CHAPTER 3
The iron-rimmed pit of the Black Leviathan was a place where souls were broken for the amusement of monsters. It was a sunken arena built directly into the center of the main deck, surrounded by heavy oak railings where hundreds of bloodthirsty pirates could look down and watch men tear each other apart. The floor of the pit was lined with rough sand, soaked black by the blood of decades of executed prisoners and failed mutineers.
“Let the trial by blood begin!” Fleet Commander Vance shouted, his voice echoing across the torchlit waters. He stood at the edge of the pit, his silver-fox fur coat discarded, wearing only a dark leather jerkin that showed the thick muscles of his arms. He held his silver-hilted cutlass in his right hand, the blade catching the flickering orange light of the deck braziers. “Tonight, we see if this slave is a prince, or if he is just meat for the bilge rats!”
The crew cheered, a savage, roaring sound that shook the very timber beneath my feet. They didn’t care about royal bloodlines. They didn’t care about ancient oaths. They cared about the spectacle of death. To them, I was still the starving, bruised boy who had been dragged from the dark lower hold.
King Robert sat on his high-backed wooden chair near the edge of the pit, his face carved from stone. He had offered me his own personal sword—a massive, double-edged broadsword with a pommel shaped like a roaring sea bear—but my arms were too weak from seven years of starvation and heavy rowing to lift it properly. Instead, I had chosen a simple, rusted iron boarding pike from the weapon rack. It was heavy, but it gave me reach. It was the tool of a common sailor, the weapon of the desperate.
“You have one chance to beg for mercy, boy,” Vance hissed, stepping down the wooden ladder into the sand. His boots made a soft, heavy sound as he walked toward the center of the pit. He moved with the fluid, dangerous grace of a seasoned duelist, his cutlass drawing small, lazy circles in the air. “Kneel before me, admit you are a fraud, and I will make your death quick. I might even let that little orphan deckhand live.”
My fingers gripped the rough ash wood of the pike. My heart was pounding against my ribs, not with fear, but with an overwhelming, suffocating rage. I looked at Vance’s clean, unmarked skin. I looked at his arrogant smile. This was the man who had ordered the whips to tear my back. This was the man who had watched my people burn twenty-two years ago, the man who had traded his honor for a chest of stolen gold.
“The only man kneeling tonight will be you, Vance,” I whispered, my voice carrying across the silent space of the pit.
With a sudden, explosive roar, Vance lunged forward.
The silver blade of his cutlass cut through the air with terrifying speed. I instinctively brought the iron head of my pike up to block, but the force of his strike sent a shockwave of pain tearing through my cracked ribs and weak shoulders. I stumbled backward, my bare feet slipping in the loose sand. The crowd cheered, sensing an immediate kill.
“Too slow, slave!” Vance mocked, his blade flashing again.
He didn’t go for a mortal wound. He wanted to humiliate me first. The tip of his cutlass sliced across my left shoulder, leaving a thin, burning line of crimson that soaked into my tattered rags. He moved like a viper, striking and retreating, using his superior strength and conditioning to wear down my fragile body.
I breathed heavily, the salt air burning my lungs. Every muscle in my arms was screaming for relief. My vision blurred for a fraction of a second, the heavy faces of the watching pirates spinning above me like a gallery of demons. Vance took advantage of my hesitation, stepping inside my guard and delivering a brutal kick directly to my stomach.
The blow sent me crashing into the wooden wall of the pit. The impact knocked the wind from my lungs, and I dropped to one knee, using the pike to keep myself from collapsing entirely into the sand. Blood and sweat ran into my eyes, blinding me.
“Look at your prince!” Vance shouted to the crowd, raising his sword to the sky. “He can barely hold his weapon! He is a ghost from a dead world, and ghosts belong in the dirt!”
The younger pirates laughed, throwing empty wooden cups into the pit. But as I sat there in the sand, my blood dripping onto the dark wood, I looked up at the quarterdeck. Through the crowd of jeering killers, I saw the faces of the old sailors. The veterans of the royal navy. They weren’t laughing. They were standing perfectly still, their hands resting on their belts, their eyes filled with a desperate, unspoken sorrow. They were watching the last light of their old world get snuffed out in a pirate fighting pit.
And then, I looked at King Robert.
The old warlord was leaning forward, his giant hands gripping the railing so tightly that the ancient oak was creaking. He wasn’t looking at my weakness. He was looking at the purple burn mark on my neck, his eyes burning with an ancient, forgotten fire. He was waiting to see if the blood of High King Alistair was truly dead, or if it still carried the spark that had once commanded ten thousand ships.
A strange calmness washed over me. The pain in my ribs seemed to fade into a distant, unimportant murmur. For seven years, I had survived by enduring. I had endured the whip, the hunger, the freezing winter seas, and the absolute dark of the lower decks. Vance was a master of the sword, but he had never lived in the dark. He had never learned how to survive when everything was taken from him.
“Stand up,” I told myself, my voice a silent command inside my mind. “The Sea Throne does not fall to a traitor.”
I forced my legs to straighten. The crowd’s laughter slowly died away as they saw the starving slave rower rise from the sand once more, his grip tightening around the rusted iron pike.
Vance turned back to me, his smile fading into a look of minor irritation. “You don’t know when to die, do you? Fine. Let’s end this little theater.”
He rushed me again, bringing his cutlass down in a heavy, overhead strike meant to shatter my weapon and split my skull. It was a predictable move, born from pure arrogance. He thought I would try to block it again. He thought I was too weak to do anything else.
But I didn’t block.
At the very last second, as the silver steel descended toward my head, I stepped into the strike, letting the blade slice deep into the flesh of my left shoulder. The pain was blinding, but it anchored me. It held his weapon in place. With my right hand, I drove the butt of the wooden pike upward with every single ounce of strength left in my broken body, striking Vance directly under his jaw.
The sound of his teeth shattering echoed through the pit.
Vance stumbled back, his eyes wide with sudden, unadulterated shock. His cutlass slipped from his hand, clattering into the sand. He clutched his bloody mouth, his breathing turning into a ragged, choking gasp. He had never been hit like this before. He had never faced someone who was willing to take a blade just to land a blow.
Before he could recover, I swung the iron head of the pike, striking the side of his knee. A loud crack signaled the breaking of bone, and the powerful Fleet Commander crashed heavily onto his knees in the black sand—directly in front of me.
The entire ship went dead silent. The hundreds of pirates watching from the railings held their breath, their mouths open in disbelief. The man who had ruled them with an iron fist for a decade was now kneeling in the dirt before a slave.
I stood over him, the iron tip of my pike resting against the soft hollow of his throat. Blood was pouring from my shoulder, mixing with his own blood in the sand, but my hand was as steady as the northern stars.
“You asked me if I could protect myself from your boot, Vance,” I said, my voice echoing clearly across the frozen deck. “Now, tell me… who is the piece of garbage?”
Vance looked up at me, the arrogance completely gone from his eyes, replaced by a cold, pathetic terror. He looked past me to King Robert, silently begging for the King to intervene, to save him from the law of the fleet he had so proudly invoked just minutes ago.
But King Robert didn’t move a muscle. He slowly stood up from his chair, looking down into the pit with an expression that made the entire crew tremble.
“The trial by blood is decided,” King Robert announced, his voice booming like thunder over the quiet ocean. “The sea has spoken. The slave rower is no more. Stand before your King, Prince Kaelen.”
The old sailors on the deck suddenly moved. They didn’t wait for an order. They dropped to their knees, their heavy boots thudding against the wooden deck as they bowed their heads toward the fighting pit. One by one, the younger pirates followed, their weapons slipping from their hands until the entire crew of the Black Leviathan was kneeling before the boy they had mocked.
But the twist was not yet complete. As Vance lay shivering in the sand, his eyes darting wildly, a small leather pouch fell from his discarded coat, spilling its contents into the blood-soaked dirt.
King Robert’s eyes locked onto the items in the sand, and his face turned from stone to pure fury.
CHAPTER 4
Among the silver coins and small trinkets that had spilled from Vance’s pouch, one object caught the faint light of the moon. It was a heavy, iron key, etched with the distinctive, stylized three-headed serpent of the western sea-fortresses.
It wasn’t a standard key for the ship’s supply chests or the slave shackles. It was the master key to the hidden ammunition hold—the secure vault where the Black Leviathan kept its most volatile fire-barrels and black powder.
King Robert stepped down the wooden ladder into the pit, his massive boots sinking into the sand. He ignored Vance completely, walking straight to the spilled items and picking up the iron key. He held it up to the light of the braziers, his knuckles turning white.
“Vance,” the King said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. “This key belongs to the secure vault. The vault that only I and the master-at-arms are supposed to have access to. Why is it in your personal pouch?”
Vance tried to speak, but the blood from his broken jaw choked his words. He spluttered, his face turning an ash-gray color that had nothing to do with the cold. “Sire… it… it was for safekeeping… during the storm…”
“He’s lying,” a new voice called out from the edge of the pit.
The crowd parted, and the small orphan deckhand—the boy I had tried to save in the dark lower hold—stepped forward. He was trembling, his small hands clutching a ragged piece of sailcloth, but his eyes were wide with a sudden, fierce courage.
“Speak, boy,” King Robert commanded, looking up at the child.
“Two nights ago, before the storm hit,” the boy whimpered, pointing a thin finger down at Vance. “I saw Commander Vance in the lower cargo hold. He was talking to a scout boat from the Royal Alliance fleet—the ones who hunt us. I heard him tell them that he would unlock the powder hold and wet the lines when the flagship entered the coastal fog. He… he was going to sell the ship to the Alliance for three chests of gold.”
A collective gasp tore through the hundreds of pirates standing on the deck. In the warlord society of the sea empire, there was no crime worse than betrayal. To sell your own crew to the enemy fleet was a death sentence that carried no mercy, no trial, and no honor.
Vance had not just been trying to execute me to keep order; he had been trying to eliminate anyone who spent too much time in the lower decks, anyone who might have seen his midnight meetings with the enemy.
King Robert turned his head slowly back to Vance. The look in the old warlord’s eyes was no longer just anger—it was the cold, unyielding judgment of a king who had finally found the piece of his soul he thought he had lost twenty-two years ago.
“You betrayed my old master,” Robert whispered, stepping toward the kneeling commander. “You helped burn the white stone fortresses. I took you into my fleet because you swore you were a survivor who wanted revenge. But you are nothing but a vulture, Vance. You eat the flesh of the fallen.”
The King looked at me, his eyes softening for a brief moment as he saw the blood flowing from my shoulder. “My Prince… seven years ago, I failed to protect your father. I let his kingdom turn to ash, and I became a pirate out of shame. But tonight, the sea has given me a chance to fulfill my true oath.”
Robert reached down, grabbed Vance by his leather collar with one hand, and lifted the heavy man completely off his knees as if he weighed nothing.
“Throw him into the beast cage below the cargo hold!” King Robert roared to the guards. “Let him see how much his silver fur coat is worth to the sharks when we dump him into the deep!”
The giant executioner and three heavy guards rushed into the pit. They didn’t show Vance any of the respect they had given him only an hour ago. They dragged him out of the sand, his broken leg trailing behind him, his pathetic cries for mercy echoing across the silent ship as they kicked him down the dark hatch into the deep hold.
The wind began to die down, leaving the sea flat and calm under the silver moonlight. The thick fog that had hidden the ship began to lift, revealing the endless, open horizon of the naval kingdom.
King Robert walked over to me, sinking onto one knee in the blood-stained sand. He unbuckled his own heavy leather belt, removing the massive broadsword with the roaring sea-bear pommel—the symbol of the supreme commander of the armada. He held it up with both hands, offering it to me.
“The Black Leviathan is yours, High King Kaelen,” Robert said, his voice thick with emotion. “The fleet is yours. Command us, and we will take back the stone fortresses that were stolen from your blood.”
I looked down at the sword. I looked at my own hands—still covered in the deep blisters of the rowing oars, still stained with the salt of the lower decks. I reached out and took the heavy hilt. The steel felt cold, but inside my veins, the blood of my father was burning brighter than any fire Vance had ever lit.
I pulled myself up, stepping out of the fighting pit and onto the main deck of the flagship. The hundreds of hardened pirates stood in perfect, reverent silence, their heads bowed, their flags lowered in a salute that hadn’t been seen in the northern seas for over two decades.
I walked past them, my bare, bleeding feet leaving a trail of crimson on the wet oak wood. I walked all the way to the bow of the ship, where the great wooden dragon head looked out over the vast, dark ocean.
The young orphan deckhand walked silently behind me, no longer afraid of the whips or the dark. The old sailors followed, their hands on their hilts, ready to sail into the very mouth of hell if I gave the word.
I looked out at the distant horizon, where the white cliffs of my father’s old kingdom were waiting. The chains were gone. The dark was gone.
And for the first time in many long years, nobody knelt on my back again.
