When Lotti joined the crew, going on five years back now, she and Grey had not gotten a great start. Grey had just been pulled from the grounder ranks and promoted to riptide, and ready to prove herself as such. Lotti, however, had been hired on directly as a very young wind sage. Both were at the cusp of adulthood, finding their way as essential members of the crew, and Grey felt that the aggressive sage had not earned her position.

  Of course, Grey was young enough to be stupid about the value of sages, especially one as relatively inexperienced as Lotti. She had just dragged herself through five years as a grounder and was in no mood to sit at the same tables as the opinionated young woman.

  There was no arguing her talent as a whisper, but even Lotti would eventually admit she was overconfident about what she could contribute to the ship as a leader. Typically, a young whisper would stick to navigation-related topics, but Lotti involved herself in every conversation her title afforded. This was an overreach for anyone too new to a ship, but especially annoying for someone with very little practical sailing experience at all.

  After several loud and later morbidly embarrassing encounters in front of the lower enlisted, the captain had tried to mediate a few sit-downs with the two sailors. Akula was an evolved, intelligent man, but still not built for the task of navigating the intricacies of a conflict between two overconfident, prideful, and gruesomely sharp women.

  His solution, then, was to drop them on a short chain of islands just north of Saphir to cool off.

  The Dusk Isles were inhabited, but not in the traditional sense. Ale, wine, and liquor traders, often from the mainlands of Etos or Talcot, used them as a stopover to bottle their products from transport barrels. They could then sell crates of the bottles straight to the taverns in Saphir instead of being forced to sell them in bulk. The extra step allowed them to turn over a much nicer profit for their efforts.

  As with most industries, booze traders loved to partake in their product, which created a unique culture on the islands. Their palm-lined streets were full of barrel tap rooms, loud inns, music halls, and brothels.

  As for the women, the captain would be passing back through in a month, and if they were still on the Isles, they could return to the ship. Of course, he was counting on them to have figured out a way to co-exist, or one or both finding another ship to work on. Grey knew her growing friendship with Akula gave her preference, but it was clear he was willing to part ways over this conflict.

  This realization did more for Grey's maturing as a leader than any other had. She bought the bottle for their first night on the Isles. Lotti had been wary, but after a few glasses of rice wine, had relented to sharing a pleasant evening with the tall riptide.

  Over the course of their month on the islands, the two started to form a strong friendship. They lived off of Grey’s purse in the evenings, Lotti not having a long enough career to have anything stored with the Chest Officials. It never bothered Grey; the bottles were cheap, and free music poured into the streets nightly, the houses paying the musicians all but tips.

  They ate and danced, drank and told long-winded stories. At the end of their evening, there was often a handsome enough gentleman with eyes for Lotti and a giggling woman looking under her lashes at Grey. Though Lotti would sometimes choose a woman for herself, she never crossed the line with Grey. As crew members and new friends, Grey thought it was for the best. She had never had a friend on the ship who was her equal, and she was starting to see the benefit.

  The following mornings, they would lay in the clear seas of the Myriad and recount the evening. They always had poles in the water, and pulling up a fish signified lunch. Grey taught Lotti how to clean a fish, and Lotti taught Grey how to talk to women in silks and gowns.

  As the month wound down, their talks began to re-focus on the ship and their new responsibilities. Though their relationship had changed, and she respected Lotti as a woman, she had not yet started respecting Lotti as a sage. This was an important piece of the puzzle for Grey, and she wasn’t sure how to navigate it.

  The evening she would truly understand started as most of them had, with Lotti and Grey lounging in a booth of their favorite seaside tavern. They had both grown fond of the rice wine Grey had ordered on their first night on the Dusk Isles, and while they had since strayed to an island further along the chain, they were able to find it at this open-air inn near the island's only small dock.

  Grey relaxed against the pillowed back of the seating platform in a loose white tunic and tanned leather pants. Her full riptide leathers were across the cove in her sunveil as she tried to paint the picture of a carefree, handsome sailor for any passing noblewoman. Lotti’s sage raiments were retired to her sunveil as well, the loose tunic and pants not tailored to show enough of her fawn skin for her liking.

  Lotti’s green eyes sparkled under the palm torches as she dove into more detail about the previous evening. Grey had left her in the arms of a handsome, if not a little rough-looking, sailor. She had assumed the whisper had ended the night with him in her sunveil.

  Apparently, though, Lotti had lost interest after Grey was no longer around to carry the conversation. When she started to wander down the dock without him, he had gotten belligerent and grabbed her arm. Lotti had kicked him and all his shit directly into the ocean, laughing and dancing. She hadn’t even bothered to look back as she made her way back up the street to continue her evening through the town.

  As Lotti’s story wound down, Grey watched her features gather into a scowl. Grey turned to follow Lotti’s gaze out over the street to the dock, where a group of sailors gathered near the entrance. The man from the night before stood in the middle, staring directly at Lotti.

  Grey recognized the lanky sailor immediately. “You did all that to him?” The man's face was pummeled all to shit, and he appeared to have a limp.

  Lotti rolled her eyes. “No! I dumped him in the Myriad. I don’t know what he’s been up to since.”

  The group at the dock followed the man’s gaze and started marching up the dirt street towards where Lotti and Grey sat. Though Grey wasn’t completely sure of their intention, it seemed pretty clear they were unhappy with the sage.

  She reached across Lotti for her discarded scabbard and belt and rolled gracelessly off the platform. After a quick recovery, she hopped the small patio rail onto the dirt street in front of the establishment. Lotti followed suit, albeit more casually than Grey had managed.

  Sages did not typically carry weapons on casual evenings at a tavern, but Grey knew Lotti always kept a long dagger tucked into her boot, and tonight, she was thankful for it. Grey counted nine sailors. Thankfully, they didn’t appear to have a riptide, though maybe some leadership could have de-escalated what appeared to be a situation.

  The group looked very much like a pissed-off pack of grounders.

  “That’s her. That’s the bitch that pushed my pack in the water.” The man from the night before glared at Lotti through his one good eye, the other half-busted.

  “I kicked you in too, you one-eyed cunt.” Lotti barked.

  Grey glared at her, speaking calmly. “Alright, look, what can we do for you lot? I assume you’re not stomping over here to try the rice wine.”

  A woman with thick shoulders and a grappler’s build replied, “We’ve got a debt to settle with the pretty blonde, and though we understand Sal here was most likely at fault, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re owed a heavy sum of gold. If we could just follow her to a chest official, and she makes it square, we’ll be on our way this evening.”

  Lotti started, “Are you serious? You want gold for your man’s swim in the Myriad? What, did he hit every fucking pier timber on the way down?”

  The woman turned to face Lotti. “Miss, no. We wouldn’t care if he did. We rearranged his features ourselves... just this morning. As I said, we know he’s responsible for most of the debt, but that doesn’t change the fact that he can’t pay it. Unfortunately, the pack you kicked over the dock had about a gold brick’s worth of dream inside.”

  Grey grimaced as her stomach sank. If she had to put gold on it, she’d wager they didn’t own the dream outright. Whatever they lost, they’d have to come up with themselves, and by the looks of them, they didn’t have the funds.

  Trying to shake down a known riptide and wind sage was risky business, but if the owner of the dream was more dangerous than Grey and Lotti were, it was no shock that the sailors had chosen to take their chances.

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  It was very likely that they stole the dreamsand from their own ship and would need to replace it before the cargo steward noticed it was missing. If this was the case, they could want Grey and Lotti dead after the exchange. It would be a problem if the women took the story straight to their ship’s captain in an effort to recoup their gold.

  To make matters worse, they were some shade of right. Lotti had punted his satchel into the sea for little more than her own entertainment and could be held responsible for the contents. Whether there truly was a gold bar’s worth of dream in the pack or the sailors were inflating the value would be impossible to know.

  None of that really mattered. Neither party wanted to get the Ironcloaks involved for a resolution, and if they planned on killing the riptide and sage, they would do it out of sight of the gathering crowd.

  Grey rolled her shoulders in an effort to stretch her neck. There was only one place this was going.

  She didn’t have the equivalent of a gold bar to give them. It took thousands of coins to make a gold bar, and less than a hundred had floated her and Lotti the whole month. It was a hefty, unrealistic sum.

  She had never seriously taken up dream because of how disgustingly expensive it was, even for small quantities. It was entirely possible a gold bar’s worth could fit in the pack she had seen Sal with.

  Grey was the one to reply. “We don’t have a gold bar or anywhere near it, and as there’s no way to verify your story, I don’t feel we owe it to you. I can put fifty gold coin... towards your loss... and buy your next bottle here at the tavern. I’m afraid that’s as much as we’re willing to do.”

  The woman’s features hardened. “And if I say we’re not asking, but telling both of you to pull all you have from the chest warden?”

  Of course, Grey had hoped this wouldn’t be the response. Now, she needed to end things quickly. If she allowed the grounders to separate them.

  While not as proficient in combat as a riptide, she knew sages could hold their own. Better they dealt with this together than stabbed alone in different alleys once the money was handed over.

  Grey kicked a spray of sand into the first three sailors and charged forward.

  She didn’t want to kill anyone in a public setting and deal with the complications of the Ironcloaks. As close as they were to Saphir, they may even have to contend with the Etosian military and the Seawardens if someone ended up dead. She chose to leave her sword sheathed and reassess as the confrontation progressed.

  She held the scabbard by its pointed end and swung hard in an upward arc, landing the hilt under the chin of the closest sailor. His head snapped backward, and he crumpled. Before he even hit the dirt, she had spun her body towards the sailor on her right, bringing the scabbard back down and driving the knoll of her sword hilt into the woman’s temple. She also crumpled.

  These two hits were the cleanest she would get, the element of surprise on her side, and Grey knew it. The sailor who was to her left, and now slightly behind her, cracked a cross into her left cheek as she turned back to him. She staggered away with the force of the blow.

  Instead of regaining his balance and following up with strikes, he clumsily followed his punch, trying to overpower her. This was the best-case scenario for Grey, who took a knee and let his momentum carry him onto her shoulders. As she twisted, he dumped hard out of the fireman’s carry onto the packed dirt. Instead of following him down, as she would if he were the only problem, she darted forward, barely escaping a dog pile from two additional grounders.

  She whipped around to face the pack, and now Lotti was in her line of sight. The woman was graceful and harsh, moving at a reasonable pace, and there was already a sailor on the ground behind her. She kept a smart distance from her opponents. Any time she closed it, Grey could hear a sharp snap of a bone breaking or a joint popping.

  The attackers nearest to her moved sluggishly, gasping for air. Lotti was fast, but not unnaturally so. Either the three sailors surrounding her were the most out-of-shape grounders Grey had ever seen, or Lotti was doing something to slow them down.

  Grey didn’t have more than a second to consider it before she was in the air. In another brief moment, she met the ground hard.

  She was able to throw her arm down in time to spread some of the concussive force, but the wind was knocked from her lungs, and her head snapped violently. The woman who had done the talking early had shot a vicious tackle, lifting Grey to the sky and then driving her into the earth.

  Grey’s only saving grace, besides hitting the ground well, was that she landed with her legs wrapped around the sailor’s waist. The woman was, in fact, a gifted grappler, but Grey had managed to hang on to her sheathed sword. As the Grounder regained her posture to pummel Grey, she shot her legs up around the woman’s neck and an arm, trapping her close. She held the scabbard right under the crossguard and smashed the hilt hard into the sailor’s temple.

  Grey released the sailor, unconscious, in time to roll away from a downward thrust from Sal’s sword. She heard the clash of blades behind her, as Lotti’s fights must have escalated to weapons as well.

  Sal slashed wildly as Grey scrambled to dodge from the ground. She drew her own sword in time for a block and launched to her feet. There was a brief pause as they assessed how to advance now that she’d drawn her blade. Everyone was hard until a riptide’s sword was unsheathed.

  The man Grey had thrown earlier was up, and it didn’t appear Lotti had gotten any more of hers on the ground. There were five sailors left to deal with, and everyone was drawing weapons. This was all looking very bad. In her head, she cursed her lack of armor, but squared her shoulders as if it made no difference to her at all.

  If Grey could get closer to Lotti, maybe they could defend themselves a little better. Lotti was doing a surprisingly good job with her long dagger, but it wouldn’t be enough.

  It seemed they feared whoever they owed the dream to more than they feared Grey’s sword, and began their advance. Parrying and attacking only to move forward, Grey slid in and out of the opponents between her and Lotti.

  She swung into place slightly in front of the sage, assuming, after watching her figh,t that she worked best at a maintained distance and that she could help her keep it. As soon as she entered the space, she felt choked by the air around her and lightheaded. She couldn’t catch her breath, and her chest started to ache.

  Whether it was the confidence of youth, the nature of the air around Lotti, or her lack of training without her armor, Grey did not commit hard enough to block a clean downward slash aimed at her neck. She did manage to keep it from slicing her carotid artery, but the blade sank deeply in the shoulder of her sword arm, where her hardened pauldrons should have been.

  The soldier wrenched the blade clean, and Grey roared. Pain flashed in her vision, leaving her momentarily blind. She dropped to a knee, unintentionally dropping her sword while blood gushed down her arm.

  Her vision cleared in time to see his blade repeating the same arc, this time aimed at her head. Grey had no time to react, and she knew it.

  She felt a jerk from behind as Lotti pulled her backward and tried to block the blow with her dagger. The small blade and the angle Lotti had tried to block from weren’t enough. The sword continued dropping through the dagger, straight through the fingers of the hand Lotti was using to guard Grey’s head and across the length of Grey’s left eye and cheek.

  If Grey hadn’t knocked out the only one with sense, she might have reminded them that it was better if the riptide and the sage remained alive as far as the public was concerned. As it stood, the remaining sailors were looking to guarantee their survival.

  Grey was forced back against Lotti’s chest and knew the next blow would be her last. It was happening too fast. Neither of them had anything to stop the next attack, and there was no way to move fast enough to avoid it. Even if they managed to roll away, four sailors were behind this one, ready to finish them off. Typical of the Dusk Isles, no one was moving to help them.

  The grounder was loading his next strike when Grey’s ears were filled with Lotti’s gut-wrenching scream. It was a blood-curdling sound, violent and angry, and reminded Grey of a wolf caught in a snare. Lotti curled over Grey, the blood from her hand soaking through Grey’s tunic onto her chest, her honey blonde waves cascading over Grey’s shoulders.

  The patio torches dimmed and then extinguished. The sound of the ocean grew faint. The rising howl seemed to come from everywhere, combining with a roar of wind. Both were picking up rapidly.

  The wood of the tavern groaned and creaked, and the gale had already started launching debris. The sailor paused briefly, unsure, and then swung hard. Before he could complete his arc, a stretch of bamboo from inside the tavern flew through the air and sank deep into his chest.

  For the longest time, Grey thought that Lotti had done that on purpose, and of cours,e Lotti let her. What happened next was actually what Lotti was trying to accomplish.

  The massive plank and driftwood tavern sign, lashed tightly to pillars extending from the roof over them, ripped free and crashed onto the dirt-packed street below. Grounders screamed as they were smashed under the wreckage. Only two sailors were out of its path, and after a moment of panic, they turned and sprinted back to the dock.

  Lotti lay over Grey, breathing hard. Her curls were damp with sweat, and her mangled hand lay limp on Grey’s chest. Grey looked up through the blood weeping from her fac,e expecting to see tears, or maybe fear, but Lotti looked calm.

  The Sage helped Grey to her feet, sending her uninjured hand behind Grey’s good shoulder. It wasn’t long until the Ironcloaks found them, struggling to make their way unseen back to Lotti’s room.

  When Captain Akula arrived a week later, after a fast-traveling message from Sal’s Captain apologizing for the mess, he found Lotti and Grey in the same cell of the Dusk Isles’ only dungeon. They were laughing over a game of cards the wardens had taught them, betting stale crusts of bread.

  For the most part, they were on the mend. Most of Lotti’s fingers had been found and sewn back on, save the pinky, and Grey thought the new scar forming across her eyebrow and cheek looked rather handsome and dangerous. Her shoulder would take much longer to heal, but it hadn’t caught an infection, and she had a full range of motion.

  The Justicar had already written off the fight as an equal cause skirmish, but the women didn’t have quite enough purse or connections to fix the destruction they’d caused. Akula paid the Ironcloaks the women’s debt, having the ship’s Purser hold it against their next several hauls, and they were released under his supervision.

  Back on the ship, Lotti and Grey fit more confidently into their leadership positions and were thick as thieves to boot. While it was never guaranteed that the wind sage and riptide would be of the same mind when they made decisions for their crew, it was a certainty that they would sort it out behind closed doors, usually over a bottle of rice wine or two.