The Waeld greatship had an entire hold filled with steel. Lathe would’ve thought that much weight would sink a ship, but the huge vessel kept on floating.

  Half-walls separated raw ore from black steel ingots and silver steel ingots. Opposite those storage spaces, the hold was lined with racks of handsomely forged pirate weapons. The frames were nailed in place so they wouldn’t tumble over in a storm and the brackets hooked at the end so they weapons couldn’t be thrown off easily.

  In a smaller niche at the end of the hold was a pile of blades captured in raids and waiting to be melted down for scrap.

  “Choose what you feel most capable of wielding,” the smith rumbled.

  The broad, muscly man and his tiny wife had showed Lathe down to the hold, but those bruisers from the Darkwind still flanked her like she was dumb enough to attack before she got to the test of steel.

  All four watched silently while she picked through the weapons.

  Most of the pirate stuff was big and heavy. Lots of deeply curved blades for slashing, but with enough weight behind them to break bone. Twenty-six would’ve liked the cutlasses, but they weren’t for her. She moved on past elaborately spurred and scrolled weapons that would’ve gotten snagged on clothes and hung up in flesh. Good for ripping out chunks, probably, but still not her style. She wasn’t going to be able to fight with a pirate sword.

  She sifted through the pile of plundered weapons—daggers, longswords, hand-and-a-halfs, and flimsy little rapiers. Finally, she turned up a long, narrow blade with a plain cup hilt and single cutting edge. Flexible but still strong and fast. She stuck it in her belt and kept shifting steel.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the pirates making hand signs at each other.

  “I’d be sick of waiting too,” she said. “Help me dig through this pile, howabout, and we’ll get it done faster. Look for a sword that matches this’n.”

  They didn’t say anything to that and they didn’t help her, so she just shrugged and got back to searching.

  No exact match appeared, but Lathe found the closest they had, a straight, fullered blade a few inches longer than the first. No basket or cup covering the hilt, but the thin crossguards didn’t throw off her grip that much.

  She tried a few swings with the pair to see how far off the balance was. Not very. A couple sword postures and she got the hang of compensating for the size difference.

  Panting, but still full to busting on energy, she turned back to her silent audience.

  “These’ll work.”

  Back on deck in the brilliant sunlight, Lathe noticed most of the work and socializing had stopped. Stony-faced pirates and colorful silk-wrapped gals lined the rails or sat with their feet dangling off the forecastle. It reminded Lathe of students at Thornfield gathering around the bailey to watch the mock tournaments.

  Except here, the fighting space was cluttered with crates and barrels. Ratlines that disappeared up into the rigging. Ladders to other decks. Hatches you could break an ankle on.

  Lathe eyed it all, fixing the locations in her head.

  Use your ground or lose the fight, the old crow Master Saint Daven had told her once. A lot of what the old crow had said had slipped in one ear and out the other, but that one she’d hung onto. It was like swiping bread on Market Street—you had to know where to bolt to once you grabbed it and ten other ways to run if the first way wouldn’t do, or you were as good as caught.

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  The old pirate chief met her at the center of the deck, under one of the enormous masts. He eyed her not-quite-twin steels.

  “Are you satisfied with your choice?”

  “I’m ready. Who do I whup first?”

  Gesturing across the deck, the chief stepped back into the crowd.

  Cutlass in hand, the first raed commander emerged. He stood even-eyed with Lathe, but his neck and shoulder muscles bulged, and his sweat-soaked shirt strained over a chest like a bull’s. Long gold hair whipped in the wind behind him, and wiry grays twisted in his bushy beard.

  As Lathe raised her steels and met his burning gray glare, the nervous excitement twisting and popping in her muscles calmed. His thin lips snarled up like he wanted to bite her in half and spit her out, but she’d seen that before. Hateful glowers, dark smirks, psycho smiles, and dead calm—after the first couple tournaments at Thornfield, she was used to it all. Everybody put on a different front when it was time to scrap.

  Lathe felt her own face stretch into her pre-fight grin. “Don’t you know long hair ain’t no good in a fight, pirate boy?”

  “Do not speak to me, blood-drinker. I will cleanse your filth from this ship.”

  “Cleanse this.”

  She winged herself at him, borrowed steels flashing. While he was still cranking his big muscles around with that huge cutlass, she ducked under the curved blade, thumped him in the gut with her basket hilt, and stood back up behind him.

  Sheathing one sword, she snatched a handful of gold hair, and yanked his thick neck back. A few pirate gals shrieked and more gasped as Lathe brought her other blade to the raed commander’s throat.

  Before she started cutting muscle, though, something occurred to her.

  “Wait!” She looked around the crowd until she found the pirate chief. “Am I supposed to kill him or not? I didn’t hear that part.”

  The chief’s pale glare narrowed. “What would you do if you met Ielan on the planks during a raid?”

  “Gut him, I figure. Unless he was on my side. Then I’d steer clear of his swing and watch him gut everybody else.”

  The chief nodded approvingly.

  Ielan’s head jerked in her grasp as he spat.

  “I would commit my body to the depths before I fought alongside a blood-drinker,” he snarled.

  Lathe shrugged and raised her steel. “You’re gonna commit it without a head, then.”

  She was just bluffing to see what the raed commander was really made of, but some more gals screamed and the pirate chief hollered at her to stop. Lathe tapped Ielan with the flat of her blade and looked at the chief.

  “You are defeated, Ielan,” the old man said. “Reikr.”

  Reikr was closer to Lathe’s age, gray-eyed, and slim and splintery as a green switch. His hair was yellow, but his beard was darker with reddish hints, and pockmark scars showed in his cheeks. He fought with a cutlass, too, but in his off-hand he swung a short, leather-covered cudgel.

  Smart pirate that he was, Reikr tied up his long hair before stepping out to meet Lathe. Taking their cue from him, other raed commanders started tying up their hair, too.

  No more hair-pulling, then.

  Lathe fed a stream of blood magic to her tiring heart and readied her blades. She didn’t like the wily look in Reikr’s eyes or the way he hung back and waited for her to make the first move. It felt like her every twitch told him something about how to beat her.

  She wanted that fight over fast, so she went invisible and blinked around behind him. She laid steel alongside his throat and across his flat gut before he could use that craftiness on her.

  A murmur went through the crowd, and hand signals flashed. They must never have seen somebody go invisible before.

  Lathe took advantage of that in her next three fights, disappearing and turning up somewhere else to end the scuffle as fast as possible. Still, her heart struggled to keep up. It stuttered and jumped. Black spots speckled her vision and almost cost her the sixth fight, but she poured on the blood magic and won it. Barely.

  She scrubbed sweat from her eyes, waiting for the next fight and praying to the Cormorant to send her someone slow and dumb.

  That fool Reikr stopped the next raed commander in line—a big bruiser who looked like the answer to her prayers—and whispered something to him.

  The bruiser kept his eye on the planks while they fought, which meant Reikr had seen her shadow. Lathe panted out a curse as she knocked away a heavy blow from the bruiser’s cutlass. She must be close to bleeding time if her shadow was still visible.

  Ducking another strike, she mirrored her shadow to the opposite side of the bruiser, cracked him in the jaw with her cup hilt and buckled his knee with a kick. He smacked the deck, unconscious.

  When she reappeared with steel to the back of the bruiser’s neck, it was Reikr she glared at.

  He didn’t notice. He was busy telling her next opponent how to whup her.

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