Lathe had seen all kinds of river craft come and go on the delta—barges, merchant ships, riverboats, rafts, fishing punts, and pullers—but she’d never seen anything like the Waeld’s tribal greatship. Her mouth hung open as she stood squinting up at it. The sunlight stabbed at her good eye like a hot knife, but she couldn’t look away.

  The thing was as big as Thornfield all by itself, towering over the little pirate ship she stood on like a castle over a cup. Four enormous masts clawed at the sunny sky, with smaller ones sprinkled here and there. The back end of the ship was higher than the front, and both back and front were higher than the broad expanse of the center. A great pegged wheel perched on the cliff of the topmost deck. Every inch of wood and metal was elaborately carved or fashioned and sparkled with flamboyant paint, like they’d been covered in crushed gemstones to catch the sun.

  There were folks everywhere. Men climbed ratlines or walked the crossbeams, so high up it made her dizzy to look at them. Silk-bundled women cleaned fish over the rail or mended nets or sat in circles sewing colorful canvas. Pirates with shoulders as thick as a bull’s worked the forges that studded the forecastle, while pirate gals sat nearby scribbling at wax tablets or putting things down on parchment. The air rang with hammers and rasps and shouts, and where a shout couldn’t be heard over the noise, hand signals flew.

  The Darkwind skimmed into the shadow of the greatship, swallowed to the top of her red and gold sails by the shade it cast, and giving Lathe a reprieve from the glare of the sun. The smaller ship dropped anchor, while thick ropes rained down from the deck of the beast.

  Most of the Darkwind’s crew shimmied up the ropes, hand over hand, with their legs hooked around the line. Above, pirate gals ran to the rail to meet them, but once the men made it on deck, they never hugged or jumped up and down with joy, so Lathe figured they must not be that excited to see each other.

  Soromet and two big pirates stayed behind, one hanging on either of Lathe’s arms.

  “You figure I’m gonna jump ship?” Lathe turned her left-eyed glower at the pirate gal. “Wouldn’t be very smart, seein’ as I can’t swim a lick.”

  “I do not expect a servant of the dirter king to do what is smart,” Soromet said coldly. “I expect you do to what is treacherous.”

  “Well, I ain’t doin’ neither ’til I get my test of steel.”

  Iron and wood clattered as a long chain ladder with wooden steps unrolled down the side of the hulking greatship. Soromet reached out with a hooked pole and dragged the end aboard. Two big, metal pinchers fastened onto the smaller ship’s rail with a rusty screech.

  “Climb,” Soromet said.

  The pirates let go of Lathe. She scowled and shook her arms out, then she looked at the ladder.

  It was too long; once she got over the Darkwind’s rail, she’d be climbing out onto a hanging belly of slack chain. Maybe slack enough that her weight would dip it into the water, where she could feel sharks and other bigger, badder medicine sea creatures circling.

  Fathoms down, where the water got so dark Lathe could barely see through it anymore, a single tentacle wider than the raed ship slid past forever and ever.

  But Soromet had said the test of steel was only for captains who showed great courage, so Lathe grabbed hold of the chain and started climbing.

  The ladder didn’t quite touch the water with her on it, but there was some tricky cat-footing required when her head dipped lower than her backside. Finally, the ladder’s curve started up again, and Lathe got straightened out.

  She climbed until she thought she must have reached the top, but when she looked up, she’d only made it a quarter of the way. The Culling Drop in the Closes under Siu Carinal wasn’t even that tall.

  Behind her, Soromet was climbing like this little stretch of steps wasn’t nothing. Lathe gritted her teeth and kept going.

  Her arms started to shake. Her hands burned with the cold of the chain, and her bare feet felt like they were splitting in half from standing on the narrow wood rungs. She was fixing to run out of medicine, and she was less than halfway.

  At Thornfield, she’d been taught to fight on after she ran out of blood magic, after other men would be long dead from exhaustion, until she won or died. But nobody’d thought to tell her how to do all that when her heart could barely keep beating.

  She could drink the energies off these pirates, but that would be sips and gulps compared to what was swimming around down there in the deep dark water.

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  Lathe reached out and drank the energies from the monster down below, until she felt full of power.

  If a little of something was good, a lot of something was better. Lathe kept on drinking. She drank until she was full up and busting with energies, then she drank some more. She never had to stop if she didn’t want to; every drop of medicine in the world belonged to her.

  The ladder jerked in her grasp. Down below, the ocean boiled. Somebody hollered and pointed.

  A gray-purple landmass slowly floated to the surface of the ocean, shedding water and lifting Darkwind up to beach on its slimy shore. The ladder pulled taut as the dead thing pushed the Waeld greatship back and back.

  At its center was a big round eye the size of a house, shining black in the sun.

  Lathe grinned and started climbing again. Every drop of medicine in the world. Even a sea monster’s worth.

  By the time she reached the top and pulled herself the rail, pirates and their gals had crowded around to look down at the dead monster.

  The pair of bruisers who’d been holding Lathe on the Darkwind had shimmied up the ropes faster than she had climbed the ladder. They made to take hold of her again.

  “You don’t dare touch me.” Lathe shook them off as easy as flicking off a bug. She was seething with medicine. Her skin was about to rip apart with it. “None of you dare.”

  Soromet climbed over the rail and spent a moment straightening her silks.

  An old man dressed in a bright blue and gold jerkin over a dove-colored shirt stepped forward. His eyes were a blue so light they were almost white.

  Lathe met his pale glare with her good eye. The old man’s long gray hair and wiry beard blew in the wind. His ears clinked, covered in gold hoops. His scowl was pulled straight on one side and the wiry facial hair pushed back by a shiny pink burn scar.

  “What have you brought onto our greatship, Soromet Wife of Chaelon? Where is your raed commander husband?”

  “Dragaar Fearnaught, Chief of the Waeld, Third Tribe Among Ocean Rovers.” Soromet bent her head to the old man. “Good Chaelon was washed clean in the sun and the salt after a fierce battle with dirter chasers. In the aftermath, the God Who Owns the Waves on a Thousand Seas saw fit to send this blood drinker to the Darkwind. We—”

  “I’m here for the test of steel, me,” Lathe interrupted. “Let’s get on with it.”

  ***

  Lathe never would’ve guessed it from Twenty-six, but pirates liked to talk. She had to wait while the chief and his wife, who was bundled in eyewatering magenta and green silk, stepped aside to “discuss this unprecedented occurrence.” Then she had to wait some more while they questioned Soromet and every member of the Darkwind’s crew.

  The rest of the pirates must’ve got bored as bored as she did while all that was going on. They went back to forging and sewing and drawing; a bunch of them even shimmied down the ropes to inspect that giant dead thing with the eye. After a while, they started hauling up big chunks of blubber to render.

  While Lathe sat on the rail and watched their doings, her skin flushed and tightened under the hateful midday sun. She didn’t waste the blood magic healing it. She wanted all her medicine for the test. If they ever got to it.

  Finally, the chief and his silk-wrapped wife rejoined Lathe at the rail.

  “The Waeld are known for the black steel we smith. We harvest ore from deep in the seams of the Fallen Star Sea, where the God of the Waves deposits once-burning iron embedded with stardust. This gives our steel its color and strength, but it does not give it shape…”

  This was almost as bad as the sciences lectures at Thornfield. Lathe watched the tasseled fringe of the chief’s wife’s silks. The threads shimmered as they wiggled in the sea breeze.

  “Heat. The hammer. The vision of the forger. These are the elements that give steel a shape and a purpose…”

  That sounded like something Master Smith would’ve said. Lathe had always liked Master Smith. He didn’t harp about rules all the time the way the rest of the masters at Thornfield did.

  “Only when it has been beaten, tempered, formed…”

  The breeze calmed, and the tassels on the magenta and green silks stopped moving. Lathe wondered if she was close enough that blowing on them would make them wiggle some more.

  “… the measured addition of fresh blood… strengthening the line like the stardust strengthens the sky iron… greatest valor… the test of steel.”

  Lathe’s ears perked up.

  “No dirter has asked for the test of steel in generations,” the chief said. “Kalaset, Wife of Dragaar, Chieftainess of the Waeld, interprets your arrival as no less than the intercession of the God of the Waves. Though you are no man, no captain, and no warrior—”

  “Oh, I’m a warrior, me. And I was a boy for a while. ’Til I didn’t hafta be one no more.”

  The old man went on like he hadn’t heard her.

  “The God placed you in the hands of the Waeld with a purpose in mind. To discover that purpose, I grant unto you the test of steel. Be warned, dirter, this is not for those with a coward’s soul. This is a test for a man, not a child, nor even a woman.”

  His pale eyes searched her face. “If you persist in this course, do not believe that you will receive lenience because of your sex. On the sea, a woman who lives by the sword dies by it, just like a man.”

  “I live by the twin swords, me,” Lathe said.

  The old pirate’s scowl deepened. “This is no matter for lighthearted jests. You will battle raed commanders who have never lost.”

  “Them raed commanders never battled me.”

  “Knowing it is combat you face, you do not revoke your request?”

  “I never run away scairt. I run away smart sometimes, but that’s different.”

  “Let it be so, then. Defeat the first raed commander, and you will face the next, and so on until you fail. Lose, and the test is at an end. You will be keelhauled beneath the hull of the commander who defeats you.”

  “What do I get if I whup ’em all?” Lathe asked.

  “Emerge tempered and quenched in combat,” the old chief said, “and upon our ocean, you will always have a name and a place among the Waeld.”

  “Know this,” his silk-wrapped old lady said. “Twenty-eight raed ships sail for our fleet, and every commander to walk their planks is a leviathan in his own right. Even without good Chaelon, twenty-seven of the strongest Waeld remain. If you defeat these men, it is a miracle of the God of the Waves. If you lose, it is His judgment.”

  Lathe grinned. She drank sea monster medicine like water and talked with the god of the streets.

  A couple puffed-up pirates didn’t worry her none.