Conquer the Kingdom by Jennifer Estep

“The way I see it, we only have two options—run or fight,” I murmured.

Reiko snorted, although she never took her gaze off the approaching pirates. “Aren’t those always our only two options?”

“They haven’t thought to block the gangplank yet. You’re the one who wanted scones. If we run now, you can get them a lot faster.”

“And let these bastards find some other women to abduct and sell into slavery?” Reiko growled. “No bloody way.”

I grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Reiko grinned back at me. Magic flared in her eyes, making them burn like green torches, and long black talons sprouted on her fingertips as she partially shifted into her larger, stronger morph form.

I plucked my gargoyle dagger off my belt and twirled it around in my hand, getting it into just the right position. Then, together, we both charged forward.

Reiko ducked the first pirate’s swing, then lashed out and raked her razor-sharp talons across his throat. He screamed and clutched his bloody neck. Reiko shoved him away, then charged forward again, swinging her sword at first one pirate, then another, then another.

I dove into my own pack of pirates. First, I sliced my dagger across one man’s stomach, then turned and buried the blade in another man’s throat. I ripped my weapon free and spun around, searching for a new enemy to kill. A gleam of gold glimmered off to my left. On instinct, I jerked to the side.

Clash!

I brought my dagger up just in time to block Davies’s cutlass, although the brutal blow knocked me off balance. I lurched backward, my boots skidding on the slick deck, but Davies followed me, swinging his cutlass back and forth in a series of quick, confident strikes. Not only was he an excellent fighter, but Davies was also a mutt, a somewhat derogatory term for someone with a relatively simple, straightforward power, like enhanced strength or speed.

Unfortunately for me, the captain had both.

He swung his cutlass at me over and over again, and it was all I could do to block his hard, fast blows and keep him from knocking the dagger out of my hand. Using both his strength and speed, Davies quickly drove me across the deck. I lunged to the side, and he slammed his cutlass into the railing hard enough to make chips fly up out of the scarred wood. He growled, whirled around, and came at me again.

Davies drove me back in the opposite direction. Two other pirates joined in, and they all took turns lashing out at me time and time again. I dodged yet another blow and whirled around, putting my back to the main mast so they couldn’t attack me from multiple sides at once.

Across the deck, pirates surrounded Reiko, and the dragon morph used her sword, along with her talons, to attack the men, who shrieked and screamed every time one of her vicious swipes connected with their throats, chests, or guts.

Davies stopped and brandished his cutlass at me, as did the other two pirates.

“You shouldn’t have come here, girlie,” the captain crowed, his spicy cologne rapidly turning sour with sweat. “I was going to save you and your friend for myself, but now I’m going to let every man on my crew have a turn with the two of you.”

White-hot rage roared through me at his vile threat, and a storm of magic erupted deep inside me, just begging to be unleashed. For a moment, I considered giving in to that rage, that storm, and showing the captain and his men just how dangerous I truly was. But that wouldn’t get me any answers about Milo and Wexel, so instead I stared at each one of my enemies in turn.

“You’re not going to hurt me or my friend or anyone else ever again.”

The other two pirates shifted on their feet at the icy fury in my voice. Davies hesitated, but he quickly found his bravado again.

“And why is that?” he asked, a sneer on his face.

“Because you’re not the only one who brought reinforcements.”

I puckered my lips and let out a loud, earsplitting whistle, just as Davies had done earlier. The captain grimaced, as did the two pirates. They all tensed and glanced over their shoulders, but when no one came running up the gangplank, they pivoted back to me.

Davies sneered at me again. “Seems like your reinforcements didn’t get the message—”

A shadow zipped over the deck, and what looked like a large boulder dropped down from the sky, smashing into the pirate on Davies’s right. The man grunted once, too wounded to even scream as his bones snap-snap-snapped one after another. His arms and legs spasmed for a few seconds, but the pirate swiftly went silent and still as death claimed him.

Everyone on the deck froze, including the pirates who were still battling Reiko. The boulder let out a loud, jaw-cracking yawn and sat upright, morphing into the familiar, blocky shape of a gargoyle.

The gargoyle was about the size of a horse, although his stocky, powerful body was set much lower to the ground. Two curved horns jutted up from his forehead, while black talons protruded from his large, wolfish paws, and a sharp arrow tipped the end of his long tail. His flexible stone skin was a dark gray, with pinprick bits of blue that shimmered in the early morning sunlight. His eyes were also blue, the color rich and deep, like that of the finest sapphires.

Grimley yawned again. Pirates? His low voice rumbled through my mind, sounding like pieces of gravel crunching together underfoot. You woke me up just to battle a bunch of mangy, scurvy pirates?

So sorry my being in mortal danger interferes with your nap schedule.I sent the snide thought back to him.

Putting yourself in mortal danger is becoming a nasty habit, Gemma.Grimley yawned for a third time. Well, since I’m already up, I suppose I should help you. Which pirate do you want me to kill next—

Another shadow dropped down from the sky and landed on the pirate to Davies’s left, crushing him just like Grimley had crushed the other pirate. The shadow perched prettily on the pirate it had just killed, lifting its head and morphing into the sleek shape of a strix.

Like Grimley, the strix was also about the size of a horse, although with a much stronger and more streamlined body, making it resemble an oversize hawk. The creature’s eyes were a dark vibrant amethyst, as were its feathers, which were tipped with razor-sharp pieces of onyx that looked like arrows. Its equally sharp beak and talons were the same shiny, glossy black. Another beautiful, if deadly, creature.

Thank you, Lyra.I sent the thought to the strix.

You’re welcome!Her high singsong voice sounded in my mind. Lyra winked at me, then hopped across the deck and plunged into the group of dumbstruck pirates.

Grimley watched the strix stab her beak into the throat of another enemy. That stupid bird ruins all my fun, his voice grumbled through my mind again.

But he loped over and started battling the pirates side by side with Lyra. The two creatures quickly worked their way over to Reiko, who was once again fighting her own enemies.

I focused on Davies again. “Now, where were we?”

The captain brandished his cutlass. I braced myself for another attack . . . but he whirled around, ran across the deck, and sprinted down the gangplank.

My mouth gaped in surprise, but I hurried over to the railing and glanced down below. Davies was using his mutt speed to its full advantage, and he was rapidly leaving The Drowned Man behind—

A man strode out from behind one of the wooden crates stacked up along the riverfront. He stepped right into Davies’s path, causing the captain to pull up short to keep from crashing into him.

This man was a year or two older than me, thirty or so, with tan skin; sharp, angular cheekbones; and a straight nose. His longish wavy hair gleamed like polished onyx, while his eyes were a deep, dark amethyst that was the same color as Lyra’s feathers. He was wearing a long black riding coat over a black tunic, leggings, and boots, and the layers of fabric perfectly outlined his tall, muscular body. Black gloves covered his hands, and the cool, steady breeze pushed his black cloak back and forth like a hungry greywolf snapping around his legs. A light gray tearstone sword and a dagger dangled from his black leather belt, but he didn’t reach for the blades. Even without a weapon in his hand, this man was still extremely dangerous.

“Who the fuck are you?” Davies asked.

Instead of answering the question, Prince Leonidas Luther Andor Morricone looked up at me.

Dead or alive?he asked, his low, husky voice curling through my mind and sending a shiver down my spine.

Alive, please. The captain might know more than he thinks.

A grin stretched across Leonidas’s face, softening his angular features. As my lady wishes.

“Get out of my way,” Davies snarled. “Or I’ll gut you like a fish.”

Leonidas’s warm, teasing grin vanished. His face settled back into its usual cold, blank mask, and he gave the captain a bored look, as though Davies’s threat was no more worrisome than the winter wind tangling his hair.

“Fine,” Davies snarled again. “Have it your way.”

The captain raised his cutlass and rushed forward. Leonidas waited until the last possible second before calmly, smoothly spinning out of the way. Davies couldn’t stop his reckless charge, and he crashed into one of the wooden crates and bounced off like an oversize ball. The captain growled, whirled back around, and charged again.

Leonidas watched him come with the same bored expression as before. Once again, at the last second, right before Davies would have skewered him, Leonidas lifted his hand and curled his fingers into a tight fist.

Davies stopped in his tracks.

The captain growled again and tried to move. His biceps bulged, and the muscles in his neck stood out like taut ropes, but Leonidas flexed his fingers, then curled them into an even tighter fist. Despite all his growling and straining, Davies remained frozen in place, like a statue that had been perched along the riverfront.

Leonidas was a mind magier just like I was, and he could do many of the same things I could with his power, including moving objects with his mind—or holding them in place, in the captain’s case.

Every person, creature, and object had its own energy, an invisible layer of power that surrounded it just as surely as Leonidas’s black cloak covered his body. As mind magiers, we could both tap into that energy and bend it to our will.

I’d always thought of my power as invisible strings radiating out from my fingertips and connecting to everyone and everything around me, as though I were a puppeteer moving dolls and scenery around a stage. All I had to do was push and pull, and grasp and release those strings, and I could do almost anything I wanted, from making a flagstone fly up out of the ground, to tearing the top off one of the wooden crates, to holding Davies in place, like Leonidas was doing right now.

Even up here on the ship, I could feel the prince’s power and how smoothly and effortlessly he was manipulating the strings of energy surrounding Davies. In some ways, Leonidas was much stronger in his mind magier magic than I was in mine. He could always completely control his power, whereas I still struggled to wrangle mine. Sometimes, that mercurial storm of magic deep inside me did exactly what I wanted it to. Other times, the power squirted out of my grasp and either drowned me in memories or overwhelmed me with other people’s thoughts and feelings, leaving me paralyzed and useless.

Are you sure you want him alive?Leonidas’s voice sounded in my mind again. I’m happy to toss him into the river and drown him like the rat he is.

That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?

His eyes glittered like dark amethysts. Not when it comes to you, Gemma. I would tear that whole ship apart and drown every man on board if that’s what it took to keep you safe.

Another shiver swept down my spine. Well, for now, let’s keep the captain alive. He can’t answer questions if he’s dead.

Leonidas tipped his head. As my lady wishes.

He flicked his fingers, and Davies sailed through the air and smashed into a nearby crate hard enough to splinter the thick wood. The captain dropped to the ground, unconscious.

A couple of low moans caught my ear, and I glanced over my shoulder. Reiko, Grimley, and Lyra had killed most of the pirates, and the ones who were still alive were too injured to threaten us anymore.

“Well, that was fun.” Reiko stepped over a whimpering pirate with a nasty gash across his chest and walked over to me. “Just the thing to work up an appetite for those apple-cinnamon scones waiting for me back at Glitnir.”

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “You’ll get your scones, but we still have work to do here.”

Reiko saluted me with her bloody sword.

I turned to Grimley and Lyra. “Stand guard, and make sure none of the pirates try to escape.”

Grimley and Lyra both nodded. The gargoyle hopped up onto the railing, perched there like an oversize cat, and started licking the blood off his talons, while Lyra flapped her wings, shot up, and landed on top of the main mast.

“Let’s search the ship,” I said. “Davies might have been lying when he said Milo hadn’t approached him about booking passage down the river.”

Reiko grinned and swept her sword out wide. “After you, princess.”

I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t stop an answering grin from spreading across my face. “Come along then, spy.”

*  *  *

Reiko and I went down the steps into the lower part of the ship. Sunlight streamed in through the round windows, illuminating a long hallway that ran the length of the vessel, with several rooms and corridors branching off it. In the largest room, dozens of hammocks were strung up like gray spiderwebs swooping from one wooden post to the next, while shelves had been built into the walls, stretching from the floor up to the low ceiling. Metal buckets were also lashed to the bottom of the posts, and the sour stench of urine filled the air, despite the lids that topped each container.

“Not the most luxurious accommodations for the pirates and their passengers,” Reiko said. “No matter how desperate they might be to flee from Andvari and Morta, I can’t imagine Milo or Wexel willingly enduring these conditions for days on end.”

“Me neither, but let’s see what we can find.”

Reiko searched through the shelves on the right side of the room, while I took the ones on the left. Small, framed painted portraits of loved ones. Wooden carvings of krakens, mermaids, and other sea creatures. Books, playing cards, and other odds and ends that were either sentimental, entertaining, or useful in some way. All the objects were perfectly ordinary, and nothing looked like it might have belonged to either Milo or Wexel.

“Find anything?” I asked when I reached the end of my shelves.

“Just an alarming amount of licorice. Blech.” Reiko’s face crinkled with disgust, as did the one of her inner dragon.

I laughed. “Let’s keep looking.”

Together, we moved through the rest of the lower deck, searching all the rooms. A small galley, a dining hall with scarred wooden tables and chairs, several storage areas for sails, ropes, tools, and weapons. Nothing unusual, so we plodded down another set of steps into the cargo hold in the very bottom of the ship.

No windows were set into this level, so Reiko and I grabbed a couple of black iron lanterns hanging on a peg by the door. The round fluorestones inside flared to life, casting out gloomy gray light. Instead of wooden crates full of goods, dozens and dozens of hammocks were also strung up down here—along with shackles.

Coldiron shackles attached to short chains were embedded in every single post, while several more sets lined the walls. I crouched down and shined my lantern on the closest set of shackles. Dried blood covered the cuffs, along with the attached chain, and even more blood stained the floor, along with urine, shit, and vomit.

Anger, revulsion, and sorrow surged through me at the thought of all the people—women—who had been trapped in here and all the horrors they had suffered at the hands of Davies and his crew. Given the number of shackles, Davies probably made most of his money kidnapping and selling people to the DiLucris, rather than hauling cargo and paying passengers up and down the river. Greedy, heartless bastard. I should have let Leonidas drown him after all.

“Hey, Gemma. Look at this.”

Reiko plucked something off the floor and tossed it over to me. I caught the object and held it up to the lantern light.

It was a coin.

I squinted at the gold, which was stamped with a familiar crest—a woman’s face that featured two tiny coins for her eyes and a third coin for her mouth. “This is a DiLucri gold crown. What’s it doing here?”

“Maybe it belonged to one of the pirates’ victims,” Reiko suggested. “It would be easy to lose a coin from your pocket in the dark, especially if you were struggling not to get shackled.”

“True,” I agreed, then swung the lantern around and looked out over the cargo hold again. “But that doesn’t explain all these hammocks. More than a hundred of them are squeezed in here.”

Reiko shrugged. “Maybe Davies brought a bunch of people up the river for some reason.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “Or maybe the Mortans were here after all. Back in Blauberg, when Wexel was buying the stolen tearstone, he paid Conley with DiLucri gold.”

Reiko shrugged again. “A single coin doesn’t mean Wexel or Milo were here. Anyone could have dropped that DiLucri crown at any time.”

She was right, but frustration filled me all the same. Despite our searching, we still had no idea if the Mortans had been here or not.

We didn’t find anything else noteworthy in the cargo hold, so I shoved the gold coin into my pocket and we went back upstairs to the captain’s quarters. Unlike the rest of the ship, which was devoid of finery, Davies’s room was crammed full of expensive furniture, with a bed shoved up against one wall and a writing desk perched in the corner. Shelves lined the walls, but they were filled with spyglasses, maps of the Summanus River, and other navigational tools, rather than the books, bags of candy, and knickknacks that had populated the crew’s quarters.

I sat down in the desk chair and riffled through the drawers. More spyglasses, a couple of daggers, some feather pens and pots of stoppered blue ink. Nothing interesting—except for a thick black ledger.

Curious, I cracked open the ledger and scanned the notations inside.

Girl, thirteen, red hair, blue eyes—100 gold crowns.

Woman, mid-twenties, ogre morph, brown hair and eyes—500 gold crowns.

Man, mid-thirties, mutt with strength magic, black hair and eyes—50 gold crowns.

More anger, revulsion, and sorrow surged through me. Davies kept detailed records of all the people he sold to the DiLucris—and how much money he got for them.

Disgusted, I slammed the ledger shut hard enough to make a couple of compasses perched on the desk rattle-rattle together. “There’s nothing here. Not the smallest hint that Milo and Wexel ever set foot on this ship.”

“Maybe the rumor we heard was wrong,” Reiko said, leaning one shoulder against the doorjamb. “Or maybe this is simply the wrong ship. Maybe Milo has already left on another ship. We both know it’s his best option at this point.”

So far, everything indicated that the crown prince was fleeing south and trying to get as far away from Andvari and Morta as fast as possible, since he was now a pariah with a hefty price on his head in both kingdoms. And given the deals my father had struck with the other royals, Milo wouldn’t find safety in Unger, Ryusama, Bellona, Flores, or Vacuna either. No, his smartest, safest course of action was to run south to Fortuna Island and somehow convince—or bribe—the DiLucris to shelter him.

From there, Milo could board a ship and sail far, far away across the Blue Glass Sea to another kingdom, where he might find favor in some other royal’s court. But even that was a faint, tenuous hope, since most leaders would not look kindly on a crown prince who had tried to depose and murder his own queen mother, along with several other royals. Plus, it would be a long, hard, dangerous journey—one that Milo might not survive, even with all his lightning magic, cleverness, and cruelty.

I rocked back in Davies’s chair, which creaked in protest. “Well, according to all the rumors we’ve heard, Milo and Wexel have definitely been heading south.”

“But?” Reiko asked.

“But you saw Milo during the Summit. Even though his plan to have Corvina murder me and Leonidas failed, he didn’t give up—not for an instant. Instead, he barreled straight ahead with his plot and tried to assassinate all the other royals.”

“So?”

I shook my head. “So I don’t think he’s running. At least, I don’t think he’s running away from us—more like toward something that will further his plans.”

Reiko chewed on her lower lip, while her inner dragon’s face scrunched up in thought. Worry radiated off them both, joining what was already churning in my stomach. We all knew the same unsettling truth—that we needed to figure out what Milo was plotting before he struck again and finally found some way to conquer my kingdom.