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RESCUES

‘I DON’T CARE ABOUT Kennit!’ Brashen roared. ‘Go back for Althea!’

‘She is safe where she is for now!’ Paragon shouted defiantly. ‘I must have Kennit back. I need him.’

Brashen clenched his teeth. So close, for an instant, and then they had swept past. The need to see Althea and know she was safe hollowed him but the headstrong ship seemed intent on bearing them to their deaths.

Every time Brashen began to trust Paragon, he dashed his hopes again.

He defied both rudder and orders, arrowing after the fleeing Jamaillian ship.

The white serpent leapt and dove in their bow-wave like a dolphin.

On the foredeck, Mother leaned on the railing as if she could push the ship to go faster.

Amber stood straight and tall, the wind whipping her hair.

Her eyes were wide as if she listened to distant music.

‘At least slow down,’ Brashen begged. ‘Let the other ships pull even with us. We don’t need to face the whole Jamaillian fleet alone.’

But Paragon rushed blindly ahead. Brashen surmised that somehow the white serpent guided him. ‘I can’t delay. They’ll kill him, Brashen. They might be killing him right now. He must not die without me.’

That had an ominous tone. Brashen suddenly felt a light touch on his wrist. He glanced down to find Kennit’s mother standing beside him.

Her pale eyes locked with his dark ones and spoke all the words her tongue could no longer say.

The eloquence of that appeal could not be refused.

Brashen shook his head, not at her but at his own foolishness.

‘Go then!’ he suddenly shouted at the ship.

‘Fling yourself forwards blindly. Satisfy whatever madness drives you once and for all.’

‘As I must!’ Paragon flung back at him.

‘As must we all,’ Amber agreed quietly.

Brashen rounded on her, glad of a new target. ‘I suppose this is the destiny you bespoke,’ he challenged Amber in frustration.

She gave him an ethereal smile. ‘Oh, yes indeed,’ she promised him. ‘And not just Paragon’s. Mine. And yours.’ She flung an arm wide. ‘And all the world’s.’

Kennit had never been in a worse place. Crutchless, weaponless, he sat on the deck while working sailors moved matter-of-factly past him.

The few men who had boarded with him were bloody corpses.

Pointless to take satisfaction in the Jamaillians they had taken with them.

The Satrap was a crumpled heap behind him.

He was uninjured but swooned. Kennit himself was battered, but as yet unbloodied.

He sat on the open deck near the house of the ship.

He had to look up at his guards. He refused to do so.

He’d had enough of their sneering faces and mocking grins.

They’d taken much pleasure in snatching his crutch away and letting him fall.

His ribs ached from their boots. The sudden change in his fortunes dazed him as much as his injuries.

Where had his good luck vanished? How could this have happened to him, King Kennit of the Pirate Isles?

But a moment ago, he’d held the Satrap of all Jamaillia captive and had the signed treaty that recognized him as King of the Pirate Isles.

He had felt his destiny, had briefly touched it.

Now this. He had not been so helpless and defeated since he was a boy.

He pushed the thought aside. None of this would have happened if Wintrow and Etta had followed him, as they should have.

Their courage and faith in his luck should have matched his own.

He’d tell them so when they rescued him.

Behind him, he felt the Satrap stirring from his dead faint. He moaned faintly. Kennit elbowed him unobtrusively. ‘Quiet,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Sit up. Try to look competent. The more weakness you admit, the more they’ll hurt you. I need you in one piece.’

The Lord High Satrap of all Jamaillia sat up, sniffled and looked fearfully around.

On the deck, men thundered past them, intent on wringing yet more speed out of the ship.

Two men guarded them, one with a long knife, the other with a nasty short club.

Kennit’s left arm was near numb from his last encounter with it.

‘I am lost. All is lost.’ The Satrap rocked himself.

‘Stop it!’ Kennit hissed. In a low voice he continued, ‘While you whine and moan, you are not thinking. Look around us. Now, more than ever, you must be the Satrap of all Jamaillia. Look like a king if you wish to be treated as one. Sit up. Be alert and outraged. Behave as if you have the power to kill them all.’

Kennit himself had already followed his own advice.

If the Jamaillians had taken the Satrap to be rid of him, he reasoned, they would have killed him outright.

That they both still lived meant that the Satrap had some living value to them.

And if he did, and if the Satrap felt some small measure of gratitude to Kennit, perhaps he might preserve the pirate’s life as well.

Kennit gathered strength into his voice.

He poured conviction into his whisper. ‘They shall not emerge unscathed from this treatment of us. Even now, my ships pursue us. Look at our captors, and think only of how you will kill them.’

‘Slowly,’ the Satrap said in a voice that still shook slightly.

‘Slowly they will die,’ he said more firmly, ‘with much time to regret their stupidity.’ He managed to sit up.

He wrapped the scarlet cloak more closely about himself and glared at their guards.

Anger, Kennit reflected, suited him. It drove the fear and childishness from his face.

‘My own nobles turned on me. They will pay for their treason. They, and their families. I will tear down their mansions, I will cut their forests, I will burn their fields. To the tenth generation, they will suffer for this. I know their names.’

A guard had overheard him. He gave the Satrap a disdainful shove with his foot.

‘Shut up. You’ll be dead before the day is out.

I heard them say. They just want to do it where they all can witness it.

Binding by blood, they call it.’ He grinned, showing a sailor’s teeth.

‘You, too, “King” Kennit. Maybe they’ll let me do it.

I lost two shipmates to them damn serpents of yours. ’

‘KENNIT!’

The roar was the voice of the wind itself, the cry of an outraged god.

The taunting guard spun around to look aft.

A terrible shiver ran over Kennit. He did not have to look.

It was the voice of his dead ship, calling him to join it.

He struggled to stand, but without his crutch, it was hard.

‘Help me up!’ he commanded the Satrap. At any other time the royal youth would probably have disdained such a command, but the sound of the pirate’s name still lingered in everyone’s ears.

He stood quickly and extended a hand to the pirate.

Even the men on deck had slowed in their appointed tasks to look back.

A look of horror dawned on some faces. Kennit hauled himself to a standing position by the Satrap’s slender shoulder and stared wildly about for the ghost ship.

He found it, coming up swift on their starboard.

Impossibly, it was Paragon, transfigured in death to a youth.

A ghostly white serpent gambolled before the ship.

More swift than the wind, unnaturally fleet, the liveship drew alongside.

Completing the nightmare, his mother stood on the foredeck, her white hair streaming in the wind.

She saw him. She reached a beseeching hand towards him.

A golden goddess stood beside her, and a dead man commanded the crew.

Kennit’s tongue clove for an instant to the roof of his mouth.

The ghosts of his past came on, impossibly swift, drawing abreast of the Jamaillian ship and then veering towards it.

‘Kennit!’ the voice thundered again. ‘I come for you!’ Paragon put cold fury in his voice.

‘Yield Kennit to me! I command it! He is mine!’

‘Yield!’ Vivacia’s voice cracked the sky, coming from the port side of the ship. Kennit’s view of her was blocked, but he knew she was close. His heart lifted painfully in his chest. She could save him. ‘Yield, Jamaillian ship, or we take you to the bottom!’

The Jamaillian ship had nowhere to go. Despite her master’s frantic commands to spill wind from her sails, he could not slow her fast enough.

The Paragon cut recklessly towards her bow.

The Jamaillian ship veered, but it was not enough.

With a terrible splintering sound followed by the groans of stressed timbers, she caromed at an angle against Paragon.

His wizardwood absorbed her impact, but splinters flew from the Jamaillian ship.

The Jamaillian ship slewed around, all control lost. Overhead, canvas flapped wildly.

Suddenly, there was another grinding impact as the Vivacia pressed up against her other side.

It was a reckless manoeuvre, one that could take all three ships down.

The halted momentum of the ships swung them all in a slowly turning circle.

Sailors on every deck roared in dismay. Overhead, rigging threatened to tangle.

To either side, the Marietta and the Motley swept past, to hold off approaching Jamaillian vessels.

The deck under Kennit was still shuddering from the impacts when grapples from both liveships seized onto it.

Boarders from both sides leapt over the railings.

The clash of fighting rose around them, supplemented with the wild shouts of the liveships themselves.

Even the serpent added his trumpeting. Their captors were suddenly intent on defending their own lives.