Young Writers Society

The mutiny was planned by the next day’s evening. The futile, reckless attempt that would get them all killed. Azrael stared up at the bundles hung above their heads, rocking along with the ship in her sleeping net. The ship was turning, heading towards the mountains, and she could imagine the wind howling outside, stretching the sails, pushing left and right against the recently-oiled sides of The Dancer.

Azrael turned her head to the side to look at the others. Without their cabins to sleep in, all of them were huddled below deck, clearly separated from the side where Captain Vane’s men slept. Not that any of Azrael’s crewmates seemed to mind — they’d all once started as deck scrubbers and cabin boys, after all.

Bos’n Ranye slept closest to her, snoring gently and almost inhaling a curly strand of her own hair with each breath. Azrael smiled, gently reaching to move the curl up and away from Ranye’s face. The woman, whose reflexes in awake state were widely praised, didn’t move a millimetre.

Fast asleep, Azrael thought. It was for the best: no one deserved to face inevitable death having spent the night thinking about it.

A soft sob, almost too quiet to be noticed, attracted her attention. She stretched her neck to look behind her, and found Missy’s thin figure sat in the corner, a hand over his mouth and knees drawn up to his chest.

She closed her eyes and fought with herself for a moment. There was nothing she could tell the young cabin boy to calm him down — nothing but lies. And hadn’t she been taught that the weakest die first, and whoever thinks they can help them is wasting time and will end up taking their place?

Her eyes snapped open.

No.

Those thoughts were not hers. Those thoughts belonged to Azrael Rose, the student at the Academy, to her parents and to Reiner, and not Rosie the cabin girl.

She silently slid out of her sleeping net and approached Missy, and lowered into a crouch next to him.

“You can’t sleep?”

He glanced at her sideways. “You’re awake too.”

“I heard you.”

He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

Azrael sighed quietly and switched to a sitting position, crossing her legs. “It’s alright to be scared. We’re getting the Dancer back — it’s a big task we gave ourselves.”

Missy said nothing for a while. Then, after the silence had already settled over them and she’d focused on the sound of Ranye’s quiet breathing again, he uttered the question she’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask:

“Are we all going to die?”

Yes. She bit her tongue, but the thoughts kept coming. Undoubtedly, inevitably, yes.

“We are going to fight,” she said. “We’ve been through it: we’ll attack in just a bit over an hour, starting right here, and make our way upstairs while most of them are still asleep and the winds are loud and distracting.”

Missy nodded, enthusiastically whispering the rest of the plan: “We know the ship better than they do, and we’ve taken all kinds of routes before, and we won’t be as bothered by the winds or the cold. We’ll separate into two groups and attack at the same time, and it will be over before they even realise it had begun.” He grinned and shortly leaned his head on Azrael’s shoulder. “Thank you, Rosie.”

They sat in silence. Missy eventually leaned against her again, and his breathing grew slower and deeper, but Azrael stayed awake and alert. She knew better than to enter a fight with a Captor sleep-deprived, but tiredness just refused to overcome her. She sat there, watching the others, fighting the thoughts that raced through her head.

Not all battles are worth fighting, little sister; don’t embarrass yourself choosing the wrong ones.

Azrael bore her nails into her thigh. She was done with the Academy and the Palace. Done with Reiner and the Council. She’d believed she’d never come in contact with anyone related to them again, that she’d never have to go through these thoughts again — and now, here she was, waiting for seconds to tick by and the killing to begin. She allowed herself another sigh. These people — the cook, the navigator, Missy… — did they even know how it felt to kill a person?

Ranye woke up first, alertedly rolled out of her net and stilled as she spotted Azrael. While the bos’n quietly woke the captain and the others, Azrael shook Missy awake and stood up.

Ranye held out a knife to her. Fairly large and sharp, it was a meat-cutting knife from the kitchens, brought to them by the cook along with the others. An old scar under Azrael’s right breast stung with memories.

Rosie the cabin girl, she reminded herself.

She took the knife from Ranye and joined the bos’n and the others in slowly creeping towards the sleeping sailors.

There were six of them — their group of mutineers outnumbered them, but they had weapons and skills none of Azrael’s friends possessed. She glanced at the captain and nodded as he gave a small nod, and stopped paying attention to what anyone else was doing.

The man before her slept curled on his side, in a thick woollen shirt and blanket tossed to the floor. She shifted the knife in her hand, flexed her fingers around the handle.

Rosie the cabin girl.

She clasped her hand over the man’s mouth and, in a swift move, stabbed the knife into the base of his skull. His spinal cord severed, he was dead before his hand got to lift enough to grab onto her wrist.

Darkness exploded through her mind as if someone threw ink into her face, and images came with it.

The man lay in front of her, but it wasn’t a man. It was a little girl, a student two years below her, tied to a table and helpless. Her eyes wide and pleading, her lips sewn shut.

If you are not ready to conduct a punishment, then you are not ready to graduate.

But she wasn’t ready to graduate — she wanted to leave, she wanted to run, and take that mask off her face—

A noise to her right pulled her back below deck.

She turned. One of the men was awake. The navigator sat on the floor and held a hand to his bleeding head, his knife uselessly tossed to the floor a few meters away. Captain Vane’s man stood with a red line across his neck, blood pouring down his front but hand raised and gun aimed at Ranye.

Azrael reacted instinctively: she pulled her knife from the body beside her and threw it like an arrow towards the other man. The impact pushed him backwards to the floor, where he remained motionless and with the knife sticking out of his eye.

For a moment, everything was silent.

Then Ranye suddenly threw herself at Azrael, pulling her into a tight hug.

“You saved my life,” she whispered, and pulled away before Azrael got to answer, turning back into her usual bos’n self. “Report?”

“They’re all dead,” Missy said. He was pale, but his eyes were dark and determined. “We’re all alive.”

“Take their weapons,” the captain said.

They all complied, arming themselves with better knives and the guns Vane’s men carried. Azrael watched as Ranye weighed two guns in her hands; the cook kept his meat cleaver, and the captain and his first mate both opted for guns as well. Azrael took a set of small throwing knives off one of them — they were well armed, too well for below-deck hands — and yanked her knife out of the dead man’s skull.

“Stay here,” she told Missy when the cabin boy reached for the last of the guns. She gestured at their navigator, who still clutched his head. “Help him, and stay quiet. Barricade the door.”

“But—“

“Just listen to me,” she snapped. Maybe because she sounded so much like Ranye, maybe because he’d just seen her hit a man’s eye from a two-metre distance — she hoped it was the former — Missy listened and went over to the other man, and Azrael followed the others out.

A blow of the wind greeted her. It was cold and raining, with a visibility of barely a few metres and gusts of wind from unpredictable directions — a terrible weather for guns and throwing knives. She turned her head towards the captain’s quarters, where Arcus Vane was asleep in his grey-green mask and with a weapon undoubtedly in close reach.

Rosie the cabin girl, she thought again, and a nostalgic sigh got lost in the wind.

Rosie the cabin girl wasn’t the one who stood a chance against the Captor.

*