The wind was howling like a dying beast, and the waves of the northern sea were crashing over the wooden deck of the Black Leviathan. I was starving. My ribs were pressing hard against my skin under my torn, wet rags. For three days, the crew had been trapped in the belly of the grand naval storm, and for three days, the First Mate had denied food to the orphan deckhands.
When my stomach burned so fiercely that I couldn’t breathe, I reached for a single piece of dried salt-pork resting in the captain’s galley. I didn’t make it two steps before a heavy, scarred fist slammed into the back of my head.
“Thief!” the First Mate roared, his voice cutting through the thunder. He dragged me by my matted hair out onto the freezing, rain-slicked deck, forcing me onto my knees before the entire crew. They gathered around, laughing and spitting, waiting for blood.
The First Mate pulled out his heavy iron cutlass, pressing the cold blade against my throat. He dragged me directly toward the dark quarterdeck, where the terrifying Pirate King stood watching. I was completely helpless. I closed my eyes, preparing for the blade to slide through my neck.
But as the heavy iron storm lantern swung violently above us in the gale, its bright yellow light hit the side of my collar. The fabric pulled back.
The Pirate King suddenly stopped breathing. His iron cup fell from his hand, clattering against the deck. The laughter of the crew died instantly.
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FULL STORY CHAPTER 1
The salt water always tasted like blood when the skin on your lips was split wide open.
I learned that lesson when I was nine years old, curled up in the freezing, rotted timber of the Black Leviathan’s lowest cargo hold. The ship was a monster made of black oak and rusted iron, a floating fortress that ruled the fractured islands of the northern sea empire. To the world, she was a shadow that brought fire and death to the trading routes. To me, she was a wooden cage that smelled of dried blood, moldy grain, and the sweat of men who had long forgotten the meaning of mercy.
I was nothing but a ghost on that ship. An orphan deckhand. A nameless cabin boy with no mother, no father, and no past that anyone cared to ask about. My days were measured in the weight of the water buckets I hauled across the splintered decks, the intensity of the winter frost that bit into my bare feet, and the heavy leather boots of the older sailors who kicked me out of their path just to watch me slide into the gutters.
“Get up, you miserable little rat!”
The roar came from the top of the cargo hatch, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of iron-toothed boots coming down the wooden ladder.
I scrambled backward into the dark corner, my hands scraping against the rough burlap sacks of spoiled grain. My heart hammered against my ribcage like a trapped bird. I knew that voice. Everyone on the Black Leviathan knew that voice, and everyone feared it.
It belonged to Kurt, the First Mate.
Kurt was a man built like a boulder, with a thick, grease-stained beard and a face crisscrossed with jagged scars from a dozen boarding battles. He was a creature of pure, unadulterated cruelty. He carried a heavy leather whip tipped with lead weights at his hip, and he used it on the crew whenever the wind died down or his mood turned sour. But he saved his special malice for the weak. For the boys who had been pulled from burning coastal villages or captured from merchant vessels to serve as property of the fleet.
A heavy hand reached into the darkness, grabbed the collar of my oversized, wet tunic, and hoisted me completely off the floor.
“Look at me when I’m speaking to you, boy,” Kurt sneered, his breath smelling of sour ale and rotting teeth. He shoved his face inches from mine, his small, dark eyes glinting with a vicious sort of pleasure. “The bilge pumps are clogging again. If the water rises another inch before the storm hits, I’m going to tie you to the rudder and let the sharks take your legs. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, my voice trembling. My throat was so dry it felt like sandpaper.
“Speak up!” he shouted, throwing me hard against the wooden hull.
My back collided with the thick timber, and a sharp pain flared through my spine. I fell to my hands and knees, coughing violently. I hadn’t eaten a solid meal in three days. The ship had been running low on safe rations ever since we entered the treacherous waters of the High King’s outer domain, and Kurt had decreed that only the fighting men would receive the dried beef and freshwater. The cabin boys and the galley slaves were left with nothing but moldy hardtack that crawled with black weevils.
My stomach burned with a fierce, agonizing emptiness. It wasn’t just hunger anymore; it was a deep, hollow ache that made my vision blur and my knees shake. I knew that if I didn’t get something real into my body soon, I wouldn’t survive the night shift at the pumps.
Kurt kicked a wooden bucket toward me, splashing foul, brackish water over my shivering legs. “Get to work. And if I catch you slacking, I’ll let the crew use you for knife practice.”
He laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that echoed off the damp timbers, before turning on his heel and climbing back up to the main deck.
I lay there on the cold wood for a long moment, listening to the groaning of the ship as it climbed the massive swells of the open ocean. The sea was angry today. The dark, gray water was slapping hard against the hull, and the wind outside was starting to howl like a dying beast. A grand naval storm was coming, the kind that could tear the sails right off the masts and swallow a ship whole if the crew wasn’t sharp.
I dragged myself up, my hands shaking as I grabbed the handle of the wooden bucket. But as I passed the small, locked pantry near the officer’s galley, a scent drifted through the cracks in the wood.
It was the scent of smoked salt-pork. Rich, fatty, and real.
My feet froze. My mind went blank with hunger. I looked around the dim hallway. The grease lamps were flickering low, casting long, dancing shadows against the walls. The sailors were up on the main deck, securing the rigging and preparing the heavy cannons for the rough seas ahead. The hallway was completely empty.
It was madness. If you were caught stealing from the ship’s safe rations, the punishment was death. Or worse, you were flayed alive and left on the deck for the gulls to peck at. I knew the rules. I had seen a grown man thrown overboard just last month for hiding an extra flask of freshwater under his hammock.
But hunger is a terrible master. It strips away your fear, your reason, and your caution until there is nothing left but the primal need to survive.
I knelt down beside the small wooden door of the pantry. The latch was secured with an iron pin, but the wood around the hinge had rotted from the constant salt dampness. With trembling fingers, I wedged my thin, bony hands into the gap. I pulled with everything I had left in my weak body.
The wood groaned. A small splinter cracked. The gap widened just enough for my small arm to slip inside.
My fingers brushed against something wrapped in rough greasepaper. I gripped it and pulled it through the narrow opening. My heart was pounding so loudly I was certain the entire ship could hear it. I tore the paper open. It was a thick, cured piece of salt-pork, glistening with fat.
I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I shoved a massive piece into my mouth, chewing furiously. The rich, salty flavor exploded across my tongue, and for a single, fleeting second, the cold, the pain, and the terror of my existence faded away. I felt alive.
Then, a shadow fell over the doorway.
“Well, well, well,” a voice purred from the darkness. “What do we have here?”
My breath hitched in my throat. I couldn’t even swallow the meat. I turned my head slowly, my eyes wide with horror.
Standing at the end of the narrow corridor was Jarek, one of Kurt’s loyal lackeys. He was a scrawny, rat-faced sailor with a yellow smile and an iron club hanging from his belt. He had been looking for an excuse to get into the First Mate’s good graces for weeks.
“A little rat eating the king’s meat,” Jarek hissed, stepping forward. “Kurt is going to love this.”
I scrambled to my feet, dropping the remaining pork onto the dirty floor. “Please,” I choked out, the half-chewed food still in my mouth. “Please, Jarek, don’t tell him. I was starving. I haven’t eaten in days. I’ll do your shifts at the pumps. I’ll wash your boots for a month. Please.”
Jarek didn’t answer with words. He lunged forward, his heavy hand clamping onto my shoulder. I tried to twist away, using my small size to slip under his arm, but he was too fast. He grabbed a handful of my long, matted hair and yanked backward with vicious force.
A sharp cry tore from my throat as my legs gave out. Jarek dragged me across the rough floorboards, my fingernails scratching desperately against the wood as I tried to find a handhold. He hauled me up the wooden steps, slamming my knees against each riser until we broke out into the blinding, freezing chaos of the main deck.
The storm had arrived.
The sky above was a swirling mass of bruised purple and black clouds. Sheets of icy rain were driving down horizontally, stinging my bare skin like a thousand tiny needles. Massive, white-capped waves roared against the side of the Black Leviathan, lifting the massive warship high into the air before dropping it down into the trough of the sea with a violent, bone-rattling thud.
“We got a thief!” Jarek screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice carrying over the roaring wind. “We got a little gut-worm stealing from the safe stores!”
The words spread across the deck like wildfire. Pirates who had been hauling ropes and tying down cargo stopped what they were doing. Their hardened, weathered faces turned toward us, their eyes lighting up with a dark, hungry curiosity. On a pirate ship, entertainment was rare, and a public punishment was the best kind of distraction from the fear of a storm.
“Bring him here!” a massive voice boomed through the gale.
Kurt stepped out from under the shadow of the main mast. His leather coat was slick with rain, and his face was twisted into a grim, expectant smile. He walked over to us, his boots splashing through the pools of salt water that ran along the deck.
Jarek threw me down onto the wet, splintered wood right at Kurt’s feet. I slid across the deck, my bare knees scraping against the rough grain until I bumped against the base of the heavy wooden mast.
“Look what I found in the officer’s corridor, boss,” Jarek said proudly, holding up the greasepaper I had dropped, which still contained a small scrap of the salt-pork. “This little rat tore open the pantry. He was stuffing his face while the rest of us are working the lines.”
Kurt looked down at me, his eyes cold and dead. He slowly unbuckled the heavy leather whip from his hip, letting the lead-tipped tails trail along the wet deck.
“Is this true, boy?” Kurt asked, his voice deceptively soft. “Did you think your worthless life was worth more than the law of this ship?”
“I was starving, sir,” I cried out, the rain washing the tears from my face as soon as they fell. I raised my hands in a desperate plea. “The rations… there was nothing left for us. I only took a small piece. I’m sorry. Please, Lord Kurt, mercy!”
“Mercy?” Kurt laughed, and the pirates surrounding us joined in, their harsh, mocking laughter cutting through the thunder. “There is no mercy on the high seas for a thief. If we let every starving dog take what they wanted, the fleet would rot from the inside out.”
He stepped closer, raising his massive boot. Without a shred of hesitation, he slammed his iron-toothed heel directly into my ribs.
A sickening crack echoed in my ears as the breath was violently driven from my lungs. I collapsed onto my side, curling into a ball as a blinding, white-hot agony flared through my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I could only gasp like a fish pulled from the water, my fingers clawing at the wet deck as I tried to pull air into my collapsed lungs.
“Get up,” Kurt growled, grabbing me by the hair again and pulling my head back so far I was forced to look at the dark, swirling sky. “You aren’t dying yet. We have a proper place for thieves. Jarek, drag him to the quarterdeck. Let’s see what the King thinks of our little stowaway thief.”
The crew cheered, banging their fists against their wooden shields and the handles of their axes.
Jarek grabbed my arms, binding them tightly behind my back with a rough piece of hemp rope that bit into my wrists. He dragged me up the stairs toward the raised quarterdeck, my feet trailing limply behind me. The pain in my ribs was so intense that every bounce against the wooden steps made my vision go black around the edges.
At the center of the quarterdeck, standing completely unmoved by the violent rocking of the ship, was the Pirate King.
His name was Vance the Iron-Hearted. He was a legendary warlord of the sea, a man who had conquered three separate naval kingdoms and united forty pirate crews under a single, bloody banner. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wore a heavy cloak made of dark wolf fur, despite the rain. His face was weathered like a cliffside, and a thick, silver-streaked beard fell to his chest. He held the ship’s massive wooden wheel with one giant, calloused hand, guiding the warship through the terrifying waves with an eerie, calm precision.
To his right stood the Fleet Council—four ruthless captains who commanded their own ships within Vance’s grand armada. They were men of blood and iron, covered in expensive silks stolen from foreign merchants, their belts loaded with silver-hilted daggers and flintlock pistols.
“What is the meaning of this disruption, Kurt?” Vance asked, his voice deep and resonant, like a low note struck on a massive bronze bell. He didn’t look away from the dark horizon, his eyes locked on the massive waves ahead.
“A thief, King Vance!” Kurt shouted, shoving me forward. I collapsed onto the wet wood, my face sliding into a puddle of icy rainwater. “This worthless cabin boy was caught red-handed stealing from the safe rations during a grade-four storm. He broke into the officer’s pantry.”
One of the Fleet Council captains, a cruel-looking man with a gold tooth and a silk eyepatch, laughed loudly. “A cabin boy? He looks like a stiff breeze could blow him into the ocean. Why waste the King’s time with a rat? Just throw him over the side and let the sea wash him away.”
“The law is the law, Captain,” Kurt replied, his voice dripping with an arrogant righteousness. “The code states that any crew member, no matter how small, who steals safe rations during a naval emergency must be publicly executed before the mast to ensure discipline. I demand the right to give him forty lashes with the lead-tail and then hang him from the yardarm.”
I lay there, shivering violently, the freezing rain soaking through my skin. I looked up through my blurred vision at the Pirate King. He was my last hope. He was a king, a ruler of men. Surely he could see that I was just a boy. Surely he could see that a single piece of meat wasn’t worth a human life.
Vance slowly turned his head. His piercing, icy-blue eyes looked down at me. There was no anger in his face, but worse, there was no pity. To him, I was just another piece of broken cargo on his massive ship.
“The First Mate is correct,” Vance said coldly, his voice carrying an absolute, unyielding authority. “The code keeps us alive in the dark waters. Without discipline, we are nothing but savages. If the boy stole the safe stores while the men fought the storm, he has forfeit his right to be part of this crew.”
The crowd below the quarterdeck erupted into a roar of approval. They began to chant, “Lash him! Hang him! Sea took his mother, let the sea take him!”
Kurt’s face lit up with a triumphant, sadistic grin. He stepped toward me, his heavy leather whip coiling in his hand like a snake. “You heard the King, rat. Your time is up.”
He grabbed my shoulder, flipping me onto my back so he could drag me to the execution post at the center of the deck. I didn’t have the strength to fight. I didn’t have the strength to scream anymore. I just stared up at the swinging iron storm lantern that hung from the wooden roof of the quarterdeck balcony above us.
The lantern was large and heavy, swaying violently back and forth with the rolling of the ship. The harsh yellow flame inside flickered wildly, casting sharp, blinding flashes of light across the deck.
As Kurt dragged me backward, my tunic tore open at the collar, the wet, ragged fabric pulling completely away from my right shoulder and neck.
The ship gave a massive, violent lurch to the left as an enormous wave slammed into the hull. The iron lantern swung hard, its bright, concentrated light shining directly down onto my exposed neck.
The Pirate King, who had turned back to the wheel, caught the motion out of the corner of his eye. His gaze flicked down to my body for a brief second.
And then, Vance the Iron-Hearted froze.
It was as if the blood in his veins had turned to solid ice. His hands, which had been steering the massive wooden wheel through the roaring storm with effortless strength, suddenly clamped down so hard the wood groaned under his grip. His face, normally a mask of unreadable bronze, turned completely pale, the color draining from his lips until he looked like a ghost.
“Stop,” Vance whispered.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it held a terrifying, sudden weight that made the air feel heavy.
Kurt didn’t hear him over the roaring wind and the chanting of the crew. He raised his heavy leather whip high into the air, the lead tips glinting in the dark storm light, ready to bring it down across my chest. “Time to bleed, boy!”
“I SAID STOP!”
The Pirate King’s roar was louder than the thunder that cracked across the sky. It was a sound of pure, raw fury and terror that echoed off the sails and sent a shiver down the spine of every man on deck.
Kurt’s arm froze mid-air. The whip hovered in the wind, trembling. The chanting of the crew stopped instantly. The only sound left was the howling of the wind and the crashing of the black waves against the hull. The entire deck went deathly silent.
Kurt turned around, his face a mask of utter confusion. “King Vance? The boy is a thief. The judgment was passed. We must—”
“Step away from him, Kurt,” Vance commanded. His voice was no longer cold; it was shaking. A faint, barely perceptible tremor ran through the great warlord’s hands as he slowly let go of the ship’s wheel, leaving his second navigator to hold it.
The crew watched in stunned silence as the Pirate King, a man who had never shown fear to any king or emperor, slowly stepped down from his raised platform. He walked toward me, his heavy wolf-fur cloak dragging in the salt water, his eyes locked entirely on my neck.
Kurt frowned, his eyes darting between Vance and my trembling form. “Sire, he’s just a worthless deck rat. He isn’t worth your attention. Let me finish him.”
“If you move another inch toward him, Kurt,” Vance said, his voice dropping to a low, lethal whisper that made the First Mate’s confidence instantly vanish, “I will flay you myself and feed your heart to the gulls.”
Kurt stepped back, his face turning pale as he lowered his whip.
I lay there on the cold, wet deck, my chest heaving with agony, my eyes staring up at the terrifying warlord as he knelt down right next to me in the dirt and water. The entire crew pushed forward against the railings, their breath held, trying to understand what was happening.
Vance reached out a massive, scarred hand. His fingers were trembling so violently he could barely control them. He didn’t grab me. He didn’t strike me. Instead, he gently, carefully touched the edge of my torn collar, pulling the wet fabric back a few more inches.
The swinging iron lantern shone its bright, unyielding light directly onto the right side of my neck, exposing the deeply textured, silver-white skin that lay beneath the dirt.
It was a burn mark. But it wasn’t a random scar from a galley fire. It was an ancient, perfectly defined mark shaped like a triple-crested wave rising out of a broken crown—the exact, forbidden seal of the Old Naval Dynasty, the royal bloodline that had ruled the sea empire before it was betrayed and slaughtered fifteen years ago.
The four captains of the Fleet Council gasped, their faces turning completely white as they leaned over the quarterdeck railing to get a closer look.
“By the gods,” one of the captains whispered, dropping his silver flask onto the deck. “It can’t be. They were all killed. Every last one of them.”
Vance didn’t speak. He just stared at the mark, a single tear cutting through the salt and grime on his hardened face. He looked into my eyes, searching my face, seeing the shape of my jaw and the color of my eyes for the very first time.
“What is your name, boy?” Vance asked, his voice cracking with an emotion I had never heard in a man before.
I swallowed hard, the pain in my ribs making it hard to speak. But I raised my chin, my voice steady despite the terror that gripped my soul.
“My mother called me Kaelen,” I whispered into the silent storm. “She told me never to show anyone this mark. She said if the fleet found out who I was, they would kill me.”
The moment the name left my lips, an old, veteran captain in the back of the crowd fell directly to his knees on the wet deck, his sword clattering out of his hand.
Kurt stared at me, his mouth hanging open, his arrogant smile completely erased as a cold, terrifying dread began to fill the space where his cruelty had just been. He looked at the Pirate King, then down at me, realization hitting him like a physical blow.
The storm rumbled above us, a massive bolt of lightning illuminating the entire sea, but the deck remained frozen in absolute shock, because every man on that ship now knew that the boy they had spent months kicking, starving, and torturing was not an orphan deckhand at all.
CHAPTER 2
The silence that stretched across the deck of the Black Leviathan was heavier than the storm itself.
For months, I had been nothing more than a piece of wood to these men—something to be stepped on, broken, and thrown aside. I had grown used to the weight of their shadows over me. But now, as I lay on the wet deck with the rain washing the grease and blood from my face, the shadows felt different. They weren’t pressing down on me anymore. They were retreating.
Kurt stood five feet away, his massive hand still gripping the leather handle of his whip, but his knuckles had turned entirely white. His chest heaved, not from the exertion of a fight, but from the sudden, suffocating realization that the ground beneath his feet had just shifted. He kept looking from the burn mark on my neck to the face of the Pirate King, his small, dark eyes darting around like a trapped animal looking for an escape.
“King Vance,” Kurt stammered, his voice losing its booming authority, replaced by a desperate, high-pitched edge. “This… this must be a trick. The boy is a liar. He’s a thief from the southern ports! He probably got that mark from a hot iron in a slave market. You know how these gutter rats are. They mark themselves to look like someone important so they don’t get drowned in the bogs!”
Vance didn’t look at him. He didn’t even acknowledge that Kurt had spoken.
The Pirate King remained on his knees in the salt water right beside me. His massive hand, which had cut down dozens of men in battle without a single tremor, was hovering just above my shoulder, as if he were afraid that if he touched me too hard, I would disappear into the ocean fog. His icy-blue eyes were wide, staring into mine with a fierce, burning intensity that made me want to pull away, but I couldn’t move. The pain in my broken ribs was a sharp, localized fire every time I took a breath.
“Kaelen,” Vance murmured, the name coming out of his chest like a prayer he hadn’t spoken in a lifetime. “Your mother… was her name Elena?”
I swallowed the metallic taste of blood in my mouth, my eyes locked onto his. “She… she died three winters ago in the coastal huts of Eldervale. She told me to hide. She told me that if the men with the black sails ever saw my face, they would finish what they started in the capital.”
A low, collective groan went through the older members of the crew.
The four captains of the Fleet Council moved down from the quarterdeck steps, their heavy leather cloaks snapping in the wind. They didn’t look at Kurt. They didn’t look at each other. Their eyes were fixed entirely on me.
Captain Kenneth, the oldest of the four, a man whose face was completely covered in grey battle scars and who had served the sea empire long before Vance ever claimed the throne, stepped forward. He knelt down on the wet wood, his knees splashing into a puddle, regardless of his high status or his expensive silk trousers.
“It’s his face, Vance,” Kenneth whispered, his voice thick with a sudden, overwhelming grief. “Look at the line of his jaw. Look at those eyes. Those are the eyes of the High Admiral. Those are the eyes of the man who built this very fleet before the betrayal.”
“Silence!” Kurt roared, stepping forward blindly, his arrogance trying to claw its way back through his fear. “I am the First Mate of this ship! I passed judgment according to the code! The boy stole food during a naval emergency! Even if he is some ghost from a dead house, the law of the sea doesn’t care about bloodlines! The law says he dies!”
“The law?” Vance said softly.
He slowly rose to his feet. He didn’t rush. He stood up straight, his towering form casting a massive shadow over both me and Kurt. When he turned his face toward the First Mate, the expression there was so cold, so utterly devoid of humanity, that Kurt instinctively took two steps backward, his boot slipping on the wet deck.
“You talk to me of the law, Kurt?” Vance asked, his voice dangerously quiet, yet it carried perfectly over the howling gale. “You, who have spent the last six months skimming silver from the prize chests? You, who I found hiding in the cargo hold during the battle of the Red Reef, pretending to be wounded while my men were dying on the decks?”
The crew began to murmur, their faces darkening as they looked at the First Mate. In the pirate fleet, rumors traveled fast, but nobody had ever dared to speak them aloud to the King.
“That… that’s a lie!” Kurt shouted, his face turning a deep, angry red. He looked around at the crew, looking for support. “Jarek! Tell him! Tell him the boy is a thief! We have the evidence!”
Jarek, the rat-faced sailor who had dragged me up from the hold, looked at the Pirate King’s face and immediately dropped his iron club. He fell to his knees, his hands raised in the air. “I don’t know nothing, boss! I just found him in the pantry! I didn’t see nothing else! Don’t look at me!”
“Coward!” Kurt spat, his eyes wild. He turned back to Vance, his hand tightening on his cutlass hilt. “You’re going to cast aside the rules that keep this ship together for a starving brat? The crew won’t stand for it! We’ve been freezing, we’ve been starving in this storm, and you’re going to let a thief walk because of an old scar?”
Vance took a single step forward. The air seemed to drop ten degrees.
“That ‘old scar,’ as you call it, is the only reason you are breathing the air on this deck today, Kurt,” Vance said, his voice vibrating with a deep, ancient fury. “Fifteen years ago, when the High King’s royal fleet turned against us, when the great capital was put to the torch, it was the High Admiral Brandon who stayed behind with his personal flagship. He held the line against twenty imperial warships alone, giving the rest of our people time to escape into the dark waters. He died so we could live. He died so this fleet could exist.”
Vance pointed a massive finger down at me.
“And before he died, he sent his wife and his newborn son into the hidden northern villages to keep the bloodline alive. This boy is not a thief. He is the son of the man who saved my life. He is the true heir to the Sea Throne that we abandoned.”
The revelation struck the deck like a thunderbolt.
The younger pirates, who had only known me as a punching bag, looked at me with wide, horrified eyes. The older sailors, men who had fought alongside my father fifteen years ago, were already lowering their heads, their expressions filled with a deep, burning shame. They had watched me get beaten. They had watched me get starved. They had participated in my misery, completely blind to the fact that they were torturing the flesh and blood of their savior.
“I don’t care who his father was!” Kurt screamed, completely unhinged now. He knew that if he lost this argument, his life was over. “The boy broke the code! If you don’t punish him, you’re a hypocrite, Vance! The crew demands justice!”
“You want justice, Kurt?” Vance asked, a terrifying smile finally breaking through his silver beard. “You shall have it. But we will do this properly. We will hold a formal trial before the Fleet Council, right here, in front of the men. Jarek, grab the boy. Gently.”
Jarek scrambled forward like a dog, quickly cutting the ropes around my wrists with a small knife. He helped me up, his hands trembling so badly he almost dropped me. “I’m sorry, little lord, I’m sorry,” he kept whispering under his breath.
I couldn’t stand on my own. My broken ribs flared with agony, and my knees were completely numb from the freezing water. Captain Kenneth stepped in, his massive, fur-lined arm wrapping around my waist to support my weight. He smelled of salt, tobacco, and expensive spice, a world away from the sour rot of the lower decks.
“Bring out the logbook,” Vance commanded, his eyes never leaving Kurt. “Let us see the records of the rations for the last three months. Let us see exactly who has been eating, and who has been starving on this ship.”
Kurt’s face went from an angry red to a sickly, pale white. “The logbook? The storm is tearing the sails apart, Vance! We don’t have time for this nonsense!”
“We have all the time in the world, Kurt,” Vance said, his voice dropping into a low, steady rhythm. “The ship will hold. My navigators know their business. But right now, we are going to clean the rot out of my quarterdeck.”
Two large, armored ship guards ran down into the captain’s cabin, returning moments later with a massive, leather-bound book protected by an oilskin cover. They laid it out on a heavy wooden barrel at the center of the deck, under the flickering light of the swinging storm lantern.
The entire crew pressed inward, forming a tight, dense circle around the barrel. The rain was still pouring, washing over the pages as Captain Kenneth flipped through the thick parchment sheets, his fingers stopping on the entries for the winter months.
“Read it, Kenneth,” Vance ordered.
Kenneth squinted through the rain, his voice rising above the wind. “According to the official log kept by the First Mate, the safe rations were reduced by half for the general crew due to spoilage. The cabin boys and deckhands were marked as ‘dead weight’ and given zero allocation of meat or freshwater for the past fourteen days.”
The crew began to growl. They had been told there was simply no food left on the ship.
“Now,” Vance said, stepping toward the small hatch that led to Kurt’s private quarters beneath the quarterdeck. “Let us look at the First Mate’s personal stores. Guards, open his cabin chest.”
“No!” Kurt shouted, drawing his cutlass with a sharp, metallic ring. “You have no right! That’s my private property! You’re breaking the captain’s own rules!”
The two ship guards didn’t hesitate. They drew their heavy iron axes, their faces grim. They didn’t even look at Kurt as they kicked his cabin door open, disappearing into the darkness below.
A few seconds later, a loud crash echoed from below. The guards returned, carrying a massive, heavy iron trunk between them. They slammed it down onto the wet deck right next to the logbook. One of the guards raised his axe and brought it down with tremendous force onto the heavy brass lock.
The lock shattered. The lid flew open.
Inside the trunk, glistening in the yellow lantern light, were dozens of rings of dried salt-pork, smoked beef, tins of fine foreign butter, and several flasks of clear, unspotted freshwater. There was enough high-grade food in that single chest to feed every cabin boy on the ship for three months.
The silence on the deck shattered into a roar of pure, unadulterated fury from the crew.
“He lied to us!” a burly harpooner shouted from the crowd, pointing his thick finger at Kurt. “He told us the rats ate the meat! He told us my boy died of the fever because there wasn’t enough safe water to go around!”
“Vicious bastard!” another sailor screamed, drawing his dagger. “He’s been living like a king while our boys were eating dirt!”
Kurt backed away until his shoulders hit the heavy wooden railing of the ship’s side. The sea was roaring behind him, massive black waves rising up like walls of solid water, but the danger of the ocean was nothing compared to the look on the faces of the fifty men who were now staring at him.
“It was an emergency reserve!” Kurt cried out, his voice cracking as he looked around at the hostile faces. “I was saving it for the officers! If the storm lasted another week, we would have needed it to keep the fighters strong! You can’t blame me for being careful!”
Vance stepped into the center of the circle, his face completely calm, yet his eyes were burning with a terrifying satisfaction. He looked down at me, where I was still leaning heavily against Captain Kenneth’s side, my breathing shallow and painful.
“Kaelen,” the Pirate King said gently. “This man dragged you up here to be executed for taking a single scrap of meat to save your life. He used my name, my law, and my ship to torture you. What do you think his punishment should be?”
I looked at Kurt. For months, this man had been the god of my world. His voice had made my limbs turn to water. His whip had left permanent tracks of scar tissue across my back. I had spent nights crying myself to sleep, praying to whatever gods were listening to just let me die so the pain would stop.
But as I looked at him now, cowering against the railing with his sword shaking in his hand, he didn’t look like a god anymore. He looked small. He looked pathetic. He looked like the true rat of the Black Leviathan.
I swallowed hard, feeling the eyes of every pirate on the ship waiting for my word. The boy who had been a slave was now the judge.
“He… he wanted to give me forty lashes,” I whispered, my voice small but clear through the wind. “He wanted to hang me from the yardarm so everyone could watch me die.”
Kurt’s eyes widened in sheer terror. He dropped his cutlass, the blade clattering against the wood, and fell straight to his knees, his hands sliding through the wet puddles as he begged. “Please, little lord! Please! I didn’t know! I swear by the gods of the sea, I didn’t know who you were! If I had known your father, I would have treated you like gold! Mercy! Have mercy on an old warrior!”
Vance looked at Kurt with disgust. “You didn’t need to know his father to treat him like a human being, Kurt. You treated him like dirt because you thought he had nobody to protect him. You thought he was powerless.”
The Pirate King turned back to the crew, his voice booming out one final command that made my heart leap into my throat.
“Tie him to the execution post,” Vance roared. “Give him the forty lashes he promised to the boy. And when the storm clears, we will let the sea decide his fate.”
Four massive sailors lunged forward, grabbing Kurt by his arms and dragging him toward the wooden post at the center of the deck. He screamed and kicked, his voice raw with fear, but the very men who had laughed at my misery just an hour ago were now tightening the ropes around his wrists with a cold, merciless precision.
But as they threw the first leather tail across Kurt’s back, a loud, cracking sound tore through the air from the front of the ship.
The main navigator screamed from the bow balcony, his voice filled with a sudden, icy panic that made even Vance turn around.
“Sails on the horizon! Black sails with the golden crest! It’s the Imperial Fleet! The High King’s vanguard has found us in the storm!”
The entire crew froze, their faces turning toward the dark, turbulent sea as three massive warships emerged from the thick ocean fog, their heavy brass cannons already glinting in the flashes of lightning.
