“Are your worries satisfied now?” She kept her voice sweet as she wiped her hand on her trousers. “Am I what my mother wished for?”


    She didn’t really care. Captain Pascal had watched the scene from up on his captain’s perch and was now bellowing orders for the sailors to get back to work. The anchor was up, the sails down and billowing in the evening wind. The Wild Summer lurched forward, dipped to the side and began its ponderous turn away from shore.


    Catharina turned away from the port and stepped over Henrigh’s mess. She joined the captain up on his dais and looked to the horizon.


    “Clear skies and a fair wind at our back,” he said. “Good omens for this journey. Can’t say the same about blood on my deck.”


    “Have your men help the steward off the deck, please. He seems to have fallen and can’t get up.”


    He nodded and a look sent his first mate scrambling down the stairs, calling for others to help him carry Henrigh back to his quarters.


    “My escorts?” she asked, looking to the other two ships breaking anchor with them and following at a distance.


    “In hand. When?”


    “Tonight. When the moons are highest.”


    “Not a moment wasted, then. My men and I are at your service, Lady Catharina.”


    “Simply Catharina will do fine, Captain. Expect a signal from me.”


    Shadows lengthened as Neptas dipped beyond the horizon. Men, weary from their too-short shore leave, changed shifts and lit lamps, their orders to sail day and night even at skeleton strength.


    Henrigh’s door opened with a soft, barely-audible click. It only took a spark of power to melt the mechanism inside and force it unlocked. Catharina let herself into the old man’s cabin and did not bother closing the door again.


    He slept nearly naked on his cot, snoring loudly, a reading lamp still lit by his bedside. A stupid thing aboard a ship, but one she did not begrudge him. The dark held many things for a man like Henrigh to fear. There were precautions laid across the room, yes. Paltry things, knick-knack cantrip enchantments that were barely worth the illum trapped in them, and more mundane traps embedded in floor and walls. It must have taken him the better part of an afternoon just to set them all once he’d regained his senses. Or maybe that was simply how little he trusted the captain and his men.


    Henrigh had lived a long life by the standard of one not attuned to illum. He’d done so by being paranoid and prepared for every knife in the dark that had ever come at him. But she took away his petty toys with a flick of her finger, scoured the walls and floor with a push of power, and rendered him defenceless.


    She thought she would hate him if she ever saw him again. A small part of her did. Most of her hadn’t expected him to still live. His presence brought with it memories that she did not relish. Her mother’s beatings and derision. The drunken laughter of her brothers and the doddering, incomprehensible mess of her father’s declining sanity. And the lies, always the lies and poisoned whispers to any who would listen.


    Standing there, watching him, she found her hatred had distilled into a kind of pity. He was not the canker at Aztroa Magnor’s heart, merely an old man that should have outlived his usefulness long ago.


    His eyes flew open when she sat by the side of his cot. Her glass-bladed knife, the first of her tools, was at his throat before he got to reach for any of his closer, better hidden precautions. Instead, she took his hand into hers and squeezed gently.


    “Terribly sorry to bother you at this hour, master steward.” She smiled warmly at him. Moonlight streamed into the cabin by a porthole and her blade glittered in hand. “But I have some questions that have troubled me for a long time. I hope you understand.”


    The tip of the knife pricked skin and a bead of blood flowed down the edge to stain the pommel guard.


    “Lady?” he breathed out, his voice creaking after what she’d done to him. “What is this?”


    “Who leads the house now?” she asked, keeping her voice low and soft.


    “Your father, lady. You know that.”


    A lie. Her father had been in no fit state to lead even before she left for Nen. More than anything, it surprised her that he hadn’t yet drunk himself into an icy grave. Captain Pascal had only written of the rumours he’d heard in ports about what happened in her far-off home.


    She reached out and felt the lies bubbling underneath the surface of his thoughts. This time he recoiled from the touch, pushed back against the wall of his cot, his eyes widening in fear of her. Good.


    She was strong and well-trained, but she couldn’t read a mind the way an aelir’matar could. The skill took lifetimes to master and she had other, more urgent work to do. It was pathetic that she needed to extract information in this brutish manner, by torture and fear, but she couldn’t allow herself more respite between duties.


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    Henrigh was terrified of her. Good. Pity that he hadn’t paid more attention to her mother while licking her boots, or he would’ve known this was coming. It was from her that Catharina had learned how punishment should be doled out, how to give the impression of finality and dull defences for a real blow.


    She snuffed out a line of thought. Something far from the surface, unlikely to affect his answers to her. It went dark and his eyes widened in realisation.


    “No,” he begged. “Please, don’t.”


    “Among the aelir,” she spoke softly, squeezing his hand, “it is common belief that a shock applied to the head in a particular way will free one of all their ills.”


    She tugged on a furious line of thought. Not enough to sever it, just to make it thrum. It sent him twitching.


    “Who leads the house, master steward?”


    This time it was sheer terror that bubbled out of him.


    “Your brothers, Callamis and Dura. They’re buying off the others and trading the land to the lower nobles. Houses Var Karin and Voc Pollus are ascendant.” He spoke quickly and it was the truth now. “Soon there will be nothing left to the Voc Anghan except what they save for themselves.”


    She snuffed out another thought and the damage cascaded. What could it have been, she wondered. A treasured memory, maybe? Didn’t matter. His terror increased and she had to force his heart to calm lest it blow itself out.


    “What of my sisters?”


    “Whores, both of them. Ilaya beds with Callamis after the old fashion, and hopes for a child to secure her station. She has no idea that his grasp on Aztroa Magnor is tenuous.” He breathed faster, fervour building in his words. “The Lady has all her hopes riding on your return. You are the one she has kept free of corruption. Your skill! It must save the Voc Anghan name, bring the city back to our control and undo the damage wrought by your brothers.”


    Our control? She smiled sweetly and squeezed his hand.


    “My lady mother has high expectations of me,” she mused. “She harvests the fruits of her games and finds them bitter.”


    “Aztroa Magnor belongs to the Voc Anghan. We are the rightful inheritors of the Empire.”


    Bold, bold claim, she thought. So the family was in ruin, as she had feared. Callamis and Dura, two imbeciles set on finishing what the aelir had started generations before. The Var Karin and Voc Pollus were old rivals and had only kept in line for fear of the Voc Anghan allying with the other. Now there would be war.


    The Empire lay long dead, only its memory kept alive by fools like Henrigh and her mother. They understood so little and clung to ghosts of a past they had never really known. Aelir memory, however, ran very long.


    A flick of her wrist. A clean cut. Blood, hot and sticky, gushed from the red gash she opened in Henrigh’s throat. He tried to speak. Blood bubbled out. She held his hand as life drained out of him.


    “I have no need of you.”


    She had known her brothers would be the end of the family’s destiny. Their fortune had been wavering since she was but a girl, all their holdings rife with corruption, seeded with turncoats and bastard-born. Her father was a drunkard, her mother a shrew playing games above her station. The siblings had run amok and now she was returning to the ruin of their hubris.


    Catharina sighed and extracted her hand from the cooling grasp of the dead man. She hadn’t expected to shed blood quite so early but he was a nuisance that she couldn’t afford when there were plans to make. She cleaned the blood off her blade on his nightshirt. The sounds of a scuffle carried through the ship as she got up.


    Captain Pascal and two men waited in the corridor. She walked out and the two men walked in. They carried out the corpse between them.


    “Try and not let it bleed on the deck, boys,” the captain said as he and she ascended the steps up to the main deck.


    By moonlight more corpses were being dragged out from beneath. All were dumped unceremoniously into the Divide. Predators would be tailing the ship for weeks to come.


    “Who were they?” Catharina asked.


    “Men of the lower houses, come to escort the steward. We had them picked out since before they boarded.”


    On the other ships torches moved on deck. A similar purge was carried out.


    “How many men remain of my house?” she asked.


    “A handful. Two here.” He showed her two men with blood on their clothes and hands. They heaved a corpse over the railing and into the water. “Them, over there. On the other ships a similar number. I’ve picked all my sailors by hand ever since you wrote to me.”


    She nodded. It would do for now.


    “Call the other men here. I wish to speak to them of what is to come.”


    “As you wish, Catharina.”


    “Captain Pascal?”


    “Yes?”


    “I thank you.”


    He smiled grimly in the ghost-light of the two moons. “I serve my Lady. We’re not all blind and deaf to the world. It’s time we take a stand for our future.” He pressed a hand to his chest pocket, as if cupping something. “And for the future of our children.”


    She nodded and he went about his business. Dawn was still far off and darkness ruled across all horizons, Diolo’s lights long disappeared across the water.


    Her mother had wanted an assassin to serve her ends, whatever those were. It’s why she’d been sent across the Divide, why she’d searched for an aelir patron, and why she’d hated every single day of her training up to the first bloodletting. Then she had understood that a knife in the dark could change the fate of a whole people.


    Her knives hung heavy in their sheaths, four tools fashioned for grim work, already bloodied by the aelir’matar’s wish. Now, they served the true mission for which they’d been painstakingly forged.


    Her brothers were fools to give away Aztroa Magnor, the last city at the end of the human world. A fortress of ice, smashed once by the aelir fury, fashioned to be humanity’s tomb. Places like that held power that they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.


    A hand settled on her shoulder and a cold presence was at her back. She didn’t turn around.


    “Good start, Cat,” the weakened god whispered in her ear. “I have high hopes for your future.”