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PROLOGUE: "the king is dead."
REVOLUTION HAS NEVER TASTED SWEETER.
The smell of blood on the air was a siren's call, the cry of wounded men like a chorus that sounded sweeter than an symphony. Violence, in its many forms, had never sounded better than it did onboard the Immaculata that morning as Mercy held her blade in hand, ready to let the rising sun herald her victory.
The winds of change had been blowing for months, after the irrational idiocy of a man that had declared himself Captain nearly cost Mercy her life one too many times. The imbecile in question went by the name of Goldfinger - which (in hindsight) should have been the first indication that this man was never to be trusted with any degree of responsibility beyond how many barrels of kvas to store below deck.
He was a fool. A greedy, arrogant fool. And as Mercy soon discovered, there was nothing more dangerous than a fool with power. She'd served him too long, nearly died too many times to live under his command to bear it with a tight lip any longer. So it was the time to reap the benefits of that servitude.
Today was the day Mercy would kill Goldfinger.
Convincing half a crew of savages to revolt against their, quite frankly, useless captain is not as easy as it may sound. After all, despite their aversion to anything resembling honour and duty, pirates were fiercely loyal to a handful of rules that were so reverred throughout the ages that they became a code. It was safe to say this code didn't exactly celebrate mutiny.
But the rules could be changed, however the mind of man was a little harder to meld. Before she had spilt a single drop of that man's blood, her reputation as nothing more than Goldfinger's little grisha taunted her to fail. Under the Captain's command, her place on the Immaculata balanced on the fine edge of a knife, dependent solely on her ability to manipulate the very metals on which their life depended. In Ravka they'd called her a fabrikator, on the ocean she was a slave to the whims of a man who couldn't spare the time to learn her name.
Mercy had heard tales of grisha stolen in their sleep, forced into an elusive kind of slavery from which they could never be freed. In Ravka, parents told tales of these wanton sailors, the evil kind who would take naughty grisha children far, far away into a life of cold food and even colder feet. It was enough to haunt even the most stoic child and so, when she pledged her service to Goldfinger, Mercy had never imagined to meet the same fate as the children in her nightmares, with the only difference being that her prison was the ocean, not the destitute isle of Ketterdam.
( She wondered if he'd beg for his life. )
The blade-bender. That's what they called her. She could shatter a cutlass like glass, stop bullets in flight and change the course of cannonballs. They were scared of her and the magic she wielded that they could never dream to understand, let alone control, and it was this fear that gave her the crew she needed to take the Immaculata for herself.
