The night went on with its placidities and tensions intact; the Wounded Moon crawled, up over the mast and began sliding toward the heaving black water with its tracery of foam; the groaning song of the riddle rock grew loud enough to ride over the noises of the sea, the wind and the straining ship and creep into the fuddled mind of the blond hero who stirred uneasily and reached for the empty skin. Remembering its emptiness before he completed the gesture, he settled back into the muddled not-sleep that was a world away from the vigilance he was being paid for. The woman stirred, muttered, moved uneasily, on the verge of waking.

Shadows began converging on the foremast, dark forms moving with barefoot silence and confident agility, Captain and crew acting according to their nature, a nature she’d read easily enough when she made arrangements to leave Bandrabahr on that stealthy ship, needing the stealthiest of departures to escape the too-pressing attentions of an ex-friend of her dead father, a man of power in those parts. Having no choice in transport and understanding what a swamp she was plunging into, she hired the hero as a bodyguard and he’d done the job well enough up to this moment but her luck and his were about to run out.

The hero’s throat was cut with a soft slide, the sound lost in the moan from the riddle rock now only a few shiplengths off, but since most of the crew were here, not tending the ship, she lurched in annoyance at being neglected and sent the hero’s sword clanging against the deck. Half awake already, the woman jerked the knot loose and was on her feet running, knives in both hands, slashing, dodging, darting, slipping grips, scrambling on her knees, rolling onto her feet, creating and reading confusion, playing her minor whistle magic to augment that confusion, winning the shiprail, plunging overside into the cold black water.