The Drowned King Returns

Chapter One: The Parcel

The elite of Kingsreach never murder their problems. They ship them to Black Toll.

At midnight the crane groaned against the wind, lifting a wooden crate out of the supply boat's hold and swinging it over the black water. Rain lashed sideways across the platform. As the crate turned on its chains under the floodlights, the stencil on its side came into view. DISPOSE.

Nash Redfern watched it come down from the edge of the dock, his coat dark with rain. Behind him rose the fortress, a rusted oil platform abandoned decades ago and turned into something far worse, stacked with steel cells, watchtowers and a fighting pit where men used to bleed for their dinner. It sat in international waters, where no flag flew and no court could reach.

In Kingsreach, the richest families spoke of it only in whispers. When a rival refused to sell, when a mistress grew too bold, or when an heir stood in the wrong place in line, someone made a quiet payment. A few days later, that person simply stopped existing. There was no body and no murder, only a death certificate and a closed casket.

Eight years ago, Kingsreach had buried Nash in exactly that kind of coffin.

He still remembered the taste of the drink. It was the night before his wedding, and he'd been laughing when the room tilted. He woke in the hold of a boat with chains on his wrists and salt in his mouth. He had been twenty-one, an orphan with nothing to his name except a fiancée he adored and a borrowed suit for the ceremony. Within a week, the wardens had thrown him into the pits.

He should have died there, most men did. Instead he learned to fight, then to win, and when a dying prisoner called the Abbot took notice of him, he learned everything else. The old man taught him how to read a man before he moved, how to break him without wasting a breath, and above all, how to wait. Two years ago, a week after they gave the Abbot to the sea, Nash led the uprising that dragged the wardens out of their towers.

The elite never found out. Their orders still arrived through the same channels in the same codes, and Nash answered them exactly as the wardens once had. He took their money and accepted every parcel they sent, and not one of those parcels had died since the night he took the island. Somewhere in Kingsreach, powerful people slept soundly while their enemies ate three meals a day under Nash's protection.

Black Toll had always called its master the Drowned King, and for two years the title had been his. He had never planned to go back.

"Easy," he said as the crate settled onto the dock. Two men stepped forward with crowbars, and he raised a hand to stop them. He always opened the crates himself.

First he opened the intake ledger under his arm, where every parcel received a line in his own handwriting. Pressed between its final pages lay a sheet of paper scorched brown at the edges, pulled from the wardens' burning office on the night of the uprising. Most of the writing was gone. The date had survived, and so had his own name. At the bottom, in an elegant hand he would have known anywhere, so had a single signature.

Elara Sinclair.

She used to leave notes in his jacket pockets, little jokes and grocery lists and promises. He knew the curve of every letter she wrote. Seeing her name on the order that sold him had done what eight years of fists and hunger never managed, it had finished him with Kingsreach. Whoever she had become, whoever she had married, he didn't want to know.

Nash shut the ledger, took a crowbar and pried the lid loose.

A young woman lay curled inside on a bed of straw, her wrists zip-tied and a canvas hood over her head. She flinched at the light. Nash crouched and eased the hood off.

She was nineteen or twenty, her dark hair matted with sweat and mascara streaked down her cheeks. Her eyes were glassy from the drugs, but they found his face slowly, then went wide.

He knew her before she said a word. The last time he'd seen her, she was eleven years old and stealing frosting from his wedding cake samples.

"Juniper," he said.

She scrambled back until her shoulders hit the wall of the crate. "No," she whispered. "No, you're dead. I was at your funeral, I watched them lower..." Her voice broke. "Nash?"

"You're safe." He cut the zip tie with a small knife. "Nobody here is going to hurt you."

She seized his sleeve with both hands as if he might disappear. "They told us you drowned. They said you robbed us and ran and fell in the river. Elara didn't eat for weeks, she..." Juniper stopped, as though a thought had finally fought its way through the drugs. Fresh tears filled her eyes. "Oh God. You don't know, do you?"

Nash kept his voice level, though something in his chest had gone tight. "Know what?"

"She was pregnant." Juniper's fingers dug into his arm. "Elara had a baby seven months after you vanished. A little girl named Ivy, she's seven now." She swallowed hard. "Nash, she's yours."

The rain kept falling. Nash didn't move, because he wasn't sure what he would do if he did.

A daughter. Seven birthdays, a first word, a first step, an entire life lived in a city that had taught her that her father was a thief and a corpse.

The radio on his belt crackled.

"King." The voice from the radio room was tight. "New order just came through the Kingsreach channel. It's flagged Ninth Account."

Nash's head came up, and he opened the ledger to the burned page again. Every client paid through a numbered account, and most eventually left some trace of who they were. The Ninth Account never had. Two years of searching had given Nash only one fact about it, and it was the one that mattered most. It was the account that had paid for him.

"Read it," he said.

"Two parcels. Collection in seventy-two hours, in Kingsreach, on the night of the Sinclair and Ravell wedding. Bride listed as Elara Sinclair, groom Tristan Ravell."

"She doesn't want him," Juniper whispered. "Mother's forcing her."

The operator went on. "Parcels are one adult female and one female child. The instruction code is unusual, sir. It doesn't say deliver."

"What does it say?"

"Dispose in transit." The pause that followed was heavy. "They want them drowned on the way."

Juniper made a sound like she'd been struck. "That's my sister. That's Ivy, that's..." She couldn't finish.

Nash looked down at Elara's name on the scorched page, then out toward the dark horizon where Kingsreach lay somewhere beyond the storm. For eight years he had told himself the city held nothing that belonged to him anymore.

He closed the ledger.

"Ready the boat," he said. "I'm going home."