Chapter 245: For King and Crown

From the quarterdeck, James could already see how the fight below was going to end. There was not much left for him to do except watch it happen, which suited him perfectly well.

The knot of English sailors by the mainchains threw down their cutlasses together and dropped to their knees with their hands raised, crying quarter loudly enough to be heard over the timbers of the ship.

"Quarter! Christ’s sake, quarter!"

"Quarter’s yers the instant that blade kisses the boards! Not a breath afore!"

Past the foremast, a marine broke and rushed for the water instead of begging, going over the side in a dive that ended beneath the churned white water rather than with any Christian burial.

Another tried to reload, but his hands were shaking too badly to manage it. A cutlass hacked through his forearm, nearly taking the hand with it, and the pistol dropped from his fingers while the next stroke cut open his belly. His powder horn was still open, and black grains scattered across the deck beneath the blood.

James let his gaze travel over the wreckage without hurry, picking familiar shadows from the smoke.

Then he stopped.

Anne was locked hard against a marine near the mainmast, her cutlass tangled with his in a bind that had taken all her attention, while a second marine closed on her blind spot with his hanger rising for a cut that would open her from shoulder to hip.

The noise below would have swallowed any warning before it reached her, and there was no time to try regardless.

James’s hand found [Counterargument], he drew her and went rigid.

The whole deck dropped away until there was only the target he needed. He narrowed one eye down the barrel while the crowd below churned and broke and closed again like one great beast with too many arms, then drew the cock back slowly, cautious not to fumble it.

"One shot left in ye, lass."

He murmured, too low for anyone but himself.

"Best make the damn thing count."

The chance appeared.

[Counterargument] answered, her last charge spent, and the shot caught the marine full in the throat, smashing through the collarbone beneath it. He spun off his feet in a spray of blood that painted the mast in sheets and struck the planking dead while the hanger fell loose.

The pistol went dark and empty in James’s grip, spent down to the last grain.

Anne, now done with the first marine, only understood what had happened when the body dropped beside her. She turned, followed the shot back along its own line, and found James standing above her at the quarterdeck, the barrel still trailing smoke.

She seized the front of her shirt and gave it a shake that could have been seen from the mizzentop, then threw her hips forward once for good measure and howled her thanks across half the ship in words no chaplain aboard would have wanted repeated in church.

"Spent your last shot saving me, James? Good! Means that pistol’s empty, so I’ll just have to see what else you’ve got loaded in you. And I’ll be damned if I don’t empty every last drop of it before this night’s through!"

James laughed outright.

He figured his night plans had taken care of itself without troubling to ask his opinion, then turned back toward the one fight left aboard worth watching.

That fight belonged to Kwaku now, and it had swallowed the noise the deck had left to spare.

Radcliffe fought with a boom in his chest that Stanhope had never managed, a big man swinging a heavy naval hanger in broad, hungry slashes, every stroke meant to finish matters at once.

He came in high first, the hanger crashing down as Kwaku caught it on the length of his chain with both hands, iron shrieking against steel. The chain fighter twisted, let the blade slide off the links, then snapped them around the bigger man’s wrist as he recovered.

He laughed through the effort, too, while the chain kept slipping between those cuts and turning the captain half a step away from wherever he had meant to stand.

"Chains fit for a slave pen!"

Radcliffe roared, driving in with a cut meant to split his opponent from hip to shoulder. "Wielded by a man who never should have been freed from it! His Majesty’s Navy does not answer to some savage swinging his own leash as a sword!"

The cut came hard, but Kwaku caught it on a loop of iron and turned it aside without hurrying his feet.

Steel rang, the chain jerked tight, and the hanger tore off line. Radcliffe’s blade ripped through empty air beside Kwaku’s shoulder, allowing the larger fighter to step inside his reach before the chain slipped free again.

His voice never rose above its usual level. "This chain has outlived every bastard who ever thought to put me in it. I have every confidence it shall survive you as well, though, if I may be so bold, I suspect it shall have considerably less work to do."

James called down from the quarterdeck. "Take him breathin’! I’ve questions want askin’, and a corpse answers precious few of ’em!"

Kwaku accepted the new terms as calmly as a fresh hand dealt halfway through a game. "Very well, a fight becomes considerably more interesting when one is instructed a required outcome. It introduces a certain novelty to the proceedings."

The captain heard him clearly, and the idea offended him greatly. "Taken alive? To be trussed up and carried below like a bale of cargo, all for some pirate’s idle curiosity? I think not!"

Some blood was already dripping from a bitten lip where a punch he hadn’t seen coming had caught him.

"I’ll die standing on my own feet before I submit to such an indignity, and I’ll do it gladly!"

He came on harder after that, throwing what strength he had left straight back into the fight.

The hanger hacked down and Kwaku slipped left, the blade biting into the planking where his shoulder had been a heartbeat earlier as the chain whipped around the back of the captain’s knee and yanked.

His leading foot swept out from under him, the knee buckled and the swing went wide, but the marine lurched forward, caught himself on one boot and twisted with the momentum rather than fall. He came around with the hanger rising, recovered quickly for a man his size, and answered with a cut fast enough to open a thin red line across Kwaku’s forearm before the chain could return to guard.

Kwaku let it bleed and struck back at once, snapping the chain across the sword arm to catch the wrist and haul it sideways. The hanger jerked across Radcliffe’s hand, its edge biting into the knuckles before the chain tore it free.

As he tried to recover the blade, the links tightened around his wrist and wrenched his sword hand across his own body, the edge scraping hard over the back of his hand and opening a matching wound.

"There."

Kwaku’s voice remained composed.

"That makes us square. One hand apiece, and only one of yours remains worth the trouble."

Radcliffe only laughed, shaking the blood from his fingers as though it were hardly worth notice.

"Steel in the flesh makes a man fight twice as fierce, chain-dog!"

"We shall have the answer soon enough, once you have more steel inside you than outside."

The marine drove forward again, cutting left, then right, each blow heavier than the last. Kwaku gave ground by inches, turning one stroke aside with the chain and ducking beneath the next as the hanger scraped sparks from the iron links and forced him back.

The strikes came faster after that, but there was considerably less behind them. His breath dragged ragged beneath a bravado he refused to let slip for even a moment, while the chain kept finding him at that easy pace, never giving more than the moment demanded.

A cut came for Kwaku’s head and he raised the chain. The hanger struck it, bounced wide, and left the captain’s ribs exposed for half a heartbeat. Kwaku’s weighted end whipped around.

Then a wild, overreaching cut left the whole side of the redcoat open. The weighted iron came down hard across his ribs and smashed through cloth and skin with a sickening crunch, tearing a deep, ragged gash beneath them. Radcliffe folded around it with a grunt as blood spilled hot down his side.

The red soaked dark through his shirt, and he staggered a full step before catching himself against the rail.

He straightened, laughing through the pain. "His Majesty shall hear the name of every man who stood his ground this day, chain-dog, and every craven who fled it! Josiah Radcliffe shall be counted among neither, I assure you!"

Kwaku observed him, watching him sway. "Your legs ceased taking orders from your mouth some time ago. Best settle the dispute yourself before they make the decision for you."

Radcliffe answered the only way he had left.

He threw everything his body still possessed into one final charge, both hands clamped white-knuckled around the hanger’s grip, the blade held high overhead for a cut meant to split a man from crown to belt in one stroke.

"FOR KING AND CROWN, THEN!"

The roar came out raw, blood and spit flying with it. "Let it be proclaimed from one end of His Majesty’s dominions to the other! Josiah Radcliffe has never yielded an inch of ground to any living man, and by God, he shall not begin this day!"

Kwaku closed the last distance himself. As the hanger came down, he stepped inside its arc and whipped a loop of chain around the descending wrist.

The captain’s eyes widened. Kwaku twisted beneath the stroke as the chain cinched tight, letting the blade whistle past his shoulder instead of splitting his skull.

It screamed past his ear close enough to lift a lock of hair clean from his scalp, another finger’s width from cracking his skull to the bone, but never touched him.

The chain’s weight and Kwaku’s pull tore the hanger loose from fingers already too bloodless to keep hold of it. The weapon spun end over end across the planking.

Radcliffe’s hand opened involuntarily, the chain snapping tight and wrenching his arm straight as the hanger flew from his grasp hard enough to clatter and skid beneath a nearby gun carriage.

In the same motion, Kwaku reversed the chain and brought the weighted iron around in a short, brutal arc into the side of his jaw.

The weight struck with a wet, crushing crack. His head snapped sideways, teeth and blood bursting from his mouth as the force spun him halfway around.

Radcliffe dropped like a felled mast, out cold.

The redcoats watched their captain crumple in front of them and laid their weapons on the deck without needing to be told twice, and then roars went up from the Rose’s crew, loud enough to shake the rigging, and the frigate belonged to them entire.

James stood above them, cheering through the blood on his own face.