Page 76 of The Winner's Curse
The sailors raised no cry of alarm.
Two more launches approached the next largest ship, a two-master with one row of cannons, a clear second player to Wensan’s three-masted ship with double gun decks.
The Herrani glanced at Arin. He nodded, and they began to row with no interest in stealth, only speed. Oars rattled in their locks, dunked and splashed and swept in the water. When the launch reached Wensan’s ship, sailors were already ringing the rail, looking far below at them. Their faces were blurs in the dark.
Kestrel stood. “Riot in the city!” she called to sailors, stating what they could no doubt see for themselves beyond the harbor and the city walls. “Bring us aboard!”
“You’re none of ours,” a voice floated down from the main deck.
“I’m a friend of Captain Wensan’s: Kestrel, General Trajan’s daughter. The captain sent me along with your crew for my protection.”
“Where’s the captain?”
“I don’t know. We were separated in the city.”
“Who’s there with you?”
“Terex,” called Arin, careful to roll the r. One by one, the Herrani in the launch shouted names given by the harbormaster of the ship’s missing sailors. They said them quickly, some swallowing syllables, but each gave a passable version of the pronunciations Kestrel had drilled into them when they had first left shore.
The sailor spoke again: “What’s the code of the call?”
“I am,” Kestrel said with all the confidence she didn’t feel. “My name: Kestrel.”
A pause. A few sharp seconds during which Kestrel hoped she was right, hoped she was wrong, and hated herself for what she was doing.
A clank. A metallic unwinding.
Hooked pulleys were being lowered from the main deck. There was an eager clatter as Herrani attached them to the launch.
Arin, however, did not move. He stared at Kestrel. Perhaps he hadn’t been convinced that she had known the password. Or perhaps he couldn’t believe she would betray her own kind.
Kestrel looked at him as if looking through a window. What he thought didn’t matter. Not anymore.
The roped pulleys creaked. The launch was lifted dripping out of the water. It jerked and swayed as sailors on board hauled on the ropes. Then it began to climb.
Kestrel couldn’t see the hull ladder along the stern or the Herrani in the other launches on the water below. They were vague, night-colored shadows. But she noticed a ripple of movement up the hull. Herrani were scaling the ladder.
It wasn’t too late for her to cry warning to the sailors on board.
She could choose not to betray them. She didn’t understand how her father could do this again and again: make decisions that fed lives into the jaws of a higher purpose.
Yet would it be worth it, if Kestrel secured an escape route to alert the capital?
That, she supposed, might depend on how many Valorians died on Wensan’s ship.
Kestrel’s cool calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people could so easily become pieces in a game she was determined to win.
The launch swayed higher.
Kestrel pressed her lips shut.
Arin glanced at the black cloth that had covered her hair, then at her. He must have considered gagging Kestrel with it, now that she had completed her role in the plan. That’s what she would have done in his place. But he didn’t, which made her feel worse than if he had. It was pure hypocrisy for him not to live up to a ruthlessness she now knew him to be capable of.
As was she.
The launch drew level with the main deck. Kestrel had just enough time to register the shock on the sailors’ faces before the Herrani in the launch leaped onto the deck, weapons raised. The small boat rocked wildly, empty save for Kestrel.
Arin ducked the slice of a sailor’s knife, beat it away with his own, and punched the man’s throat. The sailor staggered back. Arin hooked the legs out from under him at the same moment he delivered another blow. The sailor was down.
