Chapter 209: Olsa Cut the Seven-Point Star from Her Armor

Olsa’s iron star answered the red light behind them.

The lowest point warmed first. A dull ember traveled through the metal, climbed the next white-edged point, and continued around her breast until all seven held a red glow.

Far back in the crosswake, a chain struck black water.

Morrowfin kept turning toward Kaul.

Her dark eye had passed beyond Jiang and fixed on Skykeel’s center. Each lift of the living hook beneath Kaul’s shoulder pulled the star-eater closer. The abandoned shell from Ashwake drifted beside her jaw, whole and bright and no longer interesting.

Olsa drew her blade.

The rider stepped between her and Kaul before the point cleared its sheath. She held Kaul’s own blade low in her good hand. Aylin’s safety rope remained knotted around her waist.

"Move away from him," Olsa said.

"Name what you mean to cut."

"The thing calling that animal into us."

"It is alive in him."

"So are the people behind you."

The rider did not move.

Kaul lay between the two women. His pale adult bell covered the hook-side shoulder. The animal’s scream had ended, but its folded limb trembled each time the hook rose. Kaul could give no citywide answer. His next shallow breath caught beneath the hook and came free wetly.

Olsa wanted the hook because it was an enemy she could reach.

Captain Irra Calder saw another danger.

"Seven-point!" Her voice cracked through Ashwake’s water horn. "Your command wheel is sighting through your coat."

Olsa looked down at her coat.

The red glow had spread from the iron star into the white scales stitched along her ribs. Every scale brightened in the same order as the points. Behind Skykeel, a second chain blow landed closer to the same rhythm.

"That is a recall mark," Olsa shouted.

"Not with a lance behind it."

Irra’s crew hauled their cut silver sail clear of the shell racks. Ashwake rode low enough that black water washed through its open keel. A deckhand raised a boarding line toward Olsa’s hunters.

Irra put one hand over the coil. "Nobody wearing that pattern comes aboard."

"My people did not fire on you," Olsa said.

"Your armor is firing for them now."

One of Olsa’s hunters looked toward the narrow deck. His fin-winged companion remained pressed to Skykeel beside him. The animal had no star, no white scales, and no reason to understand why the people were shouting.

Aylin planted a boot on the boarding coil before anyone could cast it. "They pulled our nursery through the fold. They stay here until they choose otherwise."

Olsa turned on her. "You do not claim my hunters."

"I said they stay. I did not say they belong to me."

For a breath, anger pushed every other expression out of Olsa’s face.

Then another red pulse ran around her star.

This time the white fire inside Morrowfin’s wound flickered with it.

Jiang saw the pattern from the copper lip. The lance was not following the city. It was bending toward the brightest piece of Olsa inside it.

"Cut the star," he said.

Olsa looked at the penguin hanging from Aylin’s line. "That iron is older than you."

"Most unpleasant things are."

"It names every ship I have commanded."

The rider kept Kaul’s blade between Olsa and the hook. "Then decide whether it names the people who die with you."

Olsa lowered her own weapon.

Her six hunters watched. None removed a matching mark, because none wore one. The white scales belonged to the captain’s coat alone.

Olsa slid two fingers beneath the lowest point and pulled the metal away from her breast. Seven short rivets held it to overlapping plates. Heat had already burned the cloth beneath them.

She drove her blade under the first rivet.

The blade twisted. The rivet held.

Olsa set one knee against the copper root and pulled harder. Hot metal opened the old glass-packed scar along her side. Blood darkened the cloth beneath the white scales.

One hunter stepped forward. "Captain, let me."

"If your hand removes it, the wheel may learn your hand."

Irra heard and barked across the gap, "It follows metal and fire, not honor. Let somebody help before you bleed empty."

"Your concern is touching."

"My concern is Morrowfin. You are leaking on the same side as her wound."

Olsa looked almost offended enough to keep the coat.

Then Morrowfin’s head passed beneath Kaul’s root, and the black current narrowed another body-width.

The rider turned Kaul’s blade around. She offered Olsa the hilt without lowering her guard from the hook.

"This edge cuts his work better than yours," she said. "Bring it back."

Olsa accepted the weapon.

Kaul’s blade passed through the first rivet. It cut the second with less resistance and the third with none. By the seventh, the hot iron sagged from one corner of the coat.

Olsa caught it in her bare palm.

The flesh hissed. She did not drop the star.

She cut every white scale from her ribs next. Some came away on their stitches. Others required a strip of black armor beneath them. The clean seven-point pattern became a torn hole with blood and dark cloth showing through it.

Her hunters had gone silent.

The youngest one said, "Captain?"

Olsa stacked the glowing scales against the star. "Not while this can answer for you."

She returned Kaul’s blade to the rider hilt-first.

Behind them, red light found the last turn of the crosswake.

The lance had not yet appeared, but its chain made the water jump in a straight line toward Olsa’s hand. Ashwake’s low keel tilted away. Irra pointed past Morrowfin’s sound wing, where the abandoned intact shell had entered a widening outer curl.

"Throw it into that curl."

Olsa measured the distance and shook her head. "The fold will return it."

Jiang saw why. The loose shell rode high in the curl. Olsa’s iron would sink through it and fall back toward Morrowfin’s wounded side.

He looked at Aylin’s remaining rope.

"No. I know that look," she said.

"I haven’t said anything."

"Your face asked. Your face is careless."

"My face is a beak."

The red light strengthened.

Aylin closed her eyes once. When she opened them, she tied a short second line through the iron star and wrapped the other end around Jiang’s ankle loop without touching the knot that held him.

"You place it," she said. "Olsa releases it. I bring back the bird and no metal."

"Agreed. Bring me back."

Olsa looked between them. "You trust me with the cut?"

"No," Aylin said. "I trust you to dislike dying."

Jiang entered the water with the bundle below him.

The hot iron sank. Its pull tried to drag his bad leg straight, so he rolled onto his sound side and let the outer curl carry both bodies around Morrowfin’s lifting wing. The exposed patch on his breast struck the current. Cold pain reached his burned tongue before he completed the turn.

He did not aim for distance. He aimed for the abandoned shell.

Its round body showed where the outward water stayed broad enough to carry weight. Jiang swam beneath it, kicked once across the curl, and let the iron bundle fall into the shell’s pale shadow.

The seven points brightened underwater.

The coming lance answered.

White fire appeared behind Skykeel, bent past the city’s broken edge, and drove toward Jiang.

Aylin hauled his line.

The iron star followed for one terrible pull. Jiang’s bad ankle burned inside the shared loop. Then Olsa cut the second rope at Skykeel’s lip.

Jiang came free of the iron.

Star and scales dropped beneath the intact shell and carried its pale shadow into the diverging wake. The lance turned after them. Its jaws passed outside Skykeel’s surviving root, close enough to bleach the copper white without touching it.

Olsa caught Jiang’s retrieval line beside Aylin. Together they pulled him over the lip while his injured leg refused to bend.

"Do not mistake this for forgiveness," Aylin said.

"I would have to mistake it for kindness first," Olsa answered.

The lance missed the city.

Its chain did not.

The crosswake bent the following links across Morrowfin’s folded wing. One struck the open feeding scar and tore it farther toward the joint. White fire spilled through dark water. Morrowfin’s whole body convulsed beneath Skykeel.

Ashwake lost the top of a silver mast. Crew fell flat on their wrist lines as the ship slid down the animal’s side.

Morrowfin folded the wounded wing against her belly.

The narrow lee Jiang had found vanished.

Her sound wing drove hard enough to carry Ashwake, Skykeel, and the severed seven-point star in three different directions. Ahead, the black water cleared for one heartbeat.

A field of dead stars waited there.

Thousands of hard white shells hung without water between them, packed close enough to crush every root Skykeel had left.