The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“I can watch your corners,” Seth said. Annalise grunted and flapped a dismissive arm at him, and he saw the blood gleaming on it. The black blood. His heart skipped. “Have you been shot?”

“Fella with a popgun there.” She gestured to the hall behind them. “I’ll live. Small bore, no bone. We’ll dig it out the meat when we’re ashore. Right after I’ve given you a paddling, you bleeding chancer.”

“Healing circle first,” Ofelia said. “Paddling second.”

“No need.” Annalise swiped sweat from her face. “It’ll heal on its own. I can even use the arm all right, see? You know how many times I’ve been shot?”

“Seth, tell mother—”

“We’re getting the circle out and fixing you,” Seth said.

“Don’t you start.” Annalise stabbed her finger at him; it shook with the wince of her injury. “You get the dress-down, mister.”

“Honestly, mother, we’re four beads fuller now,” Ofelia said. “Not even Tiago could begrudge you.”

“You underestimate your brother’s begrudgery.” Annalise set her Verdugo sword aside and crouched by a corpse slumped in a rear seat. “You know who might have the key there, Corbin?”

Someone New

“Wish I did,” Corbin said. “They kept me in the dark most of the time. Not sure who’s the honcho.”

Annalise indicated the man’s cuffs with a jerk of her chin. “You pick those, il Gutierre, you’re halfway out the doghouse.”

“Got it.” Seth hurried to Corbin, eager to be useful. He lifted them, and they clinked. And he made eye contact with the man, and saw the tension in his jaw.

His dog. They’d kept it alive. They’d scolded it, but they hadn’t kicked it.

Seth seized Corbin’s arm as the gun rose. He wrenched the barrel away from his ear. Whether Corbin had intended to hold him at gunpoint or blow his brains out, he’d never know. He bore Corbin to the ground, and the gun shrieked a shrill ring into his ears and tore across Annalise’s side.

“Fucking saints,” Annalise barked, spinning around and clutching her hip. “Twice?”

Seth was attempting to apply some sort of chokehold to the thrashing Corbin, with no training to speak of. Ofelia’s boot sank swiftly into the man’s gut and he sprawled; the al Ydris daughter was upon him, sword point a fingerspan from his face. “You fucking dare move,” she hissed. “Give me a reason.”

“it glanced, girleen. Hold your water.” Annalise hauled her Verdugo sword back into her fist.

Seth clambered out from his grapple with Corbin. “You are getting circle-mended on the ground.”

“Fine. Fine. Fair enough. Bit ridiculous otherwise, at this point.” Annalise gingerly patted her perforated side and winced. “Right, then, Mister Corbin. Who the bleeding fuck are you?”

Corbin il Mandrak coughed and spat a glob of pinkish spittle onto the sheet metal. “Just take my hexis, Verdugo. Do what you’ve got to.”

“In due time,” Annalise said. “I came to rescue you. If that’s banjaxed, I’ll at least understand why.”

Corbin slumped on the rear side of a cockpit seat. “They came asking me to come back. I said yes. They didn’t kidnap me.”

Ofelia kept her sword trained on him. “You’re not a shepherd, then.”

“I tried,” he said. “But no. I’m not a shepherd. Nor a nobody. I’m Corbin il Kolossi. Red Corbin. I’ve killed—” He smirked. “I don’t even know how many Legion lapdogs I’ve killed. Two dozen at least. I’ve burned stormships with their howling crew aboard. I’ve feasted on the riches your crow king leeches from the continent. I hid like a coward and I retired to scrape a half-life out of Shipfarrok chalk, but I never once bowed to any Verdugo or saluted any Exark. And I’ve beheld the world from Heaven, and I’ve seen it one last time. And that’s enough.”

“This is a confession, then, Corbin?” Annalise asked.

“Aye, it is.”

“You could’ve kept your mouth shut,” she said. “Had me well fooled.”

“And then done what? Wander back down to the sheep and the stillness? Pretend I’m alive?” Corbin sighed. “I wanted to be someone new. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? Someone new. As if you could bear yourself. As if you could come back without going away first. There’s no going straight. You think so, and then you walk long enough, and you see that you’ve been a few degrees off. And now you’re crooked for miles.” He stood and brushed his knees off. “They said I belong here. That I was fooling myself otherwise. They were right.”

“What about Soya?” Seth asked.

“I love her.” Corbin shrugged. “But not enough. I thought it might be. I thought it was. But when that ship broke cloud cover, and I heard the thunder inside it, I woke up from a five-year coma.” He turned to the horizon. The bright sky bisected his pupil as he stared out the window. “You’ve killed the men and women I spent the best and freest years of my life with. I’d sooner go with them than with liver spots and crooked knees and the endless fucking sheep of Sheepfuck.”

Annalise paced behind the pirate, sword shouldered. “Do you love your people, Corbin?”

“Some of them.”

“Do you repent your crimes against them?”

Corbin gave this a soft, derisive laugh. “Some of them.”

“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”

“No,” Corbin said. “I reckon the Sorcerer General can go fuck himself, in fact. Give Soya my dog and tell your pale army you killed the scourge of the Kanjir skyways.”

“I will,” Annalise said, and then there was the sound of rushing air and a dark shadow lashed across Corbin’s throat, and his expression barely had time to change—a widening of the eyes, a parting of the lips—and then it froze forever as his head tipped from its housing.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...omeone-new (WARNING: infested, when I was trying to get the text from there, with one of those redirecting ads that tells you it's a McAfee scan but is probably more of a scam)
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2524722/