Mercy

Mercy had a blanket wrapped around her waist, with each end tied to an anchoring post nearby, to secure her to the floor of their cabin. Vincent had done the same. Facing each other, and using sticks built a ship to float in the air between them.

The free sky beyond the pull of the large isles was the domain of Mercy's people. The Wayfarers were often born in free float, and lived on ships that traversed thousands of miles in strange skies. Her people lived as much without being pulled to the ground as they did with it. She had played tag jumping between the hulls of ships, had danced in slippers lined with lodestone. She was born and raised for life in free float.

And now she was losing a game from her childhood to a man who had never played it before.

Vincent was setting a piece of wood in the middle of the floating ship's deck. Somehow --despite the ship's rotation and the fact that he had to navigate his arm through a cloud of other pieces --Vincent set the next stick inside without knocking anything else loose.

"Your move," Vincent replied as he drew his hand out. One of only two constant rules to the game they played, known as Ba'tal to the Wayfarers, was that the next piece played should be set close to the last. The other rule was that breaking the shape being made was an instant loss.

"Pass," Mercy said. She shook her head in disgust and folded her arms. Vincent grinned that cheeky grin he often wore and set another piece inside. When he looked to her, gesturing to the shape they had made and raising an eyebrow, she took her next stick and knocked it into the ship.

Their creation broke in half, and transformed into a cloud of slow-moving shrapnel.

"Cheeky bastard," Mercy muttered, as Vincent reached out to collect the pieces.

"What can I say? Goofy children games suit me," Vincent said, as he opened the box for the pieces. Mercy reached out and began to gather up sticks as they drifted by her.

"Is there anything you're actually bad at, Vincent?" Mercy asked. She was watching the way he snatched pieces, storing them between his fingers until he had collected more than a dozen in each hand. Even in something simple like putting away a game, the fact that he was unnervingly clever stood out.

More than just clever, Mercy thought to herself. Vincent Locklear understood the world with a clarity no one else in her life possessed.

"I can't cook," Vincent offered, after a moment of consideration.

The laugh that slipped from Mercy's lips came out so quickly she wasn't sure if Vincent had even finished speaking. She doubled over, nearly sliding out of the sheet anchoring her to the floor, and slapped at the deck. Tears welled in her eyes, and after a few seconds, she had to force herself to take quick, frantic gasps to replace the air she had spent.

She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, to try and calm herself. And nearly succeeded, until she looked at Vincent's indignant frown, and the laughter started all over again.

"Am I really that bad at cooking?" Vincent asked.

"You," Mercy said, speaking with the air she breathed in, between the spurts of giggles. "Burned. Toast. And. Porridge."

"That can't be all that strange," Vincent insisted, as Mercy took another few deep breaths and her mirth began to subside. With one eyebrow raised, wide eyes, and his small frown, he looked genuinely confused over how appalling his culinary blunders were over the years. The sight nearly made Mercy start laughing again.

It was a world apart from how he had looked a few weeks ago, when he was still captain of the Hood.

He stood at the prow of his ship, spyglass out, staring after the roar of distant cannons. His face was pale, his brow furrowed, and he was breathing in the tightly controlled rhythm artillerymen used to slow their heartbeat and steady their hands.

And when Captain Locklear finally folded his spyglass, she could see the fury in his eyes. It wasn't the hot rage she had seen in bars, or on the deck of a pirate skiff as they boarded it. The hand that fell to his sword didn't shake, his jaw wasn't clenched, there was no strain to control or even manage the anger he felt. Locklear's fury was ice cold; less a man being consumed by his rage, and more a man deliberately holding it like a weapon.

"All ahead full," the captain had said, without looking back at her. He knew where she was, knew precisely how loudly he needed to speak. And he knew exactly what orders he needed to give. "We sail to the sound of the guns."

"Most people have never, and will never, burn toast and porridge," Mercy replied, to cover up her uncomfortable recollections. "But let's get back to my original point for a moment. Asides from your ongoing series of culinary calamities, what are you actually bad at? Your skills in mechanics could have gotten you a posting with the Admiralty's Shipwrights. You had a standing invitation to the War Games Hall. And, whatever else was said about your dismissal, no one was unimpressed with how you brought down a hundred-gun ship of the line with a sixteen gun sloop."

"I am terrible at belonging," Vincent admitted. Even though he smiled, Mercy couldn't see any humour or warmth on his face. "So far, I've been thrown out of every home I've ever had. My family left me on the streets of Vol Ayre when I was fifteen. The navy has kicked me to the curb. You're the closest thing I have to a people. You and Artége."

Mercy flinched at the mention of Olive Artége, and she touched the scar on her face with her hand. The woman Vincent mentioned ran a boudoir in Vol Ayre, and was mistress to a small company's worth of girls who served and serviced the rich and wealthy of Volante. It was only the woman's strange friendship with Vincent that allowed Mercy to be civil around her.

Olive Artége sustained a way-of-life Mercy had scarred herself to refuse.

"I suppose you weren't close to many people you didn't give orders to," Mercy said. "That was a strength when it mattered."

Mercy looked through her own spyglass, and what she saw left her cold.

A small ship was belching smoke from its engines, and one of its sails had been cut away. Its lift balloon was now stained on the bottom, painted with grey and black soot from the smoke. The ship flew a now tattered flag of grey over green; the colours of the Monastery.

And in pursuit, a behemoth.

A warship taller than many buildings in Vol Ayre, with three decks of guns jutting from the sides, a lift balloon larger than some of the tiny isles smugglers used as hideaways, and a half-dozen massive propellers that churned the nearby wisps of cloud. A hundred guns rode on that massive craft; firepower enough to bring nearly any city-isle under the sky to its knees.

Worse still, even though the ship flew no colours, Mercy recognized it. The Victorious, one of Volante's prized ships of the line.

"That's one of ours, chasing the Monastery vessel. But why isn't it flying our colours?" Mercy had asked. She hadn't looked before she spoke and was surprised to find that he had moved.

The captain was at the bow, with a small mirror in his hand, turning it in a rapid series of short tilts, using the reflection of the sun to signal a message. At the time, she had at first thought he was signalling the Victorious, asking why it was attacking the other ship. The Monastery ship had no weapons, and the crew was barely keeping the fires under control.

But it was the Monastery ship the captain was signalling. And his message was both brief and extraordinarily strange.

"Are you carrying the box?"

"Mercy?"

Mercy blinked, trying to reorient herself. Vincent had a strange smile on his face, as if he wasn't sure he was allowed to find her wandering attention humorous. "Just thinking, captain," she said.

Concern won out over amusement, and Vincent's smile faded. "What about?" he asked.

The sight of his seemingly innocent concern, when his secrets were the source of everything that had upended her life, sparked a fit of unexpected anger. Rage surged through her, taking her by surprise and forcing thoughts out of her lips. "Tell me what the box is!" she exclaimed.

"The box," Vincent repeated. It wasn't a question.

"The question you sent to the Monastery ship. Don't tell me it's some political secret you can't talk about, or you wouldn't have asked me to keep it from Naval Intelligence. Right now, there's hundreds of miles of open air between us and the next pair of ears, so you can tell me without being overheard. What was so important about this box that you didn't hesitate to send us against one of our own?"

"Mercy, it isn't my secret," Vincent said, still refusing to answer.

"Is it the reason we've spent six days in this storm?" she asked.

"I hope not," Vincent answered, with that cryptic honesty that was beginning to drive her mad. "But I don't have a lot of hope for it."

There was a long, troubling silence that followed the captain's question. Mercy hadn't known at the time, but fate had just tossed a coin in the air, where an answer would upend her life's course. And for others, lead to ruin.

The coin landed. Someone on the Monastery vessel replied with a single word. Nine quick flashes of light.

Yes.

"Ensign Alberdeen, signal to the Monastery vessel the following: we will assist," the captain said, as he folded his spyglass away and marched across the vessel. He gave orders as he marched across the deck. "Petty Officer Madrigan, load the port side guns with canister shot. Engineer Hoffman, go down and prep the engines for a hard run, expect irregular bursts at overrun speeds. Lieutenant Larkin-"

"Captain, what are we doing?" Mercy had asked then.

The captain stopped his march and turned around to speak to her. Cold fury. She could see it in in his eyes, in the calm tension of his stance, in the way his left hand rested underneath the guard of his sword. And she could hear it, in the frightening authority in his voice. "We're assisting the Monastery vessel. The Victorious is flying without colours and in violation of the Idlewind Accords. It means our ship has been taken by pirates or a foreign power. Or her captain has gone rogue and is trying to start a war."

"Captain, that's one of our ships! Shouldn't we at least signal them?" Mercy asked. And even then, she had an inkling that it was the lives aboard the Victorious she was pleading for.

"Mercy," the captain began to say, and to Mercy's shock, he did something that in the years they knew each other, he had never done before.

He asked her for something. "There's more at stake here than I can say. Please."

And before Mercy knew it, she was standing up straighter and saluting, two fingers of her right hand to the brim of her hat. "Aye aye, sir," she said, and sealed more fates than just her own.

"Perhaps I'm just a little tired of being treated like a mushroom," Mercy said, after a moment. "And I know that isn't entirely fair. You haven't lied to me. But I am being kept in the dark, and you've asked a great deal of me."

"I have," Vincent admitted. "You fought when I needed it, you fought while I was being cast out of the navy, and you're here in this storm with me. And I can't even tell you why what you did was so important."

"Why can't you?" Mercy asked. "You keep calling it a secret that isn't yours, a Monastery thing. And that day, you weighed every life on the Victorious against that secret. Weighed, judged, and executed."

Mercy scrambled to work, leading the crews carrying glass jars filled with naphtha and stuffed with rags at the end. Setting up wooden shelves to hold the pots upright, inspecting the distribution, talking down an over-eager crewman with the torch, all of it was comfortably distracting. By the time she looked up again, they were overtaking the much larger Victorious from its starboard side.

Mercy took her place at the centre of the deck, understanding the plan. She had her back to the bow of the ship. She watched the captain, and waited.

She held her breath until the captain raised his hand, and brought it down towards her in a chopping motion.

"Portside guns, fire!" Mercy bellowed, spinning on her heel and looking out the side.

They were so close now Mercy could throw stones at the Victorious' crew. Close enough that when the cannons started firing, she could see the horror that canister shot caused. When the guns howled, sailors and marines fell in a shockwave of screaming pain, as a thousand ball bearings cut across the deck like a scythe through wheat. The screams rose as the echo of the cannons faded, and a half-hundred people lay on the Victorious' deck, dead or dying.

"Reload! Round shot!" Mercy shouted, and she spared one glance at the captain. His face was still controlled in ice-cold fury, his grin replaced by a slight twist to his lips, and his eyes were hard as flint and cold as ice. She could almost see what he thought as he turned the wheel. His icy rage was a terrifying, murderous thing. It was fire and wrath leashed like an obedient dog, and Mercy now knew it would devour the Victorious.

The Hood's hull rode slightly above their quarry, enough that only the guns on the top deck could have reached Mercy's ship. The guns on the decks below sounded in irregular spurts, but those shots passed harmlessly into the open air below them.

Vincent turned their ship, and the gentle swing of the hull pointed the guns a little lower, directly at the Victorious' bow. The slight downward angle was just enough that a cannonball would rip through multiple decks, doing as much damage as a single shot possibly could. It also put the Hood directly in line with the long guns on the Victorious' bow, but the first volley had put the crew out of commission.

All according to the captain's plan.

"Fire!" Mercy bellowed, responding to the captain's signal.

The eight guns howled again, and cannons ripped through the bow like rocks through paper, smashing the top of the deck, and cutting the tether chain. The bow dipped, some of the crew tumbled forward, not clipped in, and fell into the sky.

"Grenadiers, throw!" Mercy shouted.

The marines sprinted to the side and began to ignite the naphtha grenades. Once the rags were lit, the missiles were tossed as far as someone could throw, and a dozen of them smashed against the broken bow of the Victorious.

They managed another volley before the Hood passed out of their range. The captain pushed the ship into overrun speed, and turned away from the Victorious. As they turned, Mercy watched the Victorious with horrified fascination.

The bow of the ship was burning, and the fires were spreading with astonishing speed. Because of the angle the Victorious now listed at -- the bow tilted towards distant Volantis and the hull and deck riddled with holes -- the fire could breathe and spread far faster than it would normally.

The devastation of a ship of the line, one of the Volante Navy's most powerful ships, had been swift and ruthless. And as Mercy looked back up at the Captain turning the wheel, she knew that nothing this battle's outcome had anything to do with good fortune.

"Vincent, that wasn't a battle we fought. Eight hundred souls were dead the moment the Monastery ship said they had that 'box' on board," Mercy said. "Might as well have murdered a man on the street by shooting him in the back of the head, for all the chance the Victorious had."

"The box," Vincent mused. It sounded like a curse when he said it. "Did anyone else catch that signal I sent?"

"Doubtful. Only someone standing beside you on the Hood would have seen it. Someone on the Victorious might have spied the message, but they're all dead. I take it that box is important," Mercy mused.

"The most important thing in the sky," Vincent confirmed for her.

"Important enough that it was worth burning the Victorious?" Mercy asked.

Their next volley was aimed at the engines. Vincent had stopped the ship a hundred yards in front of the Victorious. Even as their crew scrambled about to try and slow the fires devouring the ship, the Hood's next shots pounded the ship's engines into shrapnel.

They fired one volley after another, long after the Victorious gave up trying to turn to return fire. Until either the fires or their cannons struck the powder storeroom, and the Victorious exploded into a cloud of shrapnel and smoke. The explosion ripped the deck into pieces, cut the lift balloon apart, and drowned both flame.

Only as the Victorious had been torn apart, beyond recognition, did Vincent turn the Hood away and steer them towards the Monastery vessel. At that point, he gestured to the helmsman to take over, and marched down onto the deck.

Every eye was watching him as he crossed the deck, every mouth was silent as they waited for him to say something. They waited for him to give an answer to the question everyone carried, unvoiced.

Eight hundred sailors were dead in that cloud of smoke behind them. And they didn't know why.

"The Victorious must have been taken, before our battle. Pirates, most likely," Vincent shouted into the silence. "There is no other reason that they would have attacked a Monastery ship. There is also no other explanation for the ease of our victory. We would not have beaten one of our ships of the line, let alone emerged unscathed, if it were crewed with the likes of you all."

The captain paused, letting his words sink in before he continued. "This will likely be our last sailing together. The Admiralty cannot reveal that one of her great ships was lost as a prize. Your silence on what happened today will be asked, and a different captain will command the Hood. But be proud of what you did today. You averted a catastrophe Volante has never seen the likes of. Be proud of that, as I am of you all."

It was the first time Mercy had heard the Captain lie. And like nearly everything else he did, he was very good at it.

"Yes," Vincent admitted. He couldn't meet her eyes, and his head was bowed as if he were inspecting his boots. His mouth hung open, and he looked pale. It was, Mercy understood, the pain of what he had ordered done, still weighing on his thoughts and conscience. But his voice was firm and unflinching. "It was more than important enough to burn the Victorious."