e had helped her find a new berth for her hammock, when the pitch stores had burst open and swamped the whole larboard side of the hold with oozing black tar. He had given her a stopper of rum to tide her over when the grog supplies had run low and crew was near mutiny. The ferocious Captain of the Ancilla, notoriously deadly and vicious, had invited her to his cabin to play with his Coypu, which not even First Mate Rot knew about.

He had given her command of the boarding party. He had trusted her. He had treated her like a daughter, and more.

Eleyna was surprised to find herself screaming, her blade whipping at speeds she never before imagined believed she could move. She thought she had known rage before, but it had been only a pale shadow of this fury. She felt elemental, a conduit for a primal force that had always existed in the world, but had never been manifest until now. Like she had been trapped for a thousand years and all of that frustration built up during an eternity of captivity was exploding from the surface at once.

He was dying, this man who had cared for her, and standing before her was the one who had killed him. The bastard who had unloaded his pistols into the Captain’s heavy chest was standing right in front of her, and her sword knew what to do. Her sword knew how to make him bleed.

She thought she saw Yelol, fighting alongside her, keeping a clutch of corsairs off her flank. For a moment she caught a glimpse of Second Mate Pellagra, on his way to her aid, being cut down in a hail of bullets. But mostly she saw only blood, the spray of blood all around her, coating her face. Some of it was her own blood: she had wounds up and down both arms from not-quite-evaded blows. Much of it was the blood of others, spilled by the edge of her cutlass, then running down the metal the way gentle waves run off the sand of an island beach.

And then, almost before she knew what was happening, the entire moment came into clear focus. All the crazed movement, all the screaming and smoke and confusion of the battle cleared away, leaving only Eleyna and Gauliga the Merciless. Gauliga had his back to the deck, his arms at his sides, trembling in his boots. Eleyna had her cutlass blade pressed against the Merciless’ neck, just close enough for a good shave. Eleyna prepared to deliver or deny mercy, poised for vengeance or absolution. Destruction or annihilation. Ready to end it all.

“Please,” said Gauliga, showing her the palms of his hands. “Please, I surrender.”

It fell to Yelol and First Mate Rot to accept the surrender and deliver the news to the disparate parts of the ship, where intermittent fighting persisted long after the formal acknowledgement. The battle was over, and now their new task was to keep as many sailors from dying as was possible. After all the casualties incurred, able bodied men were sure to be few and far between.

Eleyna was oblivious to it all as she knelt by the Captain’s side, watching his face tremble in his final minutes. He was still breathing, but barely. Some part of her knew that she should put him out of his misery, allow him peace at least. Peace from all this, this reality of dying slowly on a blood and fire-stained deck.

But she could she let him die? After he had shown her kindness, it didn’t seem possible. Or would her kindness to him now be in helping to him die? Her heart raced. With two bullets deep in his chest, and with the rag she was holding to his wound barely staunching the flow of blood, the Captain had no hope of survival. But how could she be the one to end him, or even allow him to come to an end?

She was not certain how much time passed as she watched the Captain’s labored breathing and saw the light in his eyes slowly dim. At some point the noise of the battle ceased entirely, replaced by the screams of the wounded as the surgeon made his fitful rounds. But no one dared approach Eleyna and the Captain. All were too fearful of that steely glint in her eye, the way her left hand still held on to her cutlass like it was the last solid thing in the world.

It was Yelol who came to her side at last and put his hand on her shoulder. At the touch Eleyna’s body snapped like an eel, turning, then twisting and jabbing with the point of her cutlass. Only Yelol’s quick reflexes saved him from being poked through. For Eleyna, exerting that last spasm of energy was like applying a pin-prick to a bubble, and she fell to all fours in total weariness of the mind and body. Yelol could not tell if she was sobbing, laughing, or experiencing some other, fully alien feeling that he could not even begin to describe or understand.

First Mate Rot approached, tossing a razor thin knife between his hands, sporting a brand new gash along the left side of his jaw. “Gauliga’s in the brig, all neat an’ tidy. Been thinkin’ on how we should quarter him, then hang the left-over bit from the yardarms until the birds do away with him. Unless’n you have some better ideas.”

“We can’t kill the prisoners, we need every able bodied men to crew us back to port. Now we’ve two ships, and we’re shorthanded even before our losses.”

Rot watched Yelol, twirling his knife between his hook-fingers in a complicated pattern. “An’ who’re you to tell me such? Tellin’ me I can’t execute prisoners on me own ship? Wanna go up against Captain Rot, see how yeh fare?”

Eleyna looked up at Rot, glaring with a fierce intensity. “You are not the Captain. Our Captain is still alive.” She was holding the Captain’s hand, feeling every twitch of his muscles as he teetered on the brink of death.

“The Captain’s near on dead. ‘Asides, he can’t hear a word we’re sayin’. Look innis eyes. We’re drawin’ it out, but the man’s been gone fer hours. Don’t say as you can’t see it.” Rot smiled, and his smile was a dark, hollowed out thing that sickened Eleyna. She wanted to reply, to say something biting and vicious to this horrible man, this man who would gloat over the deathbed of the one person who had cared, truly cared, for her or for anyone else aboard the Ancilla.

She was halted by a gasping sound, the squelch of air being drawn into lungs in an agonizing, final breath. She, Yelol, and Rot all huddled close to the Captain, as he made use of the final air he had gathered.

“Eleyna,” his voice came out rattling and coarse. It was like he was speaking through a pile of salt grains, and also breathing them in and out with battered lungs. “Eleyna, yeh’ll take care o’… o’ Iwaki fer me.” Rot bent in closer, hovering over the Captain’s thick beard, but the dying man’s eyes stayed fixed on Eleyna. Again he spoke, even soft, just a half-breath of air left to spend. “Yeh be th’ Captain, now. Take care, o’ Iwaki, the Ancilla, me girls…” A shudder passed through the Captain’s hand, and by some trick of the wind seemed identically to pass through the entire ship, from the hold to the foremast, rattling loose timbers and knocking over kegs of loose shot and power. With the last of his wind gone, the Captain died.

Eleyna was blinded by tears. She squeezed the Captain’s wrist, felt desperately for his pulse. Normally it felt like a pounding surf, so strong you could sense it from the far side of a room. But now there was nothing. She felt something sharp tickling her throat, and blinked the tears away so that she could see what it way.

“So,” said First Mate Rot, pressing his sharpened metal fingers against the tender, velvety underside Eleyna’s throat, “ol’ man thought he’d set ye up as th’ next Captain of the Ancilla, did ‘ee now, dearie? That’s a right larf, ‘swhat I say. ‘Coz the ol’ man’s dead now, cold an’ still, an’ ye’ll not be much a Captain either when yeh join him in the Locker.”