting me forward into the circle of light cast by the central iron chandelier. “Look at the great warrior we carry in our belly! The storm is shaking the plates off the hull, the men are working the pumps until their hands bleed, and this little parasite is hiding in the dark, fat on our crumbs!”
The crew erupted into a chorus of harsh, mocking laughter. Bearded faces, missing teeth and scarred by a hundred naval skirmishes, leaned forward from the long tables. They threw pieces of chewed bone and stale bread at my face. One old sailor, his eyes milk-white from a blast of gunpowder years ago, reached out and shoved his lit pipe against my bare forearm. The smell of my own burning flesh filled my nostrils, but I bit my lip until the copper taste of blood filled my mouth. I did not scream. I had learned early that screaming only made them pass the pipe around.
“He doesn’t even cry anymore,” the old sailor growled, spitting on the floor. “The thing has no spirit. Throw him to the fish, Robert. He’s bad luck in a storm like this.”
“No, no,” Robert sneered, his hot, ale-soaked breath blasting against my cheek as he held me aloft. “The sea doesn’t want garbage. But the men need a bit of fire tonight to warm their blood. The High King’s fleet is three days behind us, and the storm is getting tight. I say we put the boy in the storm cage. Let’s see if his prayers can calm the waves!”
A roar of approval went up from the tables. Men banged their iron tankards against the heavy oak boards, creating a deafening, rhythmic clatter that sounded like the drums of war. The storm cage was the ship’s most brutal amusement. It was a crude, heavy iron box, barely large enough for a grown man to sit in, suspended from a thick wooden crane over the starboard side of the vessel. When the sea raged, they would lock a man inside and lower him down into the freezing, churning abyss, right where the waves smashed against the hull. It was designed to drown a man slowly, or drive him mad as the black water choked him again and again while the ship rolled. Few survived more than a dozen plunges into the freezing dark.
“Please,” I whispered, the word breaking through my cracked, dry lips before I could stop it. It was the first time I had spoken in months. “Please, master Robert. I’ll work the lines. I’ll clean the bilge. Don’t put me in the cage.”
Robert’s sneer widened, his eyes gleaming with the sadistic pleasure of a man who loved nothing more than breaking the weak. “The rat speaks! Hear that, men? It thinks it has a choice!”
With a violent swing of his massive arm, Robert hurled me across the room. My body smashed into the heavy wooden base of the captain’s table, knocking the breath from my lungs in a ragged gasp. I lay there, curling into a ball as the room spun around me, trying to draw air into my bruised chest.
“Get up!” a voice barked from above.
I looked up through the tangle of my long, wet hair. Sitting at the head of the high table, completely unmoved by the chaos of the room, was the Pirate King himself—Fleet Commander Vance. He was a legendary figure across the five oceans, a man who had united twelve pirate factions under one black banner and broken the back of three royal naval blockades. Vance was not a brute like Robert; he was a cold, calculating wolf wrapped in a heavy cloak of white bear fur. His silver hair was braided with iron rings, and his face was hard as a cliff face, lined with the deep crevices of a man who had looked at death for forty years and never blinked. He held a massive, double-handled iron cup in his right hand, slowly swirling the dark wine inside.
Vance did not look at me with anger. He looked at me with something far worse: absolute indifference. To him, my life was worth less than the grease on his boots.
“The boy is weak, Robert,” Vance said, his voice low, yet it carried over the roar of the storm outside like the tolling of a funeral bell. “Do not waste too much time on him. If you put him in the cage, make sure he stays alive long enough to scrub the upper deck at dawn. The salt crust is building up on the forward rails.”
“Aye, Captain,” Robert laughed, bowing his head with mock respect. “He’ll be alive. The miserable ones always find a way to cling to life.”
Robert walked over, gripped the collar of my torn, oversized tunic, and dragged me backward out of the hall. My heels clicked uselessly against the deck as he hauled me up the wooden companionway toward the upper deck, where the full fury of the storm awaited.
The moment the hatch opened, the freezing wind hit us like an iron fist. The sky was an absolute abyss, broken only by the white, foaming crests of the massive waves that slammed into the sides of The Black Leviathan. The ship rolled violently to the port side, the wooden timbers groaning under the immense pressure of the sea. Water poured across the main deck in a rushing, knee-high river, threatening to wash anything loose into the black ocean.
A dozen of the crew’s most vicious sailors followed Robert onto the deck, shouting and cheering through the freezing spray. They gathered around the starboard crane, where the heavy iron storm cage hung, swinging wildly in the wind like a pendulum of death. The iron bars were rusted, jagged, and coated in a thin sheet of slick ice.
“Open it up!” Robert shouted over the roar of the gale.
Two sailors stepped forward, sliding the heavy iron bolt of the cage door open. The door screamed on its ungreased hinges.
“In you go, little prince,” Robert mocked, grabbing me by the back of my neck and lifting me up. He shoved my frail, shivering body through the narrow opening of the cage. The rusted iron bars scraped against my ribs, tearing through the thin fabric of my rags.
The space inside was so small that my knees were forced up against my chest. The cold from the iron immediately seeped through my clothes, freezing my skin. Robert slammed the heavy door shut, and the iron bolt slid into place with a definitive, terrifying thud. I was trapped.
“Give him three fathoms!” Robert ordered the man at the winch. “Let him taste the deep water!”
The sailor grinned, releasing the brake on the heavy wooden drum. With a deafening screech of hemp rope running through an iron block, the cage dropped.
My stomach surged into my throat as the cage plummeted through the darkness. A second later, the world disappeared. The freezing black water of the northern sea slammed into me with the force of a runaway horse. The icy brine rushed into my nose and mouth, choking me, blinding me, crushing the air out of my lungs. The pressure was immense, pushing me against the rigid back bars of the cage as the ocean tried to tear me apart.
It was an eternity of absolute darkness and suffocating cold. My lungs screamed for oxygen, my limbs turning to lead as the freezing temperature began to shut my body down. Just as the darkness in my eyes began to turn to a soft, dangerous white light, the winch groaned above, and the cage was yanked violently upward out of the sea.
I emerged into the howling wind, coughing up gallons of bitter sea water, my chest heaving as I gasped for the freezing air. I was shaking so violently that my teeth clicked together like small stones.
On the deck above, the pirates were roaring with laughter, pointing at me as I hung there, trembling and helpless, suspended between life and death over the black void.
“Again!” Robert shouted from the railing, his face illuminated by the flickering light of a storm lantern held by a nearby guard. “He’s still breathing too easy! Give him the deep drop!”
The winch released again. The cage plummeted. Once more, the crushing, freezing darkness swallowed me whole. The water felt even colder this time, a thousand needles stabbing into every inch of my skin. I held my breath until my vision began to fracture into dancing sparks of light. I knew I wouldn’t survive a third drop. My body was too weak, too thin, too broken by years of systematic cruelty.
When they finally hauled me up a second time, I couldn’t even stand on my knees inside the cage. I lay slumped against the wet iron floor, my face pressed against the bars, my breath coming in shallow, ragged wheezes. The freezing water was dripping from my matted hair, and my limbs were completely numb.
“Bring him up,” a calm, cold voice ordered from the quarterdeck stairs.
I blinked the salt from my eyes. Fleet Commander Vance had come out of the great hall. He stood on the lower steps of the quarterdeck, a heavy wool hood pulled over his silver hair, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked down at the cage as it was winched back level with the deck.
“Is he dead yet, Robert?” Vance asked, his voice entirely devoid of emotion.
“Not yet, Captain,” Robert laughed, unlocking the iron bolt and dragging my limp, dripping body out of the cage onto the wet deck. I fell like a sack of wet grain, my cheek pressing against the rough, cold timber. “But he’s close. A few more minutes in the deep water ought to finish the rat off.”
Robert stepped forward, his heavy boot coming down squarely onto the middle of my back, pinning me to the deck. The pressure on my bruised ribs was agonizing, forcing the last of the air from my lungs. He leaned down, gripping the back of my torn tunic, intending to rip it off to expose my back for a final, humiliating lashing before the crew.
“Let’s see if the sea left any skin on his bones,” Robert sneered, violently tearing the wet, rotting fabric of my collar away from my neck.
The fabric ripped with a sharp crack, exposing my bare shoulder and the base of my neck to the freezing wind and the harsh glare of the storm lanterns held by the guards.
Robert raised his leather whip, ready to strike. The crew leaned forward, their eyes gleaming with the anticipation of blood.
But the strike never came.
From the quarterdeck stairs, a sound broke through the roaring of the storm. It was a strange, wet sound—the sound of an iron cup hitting the deck planks and spilling its contents.
I forced my head up through the pool of salt water on the deck.
Fleet Commander Vance had stopped dead in his tracks on the steps. His double-handled iron cup lay on its side at his feet, the dark red wine washing across the pale wood like a stain of blood. The Pirate King’s face, usually as unyielding as a winter mountain, had gone completely, utterly pale. His eyes were wide, fixed with an expression of pure, unadulterated terror on the base of my neck.
The crew grew confused. The laughter slowly died down, one by one, as the men noticed the sudden, terrifying change in their captain’s demeanor. Robert froze, his whip still raised in the air, his massive body tensing as he looked from me to Vance.
“Captain?” Robert asked, his voice losing its arrogant edge. “What is it? Do you want me to split him open?”
Vance didn’t answer. He didn’t even seem to hear his First Mate. He moved down the stairs, his movements no longer slow and calculated, but frantic, stumbling over his own heavy fur cloak. His leather boots splashed through the water on the deck as he rushed toward where I lay pinned beneath Robert’s boot.
“Get your foot off him,” Vance whispered, his voice trembling so violently it didn’t sound like his at all.
Robert blinked, completely baffled. “But Captain, it’s just the rat—”
“I said,” Vance roared, his hand instantly flying to the hilt of his massive steel broadsword, drawing it half an inch from its scabbard with a sharp, lethal metallic ring, “GET YOUR FOOT OFF HIM, ROBERT!”
Robert slammed his foot back, stumbling away from me in shock. The entire deck of ninety-six killers went completely, deathly silent. The only sound left was the howling of the wind in the rigging and the violent crashing of the waves against the hull.
The Pirate King dropped to his knees in the wet sea water right beside me, completely ignoring his dignity, his fur cloak soaking up the filth of the deck. His trembling fingers reached out toward my neck, toward the jagged, ancient burn mark that the torn collar had finally revealed to the world.
CHAPTER 2
The silence that fell over the deck of The Black Leviathan was heavier than any winter fog I had ever seen. Ninety-six men, whose lives were built on the screams of their victims and the roar of cannons, stood like wooden statues in the freezing rain. Nobody moved. Nobody drew a breath. They simply watched their terrifying leader, the man who had executed kings and burned navies, kneeling in the bilge water beside a broken cabin boy.
Vance’s hand was shaking. For a man whose grip on a sword hilt was steady enough to cleave a warrior in two during a gale, his fingers trembled like a dry leaf in an autumn wind. He didn’t touch my skin—not at first. He hovered his hand just an inch above my neck, right where the torn fabric of my tunic had exposed the mark.
It was an old scar, one I had carried for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t a clean line from a blade, nor was it the messy lump of a common accidental burn. It was a precise, deliberate brand, shaped like a fractured trident resting within a circle of three broken lines—the ancient crest of the Lost Sovereign Fleet, the imperial armada that had ruled the western oceans twenty years ago before it was betrayed and slaughtered in its sleep by the High King’s alliance.
“It cannot be,” Vance whispered, his voice cracking against the wind. His eyes were wide, glassy with a sudden rush of emotion that looked terrifyingly like tears. “The boy… the boy was lost in the fire at Eldergard. I watched the palace burn. I watched the flagship go down with the lineage.”
Robert stepped forward, his massive chest puffed out, his face a mixture of confusion and growing irritation. He didn’t like seeing his captain look weak in front of the men. It was dangerous for business. “Captain, what are you talking about? It’s just an old brand. The boy probably belonged to some low-tier merchant lord who marked his property before the war. Let me just throw him back in the hold so we can get back to the lines.”
Vance didn’t look up. His voice dropped into a register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “Robert. If you speak another word without my leave, I will personally skin you from your chin to your groin and hang your hide from the yardarm.”
The First Mate swallowed hard, his jaw clenching, but he took a step back into the shadows of the mast.
Vance finally touched my skin. His thumb, rough and calloused from decades of handling hemp and steel, gently brushed the edges of the trident scar. A strange, involuntary shudder ran through my entire body. I hadn’t been touched with gentleness since I was a child too small to remember my own mother’s face.
“Boy,” Vance said, his face just inches from mine now. The cold northern light from the storm lantern caught the deep lines of his face. “Where did you get this mark? Who gave it to you?”
I tried to speak, but my throat was full of salt water and old dust. I coughed, a ragged, painful sound that brought up a speck of dark blood onto the deck. Vance immediately looked over his shoulder at the guards.
“Bring the ship’s surgeon! And bring wine! The good vintage from the southern kingdoms! Now!” Vance roared.
The guards looked at each other in absolute bewilderment, but the fury in the Pirate King’s voice broke their paralysis. Two men scrambled down the hatch into the dark hold, their boots slamming against the ladders.
“Tell me,” Vance pleaded, turning his attention back to me, his hands now supporting my shoulders, lifting my upper body off the freezing wood. “Tell me your name. Your true name.”
“I… I don’t know,” I whispered, my voice small and broken. “They always just called me Boy. Before that… before the docks… I remember the smell of smoke. I remember a woman with gold rings in her hair telling me to run into the water. She told me to never tell anyone about the mark on my neck.”
Vance’s breath caught in his throat. He reached into the collar of his own heavy fur cloak and pulled out a small, heavy silver medallion that hung around his neck by a thick chain. He pressed it into my hand. My numbed fingers closed around the metal instinctively.
Even through the layer of grime and sea salt on my skin, I could feel the shape of it. It was the exact same fractured trident. The exact same three broken lines.
“Twenty years,” Vance murmured, his eyes scanning my face now, looking past the dirt, past the bruises, past the hollow cheeks of starvation. “You have his eyes. You have the Admiral’s eyes. The blue of the deep trench before a storm.”
The deck seemed to tilt, not from the waves, but from the sheer weight of what was happening. The ship’s surgeon, an old, half-blind man named Harlen with a leather apron stained with a thousand operations, scrambled onto the deck, holding a small wooden box and a bottle of dark glass.
“Captain?” Harlen asked, his breath coming in short gasps. “Who is injured? Did Robert take a blade?”
“Look at his neck, Harlen,” Vance ordered, his voice dead and cold. “Look at the crest.”
The old surgeon knelt down, his wrinkled face twisting as he peered through the dim lantern light at my shoulder. He reached out with a trembling finger, tracing the scar just as Vance had done. Suddenly, the old man gasped, dropping his wooden box. Vials of oil and rolls of linen spilled across the wet deck, washing away into the sea.
“By the gods of the deep,” Harlen whispered, his knees sliding out from under him until he was sitting flat on the deck. “The Sovereign line… the boy is the Prince of the Seven Sails. The true heir to the Sea Throne.”
A collective murmur broke through the crew. The word Prince traveled from man to man like a wildfire through dry pine. The younger sailors looked confused, but the old veterans—the ones who had fought under the old banner before the world turned to chaos—suddenly dropped their weapons. The heavy iron cutlasses and axes clattered against the wood as men fell back, their faces filled with a sudden, deep-seated terror.
Robert’s face turned an ugly shade of red. He saw his authority slipping away, saw the fear in his men, and it made him desperate. He stepped forward again, his hand resting on the pommel of his heavy iron cleaver. “This is madness! A royal myth! The Sovereign line was wiped out at Eldergard! The High King’s fleet killed every last one of them! This is just a stray mutt with a lucky scar! Captain, you’re letting an old ghost cloud your mind! We have a storm to sail! We have a prize to catch!”
Vance slowly stood up from the deck. The tenderness he had shown a moment before vanished, replaced by the terrifying aura of the Fleet Commander who had broken empires. He stood at his full height, his white bear fur cloak blowing in the wind like the wings of a predatory bird.
“The Sovereign line did not die, Robert,” Vance said, his voice dangerously calm. “Because I was the one who smuggled the child out of the palace gates while the walls were falling. I gave him to a trusted maid. I told her to hide him in the outer ports. And for twenty years, I have searched every slave market, every tavern, and every ship graveyard from here to the southern ice, thinking I had failed my blood oath to the Admiral.”
Vance turned his gaze down to me, his eyes burning with an ancient loyalty. “And all this time, he was in my own cargo hold, eating my crumbs, while my own men treated him like a dog.”
The Pirate King turned back to Robert. The expression on Vance’s face was something I will never forget—it was the look of a man who had realized he had allowed his own house to be defiled by swine.
“You struck him, Robert,” Vance said.
The First Mate took a half-step back, his confidence finally beginning to fracture. “Captain… I didn’t know. He was just a cabin boy. You said yourself he was weak—”
“You kicked him across my floor,” Vance continued, his voice rising, competing with the thunder that cracked directly overhead. “You forced him into the storm cage. You let your men burn his flesh. You humiliated the bloodline that built this fleet.”
“The men needed entertainment!” Robert shouted, trying to appeal to the crew behind him. “Tell him! We’ve always done it! It’s the law of the ship!”
But none of the crew spoke up for him. The old veterans were too busy staring at me with expressions of profound guilt and fear, while the younger ones could see the shadow of death hanging over their First Mate.
“The law of this ship is my word, Robert,” Vance said softly.
He reached down, picked up the double-handled iron cup from the deck, and tossed it to one of the guards. Then, he looked at the iron storm cage that was still swinging wildly over the side of the ship, its door open, its rusted bars slick with ice.
“The storm is getting worse,” Vance observed, his eyes never leaving Robert’s face. “And the men are still cold. They still need a bit of fire to warm their blood.”
Robert’s eyes widened as he realized what Vance was implying. His hand flew to his cleaver, drawing the massive blade with a desperate shriek of iron. “You won’t put me in that cage, old man! I’ve bled for this ship! I’ve taken prizes that made you rich! You won’t discard me for a piece of historical trash!”
“Guards,” Vance said, not even shifting his stance. “Put the First Mate in the cage.”
For a split second, nobody moved. Robert was a terrifying man, a giant who had crushed a dozen mutinies before they could start. But then, the old veteran sailor—the one who had burned my arm with his pipe—stepped forward. His face was pale, his hands shaking as he drew his sword and pointed it at Robert’s chest.
“Forgive us, Prince,” the old man whispered, looking at me for a brief second before turning his blind eye toward the First Mate. “The law is the law, Robert. Get in the cage.”
A dozen more swords flew from their scabbards, a wall of sharp steel surrounding the massive First Mate. Robert snarled like a cornered wolf, his cleaver raised, his chest heaving as he looked at the circle of his own men who had turned against him in the blink of an eye.
“You coward!” Robert screamed at Vance. “Fight me yourself! If the boy has royal blood, let him see you fight for it!”
Vance didn’t even draw his sword. He simply looked at the guards and gave a slight nod.
The rush was fast and brutal. Five men lunged at once. Robert managed to swing his cleaver, catching one guard in the shoulder with a sickening crunch of bone, but the weight of the others bore him down. They tackled him to the deck, disarming him, pinning his massive limbs under the force of ten men. He screamed and cursed, spitting blood and sea water, his massive body thrashing against the wet wood.
They dragged him toward the open door of the iron storm cage. It took six of them to shove his massive frame through the narrow opening, his limbs bending at unnatural angles as they forced him inside the rusted iron bars.
Robert’s face was pressed against the iron, his eyes bulging with fury and sudden terror as the heavy iron bolt slid into place with that same definitive thud that had sealed me in just moments before.
“Give him the deep drop,” Vance ordered the sailor at the winch. “And do not look at him until I give the command.”
The sailor didn’t hesitate. He released the brake.
The screech of the hemp rope was the loudest sound on the deck as the heavy cage plummeted through the darkness, carrying the screaming First Mate down into the freezing, crushing abyss of the northern sea.
The cage vanished beneath the black waves with a massive splash.
Vance knelt back down beside me. He didn’t look at the sea where his First Mate was drowning. He looked at me, his face filled with a strange, solemn reverence. He took his own white bear fur cloak, unclasped it from his shoulders, and wrapped it around my shivering, broken body. The fur was thick, warm, and smelled of old pine and iron—the first warmth I had felt in three years.
“Your journey in the dark is over, my Prince,” Vance said, his voice thick with emotion. “We have twenty years of suffering to undo. But first, we must let the crew see what happens when the blood of the sea is insulted.”
I lay there, wrapped in the King’s fur, my fingers still clutching the silver trident medallion. The wind was still howling, the storm was still raging, but for the first time in my life, the cold didn’t feel like it could kill me.
The cage was winched up a minute later, Robert coughing and gasping for air, his arrogance entirely washed away by the freezing deep. He looked out through the bars, his face blue, his teeth chattering so hard he couldn’t even form words to beg for mercy.
“Leave him there,” Vance commanded the crew, his voice ringing out across the deck. “Let him stay in the wind until the dawn. Let every man on this ship look at him and remember who rules The Black Leviathan.”
Vance then lifted me in his arms. I was light as a feather to him, my starved body offering no resistance. He turned toward the hatch that led down to the captain’s quarters—the warm, torchlit sanctuary that I had only ever seen from the outside while scrubbing the threshold.
The crew stood in two long lines, their heads bowed, their swords held at their chests in a formal naval salute that hadn’t been seen on the high seas since the fall of the old empire.
As Vance carried me down the steps, away from the freezing spray and the screaming of the First Mate, he paused at the threshold of the great hall. He looked down at the old veteran sailor who had burned my arm.
“Bring the ship’s register,” Vance ordered. “The old one. The one with the golden seals.”
The old sailor bowed low, his forehead nearly touching the wet deck planks. “Aye, Fleet Commander. At once.”
I closed my eyes, the warmth of the cabin finally washing over my face as Vance laid me down on a soft bed of velvet and wool. The room was filled with the scent of burning cedar and hot tallow candles. It was a world I didn’t know existed—a world of safety, of power, of dignity.
But as my consciousness began to drift into the first peaceful sleep I had known in three winters, I heard the sound of the heavy wooden door opening behind us. The old sailor had returned, his boots shuffling softly across the thick carpets of the captain’s cabin.
“The register, Captain,” the old man said, his voice trembling. “The names of the true bloodlines are intact. But there is a problem.”
Vance froze, his hand pausing as he poured a cup of warm broth for me. “What problem, Harlen?”
“The High King’s fleet… they aren’t three days behind us,” the old surgeon whispered, his face white with terror in the candlelight. “The scout ship just returned through the fog. Their vanguard has already blocked the western channel. They have twelve black-sailed dreadnoughts, Captain. And they aren’t hunting pirates anymore.”
Vance’s jaw tightened, his eyes flashing with an ancient fire as he looked from the old book to where I lay. “Then they know he’s alive.”
