"Their mander’s called Warlord Threnn," Rudra reported, having pulled what he could from the scouts and the Hub’s own event ledger. "Old kingdom, old reputation. They don’t survive by being clever. They survive by being first to hit, and hitting harder than whatever hits back."
"Charming," Ainen said. "I do so love meeting new people."
The two camps watched each other across the black saddle for the first several hours, neither side eager to open a fight on unfamiliar ground, and the family used that grace to do what it always did with time.
They planned.
"A straight fight favors them," Rudra said, standing over a chart scratched into the sand with the whole family gathered close. "Heavier hull, heavier guns, a crew that’s done nothing but build for this its whole life. We don’t win that by matching them plate for plate."
"Then we don’t match them," Almond said. "We read them instead." He tapped the sand where the enemy ship sat drawn in rough lines. "Give me an hour near that hull, and I’ll tell you exactly where duskiron doesn’t want to be a warship."
"And I’ll tell you what their crew is afraid of before they do," Lily said quietly. "Every ship that heavy is carrying more confidence than it’s earned. I want to hear the note under that confidence."
"I can be persuasive," Ainen offered. "I have found that most soldiers fight less well on an empty stomach and considerably worse after eating something they shouldn’t have."
Rudra almost smiled. "Sabotage the galley."
"Sabotage is an ugly word for seasoning," Ainen said. "But yes."
The plan that came together over the next several hours was not a plan for a fair fight, because Rudra had learned a long time ago that fair fights were for people who could afford to lose them.
Lily went in first, under a silence so absolute that the Kaldrath watch never heard her cross their own perimeter, and came back before dawn with two things. The first was the note under Warlord Threnn’s confidence, which turned out to be a crew that had lost their last four ships to islands just like this one and were one bad night from breaking. The second was a working knowledge of exactly where their powder stores sat below the waterline.
Almond spent his hour near their hull in the deep dark between watches, reading duskiron until he found what he already suspected he would find. The metal that wanted to hit something did not want to be hit in return, and their ram spur, forged in haste against a shorter deadline than the Chainbreaker had enjoyed, carried a seam along its underside that Almond’s eyes picked out like a lit fuse.
"There," he told Rudra, marking the spot on the sand chart. "One good strike, low and from the flank, and that spur es apart before it ever reaches us."
Ainen did not go near their galley at all, which surprised exactly no one who knew him. He simply had Lily deliver, anonymously, a gift of Regalon rations to a resentful, exhausted enemy crew the night before a battle they did not want to fight, seasoned with nothing more sinister than genuine, unfortable kindness.
"A well-fed enemy sometimes remembers he’s a person before he remembers he’s a soldier," Ainen said, when Rudra raised an eyebrow at the plan. "It doesn’t always work. But it costs us nothing to try, and it costs them a great deal to explain to their Warlord why half the crew is suddenly asking questions."
---
The horns sounded at the twentieth hour, not from the Regalon camp, and both ships put out from their shores at the same time, into water that belonged to neither island anymore.
The Kaldrath ship came on exactly the way Rudra had predicted, straight and heavy, trusting her ram spur and her crew’s grim, battered discipline over any cleverness. Threnn’s voice carried across the closing water, hard and certain, ordering a charge meant to end the fight before it properly began.
"Helm hard to port," Rudra said calmly, both hands steady on his own wheel. "Let them mit."
The Chainbreaker turned late and tight, and the Kaldrath ram spur passed close enough to scrape black paint off her flank instead of opening her hull, and in the half second that the enemy’s heavier ship overextended past its own target, Rudra spent the Unmoved Current on the water directly beneath the Kaldrath’s stern.
Their ship lurched, its own momentum suddenly fighting a sea that had gone briefly, locally solid, and the flank Almond had marked came around exposed and slow.
"Ballistae," Rudra said. "The seam. Now."
The duskiron bolts went out low and flat, both frames firing together, and struck exactly where Almond’s reading had promised weakness. The enemy ram spur did not survive the impact. It sheared away from the hull in a spray of black fragments and dropped into the violet water, and the Kaldrath ship listed hard as the wound it left behind opened along the waterline.
Threnn’s crew did not break, not yet, not with cannons still loaded and a Warlord still shouting, and their broadside came around and answered with everything the heavy guns had.
Gopu met it in the air over the deck, dragonfire blooming to burn three cannonballs to slag before they landed, and Saffa’s ice threw a wall along the exposed rail that took the rest of the volley and cracked under it but held. Nyssara and Galvaren rose from Almond’s soul and answered in kind, frost and lightning falling across the enemy deck in a storm of their own, aimed with the precision of a man who had spent a hundred regions learning exactly where a fight actually lived.
The Kaldrath crew, tired, sabotaged in small quiet ways they would never fully understand, fighting a ship that was already taking water, began to e apart the way heavy things came apart when the ground under their confidence finally gave way.
"Threnn’s ordering the boats," Lily reported from the mast, the note of the enemy mander’s voice reaching her ears long before any spyglass caught the motion. "They’re pulling back. Abandoning the hull."
"Then let them," Rudra said, and something in his voice was not quite mercy and not quite indifference, but sat somewhere honest between the two. "We were sent to destroy their ship. Not their people."
The Chainbreaker’s second ballista volley finished what the first had started, and the Kaldrath vessel, ram spur gone, hull breached, crew already fleeing into whatever boats their island still allowed them to build, rolled slowly onto her side and went under in a long column of rising bubbles.
The Hub wrote its judgment across a sky just beginning to lighten.
[Third Objective plete: Opposing vessel destroyed.]
[Casualties: 0]
[Kingdoms remaining in event: 150 of 312]
Almond stood at the rail and watched the last of the enemy ship’s wreckage settle, and felt none of the satisfaction he might have expected, only the same steady arithmetic he had carried since the wreck on the first island. A hundred and sixty-two flags gone from the ledger since they had landed on this ocean, and every one of them had been someone’s family too.
"They’ll live," Ainen said quietly, following his gaze. "Their ship didn’t. In this event, that’s as close to gentle as the rules allow."
Rudra brought the Chainbreaker around, away from the sinking wreck, away from the two islands still ground together behind them, and out into open water under a sky finally clearing toward morning.
"Whatever’s next," he said, hands steady on the wheel that had not left them once in twenty hours, "we meet it the same way we met this. Together, and awake."
The family gathered along her rails as she sailed clear of the black saddle, tired and whole and one battle stronger, and the Thurmugin Ocean opened ahead of them, patient as ever, already deciding what to send next.
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