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Captain Finaren himself moved first, shoving his way through the ring of Amnian wealthy. He drew his cutlass and pulled it back to swing.

Timbers groaned and screeched as Yeill's fishing chair yanked free of the deck and tore through the railing. She was gone in an instant, pulled under by the big shark she'd hooked.

Jherek stood in the crow's nest and drew his seaman's knife from his leg sheath. The knife blade was a foot long, thick and heavy, with a saw-toothed back for cutting through bone. The small handle barely filled his fist.

"Sea devils!" someone shouted.

Glancing to his left, Jherek saw a sahuagin manta surface on Butterfly's port side. The oblong barge used by the sahuagin to travel above or below water was much smaller than most of its kind that the young sailor had heard described. Like all of its kind that he'd heard about, the manta had been cobbled together from ships wrecked at sea or scavenged from shorelines. The boards were stained green with undersea scud from being submerged for so long, but fitted neatly into a wedge shape that made it very maneuverable. It rode low in the water, but the finned shapes of the sahuagin could be seen hunkered down on the benches. They paddled furiously, moving in response to a measured cadence, totally focused on their prey.

Jherek had heard stories about mantas that crewed as many as six hundred sahuagin, but firsthand stories were few and far between. Most men who saw them perished in the sea devils' attack. From his initial estimate, he guessed that there were forty or fifty sahuagin aboard, easily twice the number of crew aboard Butterfly.

Captain Finaren bawled out orders at once, calling his crew into action.

Jherek looked at the water where Yeill had gone under. He couldn't see her.

"Lad," Hagagne called from the ship's rigging, already moving down to the deck himself. He stopped when he realized what Jherek was about to attempt. "Leave her. She's probably already in that shark's belly by now and not worth your life even if she isn't."

"I can't."

Hagagne reached back for the young sailor, but Jherek avoided the other man's grasp. Without another word, he dived from the crow's nest, plummeting toward the dark water.

II

9 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet

Jherek hit the ocean cleanly, holding his hands before him to break the surface tension and lessen the chance of injury from impact. Still, the force of hitting the water nearly drove the breath from his lungs. The cold bit into him with jagged, angry teeth. The sahuagin manta was ahead and on the port side of Finaren's Butterfly so he knew he wouldn't immediately be seen by the sea devils aboard their barge.

He also knew that the shark that had taken Yeill's hook hadn't bitten by chance. The sahuagin ran with the sharks. He didn't doubt the danger that more sharks would be around as he attempted to save the Amnian woman.