PROLOGUE
Dead Man's Float

When she slammed into the cold water, the world shattered into a million dark fragments.

An explosion of bubbles erupted around her as she screamed, blinded by her own breath. Her voice came out muffled, a most disconcerting sensation, like hearing her own voice ten rooms away. Salt stung her eyes, flooding her mouth and nose with a searing vehemence. At first came the shock, a thousand tiny needles of ice piercing through her skin. Then came the panic blasting through her as a wave slammed her under.

Around her, the current swelled, the vicious waves tossing her around like flotsam. She could do nothing but fight.

Fight until her muscles burned, lungs constricting, heart hammering against her aching ribs. A powerful jet of water punched against her chest, knocking the last of her breath from her lungs. In the midst of the maelstrom, the water pushing her under, the current wrapped around her ankle and dragging her down into the sinking deep, she had lost her bearings. Every sense of north, south, east or west had been sent into a tailspin. She couldn't see the surface, couldn't see three inches in front of her, and the harder she grappled with the current, the more irritable the water grew.

Every instinct in her body seemed to flee except for the primal fear that seized her in its chokehold. It unravelled every inch of her training. Every mechanism she had cultivated over the past decade and a half seemed to fail her. She could not slow her heart. She could not stop the wrath of the tides from collapsing her every defence. For the first time in years, Lei could not fight her way out of the dark. Her mind, white with fear, was blaring blank. That realisation in itself sent a bolt of terror through her, cleaving down to her core and unleashing a roiling host of every prayer she had buried deep within.

Darkness blotted the edges of her vision. There was no god in this world that could help her now. Nobody to plunge in after her, no hand reaching through the plume of effervescence, to pull her out of the water.

Lei blinked as the current whirled around her, and behind her lids, she saw her father's pleading face, her mother's grim smile. Lin blinking tears from her eyes as she stitched a gash shut on Lei's arm for the first time, her hands steadier than her breathing. Yan flitting through the rafters, her melodic voice echoing through the walls, spinning the dawnlight into song. The hiss of metal as swords clashed. The weight of a knife in much smaller hands. Hot sand and honey-dark eyes, a five-o-clock shadow and the granite-riven cut of a bruised jaw, the smell of saffron and white smoke. Dark ink striving against paper-tanned skin, lines converging, taking the form of a bird, a falcon in glorious mid-flight, talons outstretched, closing in for the kill. Her own hands keeping a bow steady, nudging Yan's into the right position. Two scarred hands shoving Lin into the murky pond. Her father's rough hands gentle on her shoulders and her mother's terse nods.

Memory after memory slipped across the forefront of her mind as her eyelids grew heavier and she slid backwards in time. Lei shuddered, convulsing violently, as she choked on the lack of air, her innards straining against her skin, her chest collapsing inward.

Lei's eyelids fell shut, darkness swallowing the blue.

Beneath her, the tide stirred. Then there was the heart-jerking sensation of being propelled upward. Lei broke the surface, her eyes snapping open. The momentum catapulted her into the air and smacked her down onto a hard surface. Pain was a sharp reverb through her bones, the snap of it jolting through her spine.

Water splashed across the wooden floor, and by some grace or mercy, Lei took her first stuttering breath, her dark hair plastered to her face and neck. Keeled over, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the wooden planks, gathering splinters beneath her nails, she coughed up bellyfulls of salt water onto the deck, expelling snot, bile and water with agonising violence, and blinked the sting out of her eyes.

A pair of leather boots stepped into view. Lei caught the gleam of a polished silver buckle, its imprint branded into her back. For a moment, she considered twisting it into something sharp, driving it through its wearer's foot and cutting right through the bone. But she was too weakened. Besides, it would be a foolish move, and Lei had worked her entire life to forsake acting on her impulses. Her mother had hammered that habit out of her since she first learnt how to hold a dagger.

"So," said the Imperator, her sharp voice cutting through the ringing of her own heartbeat in her ears. Her head was a silhouette disappearing the sun, dark hair fluttering in the punishing wind. She stood with one hand poised over the sword strapped to her belt, its wicked blade—as merciless as she—gleaming in the light. "Are you ready to tell me who you are and why you're on my ship, kazuaq?"

Though the words were formed in the shape of a question, the meaning sifted from her malignant tone pinned against her pulsing jugular. The Imperator spoke in a tongue Lei struggled to parse, but understood a step later. It was a purged provincialism broken off from Baxian mother tongue, a dialect that'd been eroded from the country with time. Lei had only ever heard it on her father's tongue in slivers, rare moments when he'd let his guard down, a piece of their ancestry that traced back centuries. One that every emperor on the Baxian throne had fought to cleanse from their history. Lei didn't understand the last word, couldn't find a match in memory to translate it in her head, but it felt as dirty as mogui.

Chest heaving, she sat back on her haunches, exhausted, drained of fight, and raised her contemptuous glare to meet her torturer's cold, cutting gaze, her smirking mouth a red twist, brow cocked in amusement. Lei schooled her expression into a blank mask, one she'd worn as the vessel of death many times over.

From the corner of her eye, Lei sought out her sisters, both still bound to the mast. Lin's fearful gaze was trained fiercely on her crumpled and soaking form, and Yan's erratic breathing strained the ropes wrapped around their torsos, lashing them to their post. There was nothing they could do for Lei. If she didn't play her cards right, they'd watch her die before the crew tossed them over the side after her corpse.

Lei set her jaw. She resisted the urge to look at her sisters, despite the leering man staring down at Lin, his finger running down her porcelain jaw. Lin shrunk away, eyes flashing with fury. Rage scorched Lei's chest, and her fingers itched for a blade.

Above, the black flag bearing the pirate's skull unfurled, flapping in the wind. Beside the Imperator, stood a man with mountains for shoulders, his bare, vein-vined arms laced with ink and scars, cresting over the musculature that spoke to a raw strength cultivated from a lifetime at sea. He met her animosity with a mirthful smirk. He flexed his fingers in a wave, lifting beads of water off the deck, and Lei fought the urge to flinch. The warning was clear. He could put her back in the water again. He could do much worse.

Surrounded by the Kingslayer's crew and their gleaming cutlasses, their bloodlust and hunger for violence thickening the air, the palpable pulse of power running between them like a red thread delineating predator from prey, the churning ocean waiting for a proper offering, Lei was powerless.

The tattoo on her shoulder blade seared like a firebrand, talons hooked into her flesh in protest, hooked beak gaped open in a silent cry.

A reminder of how far she had fallen.

"I am no one," Lei panted, scrubbing away the water dripping into her eyes with a weary hand, along with the pride that once came with the insignia of the falcon, her bloodline's emblem. No longer was she the Falcon of Baxia. No longer was she Accipitres. Broken down by the water, unmoored from her homeland, she was nothing. She was no one. She levelled the Imperator with a steel-eyed stare. "We're no one. We just want a chance."

The Imperator grinned, a flash of teeth, baring promises of brutality. Around her, the crew stirred.

"Everyone here wants a chance," said the Imperator, her cold voice slipping between Lei's guts like a set of fangs, locking around her liver, her heart, poised to rip and rend. "Why should I give it to you? What makes you so special?"

"You're in need of special talents," Lei said, picking her words carefully. "Lin's a trained medic. She can save you a lot of time and expenses. You wouldn't need to dock so often to seek medical treatment, to replace weakened crew. Yan's circus-trained—" Lei met her youngest sister's disquieted stare, cherubic face lit with the flare of confusion and alarm triggered by the lie that slipped from Lei's tongue like water, and held it, go with it— "she's good with heights and she can fix anything. Sharp eye, too. Give her a bow and arrow and she'll skewer a fly fifty yards away."

"Is that right, birdie?" The Imperator mused, turning her knife-bright eyes on Yan, who went pale in the mouth, but nodded compliantly. Her incisive gaze slid to Lin, who, despite the fear etched across her petal-soft face, kept her chin up. "I could use a surgeon. I could also use a sentinel—no one here likes the Night Watch. But you, kazuaq, give me a reason beyond scrubbing my deck to keep you. The ocean is hungry. I don't like to keep my gods waiting."

Around her, the air crackled, charged with menace and malice. Then came the strangest sensation; the pulp of skin beneath her tongue prickled with the distinct taste of bitter oranges, the way it did moments before lightning. Lei searched the skies, but no dark storm gathered.

"I can give you better," Lei finally spat out, something parasitic and dark unfurling within her, no longer cornered animal baring teeth but a creature who knew nothing except infiltration and survival. "I can give you the Jade Emperor."

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

way to throw you all into the thick of it! this will not be the only time lei almost dies. i am SO hyped for pirates and shenanigans!!!!