Once a Daughter of Steel had a name, she had to get her ear pierced. That was how pirates kept record of their accomplishments—in their ears. Lathe held as still as she could on the rail while Kalaset poked an awl through the top of her left ear and fastened a silver cuff around it.

  “Why’s mine different from his?” Lathe asked, pointing at one of the raedrs. “I want a little jingly circle, too.”

  “Only men wear hoops,” Kalaset explained.

  Only men went around in britches and shirtsleeves and leather jerkins, too. Lathe figured if she could wear one, she ought to be able to wear the other, but the old pirate gal put her foot down. The Daughter of Steel would not wear a man’s hoop; she would wear a proper woman’s cuff.

  Kalaset fussed at her now and then, but Lathe liked the old rip, so she put up with her. She was probably just going to sell the ear cuff when she got back to land, anyway, so there wasn’t much use in fighting about it. She wondered how many it would take to buy Pretty a placement—or if there was enough Siu Carinal left to buy a placement in.

  Lathe forgot all about the cuff when she saw the cabin Dragaar gave her. The previous owners had died of the blood plague and left behind a rack of jeweled longknives, daggers, and dirks; bolts of cloths woven with silver and gold thread and sewn with sparkling gemstones; a brass-bound chest of finger rings, earrings, nose rings, brow rings, chains, necklaces, torqs; even a small drawstring purse of loose cut stones and coins from exotic places Lathe had never heard of.

  When Lathe mentioned all that treasure, Kalaset sighed and said the raedr who’d left it behind had done his best.

  “Thankfully, the God of the Waves gave him a wife who did not care that their fortunes were small.” The silk-wrapped old woman squeezed Lathe’s shoulders. “But for you, Daughter of Steel, we will find a husband with ambition.”

  Lathe thought she’d rather have the treasure. She ought to be able to buy Pretty a hundred placements with that.

  Her greatship cabin was bigger than the room she’d shared with Four and Twenty-six at Thornfield. Shelves lined its walls, each of them with a door that latched to keep the clothes and belongings inside from sliding out. The contents inside peeked out from behind panels carved with intricate scenes of sea monsters and waves and ships.

  The bunk was double the width Lathe was used to sleeping on, layered with furs and thick blankets, and the mattress was stuffed with soft seabird down and scented with spices. The room even had a handy side chamber with a brass pump that pulled up sea water, a spout mounted high on the wall, and floor drain, all for washing without anybody else around.

  During the days, Lathe had free run of the greatship. As long as she didn’t go into anybody else’s cabin, she could wander where she liked through the holds, the stern walk, or on the divided decks. She watched smiths hammer metal, looked over the shoulders of the women drawing on wax drafting tablets, listened to folks argue about constructions and compositions and the war, and fished off the side of the boat. When nobody wanted to talk, she practiced drinking the sun and seeing with her blind eye.

  On the surface, the pirates seemed standoffish, but that was just because they were like Twenty-six. You had to talk to them, they weren’t going to talk to you. In short order, Lathe won over a jovial woman named Caelenel and her husband Tulaan, the big-shouldered smith who had shown Lathe to the greatship’s weapon hold her first day.

  Caelenel was a chemister, which meant she knew all about the black sand.

  “When the black sand takes a spark, it ignites at great speed,” Caelenel explained, pouring a little pile onto a corner of the metal that lined the deck around her husband’s forge. She borrowed tongs from Tulaan and pulled an ember from his fire. She touched it to the mound. The black sand popped, flashed, and sizzled. “By confining this reaction to a space too small for its expansion, the burst creates violent destruction.”

  “Sounds like arcaneries,” Lathe said, looking at the quickly dying flame with her blind eye. It flickered with a much weaker version of that sunlight energy.

  Caelenel’s laugh rang through her silk veils. “It is simply nature. I can show you many sands and even metals which do this without spark or fire at all. Some even do so in water!”

  Lathe tuned out her enthusiastic friend’s list of substances that exploded and wondered instead what would happen if she drank down that flame energy like she had the sunlight. But the last of the black sand had already burnt out.

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  On the anvil, Tulaan was shaping another tube for those weapons like Soromet had pointed at her back at the river mouth.

  A flashdirk, Caelenel had told her. The smith hammered away, then stuck the tube back in the forge to heat it again. Sparks flew as he shuffled the coals around.

  A finger of flame licked up, and Lathe drank it down. The flame winked out, and the spicy heat warmed her chest.

  “So fire’s like the sun,” she muttered. “Just weaker.”

  “It… Yes, they are alike,” Caelenel said. Between her headscarf and veil, her green eyes tried to follow the subject change. “The sun is a great fire created by the God of the Waves, and small fires mimic its properties. But I do not see how that applies to minerals and sands.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking ’bout your arcaneries. This is about drinking sunlight.”

  “As the sun-breathers do?”

  Lathe shrugged. “Might be so. I don’t know no sun-drinkers, me.”

  For meals, Lathe ate with Kalaset and Dragaar in the chief’s ornate banquet cabin. Most of the furniture was nailed down, and the inlaid table had a carved lip around the edge to keep plates from sliding off. Everything was like that aboard ship, even the little coal stove that hung by chains from a beam in their cabin. Lathe liked watching it swing with the ocean surges.

  The elderly couple acted as if Lathe was their own child. Kalaset even uncovered her face to eat when Lathe was there, which Ocean Rover women only did with their husbands, daughters, and very young sons. When Lathe had asked why not older sons, everyone thought she was the strange one for suggesting that a boy might wonder what his mother’s face looked like.

  “I gotta get back to land, me,” she told her elderly hosts at one midday meal. It was fish. It was always fish. “My sister Pretty might need me, and I know my brothers do.”

  “Daughter of Steel, the cursed earth will only serve to afflict and ruin what good there is in you.” Old Kalaset patted Lathe’s arm with one gnarled hand, her dark face wrinkling into a frown. “Remain and make a life on the sea. Take a husband. Raise children blessed by the God of the Waves.”

  Lathe didn’t have time to find a pirate husband. She had too much to do.

  “You worry my wife,” Dragaar told Lathe when they talked alone at the greatship’s enormous wheel at sunset. “You are poised between worlds, Daughter of Steel. You fight as a man, but you are a woman. You display your emotions to the world like a child, but you are an adult. If you chose to immerse yourself in your new life at sea, Kalaset would fear less for your soul.”

  “My soul ain’t even s’posed to be here,” Lathe told him. “It’s s’posed to be grafted.”

  She liked the old chief as much as she liked Kalaset. The only trouble with him was he always sided with his wife.

  ***

  At night, when Lathe would normally have been up and doing, the pirates all tucked back in their cabins. It was considered strange to go visiting then, so after the last meal of the day, Lathe scrounged around deck practicing sword postures or watching the smallships load up and sail off into the dark in little fleets of three and four.

  “Where ya going?” she asked Reikr.

  The wily, gray-eyed dog never stayed aboard the greatship for long. Raed commanders lived on their raed ships, like Soromet did. That night Reikr was one of only a few folks on deck, winching barrels of black sand and woven nets full of smaller metal bombardment balls the size of a man’s head down to his ship.

  “To sink a city,” Reikr said, signaling a pirate down on deck.

  Lathe eyed him with her blind side. Not much sun energies reflecting at night, just sleepy blue glimmers. She switched back to regular looking. In the moonlight, it was hard to pick out the red glints in his yellow hair.

  “Figure you want me to ride along?”

  “No. I do not want a blood-drinker on Throatcuttr.”

  Along the top of his left ear, seven silver hoops flashed. Absently, Lathe fingered the cuff on her own ear. The hole had been tender for a long while, but the blood magic had eventually healed it up to where it didn’t bleed anymore, even when it caught on her pillow or shirt.

  “Them earrings ever get caught in your long hair and yank out?”

  Reikr ignored the question, slipping past her to stabilize a winchload against the wind.

  Lathe crossed her arms and leaned over the rail.

  “I got to get back to land. Being an Ocean Rover’s all right, but I got to find my twin and help my brothers.” Also she hated fish.

  “An Ocean Rover does not set foot on dirt,” Reikr said like that proved she shouldn’t have won her test of steel.

  She leaned on her side so that her elbow propped her up. “Might be they would if they had to save their family.”

  “Do not speak of families. No family on the ocean remains untouched by your people. What you could not devastate by violence, you destroyed by plague.”

  “Yeah, blood plague,” she said to poke at him. “I heard it makes your eyeballs explode into blood jelly. Pop!”

  “It burns in the veins until the victim is delirious with fever. The pain cannot be abated by means yet found, and the suffering is absolute. It can take as many as six days before a man finally hemorrhages and dies with the blood clotted in his tissues. For a child, it takes much less time, but it is no less painful. Only, a child cannot understand why they are in pain and why their mother or father will not make it stop.”

  There it was.

  “So what’re you to all these dead pirate babies? The father or the brother?”

  Reikr’s gray eyes glared daggers at her. “Father to a newborn boy and a little girl just learning to walk the decks. Husband to a wife who held our children as they screamed and died while the plague burned in her blood, alone in Cryst’holm, while I was on the sea fighting your people.”

  “Then don’t tell me you don’t know why I gotta get back!” Lathe smacked a palm on the rail. “They need me!”

  Without a backward glance, the raed commander caught hold of the next winchload and swung down to his ship. Lathe thought about spitting after him, but the wind was in the wrong direction.

  e