Kono pulled the sheet with all his prodigious weight and the sail went slack. Hepthys gasped at the hard thwack when the wind filled it, jolting the little canoe until it nearly tipped over. Hepthys tried to extend her wings for balance, yelping when she once again felt the unpleasant loose sensation in her joints and was thrown against the side of the boat. She tried to dig her fingers into the wood for some kind of purchase, but there was none. It was the feel of flight with none of the control, none of the freedom.

  Kono, though, looked like every young girl the first time they tried their newly-grafted wings. His face was alight with joy, but tempered with the knitted brow of concentration. His mouth was somewhere between a grin and a grimace as he harnessed the power of nature with his basic technology. Though their predicament was serious, the primal bliss of the moment shone from him like the sun.

  Hepthys looked over her shoulder, past her useless wing, to the pursuing vessels. Her eyes, enhanced by the same alchemists who attached her wings, could pick out the grain of the wood, the weave of the sails. The skiffs appeared to be two outriggers with a flat wooden deck built between them. Ropes tied the entire thing together, and more grappling hooks, tipped in bronze, were coiled near the edges. Each boat was larger than Kono’s little craft, barely big enough as it was for two. All five of the men on each may have been smaller than Kono, but they were armed with axes and daggers, glinting bronze in the sunlight.

  These were the kinds of people Hepthys was warned about during the lectures on avoiding Ash Worlds. These were the bloodthirsty savages intent on doing unspeakable things to civilized folk.

  Hepthys turned to Kono, to extort him to go faster, but the big man’s attention was fully on the task at hand.

  The boat tipped back, the outrigger splashing against the swells. Now Kono was at a straightaway, guiding the boat south, leaving the massive warjunk on the north side of the island. As the trees eclipsed it, Hepthys watched her own ship, the golden hawk, disappear from sight. A hand closed over her heart. Salvation, a way off this blue rock, snatched away.

  The crack was deafening, and Hepthys found herself hunkering down further into the boat. She trusted her instincts. She had to in order to graduate Academy. Training for the Kheremun required nothing less.

  She saw a man in one boat whipping a sling over his head, while a man in the other boat slipped a rock into a sling and started it spinning. She picked out the tracery of scars on each man’s face, a map of a violent story she would never know.

  “Kono, look out!” she cried out as the other man let his sling go. The rock splashed into the water not far from the boat itself. Not far enough.

  “Gods’ blessing,” Kono muttered, and he said it like a curse. Hepthys had already noted his antipathy for the gods. She wondered if that was the reason why he was out alone on the island.

  Kono turned the boat even more brutally, steering it closer to the whitecaps hemming the island.

  “What are you doing?” Hepthys demanded, doing her best to keep from being thrown out of the thrashing craft.

  “This mess with their aim,” Kono said. “Don’t worry. We much too small to scrape the reef. I think.”

  “You think?” she shouted back, but it was drowned in the crash of waves.

  She looked back at the pursuers, and saw that Kono was right. As the boats followed, Hepthys saw that Kono was in fact right; both slingers fell back onto the deck to grip the ropes tied there. They shouted to each other, the motley man with the most elaborate costume—he wore a wide, circular hat tied under his chin—pointing emphatically out to sea. The other boat obeyed, the men in the back sticking oars into the water, the men in the front moving the sail to spill a bit of the wind from it. That boat left the shallows, out of sling range, but keeping pace in the comparatively calmer waters of the deep. Hepthys didn’t know much about sea combat, but she could see what they were doing: they were trapping Kono against the island.

  Kono saw it too, or else he was cursing about something else.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We gotta land,” he shouted back.

  The turn into the shallows had given them distance from their pursuers, but there was no way they could get to the island unnoticed. It was unconscionably small to Hepthys’s eyes. Small enough to walk its length in a few hours, and even thinner besides. The only thing that gave her hope was the lush and to apparently impenetrable jungle in the middle of it. A wall of emerald green, thick enough to hide them—perhaps. She had never seen so many plants in one place before.

  Kono flipped the boat into a brutal turn. Hepthys was ready this time, or as ready as she could have been. She clutched the sides of the vessel. At that moment, as though Kono had planned it, a wave hit them from behind. The boat leapt into the air, leaving Hepthys’s stomach in the churning waters below. Instead of capsizing, the wave pushed them to the white sands of shore.

  Hepthys could only hold on, doing her best not to twitch her grievously-injured wing struts. A reflex; her body wanted to fly out of there. Her muscles didn’t know that she couldn’t. The wave exhausted itself before it hit the shore. Kono hopped out, the water rushing around his midsection.

  “Get out!” he shouted.

  The closer boat was turning into shore, but they didn’t have the maneuverability or Kono’s expertise to be as swift.

  “I can’t swim,” she protested.

  “What?”

  She repeated herself. The weakness in her voice, the fear, felt alien.

  The Kheremun were unafraid.

  “How?”

  “We don’t have water like this on my world!” she blurted, only later realizing what she had said.

  Kono either missed it or didn’t react, instead picking her up under her armpits and lifting her to his shoulders. His hands felt impossibly strong, but he was gentle, and they never wandered. Hepthys knew she should feel some anxiety—not fear, never of an Ash Worlder—at his touch, but she didn’t let it rule her. Kono then hauled out both sacks, struck the sail, and pushed the front of the canoe under the waves.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Sinkin' ’her! I don’t do it, they do it for me. My way mean I can pull her back out.”

  The boat went under quickly. Hepthys watched as the water poured into the central dugout. When it hit the bucket of fish, the little creatures darted out, confused and thrilled by their sudden freedom. Kono jogged through the surf toward the island while behind them, over the crashing waves, she heard the shouts of the pursuers. Shortly afterwards, pockets of first water, then sand, sprung up around them as the slinger started his work.

  As Kono emerged onto shore, he plucked Hepthys from his shoulders and set her on the sand. She glanced backward at the boats. The closer of the two was in the shallows, some of the men already in the water and hauling it to the shore with ropes. The other was just hitting the surf.

  “Into the trees!” Kono shouted.

  Hepthys didn’t have to clarify. There was nowhere else to go. Kono was far less graceful on dry land than he was on his boat. Now his steps were lumbering, his weight and girth working against him. She followed as he plowed onto a game trail leading into the thicket.

  The leaves effectively blocked most of the sun, and as they ran, the cool dark enfolded them. The air was sweet with the scent of fruit and trees. The men shouted and called from the shore, and deep in the trees animals made noises as well—trills, warbles, and even snatches of song. Hepthys imagined birds, but she knew there was nothing of the sort on this world. Not if the natives had never seen a wing.

  The foliage was thick, battering both of them as they moved deeper into the jungle. The trail twisted and turned beneath their feet, and in only a few steps, the beach behind them was entirely swallowed by a wall of emerald leaves. The voices of the pirates carried up the shore, their harsh accents and harsher words putting wings to her feet. They spoke the same language she did, albeit a debased form. She wondered what they all would think, from Kono to the pirates, to know their tongue was spread through the stars.

  She wished she’d paid more attention in her classes on Ash Worlds. Wished there’d been more to say about them. They were backwaters, made to be ignored. The only rule a good Atumite woman needed was to stay off them. That didn’t account for emergency crash landings, though. She once again cursed the authors of her crash, still out there, maybe even still hunting her. One enemy at a time.

  The pirates had landed. They would be coming into the jungle soon.

  “What now?” she hissed. The island wasn’t that wide. Running through the jungle would only put them on the opposite beach, right in front of the warjunk.

  “We hide.” Kono was looking back and forth along the path. The jungle was so thick that diverting from this tiny game trail would require climbing over and around tree trunks, lush greenery, and through a carpet of wet, fallen leaves.

  The trees didn’t even grow straight up and down here, Hepthys noted with annoyance. Most of them, sure. But some ran horizontally, weaving through others, as though creating a wooden cage, keeping intruders out.

  “Where?” Hepthys demanded.

  Kono nodded. “There.”

  She saw nothing. Nothing special, anyway. More of these damnable plants. All she could see was a place where her wings would be pawed at by trees and bushes and vines, each time giving her the awful sensation that they weren’t truly a part of her. She longed to fly. It would have been so much easier just to go aloft.

  Kono plunged in, and she stayed in his wake, using his bulk to shield her from the worst of the greenery. It was unpleasant, though only occasionally actively painful. Kono sported red marks across his chest and arms, evidence of what he was protecting her from.

  The voices of the pirates were coming closer. She thought she could see them through the trees. Flashes of earth-tones, the occasional glint of metal. They wouldn’t have to look very far. They’d seen which trail Hepthys and Kono had taken, and now they were hung up in the maze of branches and leaves. Hepthys bit back a rebuke for the big Ash Worlder. She had to trust him. Had to think he knew what he was doing.

  “Here,” Kono said.

  “Here what?”

  “Here” was the base of a large tree. The roots erupted from the ground, forming a thick base covered in a latticework of living vines. Then Kono grabbed one corner and lifted. It came away like a net, revealing a hollow by the trunk. The soil was wet and nearly black down there, the whole place redolent with the aroma of life.

  “Get in!” Kono said.

  Hepthys dropped to her hands and knees and crawled in. Her wing ran up against the edge of the vines and she winced at the awful sensation. Then she was entirely inside, pressing her back against the hard wood of the root. Kono followed, throwing the vines over the other root, where they settled into their old positions.

  Something moved through the treetops above them, and Hepthys only caught a glimpse. It looked like a river of a rainbow between the vines and leaves. Hepthys caught her breath. This world was undeniable in its beauty, no matter what dangers it held.

  The alcove they’d found was big enough for the both of them, but only barely. Hepthys and Kono were shoulder-to-shoulder in there, both hugging their knees to their chests. Hepthys had her hands clasped over her greaves, the alchemist’s gold smooth and cool even in the heat.

  The heat was stifling. Out among the cool breeze, the punishing sun could be ignored. Here, it was like an oven. The leaves trapped the simmering heat and Hepthys found herself cooking. Atum-Ra was hot, but the heat was dry. Everything was when you lived above the clouds.

  The voices of the pirates drew closer.

  “Sharp eyes, sharp blades,” hissed one of them.

  “Somethin’ off with the girl,” countered a petulant voice.

  “She’ll get us a good price,” growled a third.

  “Somethin’ off with her back. Deformed girls don’t pay much.”

  “Too small for a tribal, too. ‘Less she’s a child.”

  “Children fetch good coin.”

  “Not deformed children,” said the petulant one.

  “Shut up, the pair of you. Warchief says we get ‘em, we get ‘em. We don’t bellyache, nor gainsay.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  The grumbling died off.

  The trail wasn’t far from their hiding spot, through a screen of foliage. When she and Kono had climbed through it, it had felt impossibly thick, an impenetrable wall of green. Now it was little more than a few branches and a couple leaves. Had they made such an obvious trail? Or was this her mind playing tricks?

  Hepthys saw the first of the men. His deep golden skin was weather-beaten, the flesh around his cheeks raw and wind-scarred. He wore a patchy mustache and beard, a collection of wooden beads hanging from a few short braids at his chin. A copper ring glimmered from his nose. A cloth over his head corralled his long black hair, and a stained tunic, a dark vest, and a pair of breeches with a leather belt. He clutched a bronze-headed hatchet in one hand.

  The men who followed were different, but they were of a type. All wearing patched and repaired cloth outfits, all carrying bronze weapons. There were no swords, only daggers, hatchets, and sickles. They were not big men, though larger than her, and numbering ten, there were more than enough. Hepthys imagined her staff, locked away in the ship. With that, she would be able to defeat even ten of them. Twenty of them. Thirty.

  Her mother had handed her that staff, her father looking on proudly, right before Hepthys had left. Right before her Meskhenet had begun, her adulthood rite.

  “Hepthys, my only daughter, pride of my life, I have waited sixteen years for this moment.” That was when she had produced the staff. Forged from alchemist’s gold and topped with the stylized head of a hawk, Hepthys had coveted it since she was old enough to want anything. “This was my staff, and it took me through my own Meskhenet. It has served me in battle and saved my life countless times. Now I give it to you.”

  Hepthys had taken it with awe. A delicious tremor worked its way through her body, starting at the tips of her fingers all the way to her wings. She didn’t know if the shiver started in her body or if it had been created by the staff, recognizing that it had found a new mistress to serve. She remembered thinking that, with this weapon, there was no way she would ever fail.

  That was before she’d caught the Chitter Harvester on her oculo. These men were of a kind with those creatures. They were both pirates. Both scavengers. Both parasites.

  The staff was in the ship, and the ship was with the warchief. And Hepthys was hiding in a root from men who would look on what her technology could do and think magic. At least they couldn’t get into her ship. Made of alchemist’s gold, there was nothing on this world—save perhaps for magic—that could do anything to it. The locks wouldn’t open for anyone but her. They had found a very large, very heavy paperweight. They’re probably going to worship it like an idol, she scoffed in her mind.

  The pirates moved past, scanning the trail in front of them and the jungle around them as they did. As the last one disappeared up the trail, only his voice filtering back, Hepthys moved to get up, but Kono clamped a hand over her. The hand was so big it went around her entire upper arm, from elbow to pit. She met his eyes and he shook his head.

  “Why don’t you use your magic?” she whispered.

  He shook his head more emphatically.

  “Why not?” She had known enough sorcerers, from the Pharaoh’s own alchemists to the hydromancers of Tethys and many others, to know magic wasn’t a simple on and off switch. The rules were often more poetic than rational, but there were rules.

  “Too much.”

  Hepthys didn’t ask for elaboration. This was neither the time nor the place, with both of them speaking in breathless whispers that barely registered into the audible. She simply nodded, accepting Kono’s reasons as valid. If his magic wasn’t a resource she could depend on, what else was there?

  The first option was negotiation. She went over what the pirates had said. They were slavers. Slavers couldn’t be talked to. They wouldn’t see her or Kono as human, and they would not speak to a nonhuman.

  Fight, then. Ten against two. She was unarmed and Kono was reluctant to use his magic. Between Kono’s size and her skill, she thought they could take maybe five pirates. Seven if she got lucky. The obnoxious part was that the pirates were moving as a group. She couldn’t even pick them off one or two at a time.

  Running? They had passed by, and so she and Kono had a clear path back to the boats. Kono’s was sunk, and though she had no real idea of how long it would take to get it out of the water, she assumed the answer was “too long.” There would be the other two boats left by the pirates. They could, perhaps steal one of those. She brightened, but she needed the opinion of the only mariner she knew.

  “Their boats are by the shore. We could take one?”

  He shook his head. “Too slow, especially with only me running it.”

  “I could help.”

  “You gotta learn first.”

  Hepthys sank. Then it would be the last option, her least favorite of all of them: hide. It robbed her of the initiative, and if there was one thing they hammered home in every lesson in Academy it was never to give up the initiative. The instructors had never thought of this situation. They would have advised her to use her power of flight, use the staff. Overawe the Ash Worlders. Make them believe she was some kind of goddess. She wondered what the instructors would say if they knew her sorry state: no ship, no wings, no weapons.

  They’d probably say nothing like that would ever happen to a Kheremun. The unspoken part would be that it never would have happened to a Kheremun like her mother.

  So Hepthys waited. Images of her mother dashing these pirates to pieces danced through her mind. At first it was with the radiant waves from the staff. Then it was without the staff, using her unparalleled unarmed combat skills. Carving through these Ash Worlders like a storm.

  Her daughter, though, had to hide in the roots of a tree, hoping another Ash Worlder would keep her safe. Not just another Ash Worlder. A man.

  Hepthys shook her head. This was unseemly. Kono had already shown himself to be of fine character, and willing to face the intrinsic challenges of his gender. She couldn’t sink to recrimination here.

  Before long, the pirates came back through.

  “...missed them.”

  “How?” demanded the petulant one. “There aren’t any other trails.”

  “There have to be. They ain’t on the beach, ain’t back here. They somewhere.”

  “Maybe he used that tribal magic? Take ‘em elsewhere?”

  “Nah, you know it when one of the tribals tries it. Sky fallin’, ocean risin’. You know.”

  Hepthys could hear the pirates shudder.

  “How do the tribals have all that power an’ they never come to us?”

  “Tribals is lazy. Stupid. Just want to be out in the sun, do no work. You take ‘em to the nations? Become like different people. Almost...civilized.”

  “Like Makani.”

  “Aye, our quartermaster is a fine example. I’d not take orders from a tribal, less a slave, but her words are the warchief’s. As Anhchoi thinks, Makani does.”

  “What are we doin’ back here? Checked this whole stretch before.”

  “Not everywhere. Lot of hihia trees, you see ‘em? Plenty of places to hide.”

  The footsteps drew closer, coming up the game trail. Hepthys saw first one pirate, then two, three, and the rest, emerging from the foliage. Swatches of dappled sunlight glittered off their bronze blades. Their shoulders were slumped in fatigue, but their eyes were still bright, darting this way and that.

  “Hihia trees? Where?” The petulant one asked. Hepthys put a face to the voice, and he was more or less what she expected: a smaller man with a sad face and the nervous twitching of the chronically bullied.

  “There, there, there,” said the pirate, pointing into the jungle. “And there,” he said, his finger indicating the one where she and Kono presently hid.

  The other pirates nodded. Hepthys watched their hands tighten for a moment on their weapons. The search had been long and exhausting, but these men were not giving up. Not when their quarry was so close. And they knew it. Hepthys could see it on their faces. It was the relief of the task almost being finished as well as the excited flush of being about to join battle. Even the little petulant one had the look.

  “That one first,” said the leader, pointing to a tree on the other side of the path.

  Hepthys barely wanted to turn to Kono, for fear that any movement at all would catch the pirates’ eyes. The slightest sound would prick their ears. But they needed a new plan. Something else. If only an agreement to attack as one when their hiding spot was inevitably uncovered.

  The group moved out of her vision, but she could hear them clearly. These men went nowhere quietly.

  “Not here!”

  “Check amongst the roots and in the boughs, you lazy salt.”

  “Checked. Not hide nor hair.”

  “Move on. The next one.”

  In the stifling heat of her hiding spot, Hepthys felt an icy fist close over her heart with the pirate’s order. It released her when she saw where the pirate indicated. Another tree like the one she was hiding in—closer. They would find her soon.

  This time they remained in her eyeline. The pirates poked around the cage of roots at the tree’s base, moving aside mats of vines. They were not disciplined in the approach, but they were ready enough. They couldn’t miss Hepthys and Kono with their tactics. She thought perhaps she might get the first in a rush. Might get his weapon. Then what? Nine more, right behind the first.

  The trees were too dense to flee through. Her wings too bulky. The mere thought of the branches and leaves gripping her injured wings was enough to turn her stomach.

  There was nothing else they could do. Hiding was no longer an option. They should have run earlier, but now, now the pirates were too close.

  “Not here either.”

  “That one next.”

  The icy fist came again, and once again released as the pirates went to a different tree. Relief was over. There were no other trees to go to. When Hepthys and Kono weren’t found there, the pirates would be coming.

  The cold fingers spreading from her heart, now tracing their way up her spine, between the muscles where her wings attached, to the nape of her neck. She tried to remember her drills in Academy. Fighting an armed opponent while unarmed. They were blanks. She should have paid more attention!

  “Nor here.”

  “Over there.”

  They were coming.

  Leaves crackled under their feet. Hepthys held her breath as the pirates approached. She felt like her eyes were magnets. A pirate would meet her gaze, and find her and Kono crouching in this pathetic hiding spot. Two kids playing at adulthood.

  One pirate peered up into the branches while the others fanned out. Hepthys picked the closest one. He was armed with a sickle, the curved blade shining bronze. She tried to imagine herself taking it from him, hitting him where it hurt, and then going after the others. Visualization was a key to victory. She remembered that at least.

  Imagination failed her. There were too many of them. In her mind they were canny combatants, despite the limitations of their gender. They were using weapons they knew. Ready for any trick she could try to pull. And she was Academy-taught. Her knowledge came from the classroom. Theirs came from whatever brutal existence they forged on the waves of a savage world. She had no chance.

  She thought the thump was a single heartbeat at first. A sign her body was going haywire. Her heart giving a single knock on her ribcage. Informing her that, thank you very much, it was time to give up. The pirates didn’t look down at her; they looked up, squinting into the light coming in through the trees.

  “What’s that?”

  "Flare from the ship.”

  “We’re bein’ called back?”

  “What do we tell the warchief?”

  “The truth. The kids hid from us, but they ain’t gonna be trouble. We want ‘em, we can always come back. He don’t like bein’ kept waitin’. Move out!”

  The pirates turned and picked their way carefully to the game trail, and then they were gone.

  Hepthys finally exhaled. When she unfroze, she threw off the vines.

  “Wait,” Kono whispered, touching her arm.

  She shook his hand away. “They’re leaving.”

  “They could come back.”

  “Even better reason to move. We’re not staying in the place they were about to check.”

  She stood up, her muscles uncoiling after being forcibly locked during hiding. Her sweat drank in the slight breeze coming through. She breathed easily for the first time since she had gone into the hiding place. She opened herself up to the jungle. She heard the crash of waves. The whisper of the wind. The cries of strange animals. Then, off near the beach, the men. They were leaving.

  “Come on,” she snapped. Hiding had worn on her nerves, and she wasn’t mad at Kono. She was mad at herself for being caught up in such a cowardly and ultimately futile “plan.”

  Hepthys followed the game trail up to the edge of the trees. She saw the pirates making their way along the shore, some pulling their boats, one man on each steering with oars. They were heading for a relatively calm section of beach, where a sandbar sheltered the shore from the pounding waves. Kono came up next to her. Both of them watched the pirates board their simple vessels, row out beyond the waves and set sail, rounding the side of the island.

  Kono stepped out onto the beach. “Now we go,” he said.

  Hepthys watched Kono walk to the edge of the water. It was lower now, the waves not reaching the heights of the beach they had before. Now when Kono stepped onto the damp sands, his huge feet left shining prints that faded after a few moments. The big man shut his eyes and began to move his body in slow, ritualized gestures. It looked to Hepthys almost like something the older warriors would do in the mornings, exercises to limber themselves up and focus their minds. Kono’s breath came in evenly, his nostrils flaring with intake, then letting it out on the winds of words. These words were like none Hepthys recognized. They were dark, slithering syllables, hissing blackly about her. Even in the warm sun, they made her shiver.

  Kono pushed his arms out, brought them in, curled his fingers, and lifted. Muscles writhed beneath his skin. His brows knit. And then, subtly at first, but growing stronger, his tattoos began to glow.

  Hepthys sucked in a breath. Running over and through the intricate geometry over his left upper arm and shoulder was a ghostly blue illumination. The light moved like sunlight dancing over the waves. Hepthys watched the young sorcerer work his spell with something approaching awe. There were those girls who went to the other Academies, to learn alchemy—beyond the basic knowledge all Atumites learned in primary school—or even the traditions of the other Fire Worlds. Hepthys never quite trusted it. Magic was capricious. Magic couldn’t be relied upon.

  Except here. There was nothing else to rely upon. If she had to design the worst possible ally for herself, a male Ash World sorcerer wouldn’t have been far off the mark, yet Kono had proven to be largely a decent companion. She kept waiting for the next gust to blow.

  The waves crashed into the shore, but a gap formed in them lengthwise, growing narrower as it reached to Kono’s feet, like a furrow plowed in the surface of the water. As Kono continued his ministrations, it deepened and widened. His motions mimicked the change, his hands closing together, then pushing apart. The waves crashed around it, unable to fill this sudden hole in the sea. The tattoo pulsed, the glow starting in the middle and moving outward, echoing the widening tide.

  The boat was revealed, bit by bit. As the sides came up out of the surf, the water actually leapt out of the bottom to join the churning walls of surf.

  Kono’s movements shifted. No longer was he pushing the water to the sides. Now he expelled the words on a single, harsh breath. A wave flowed inward, picking up the boat. Hepthys imagined it lifting the craft and gently depositing it at Kono’s feet, her mind supplying the end of this spell.

  Instead, the world shook. Off the coast, a circle of the water turned black. The island tipped to the side, as though something had grabbed the edge to shake all those on its surface off. Hepthys struggled to maintain her balance. Her wings tried to correct for her, but the awful loose sensation came with the attempt, and she collapsed to the ground, wanting to cradle the hurt but being unable to do so.

  Kono’s eyes snapped open, and he went quiet, his arms out, looking around with his peripheral vision, as though something were coming up behind him and he was too scared to move.

  “Okay. I stop now,” he muttered.

  “What was that?” Hepthys asked, getting up.

  “The gods, they like to wake up.”

  “Wake up?”

  He nodded, the stricken expression on his face implying he didn’t want to elaborate.

  “We have the boat,” she said.

  They did. It was out of the water, tossed out of it, where it landed on its side. It reminded Hepthys of a toy tossed from a bathtub by an angry child.

  “Yeah. We do, we do.” Kono was still looking at the water, waiting for something to come of it.

  “Kono, we need to get the boat in the water!”

  He blinked, turning to Hepthys, then nodding. “Yeah, you right. We gotta get back to Kamo’loa. Warn ‘em.”

  “What? No. We need to follow the warjunk. They have my ship!”

  “We gotta warjunk in our waters, sky-girl! The tribe gotta know! Gotta tell all the others! We make sure every tribe knows the nation is comin’ down to raid.”

  “What about my ship?”

  Kono shook his head. “Your ship, it’s gone. Sorry. We can make you a boat. A good boat. It’ll get you home.”

  Hepthys wanted to scream. Stupid primitive making a promise he didn’t understand. “No boat you make could possibly get me home.”

  Kono shrugged. “I’m sorry. I gotta do this, the one time. They send me out here for not listenin’! Now I know what I gotta do.”

  He started off down the shore, righting the boat when he got there, then tipping it over once again, getting most of the water from the bottom. There was still some sloshing around in there, but it was barely the depth of her knuckle. Kono lifted up the mast and locked it in place with a wooden peg.

  “Have to use the oar ‘til the sheet’s dry,” he muttered.

  Hepthys stared at the obstinate Ash Worlder before finding her argument. “We need to follow them.”

  “We can’t get your ship back!”

  “We need to follow! It’s a big ocean. Isn’t it more important to your people to get the whole story? Know where the ship is going, know how many of those pirates are there. That’s much more valuable.”

  Kono stopped what he was doing. Finally, he nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, you right.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now let’s go.”

  All she had to do was get close enough to her ship. Then she could get out of here. Back to her quest, away from this mad world of hateful gods and bloodthirsty slavers.