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Sigrid sed hard “And you’ll be needing my blood to pay the Witch, I suppose?”

To to fire “I think not The mess would be more trouble than it’s worth”

“Then why did you take me, if not to kill me? I’m told that’s what pirates do And besides, you es”

The captain srid’s face, her expression almost, but not quite, motherly “We don’t really hold with tradition We heard there was a es You’ll learn to trust one kind of ruh at the other when you live at sea—this was the kind you listen to When the Stars speak, you listen Look around; we like irls don’t exactly study to be sailors these days When we hear of sohastly beast, we snap her up as soon as we can”

“So, all of that, the fire and the raid, was for me?”

“Certainly not! We stole plenty of other things—just no other girls You’re part of our cre—you’ve been pressed into naval service, my little powdermonkey”

Sigrid leaned over the rail and stared at the water running past the red hull swift as otters fleeing a hungry shark She contereatly—and her new place as a h soan now to suspect that none of them truly were And at that side her

Tomomo’s reflection in the water was that of a wo face, but with that of a bright-eyed fox, its fire-shaded fur buffeted by the wind

SNOW LOOKED UP AT SIGRID’S WIDE FACE CAREFULLY as a deer nosing a blackberry bramble

“I was born in Ajanabh, you know,” she said softly

Sigrid nodded, but it was not precisely a confir babe—though I’m told it’s no more than a shadow of the city it was All cities are shades of what they were these days; even Muireann was once a metropolis, with towers of ice and silver and queens who sat on tuffets of whale fur drinking Ajan orchid-wine from cups of seal bone It was the capital of the North, a thousand years past Now it is a village, an outpost on the hostile sea Only the Stars recall”

The afternoon had grown fat and red-faced and the first thin wisps of twilight aiting behind its jowls Sigrid and Snoorked in unison now, like fiddlers plying their bows

“Clearly you joined the Sigrids,” Snow reious elbows, “or it would be a great coincidence indeed that you are narid yourself”

“Clearly”

“Yet”—and here Snow blushed, flushing her colorless face with pink—“you don’t swear by Saint Sigrid, you swear by the Stars I think it e road for you, from there to here”