He rose to his feet, soaked through and shivering, but victorious. Beneath him, the ship bobbed once, violently, as the water settled, but it had been a large wave, and he watched as a ripple carried down the docks, setting all the other ships rocking in their berths.
Sanct, he thought as lanterns lit on half of the surrounding boats, and a handful of sailors took to their decks to see who’d been foolish enough to mess with the tide in the bay.
“Really?” hissed Lila, halfway out of the hold. “You couldn’t have just—”
But then she cut off, head whipping to the right. He heard it at the same time. Stross, too loud, on the dock below, asking someone if they knew the way to the Merry Host. Too loud, and too late, as boots came thudding up the ramp. Several pairs of boots.
The crew of the Crow had come back.
He flicked his fingers, a silent signal, and Lila and Tav retreated a step, back into the shadow of the hold. Kay turned and pressed himself against the mast as three more Veskans stomped onto the deck.
“Oster?” they called out. “Aroc? Esken?”
They began to mutter amongst themselves, and they might have thought the two they’d left behind had gotten bored, or bitter, had gone to entertain themselves.
They might have. If not for the body lying in the center of the waterlogged deck.
Kay swore to himself as he heard them rush to the fallen sailor. He drew his second sword and stepped out from behind the mast to face the new arrivals.
Two men and a woman, tall as houses, their hair ranging from blond to white. Their gazes were steady and sober. Either they hadn’t been drinking, or they knew how to hold their liquor. The two men drew weapons—one a hatchet, the other a broadsword—while the third spread out her arms, the air filling with the scent of magic. The water on the deck rose up, freezing to ice around her hands. She flicked her wrist, and a shard shot like an arrow across the deck.
At him.
Kay’s blade came up just in time, and the ice shattered against the steel. The sound rang out like a starting bell, and the bodies on the deck surged into motion.
He danced back, cutting down the next three shards, then ducked as the hatchet buried itself in the mast where his head had been. It freed itself from the wood, returning to the Veskan’s hand. Two magicians, then.
The deck froze beneath his feet as he leapt up onto the nearest crate, landed on dry wood, and found himself face-to-face with the largest man, who was easily a head taller, and three times as wide, the broadsword raised over his head.
Kay twisted out of the way just before the sword cleaved a trench in the ship’s deck. It lodged, buried a foot into the wood, and he swept his blade across the man’s bare throat—or meant to. The Veskan’s arm came up to block the blow, and the steel met armor instead, hard enough to make the blade ring in Kay’s grip.
Tav and Lila were on the deck now—out of the corner of his eye, he saw them, going head-to-head with the other two sailors, Tav quick on his feet, slicing the ropes that bound the sails so they fell in heavy sheets, covering the icy deck, and Lila, fire licking down her knives as she melted a path through an ice-made shield, and kicked the wielder back into the rail hard enough to make it splinter.
She was grinning.
Of course she was grinning.
The woman sagged onto the deck, and—
“Look out,” shouted Kay as the hatchet whistled through the air, straight toward Lila’s back. But she was already dropping to the deck. She landed like a cat to her hands and knees as the ax sailed past, and then she was up again, her daggers in one hand, and this time, when the hatchet flew back toward the Veskan’s hand, she caught it. Plucked the weapon out of the air as if it were her own, and turned and buried it in the man’s chest.
So much for letting them live, he thought, just as his attacker’s broadsword came free with a scrape. He jumped back as the massive blade swung toward him. He twisted out of the Veskan’s reach, or tried, but the man’s mouth began to move and he had just enough time to curse that there were three magicians, wielding magic as well as weapons, before a wall of wind slammed into him from behind, knocking the breath from his body as he fell to the deck, one of his blades skating from his grip and vanishing under the crumpled sail.
The broadsword came down and Kay rolled onto his back, got his one remaining sword up in time to block the blow, or rather, redirect its force, up and away from his chest. If it had been any other sword, it would have met only the air over his shoulder, but it was two hands wide, and the bottom edge scraped along his collar, steel skating against bone.