The Stygian Blades: Act One, Scene One (Draft)

Kit stumbled down the gangplank on wobbly sea legs, the stench of rotting fish and sewage hitting her as hard as the sight of Crownspire sprawling up the bluff. The capital climbed under a wan, steel blue sky scattered with purples and gray from Kingswatch Bay to the towering fortress where the Virgin Queen herself sat her bastard arse on the Bronze Throne.

She’d never seen so many people. Burly wharfmen unloaded galleons while fishwives gutted their catch, and the crush made her feel small as she hitched up baggy slops that hung off her narrow hips. Reaching under her shirt, she scratched at the flea bites beneath the cloth binding her chest. Passing as a boy was easier when she was still a flat, bony waif, barely a woman, but now it took a tighter wrap that made her tits ache and baggier clothes to conceal her late-budding curves—and the timing couldn’t be worse.

At an age when most girls were wed and already bouncing babes on their hips, Kit had seen more of the country than most, yet the scale of this city overwhelmed her. It made bustling Elmshenge look like a two-goat hamlet.

Tucking a loose strand of copper hair under her cap, Kit picked her way through the narrow streets, past piss-reeking alleys where legless beggars lurked and grunting men tupped two-penny trulls against the walls. At least the glowfeathers still shone from their planters, their warm light better than the perpetual dusk that would come at bloomclose… she patted the bodkin looped through a knot in the frayed cord keeping her slops from falling off, just to be sure it was still there.

A whole moon since she’d fled the Provinces, and she’d never felt so alone. The capital’s crush made her feel like a prop left behind after the curtain fell. Her whole life had been the troupe—aunts, uncles, a mob of cousins—

A glowering man with a livid scar brushed past, and Kit hunched her shoulders like a whipped dog. Then she cursed herself for it. As Meg always said, they were Tarltons, and if you had a role to play, play it to the hilt. She might be on the lam for swiving a randy nobleman’s son in the stones with a carving knife, but that didn’t mean she had to act like it.

Forcing a grin, Kit straightened her back and lifted her chin. She was the Scrappy Urchin now, ready to swive the stews of Low Crownspire like a randy knave with an eager yard.

But at the moment the Scrappy Urchin was starving and sick of stale biscuit and salted cod.

“Hoy!” a grimy boy with a mop of greasy black hair shouted at her, waving a sheaf of broadsheets. “Sir Alaric’s wondrous triumph at Danvor! By the Shroud’s holy radiance, he smote a hellish mist and routed the corsair fleet, now to be hailed a paladin!”

She ignored him and strolled past, but he persisted and followed, calling after her.

“If you don’t fancy that, what of a sinister fiend haunting the stews? Ere bloomclose, it rends doxies with hellish cruelty, leaving naught but gory ruin!” He shoved a broadsheet in her face with a lurid woodcut that made her gut twist. “Nay? How ‘bout Annapurna, Zindari’s lascivious buxom wanton, a dark siren draped in naught but clinging silks and gilded bells. She brashly struts the Virgin Queen’s court, seducing all with her foreign charms! Only a farthing. Or if you don’t lust for her giant heathen tits, then marvel at this beast she brought from across the sea!” He shoved another broadsheet in Kit’s face and she stopped to look at the woodcut of a comically endowed princess lustily riding a grotesquely monstrous beast.

“Large as a barn, word is,” he commented. “With a snake-like nose, ivory horns, flapping sails for ears, and legs like oaks!”

“What in Kahdishor’s name is that?” Kit asked, stabbing a finger at the paper.

“They say ‘tis an elephant. Like a dragon or a unicorn, I reckon. Trumpets like thunder so loud it can bring down a castle’s walls.”

“So that’s what an elephant looks like. Always thought they were more like a drunken cow swived a goat and weren’t too kind about it.” She pursed her lips and cocked her head to the side. “A farthing?”

“Farthing for one, ha’penny for all three,” he replied, nodding eagerly. “Come on, mate. I haven’t sold a single sheet all bloomtide.”

Untying a small purse hidden at her waist, she traded a copper for the sheet and he tugged at his forelock.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Nubs,” he replied, holding up the stub of a middle finger, his face split by a gap-toothed grin, then spun on his heel to harass a man driving an ox-cart.

She gave the woodcut of the elephant another look and laughed to herself. There were a lot of words, but she couldn’t make out more than maybe a dozen of them.

Spotting a board swinging on an iron bracket above a door depicting a foaming tankard and steaming pie on either side of a mounted rusty sackbut, Kit crossed the street, dodging a cart and jumping over side channels of slowly flowing shite and kitchen scraps to enter the tavern.

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