“As I must!” Paragon flung back at him.

“As must we all,” Amber agreed quietly.

Brashen rounded on her, glad of a new target. “I suppose this is the destiny you bespoke,” he challenged Amber in frustration.

She gave him an ethereal smile. “Oh, yes indeed,” she promised him. “And not just Paragon’s. Mine. And yours.” She flung an arm wide. “And all the world’s.”

KENNIT HAD NEVER BEEN IN A WORSE PLACE. CRUTCHLESS, WEAPONLESS, HE SAT on the deck while working sailors moved matter-of-factly past him. The few men who had boarded with him were bloody corpses. Pointless to take satisfaction in the Jamaillians they had taken with them. The Satrap was a crumpled heap behind him. He was uninjured but swooned. Kennit himself was battered, but as yet unbloodied.

He sat on the open deck near the house of the ship. He had to look up at his guards. He refused to do so. He’d had enough of their sneering faces and mocking grins. They’d taken much pleasure in snatching his crutch away and letting him fall. His ribs ached from their boots. The sudden change in his fortunes dazed him as much as his injuries. Where had his good luck vanished? How could this have happened to him, King Kennit of the Pirate Isles? But a moment ago, he’d held the Satrap of all Jamaillia captive and had the signed treaty that recognized him as King of the Pirate Isles. He had felt his destiny, had briefly touched it. Now this. He had not been so helpless and defeated since he was a boy. He pushed the thought aside. None of this would have happened if Wintrow and Etta had followed him, as they should have. Their courage and faith in his luck should have matched his own. He’d tell them so when they rescued him.

Behind him, he felt the Satrap stirring from his dead faint. He moaned faintly. Kennit elbowed him unobtrusively. “Quiet,” he said in a low voice. “Sit up. Try to look competent. The more weakness you admit, the more they’ll hurt you. I need you in one piece.”

The Lord High Satrap of all Jamaillia sat up, sniffled and looked fearfully around. On the deck, men thundered past them, intent on wringing yet more speed out of the ship. Two men guarded them, one with a long knife, the other with a nasty short club. Kennit’s left arm was near numb from his last encounter with it.

“I am lost. All is lost.” The Satrap rocked himself.

“Stop it!” Kennit hissed. In a low voice he continued, “While you whine and moan, you are not thinking. Look around us. Now, more than ever, you must be the Satrap of all Jamaillia. Look like a king if you wish to be treated as one. Sit up. Be alert and outraged. Behave as if you have the power to kill them all.”

Kennit himself had already followed his own advice. If the Jamaillians had taken the Satrap to be rid of him, he reasoned, they would have killed him outright. That they both still lived meant that the Satrap had some living value to them. And if he did, and if the Satrap felt some small measure of gratitude to Kennit, perhaps he might preserve the pirate’s life as well. Kennit gathered strength into his voice. He poured conviction into his whisper. “They shall not emerge unscathed from this treatment of us. Even now, my ships pursue us. Look at our captors, and think only of how you will kill them.”

“Slowly,” the Satrap said in a voice that still shook slightly. “Slowly they will die,” he said more firmly, “with much time to regret their stupidity.” He managed to sit up. He wrapped the scarlet cloak more closely about himself and glared at their guards. Anger, Kennit reflected, suited him. It drove the fear and childishness from his face. “My own nobles turned on me. They will pay for their treason. They, and their families. I will tear down their mansions, I will cut their forests, I will burn their fields. To the tenth generation, they will suffer for this. I know their names.”

A guard had overheard him. He gave the Satrap a disdainful shove with his foot. “Shut up. You’ll be dead before the day is out. I heard them say. They just want to do it where they all can witness it. Binding by blood, they call it.” He grinned, showing a sailor’s teeth. “You, too, ‘King’ Kennit. Maybe they’ll let me do it. I lost two shipmates to them damn serpents of yours.”

“KENNIT!”

The roar was the voice of the wind itself, the cry of an outraged god. The taunting guard spun around to look aft. A terrible shiver ran over Kennit. He did not have to look. It was the voice of his dead ship, calling him to join it. He struggled to stand, but without his crutch, it was hard. “Help me up!” he commanded the Satrap. At any other time the royal youth would probably have disdained such a command, but the sound of the pirate’s name still lingered in everyone’s ears. He stood quickly and extended a hand to the pirate. Even the men on deck had slowed in their appointed tasks to look back. A look of horror dawned on some faces. Kennit hauled himself to a standing position by the Satrap’s slender shoulder and stared wildly about for the ghost ship.