“It’s a telescope,” Rafe Merrique said. He felt the captain’s hands on his shoulder, turning him in a direction. “Look dead ahead.”

Rudolfo raised the glass to his eye and watched the ocean surge at him. He raised it higher, caught the horizon, and scanned it. The iron ships were not easy to miss.

Rudolfo sucked in his breath at the sight of them. He’d tossed and turned through four sleepless nights after his decision to pursue Sanctorum Lux. He’d known it was the best path left to him, but it haunted him. He prided himself on the inner compass his father had gifted him with-confidence in the right direction to take at any point in time. But how to choose the best of two courses of action where neither offered any reasonable assurance of success? And now, having placed his hope in Charles’s knowledge of another unlikely path, he found himself confronting Vlad Li Tam’s iron armada.

He counted the ships-a slow moving circle of six with one anchored in the center.

Rudolfo realized he was holding his breath and released it. “It’s Tam’s fleet.” But just more than half of it, he realized.

“Aye,” Rafe Merrique answered. “One flies a flag of quarantine. And the one in the center flies colors of distress.”

The anchored ship was sleeker and slightly smaller than the others, suggesting that it might be the flagship. Rudolfo couldn’t be certain, but it was as good a place as any to start. “I need to speak with them.”

He heard wariness in Rafe’s voice. “The six are at Third Alarm,” he said. “They’ve manned their guns-better than the one the Androfrancines granted me, I’ll wager-and they’ve longboats in the water under colors of parley. I’ll not put the Kinshark in cannon range. We wait and watch.”

Rudolfo opened his mouth to protest, but a muffled boom-followed quickly by another-closed it. He saw smoke and panned the spyglass until he found the source of it-the pilot house of the quarantined vessel had collapsed in a ruin of bent metal, smoke and flames. It veered off course toward the open sea. And this time, Rudolfo saw a flash and gout of smoke from a seemingly empty patch of sea in a close-range broadside shot that opened a tear in the hull at the vessel’s waterline. “They’re under fire.”

Rafe Merrique snatched the telescope from his hands. “Under fire?”

Rudolfo had spent little time at sea, but he knew full well how jealously the Androfrancines guarded the ancient war-making knowledge. He’d seen firsthand what it could do-losing a Gypsy Scout to Resolute’s hand cannon in the last war. The very hand cannon that false Pope had used to end his life. These cannons were far larger, and Rudolfo had seen them only on Tam’s iron armada and Merrique’s Kinshark.

But who else?

More explosions drifted across the whitecapped morning sea. “It’s an ambush,” Rafe Merrique said incredulously.

Rudolfo squinted ahead. He now could just make out the ships as the Kinshark made its careful approach. “How is an ambush possible on the open sea?” But even as he said it, he knew the answer. They weren’t the only magicked vessel in the water. At least two more attacked Vlad Li Tam’s iron armada-magicked and armed with bits of so-called Androfrancine light.

He heard Rafe Merrique exhale suddenly. “They’re being boarded.” Then, his voice rose. “Take us in slow; keep us hidden and out of range.” He passed the glass to Rudolfo’s hands.

Raising it to his eye, he watched as an invisible blade cut through a crowd of armed men in saffron robes. He watched as groups of three or four of Tam’s household tried to bring down even one of the boarders and suddenly, he was in his own banquet hall, his nose filled with blood and sweat and his ears full of shouting and screaming as the hurricane of assassins slashed through them to take Hanric and Ansylus.

He watched the decks cleared and watched as children were herded onto the deck by invisible soldiers. It stirred something in him, and Jakob’s face flashed across his inner eye. He loathed Tam, and yet he remembered also the tear he’d seen on that day at the bonfire, when he’d confronted his father-in-law about the murder of his brother and his parents. He’d told him that day that if he ever had a child, he’d not use him as a game piece. And yet, he did not doubt that Tam loved his children in some way-even the ones he sacrificed so readily in service to his strategic cause.

And now, Rudolfo watched as the youngest of those children-grandchildren or great-grandchildren more likely, he supposed-were rounded up upon the forecastle, on display for the others to see.

A voice blasted out across the waters. “Surrender,” it said. It made no threat and did not utter another word. The force of the word, even at ten leagues, was enough to raise Rudolfo’s hair.

He scanned quickly and saw two other vessels with children crowded in the upper decks, terror and blood upon their faces.

“We have to do something,” he said.

“We are,” Rafe Merrique said. “We’re watching and waiting. We’re one wooden vessel, Rudolfo, with no real sense of the odds.”

Rudolfo handed the telescope over to Merrique. “I don’t think we’ll wait long,” he said in a quiet voice.

And they didn’t. Two of the vessels tried to pull out of the circle but found themselves fired upon. And now, in the flashes of light and gouts of smoke, they were close enough that Rudolfo could see the dim outline from one of the large, magicked vessels that surrounded the circling ships and the deep rent in the waters from the invisible craft’s displacement.

They were too far away to be certain, but to Rudolfo’s eye, based on its size, the attacking ship could easily be another of Tam’s iron vessels.

The realization struck him. “They’ve been divided,” he said.

And even as he said it, he watched the colors lower on all but the flagship. Their engines slowed, and the remains of Vlad Li Tam’s iron armada scattered into a loose formation with the flagship at its head. When Rafe passed back the telescope, Rudolfo scanned the waters and saw that the longboats were gone now, brought in during the fighting. Men and women wearing loose silks lined the decks under invisible guard. On three of the ships, white-faced and wide-eyed young men and women heaved the bodies of their fallen parents over the railing and into the sea.

“We’ve another choice to make now,” Rafe said. “We are less than four days from the horn. Nine from where your Charles tells us is the best landfall to reach his Sanctorum Lux.” Rudolfo heard the pirate’s words, but his eyes still swept the scene ahead. Two of the ships limped and smoked now. Two of the others were sinking slowly, their crews lined up upon the deck as their longboats were lowered. The captain continued. “We either press on for the Wastes or-”

Rudolfo sighed. “We follow them.”

His first instinct had been to find Tam. Jin Li Tam was a fierce, formidable woman, and she had believed her sister would know how to counter the powders she’d used to give Rudolfo’s soldiers back their swords. The near impossibility of the task had truly not entered into the matter.

But the promise of this new library-the hope he held that it offered a cure for his son-had crept upon him unawares when serendipity had brought Charles across his path. And though now they appeared to have found Tam, they had done so under alarming circumstances. He’d not needed to decode Petronus’s notes to grasp that the old Pope-along with the Order he once served-believed some external force threatened them. Tam had believed it, it seemed, and fled the Named Lands to investigate. And now, House Li Tam had been divided or had somehow lost nearly half its fleet into unknown hands. Unknown hands with access to the same blood magicks that had torn through the Named Lands just weeks ago and the same stealth magicks that until now had made the Kinshark one of a kind.