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the girl’s shadow was much larger than it should, or indeed could have been. And worse, it was moving .
    Peacock’s mouth opened as she introduced her boot to his partner’s groin, kicking him hard enough to cripple his unborn children. She seized the walnut thug’s arm as he doubled up, flipping him over the railing and into the sea. Peacock cursed as she moved behind him, but he found he couldn’t shift footing to match her—as if his boots were glued in the girl’s shadow on the deck. She kicked him hard in his backside and he toppled face-first into the rails, spreading his nose across his cheeks like bloodberry jam. The girl spun him, knife to throat, pushing him against the railing with his spine cruelly bent.
    “I beg pardon, miss,” he gasped. “Aa’s truth, I meant no offense.”
    “What is your name, sir?”
    “Maxinius,” he whispered. “Maxinius, if it please you.”
    “Do you know what I am, Maxinius-If-It-Please-You?”
    “… D—da…”
    His voice trembled. His gaze flickering to shadows shifting at her feet.
    “Darkin.”
    In his next breath, Peacock saw his little life stacked before his eyes. All the wrongs and the rights. All the failures and triumphs and in-betweens. The girl felt a familiar shape at her shoulder—a flicker of sadness. The cat who was not a cat, perched now on her clavicle, just as it had perched on the hangman’s bedhead as she delivered him to the Maw. And though it had no eyes, she could tell it watched the lifetime in Peacock’s pupils, enraptured like a child before a puppet show.
    Now understand; she could have spared this boy. And your narrator could just as easily lie to you at this juncture—some charlatan’s ruse to cast our girl in a sympathetic light. 8 But the truth is, gentlefriends, she didn’t spare him. Yet, perhaps you’ll take solace in the fact that at least she paused. Not to gloat. Not to savor.
    To pray.
    “ Hear me, Niah ,” she whispered. “ Hear me, Mother. This flesh your feast. This blood your wine. This life, this end, my gift to you. Hold him close .”
    A gentle shove, sending him over into the gnashing swell. As the peacock’s feather sank beneath the water, she began shouting over the roaring winds, loud as devils in the Maw. Man overboard! she screamed, man overboard! and soon the bells were all a-ringing. But by the time the Beau turned about, no sign of Peacock or the walnut bag could be found among the waves.
    And as simple as that, our girl’s tally of endings had multiplied threefold.
    Pebbles to avalanches.
    The Beau ’s captain was a Dweymeri named Wolfeater, seven feet tall with dark locks knotted by salt. The good captain was understandably put out by his crewmen’s early disembarkation, and keen on hows and whys. But when questioned in his cabin, the small, pale girl who sounded the alarm only mumbled of a struggle between the Itreyans, ending in a tumble of knuckles and curses sending both overboard to sailor’s graves. The odds that two seadogs—even Itreyan fools—had tussled themselves into the drink were slim. But thinner still were the chances this girlchild had gifted both to Trelene all by her lonesome.
    The captain towered over her; this waif in gray and white, wreathed in the scent of burned cloves. He knew neither who she was nor why she journeyed to Ashkah. But as he propped a drakebone pipe on his lips and struck a flintbox to light his tar, he found himself glancing at the deck. At the shadow coiled about this strange girl’s feet.
    “Best be keeping yourself to yourself ’til trip’s end, lass.” He exhaled into the gloom between them. “I’ll have meals sent to your room.”
    The girl looked him over, eyes black as the Maw. She glanced down at her shadow, dark enough for two. And she agreed with the Wolfeater’s assessment, her smile sweet as honeydew.
    Captains are usually clever fellows, after all.
    1. She didn’t know how to listen yet. You people seldom do.
    2. Something noticed.