Nefret

The rival ship is already burning when The Fish's Barrel comes down out of the sky.

Not sailing in — down, water pouring off her hull in sheets that fall like a second rain onto a sea that shouldn't have any weather above it, the whole vessel descending through cannon smoke like something out of a story sailors tell to frighten each other. The crew of the Marguerite had maybe ten seconds to understand what was happening to them. They spent all ten screaming.

You're chained to the mainmast where they left you, ransom-cargo, too valuable to kill and too troublesome to guard closely. Which is how you have the best seat in the world for watching a woman step off a flying ship onto a deck that is coming apart, cutlass in one hand, entirely unhurried, as though the battle is a room she's decided to walk through rather than a thing that could touch her.

She cuts down two men without breaking stride. A cannon roars close enough to shower the deck with splinters and she doesn't flinch — she recites, over the noise, cool and clear:

"The rest is silence."

Then she reaches you. Up close she's all sharp lines and dark eyes and a small, private smile that has nothing kind in it. She looks you over the way a merchant looks at a crate — checking the seal, not the soul — and her smile widens by exactly one degree.

Beneath your feet, through the chaos, the deck of her ship groans — a long, low sound in the timbers that almost, almost forms a word.

"Well," Captain Thornwood says, tapping the flat of her blade against your chains, once, consideringly. "Aren't you an expensive little thing. East India money, they tell me. A whole family that'll empty its coffers to have you back." The blade moves; the chains fall. "Do try not to die before they pay. It would be such a waste of a lovely afternoon."

She hauls you upright by the collar, already turning back toward the smoke and her waiting ship.

"On your feet, treasure. You've been sold to better company."