Chapter Five: Knuckles and Lessons

Punishment smells like salt and iron. I learned that on my knees, with a brush in my hand and sand grinding my skin raw. The deck was a scab I was being asked to pick clean.

Laughter gnat-buzzed overhead. Two men leaned against the mainmast with split lips and half-closed eyes swelling into purple moons. Another cradled his ribs and laughed anyway, because the joke was better than the ache.

“That’s what happens when you bed down on the night watch,” freckle-face said, cheerful as rot. “Captain doesn’t like sharing his stars.”

“Thought I’d just rest my eyes,” one of the punished tried. His grin peeled, then stuck. “Rested me to hell and back.”

More laughter, the rough kind that says relief: thank the gods it wasn’t me. Harp’s shadow fell over my brush. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t have to.

“Scrub deeper,” he said. “Deck bleeds just like you. Clean it.”

I put my back into it. The sand bit. My shoulder spat sparks. Under my nails, the ocean took up residence.

Kade emerged from the companionway like the ship had decided to grow a spine. His shirt sleeves were rolled; his right hand was blood. Not a lot. Enough. He didn’t flinch from it. He wrapped a strip of linen around the knuckles with the practice of a man who knows the difference between wounds that matter and ones that teach, tugged it tight with his teeth, tied it off one-handed.

The crew straightened without meaning to. It was instinct. Weather has that effect.

His gaze skimmed the deck, measuring. When it met mine, it did not linger. A second, then gone. The look still stuck under my ribs like a splinter. His face gave nothing away: no regret for the discipline handed out, no pride in it either. Only the certainty of a rule enforced. It should have chilled me. Instead, against my will, it steadied me. The world, for a breath, made sense.

I scrubbed harder until the wood stopped looking like a wound.

—

Night unstitched the day and laid the seam open to stars. I sat with rope and the ocean’s breathing. Bowline. Sheet bend. Bowline. Again. The moon scribbled silver over the water, an impossible road I wanted to walk until everything behind me was a smaller problem.

Footsteps found me. The rope in my hands remembered how to be quiet.

“Your sword work,” Kade said, coming to lean against the rail with a casualness I didn’t believe for a heartbeat, “is that of a child.”

I kept tying. “Good evening to you, too, Captain.”

“Evening’s only good if it makes morning better.” His voice was knife-clean. The linen on his knuckles had darkened, a bloom through cloth. He watched the horizon like it might change its mind if he stared long enough. “If you insist on bringing a blade to a fight, you’re going to stop embarrassing it.”

Heat crawled up my neck. Not the blush of shame—shame and I were old acquaintances—but the slow burn of wanting to be better in front of a man who saw everything and pretended not to. I untied the bowline, set the rope aside, stood.

“All right,” I said. “Teach me to be less of a child.”

He pushed off the rail without a smile. “Don’t make me regret it.”

We cleared a patch of deck by the foremast. The ship hummed beneath us, wood yawning after a long day. He handed me a blunted practice blade, weight honest, edge not. He took another, and when he lifted it, his forearm flexed, linen wrinkling, muscle under skin like cord. I looked away. I was a fool. I told myself so twice.

“First rule,” he said. “Don’t give a bigger, stronger man the thing he wants.”

“What’s that?” I asked, settling into a stance that made sense in a practice yard and less sense on a living deck.

“A full swing,” he said, and stepped in so fast the air forgot to warn me. His blade kissed mine; the shock ran up my arms. I held, but barely. “Step inside his arc. Make his strength into a clumsy luxury he doesn’t have time for.”

He moved again. I tried to flow with him. He blocked my blade with an economy that made me want to rage. The next moment, he was behind my guard, wooden edge resting against the soft place under my ribs.

“Dead,” he said.

“Annoying,” I said, and meant both.

Again. He came low; I met him late; he stopped my swing with a tap that made my wrists ache. “You like to fence,” he observed. “On a ship, they brawl. Don’t be precious. Use elbow and pommel, knee, and rail.”

He showed me. Not gently. A correction at my elbow that made my shoulder behave. A shove at my hip to close the gap. Fingers on my wrist precise, brief tilting the blade so force would travel into bone and not into air. Each touch was clinical. My blood did not care.

“Closer,” he said, stepping in. We were a breath apart. “Closer,” he insisted, and my body remembered that men are danger and also that some dangers you choose. “Now. He raises? You step in. You take the room he needs. Don’t admire your own courage—use it. Strike to soft places. Sinew cuts cleaner than pride. Inside of knee, back of hand, tendon at the wrist. He will hate you for it. Good. Hate slows men who need to be quick.”

We moved. He said, “Now,” and I stepped inside a swing that would have taken my head if I’d stayed sweet and proper. My blade checked his forearm. He approved with silence. I brought my pommel up, awkward and ugly, toward his jaw. He knocked it aside and cuffed me, light, behind the ear with the flat.

“Better,” he said. “Again.”

Again. Sweat found the small of my back; breath sawed; the bandage at my chest reminded me I had secrets. His hand came to my waist—brief—dragging me an inch closer to the angle that let my cut land. His other hand slid my blade down until the point rested over the coil of muscle at his shoulder. The motion was nothing. It was everything. My thoughts scattered like startled fish; I herded them with teeth.

He must have felt it. His mouth didn’t change. His eyes sharpened, curious and then not. He stepped back. Space rushed in like a tide.

“You think too loudly,” he said, neutral.

“I’ll try to think prettier,” I said, dry.

“Don’t,” he said. “Think faster. Quiet is for after.”

We drilled until my arms hummed, and the old ache in my knee spoke up like an uninvited guest. He made me fight in corners, with rope underfoot, with the rail a handspan from my shoulder. He had me practice on the roll, calling the tilt of the deck as he feinted. He taught me to use the ship as another blade: shove a man into a belaying pin, twist him across a coil that won’t forgive ankles, turn the boom’s shadow into a threat even when it sleeps.

“Men want space,” he said. “Take it away. Men want time. Steal it. Men want to feel strong. Teach them they’re heavy.”

He parried a strike that would have made Harp proud and used the bind to bring me chest to chest. His breath was even. Mine wasn’t. His grip adjusted my wrist and forearm without lingering. My skin lingered anyway.

“Inside,” he said, and for one foolish heartbeat, I thought he meant my head. “Inside the swing,” he clarified. “Make his best option his worst.”

I laughed then, despite the burn and the bite and the treacherous thunder of my blood. “You make everything sound easy.”

His mouth thought about a smile. It changed its mind. “It’s not. Do it anyway.”

When he finally stepped back for the last time, the moon had wandered toward tired. The sea breathed a softer rhythm. He lowered his blade.

“You’ll live longer if you listen,” he said.

“I’m listening,” I said, and meant it with a ferocity that embarrassed me.

He nodded once, the smallest coin of approval, and turned to go. At the ladder, he paused.

“Don’t fall asleep on watch,” he said. “I don’t like sharing my stars.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

He left, linen dark on his knuckles, shoulders easy in a way that lied and didn’t. I stood there with my pulse, refusing to learn manners and told myself, hard, that my body is not an oracle. That a hand on a wrist is a correction, not a promise. That a captain’s voice is a tool, not a tide.

Then I picked up my rope and tied a bowline in the dark. Untied it. Tied it again. I practiced stepping inside an imagined swing until the imagined man hit the deck, and then I stood by the rail and let the ocean cool me where nothing else could.