Karris, my life will be over in four months. No matter what. I’m so sorry. I wasted so much time. I wanted us to have a life. I wanted us to have children, to see you holding new life in your hands, to be whole with you.

Gavin suddenly wanted to vomit, and it wasn’t from the exertion.

The drummer sped the tempo again, and Gavin didn’t care. And again, the last sprint, but his mind was still, impenetrable, the actions all at a long remove.

Then, a shouted order, and the slaves stowed their oars with unhurried precision.

With the crash, Gavin was thrown out of his reverie. Wood screaming on wood. Oars snapping like kindling. Men shouting in pain and fear and rage. Muskets rattling. A cannon booming. The stench of black powder and fear. Men thrown off their benches. Gavin found himself staring at a gap-toothed sailor in the other ship. The man was standing up, having been thrown down by the collision. He had a slow match in hand, and was right behind a charged cannon.

Gavin flung out a hand, willing a spike of blue to fly into the man’s eyes.

Nothing.

The man looked at him quizzically, then an oar cracked his face. He dropped, but someone else grabbed the slowmatch.

The ships continued their slide past each other, and the cannon boomed. Wood exploded, tearing the steps off and filling the slaves’ deck with burning hot blinding smoke. The Bitter Cob’s cabin boy staggered past Gavin’s bench in the smoke, twisted metal protruding from his back.

Another cannon boomed, tearing a hole upward, letting dazzling sunlight in, illuminating the roiling black smoke. The very air seemed on fire. All the slaves were coughing, lying down, abandoning their task of stabbing their counterparts with the oars.

Gavin heard the clatter of the grappling hooks at the end of the boarding nets as they were thrown across the now widening gap between the ships. Pirates were shouting, and the distinctive crack of Captain Gunner’s musket sounded with a frequency that shouldn’t have been possible. Shouted orders, and the clatter of feet across the decks over their heads, and the pirates boarded the other ship.

Then, abruptly, the Bitter Cob was quiet. The wind blowing through the oar-holes and the two big holes from cannon fire began dispersing the smoke. The slaves began sitting up, assessing the damage, even as screams for mercy and shouts of rage sounded from the other ship just paces away.

The cabin boy was dead, or unconscious and on his way to dead, lying in the center aisle. A young kid, and not possessed of good looks or virtue, but not deserving this, regardless.

The stairs up to the second deck were half torn off. Half a row of slaves had been pulverized. Blood slicked the deck in the back rows.

Before Gavin could even complete an inventory, someone swung down from the boarding nets and dropped in through the hole the cannon had blasted. He clambered for a bit, almost losing his balance. Any of the slaves nearby could have knocked him into the sea, but they were all frozen with surprise. The man was light-skinned, blond, dressed richly. Gavin didn’t recognize him immediately as one of the crew. Worse, it didn’t look like any of the other slaves did, either. He wasn’t one of the Bitter Cob’s sailors, and he had a sword.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “If you’ll row for me, I’ll free you.” He let that sink in for a second, then said, “I’ll free you now if you’ll help me throw off the boarding nets. But quick!”

With his voice, Gavin placed him immediately. The young man could only be Antonius Malargos, a cousin of Tisis Malargos, who had become the Green briefly, before Gavin had deposed her, and a nephew of Dervani Malargos, who had become a god briefly, before Gavin had killed him.

“Who’s with me?” Antonius asked.

A slave raised his manacled hand, and Antonius’s pale skin lit with red luxin. He filled the lock with red luxin and then set it alight, burning it out. It burned the slave’s wrist, too, but he was free.

“Quickly! We have only moments,” Antonius said. “Most of the pirates are on the other ship. We kill the few men still here, cut the boarding nets, and push off. I’ll free you all, I swear it on Orholam’s name.”

It was a decent plan, if a desperate one. The other galley didn’t have any oars on one side. If Antonius could seize the Bitter Cob and throw off the boarding nets, he’d have a good chance. If he made it ten paces, he’d probably make it back to port.

And as a Malargos, he had no reason to make sure Gavin made it home alive. In his place, Gavin didn’t think he’d bring Antonius home. His family’s mortal enemy, delivered into his hand. Gavin’s heart despaired.

He saw Leonus had fallen between two slaves’ benches. The man had struggled to his hands and knees. He was bleeding a stream from his scalp. Looked worse than it was: scalp wounds bleed heavily. But he did look woozy. Should Gavin warn Antonius?

A slave behind Gavin raised manacled hands. Antonius sighed with relief that another slave was taking his offer. He began walking back toward him. His eyes fell on Gavin, then moved on. No recognition. The Prism was dead. This bearded creature in rags and filth was nothing.

Gavin felt sudden hope that he might live, and a sense of the most profound divorce from himself he’d ever known. Antonius had seen Gavin in person before, and seen his face reproduced in a thousand paintings, etchings, and mosaics. And he didn’t see him. He saw a slave. Gavin had thought himself inseparable from his power, from his title, from his position. He wasn’t even inseparable from his own face.

Antonius stopped. Looked at Gavin again quizzically. His eyes widened. Gavin missed whatever happened on the boy’s face next because he was looking at the boy’s raised sword. So much revenge for the Malargos family, that close.

Gavin knew death, and he watched it coming, unblinking.

Antonius dropped to his knees. “Your Holiness? You live!”

Gavin’s eyes snapped back to the boy’s. Far from thirsty for vengeance, if anything, Antonius looked on the verge of tears. Tears of worship, adoration, hope.

A child, not bound by what his parents hated. An innocent, putting his faith in a man he’d never met.

“Your Holiness, let’s get these chains off you!”

How long had it been since Gavin had seen such goodness? How long since he’d felt it himself? Too long, and now it was too—

Too late, Gavin saw the movement. Leonus lurched to his feet behind Antonius. Gavin’s hand shot out to stop him—and was jerked short as he reached the end of his chain, the manacle biting into his wrist, bloodying it. Worse, stopping it. But all Gavin saw was Leonus, crashing into Antonius’s back, blade first. He tackled the young man into Gavin, stabbing repeatedly. Gavin was carried off the back of his bench by their momentum, the bench cutting his knees out from under him. The oar overhead and his manacles kept him from falling all the way to the ground, as his oarmates first were caught unprepared, and then tried to help drag Gavin out of harm’s way.

Gavin couldn’t move fast enough. He pulled the bandages from his hands, unraveling them as fast as possible, and lashed out with a knee. He missed because he was held too far away, then he kicked out with one bare foot at Leonus. Somehow, he hit the man in the throat.

Leonus rolled back on his heels, gasping. It gave Gavin a split second, and he used it to drape his bandages down around Leonus’s neck. Once, twice, Gavin wrapped them, and then he yanked. It pulled the man off balance toward him.