The saltwater always found the open cuts on my back. If the stinging of the ocean didn’t wake me, the heavy leather boot of First Mate Kurt certainly would. I was nothing but an orphan deckhand, a nameless piece of human property scraping dried blood off the wooden planks of the Leviathan, the grandest flagship in the warlord’s fleet.
To the hundreds of brutal sailors who manned this floating fortress, I was less than the barnacles clinging to the hull. They called me “Ratskin.” They laughed when I starved, they cheered when Kurt used his whip to quicken my pace, and they never once looked me in the eyes. I learned early that in the ocean-based warlord society, the weak were consumed by the strong, and I was the weakest of them all.
But they didn’t know the truth about the weight around my neck. They didn’t know about the night the old sky burned, or why a broken piece of silver was worth more than my life.
On the third day of the great naval gathering, the ship arena was slick with the blood of executed prisoners. The Fleet Council had gathered to feast and plan their next bloody campaign across the sea empire. Kurt had chosen me to scrub the floor before the powerful lords. I was exhausted, my hands trembling as I pushed the heavy brush across the rough red-stained oak.
“Faster, you useless sea maggot!” Kurt bellowed, his voice echoing across the deck.
I didn’t move fast enough. With a cruel grin, Kurt kicked my wooden bucket, sending the dirty, bloody water splashing directly across the polished boots of the high commanders. The entire deck went completely silent. The laughter stopped.
Kurt grabbed me by my matted hair, dragging me across the splinters until I was thrown flat on my face right in front of the Great Admiral’s seat.
“Forgive the boy’s filth, My Lords!” Kurt sneered, pushing his heavy, iron-soled boot onto the back of my neck, forcing my face into the wet wood. “He is an idiot orphan we pulled from a sinking wreck years ago. I will cut his throat myself and toss him to the sharks for ruining your view.”
I lay there, suffocating under the weight of his boot, feeling the cold wooden deck against my cheek. I knew this was the end. The crowd began to jeer, demanding blood.
But as Kurt pulled my head back by the hair to expose my throat for his blade, the rough motion tore the collar of my ragged shirt.
Out tumbled a heavy, jagged piece of metal. It was a broken silver coin, hanging from a simple piece of dirty rope. It caught the dim light of the swinging oil lanterns, casting a sharp reflection against the dark wood.
At the head of the long table, the Great Admiral—a man who had ruled the seven seas with an iron fist for thirty years—suddenly stopped mid-breath. His iron tankard slipped from his fingers, crashing to the deck and spilling dark ale everywhere.
He didn’t look at Kurt. He didn’t look at the guards. His piercing, weathered eyes were locked entirely on that small, broken piece of silver.
The Admiral stood up so fast his heavy wooden chair tipped backward, crashing against the bulkhead. The entire high council froze. Kurt stopped his blade, his arrogant smile faltering as he looked up in confusion.
“Admiral?” Kurt stammered, his voice suddenly losing its venom. “The boy is nothing. I will dispose of him quietly—”
“Remove your boot,” the Admiral whispered, his voice like grinding stones.
“Sir?”
“I said,” the Admiral roared, stepping out from behind the table, his heavy black cloak billowing behind him, “remove your boot from his neck before I carve your leg off at the hip!”
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CHAPTER 1
The saltwater always found the open cuts on my back. If the stinging of the ocean didn’t wake me, the heavy leather boot of First Mate Kurt certainly would. I was nothing but an orphan deckhand, a nameless piece of human property scraping dried blood off the wooden planks of the Leviathan, the grandest flagship in the warlord’s fleet.
To the hundreds of brutal sailors who manned this floating fortress, I was less than the barnacles clinging to the hull. They called me “Ratskin.” They laughed when I starved, they cheered when Kurt used his whip to quicken my pace, and they never once looked me in the eyes. I learned early that in the ocean-based warlord society, the weak were consumed by the strong, and I was the weakest of them all.
But they didn’t know the truth about the weight around my neck. They didn’t know about the night the old sky burned, or why a broken piece of silver was worth more than my life.
On the third day of the great naval gathering, the ship arena was slick with the blood of executed prisoners. The Fleet Council had gathered to feast and plan their next bloody campaign across the sea empire. Kurt had chosen me to scrub the floor before the powerful lords. I was exhausted, my hands trembling as I pushed the heavy brush across the rough red-stained oak.
“Faster, you useless sea maggot!” Kurt bellowed, his voice echoing across the deck.
I didn’t move fast enough. With a cruel grin, Kurt kicked my wooden bucket, sending the dirty, bloody water splashing directly across the polished boots of the high commanders. The entire deck went completely silent. The laughter stopped.
Kurt grabbed me by my matted hair, dragging me across the splinters until I was thrown flat on my face right in front of the Great Admiral’s seat.
“Forgive the boy’s filth, My Lords!” Kurt sneered, pushing his heavy, iron-soled boot onto the back of my neck, forcing my face into the wet wood. “He is an idiot orphan we pulled from a sinking wreck years ago. I will cut his throat myself and toss him to the sharks for ruining your view.”
I lay there, suffocating under the weight of his boot, feeling the cold wooden deck against my cheek. I knew this was the end. The crowd began to jeer, demanding blood.
But as Kurt pulled my head back by the hair to expose my throat for his blade, the rough motion tore the collar of my ragged shirt.
Out tumbled a heavy, jagged piece of metal. It was a broken silver coin, hanging from a simple piece of dirty rope. It caught the dim light of the swinging oil lanterns, casting a sharp reflection against the dark wood.
At the head of the long table, the Great Admiral—a man who had ruled the seven seas with an iron fist for thirty years—suddenly stopped mid-breath. His iron tankard slipped from his fingers, crashing to the deck and spilling dark ale everywhere.
He didn’t look at Kurt. He didn’t look at the guards. His piercing, weathered eyes were locked entirely on that small, broken piece of silver.
The Admiral stood up so fast his heavy wooden chair tipped backward, crashing against the bulkhead. The entire high council froze. Kurt stopped his blade, his arrogant smile faltering as he looked up in confusion.
“Admiral?” Kurt stammered, his voice suddenly losing its venom. “The boy is nothing. I will dispose of him quietly—”
“Remove your boot,” the Admiral whispered, his voice like grinding stones.
“Sir?”
“I said,” the Admiral roared, stepping out from behind the table, his heavy black cloak billowing behind him, “remove your boot from his neck before I carve your leg off at the hip!”
Kurt stumbled backward, his face turning pale as the cold sea air. He dropped his knife, the blade clattering harmlessly against the wood. The hundreds of hardened pirates and officers standing on the surrounding tiered balconies stopped breathing. Nobody had ever seen Admiral Vance react this way. He was a man who had watched whole cities burn without blinking.
The Admiral approached me slowly, his heavy, silver-buckled boots clicking against the deck. With every step he took, my heart pounded harder against my ribs. I tried to pull myself backward, to hide the coin back inside my rags, but my strength was entirely gone.
He knelt right there in the bloody water, ignoring the stains ruining his pristine, gold-trimmed uniform. His massive, scarred hand reached out, surprisingly gentle, and lifted the broken piece of silver from my chest.
His fingers trembled as he turned it over, examining the jagged edge where the coin had been violently snapped in half decades ago. On the visible side, the faint engraving of a crown and an anchor was still recognizable under years of dirt.
“Where did you get this?” the Admiral asked, his voice cracking with an emotion I couldn’t understand.
I swallowed hard, my throat dry as sand. “My… my father,” I whispered, coughing up a bit of sea spray. “He gave it to me before the black ships came.”
The Admiral’s eyes widened, filling with a sudden, overwhelming shock that seemed to age him ten years in a single second. He looked from the coin up to my face, scanning my features, tracing the old scar across my brow that I had carried since childhood.
“It cannot be,” a Fleet Commander at the table murmured, leaning forward. “Admiral, what is that thing? It’s just a piece of scrap merchant money.”
Admiral Vance slowly stood up, turning to face the entire assembly. The silence on the flagship was so absolute that you could hear the creaking of the ropes and the distant crying of the gulls. He held the broken coin high above his head, the silver gleaming under the torchlight.
“This is no merchant money,” the Admiral announced, his voice vibrating through the timbers of the ship. “Thirty years ago, the founder of this very fleet, the High Sovereign of the Sea Throne, split his royal medallion into two pieces. One half went to his eldest son who sailed into the northern wars. The other half remained here, in the flagship’s treasury.”
A collective gasp rippled through the hundreds of sailors. Men began whispering furiously, their eyes shifting rapidly between me and the high table.
Kurt looked like he was about to vomit. He stepped forward, his hands shaking as he tried to defend himself. “Admiral, please! The boy is a liar, a thief! He must have stolen it from a dead man’s chest! He’s been a worthless deckhand in my quarters for five years, he’s nothing but refuse!”
The Admiral turned his icy gaze back to me. He reached into his own heavy leather vest and pulled out a small velvet pouch. From it, he extracted another piece of jagged silver.
With the entire world watching, Admiral Vance brought the two pieces together. They slid into place with a perfect, metallic click. The crown and the anchor were complete. The edges matched seamlessly, a perfect union of two halves separated by blood and tragedy.
The Admiral dropped to one knee right in front of me, bowing his gray head until it nearly touched my filthy, bare feet.
“The line is unbroken,” the Admiral declared, his voice echoing to the very edges of the harbor. “The sea throne has found its true blood.”
The First Mate fell to his knees in terror, realizing the ultimate horror of what he had done to the boy who now held the power of life and death over the entire fleet.
CHAPTER 2
The world seemed to spin as I stared down at the Great Admiral kneeling before me. For five years, I had been kicked, spit upon, and treated as lesser than the rats in the bilge. My fingers were permanently stained with the tar of the ropes and the dried blood of men who died for the amusement of the Fleet Council. Now, the most feared man on the ocean was bowing to me, his heavy shoulders tense with absolute reverence.
“Get up, boy,” Kurt suddenly hissed from behind, his voice a desperate, panicked whisper. “He’s playing a trick on you! Admiral, you cannot believe this beggar! Look at him! He doesn’t even know how to hold a sword!”
Admiral Vance didn’t look back at Kurt. He kept his head bowed, waiting for me to speak. But I couldn’t move. My body was a roadmap of aches and old injuries, the most recent being the burning scrape on my face where Kurt had ground me into the deck.
“Stand up,” the Admiral whispered softly to me, offering his massive, leather-gloved hand.
I took it. His grip was like iron, but he lifted me as if I weighed nothing at all. As I stood on my shaky, bare feet, the tattered rags of my shirt fluttered in the cold sea wind. The hundreds of sailors standing on the rigging, the long-rowers looking up from the hatchways, and the elite guards in their polished brass armor all stared in a state of suspended shock.
“Bring the Ledger of the Deep,” the Admiral commanded, his voice returning to its booming authority as he stood beside me, his hand remaining firmly on my shoulder.
Two senior officers at the table immediately scrambled to their feet. They didn’t walk; they ran into the aft cabin, their heavy boots thudding against the deck. They returned a moment later carrying a massive, leather-bound volume protected by heavy iron clasps. This was the sacred registry of the fleet, the book that recorded every birth, every death, and every commission since the sea empire was forged from the wreckage of the old kingdoms.
The Admiral flipped the heavy parchment pages with a practiced hand, the sound of the paper crisp against the howling wind. He stopped at a page heavily stained with old seawater and dried dark ink.
“Twenty-two years ago,” Vance read aloud, his eyes scanning the lines, “the flagship Dreadwind vanished in the northern ice fields during the Great Purge. On board was Commander Kaelen, the firstborn son of our founding Sovereign. He took with him his infant boy, the true heir to the Sea Throne, to protect him from the assassins who had infiltrated the council.”
The Admiral stopped and looked directly at Kurt, whose face had gone completely gray, the sweat dripping from his chin onto his expensive leather vest.
“The registry notes that the infant boy carried a distinct mark,” Vance continued, his voice dropping to a dangerous, low growl. “A deep, crescent-shaped naval burn on his left shoulder, received during the fire that destroyed the northern palace before they fled. A mark that could never be faked, and could never be washed away.”
Kurt swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the edge of the ship, clearly calculating his chances of survival if he jumped into the dark, churning waters below. “Admiral… thousands of boys have scars. The ocean is full of burned flesh. This proves nothing!”
“Silence!” one of the Fleet Commanders shouted, slamming his fist onto the table so hard the wooden plates rattled. “Let the boy speak!”
The Admiral turned to me, his eyes softening just a fraction. “Son. Pull back your shirt.”
My hands were shaking so violently I could barely grip the torn cloth. I reached for my left collar, my fingers slick with the soapy water from my dropped cleaning bucket. I pulled the rough, stained wool away from my neck, exposing my bare shoulder to the biting cold air of the harbor.
There, stamped into the pale skin of my shoulder, was a thick, raised mark. It wasn’t the clean scar of a sword or the long, thin line of a whip. It was a jagged, dark purple seal shaped like a roaring sea wave, the unmistakable signature of a naval fire that had melted iron onto flesh.
The Fleet Council erupted into absolute chaos. Two lords stood up so fast they knocked over their heavy oak benches. The old sailors in the rigging began to shout, their voices carrying the news across the entire harbor to the neighboring warships.
“It’s him!” someone screamed from the lower decks. “The lost blood of the Sovereign!”
Kurt fell completely to his knees, his hands outstretched in a pathetic plea for mercy. He crawled forward on the wet wood, his expensive boots trailing through the dirty water he had forced me to clean just moments before.
“I didn’t know!” Kurt wailed, his voice cracking with terror. “Your Highness, please! I swear by the sea, I didn’t know! I found you on a drifting raft five years ago! You had no name! You were just a starving child! I gave you a place on this ship! I kept you alive!”
“You kept him as a slave!” the Admiral roared, his hand instantly flying to the hilt of his massive, gold-hilted broadsword. The steel sang as he pulled it from its scabbard, the blade gleaming beneath the gray sky. “You beat the blood of the Sovereign! You made the heir to the Sea Throne scrub the blood of prisoners while you sat in luxury!”
“Please!” Kurt screamed, pressing his forehead directly against the deck, weeping openly before the entire crew that had once feared him. “Mercy, Admiral! Mercy!”
Vance didn’t look at the trembling First Mate. Instead, he turned his head slowly toward me, offering the hilt of his massive weapon. The heavy iron crossguard was cold, waiting for my grip.
“My Lord,” the Admiral said, his voice deadly quiet, ensuring every man on the flagship heard his words. “The law of the fleet is ancient and absolute. The blood of the Sovereign decides the punishment for those who desecrate the throne. The blade is yours. Command us, and his head will roll into the sea before the tide turns.”
I looked down at the sword. I looked at Kurt, the man who had broken my ribs twice, the man who had denied me food for days just to watch me beg, now shaking like a wet dog at my feet. The entire ship held its breath, waiting for the first word of my true reign.
