Soldier of Dorsa Update (Cuz I love y’all)

A big “thank you” to all the readers out there who have helped make Princess of Dorsa a success. I was nervous about writing an epic fantasy / lesbian novel hybrid. I shouldn’t have been nervous. I should have realized that there would be other queer nerds out there who were desperate for what I jokingly dubbed “Game of Thrones with Lesbians.”

As a thanks, here’s the

!!! BETA BETA BETA IT MIGHT CHANGE AND ALSO SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE FIRST BOOK !!!

first chapter. The bit that I published before in this post is, I think, going to be called the “prologue.”

CHAPTER 1

NOW

Joslyn woke with a start, the fleeting images of her half-remembered dream dissipating rapidly.  It had been of her ku-sai again, fighting the monster made of sand and decay.  The dreams had been insistent lately, yet they were a welcome reprieve from the dreams in which she found herself in the other place.  Ever since the soldier killed her and she made the deal with the undatai, the dreams had come to an abrupt end.

A temporary end, she guessed.

But that didn’t mean the dreams of her ku-sai were particularly comforting.  While not exactly nightmares, the dreams had an urgent tone to them.  They followed Joslyn into sleep each night, much the way a nagging thought might insist, You are forgetting something, you are missing something, even when one was quite sure nothing was being neglected.

Joslyn stood and stretched, brushing straw off as she felt the ship roll beneath her feet.  Behind her, a pig snuffled against the back of her thigh.  

Joslyn turned.  “No, my friend.  I don’t have any breakfast for you.  I don’t have anything to eat myself.”

She didn’t typically eat breakfast, and she figured that was a good thing, since she didn’t have any food anyway.  Fortunately, Joslyn had gone hungry many times over the course of her twenty-eight summers.  She didn’t mind going a few days without.  In fact, she’d been so well-fed during her months of service with Tasia that she’d started to worry she was going soft.  Joslyn welcomed a period of fasting.  It was good to remember things like hunger.

The belly of the ship was dark, the only light coming from the few stray strands of sunlight that had managed to force their way through the narrow spaces between the boards on the deck.  It was also dank and hot from the collection of pigs, sheep, and horses.  The animals made uneasy noises within their pens, nearly as uncomfortable with the alien environment of the ship as Joslyn was herself.

Once she found her balance, she unstrapped her short sword — she’d been sleeping with it strapped across her chest — and laid it gently on the floor beside the pig pen.  

Joslyn worked through her morning movements, a slow dance of flowing limbs and measured breaths that she modified to fit her small, unstable space.  She recited the names of the different movement patterns to herself as she went, each one more complex than the last.

Mountain.  River.  Rising sun.  Bird aloft.  Swooping hawk.  Lion hidden in grass.

She finished about thirty minutes later with weaving snake, the last of the ground movements, brushed herself off, and strapped the short sword across her back.  As always, the routine had made her mind crisp, her body primed for action.  

Joslyn headed up the narrow stairs to the ship’s deck.

“Ye slept long enough, woman,” a sailor said roughly once she emerged.  He wrinkled his nose as she approached.  “And ye smell like pig slop.”

Joslyn chose to ignore the comment.  “Where’s Cookie?”

The sailor grunted.  “I ’spect he was wanting you about an hour earlier.  Although…”  He looked her up and down.  “Smelling as you do, I don’t know if he’ll let you into the galley even if he’s still there at this point.”

“I’ll find him,” Joslyn said.

When Joslyn woke in the burned out hut a fortnight earlier, lying in a dried patch of her own blood, she hadn’t had a single copper penny on her person.  She hadn’t needed to carry a hidden coin purse during her months with the Princess; Tasia’s face alone bought her — and Joslyn by association — all the bread she could ever need.  And so Joslyn had fallen out of the habit of keeping a small purse tucked within her trousers for emergencies.  While traveling, the purse had seemed an unnecessary bit of extra weight.

She’d cursed herself for letting her old paranoia slip as she trekked to the nearest inhabited Eastern village; she had nothing to barter for food except her fine black leather armor that marked her as a member of the palace guard.  The armor made her both too noticeable (“A woman nomad?  With palace blacks?”) and too much a target, as there were plenty of men in the chaotic, war-torn East who would not think twice to try to liberate her of such a prize.

At first, Joslyn had thought to keep her palace blacks, both as a matter of pride and as a kind of unspoken pledge to Tasia that she would eventually find her way back into the Princess’s service.  But Joslyn was a pragmatist and a survivor at heart, and she quickly realized the impracticality of traveling fifty miles by foot with the armor in a sack slung over her shoulder.

Besides, Joslyn didn’t know if Tasia was even still alive.  There was a very good chance she was not.

She traded her palace blacks for simple, shoddy leather armor at the first roadside inn with an ex-soldier drunk enough and stupid enough to make the trade.  A sleeveless, padded leather jerkin, fraying in the back, plus five copper pennies.

It was difficult to part with the finest armor she’d ever owned, and for the briefest of moments, she’d hesitated to hand it over to the man with broken yellow teeth and breath stinking of fish and ale.

He didn’t deserve palace blacks, Joslyn knew.  In all likelihood, he’d deserted his unit within the Imperial Army and was fleeing back to the Capital Lands or the West, where he kept a farm as poorly maintained as his person.

He probably didn’t even own the farm.  He probably worked as a hired hand.

But although it injured her heart to hand her palace blacks over to such a man, Joslyn knew she had received the better deal.  Within a week, someone savvier than this man would stick a knife in his back or in his throat and liberate him of the fine black leather, whereas Joslyn would blend in, inconspicuous and invisible in her tattered jerkin and muddied trousers, just another ex-soldier for hire.

Most men (and women) sought immediate gain and paid little attention to the long-term consequences of their actions.  Her ku-sai had taught her that. 

By the time Joslyn made it to the coastal town of Reit, her five copper pennies were long gone, and she knew she’d have to pay with service in exchange for passage on the ship sailing west.  With the leather jerkin and sword across her back, she’d walked to Reit’s harbor with the intention of selling herself as a hired guard.  The Adessian Sea, after all, was pirate-infested even in good times, and now, with most of the Empire’s military might focused on the War in the East, hired swords were more necessary than ever.

But instead of seeing a sword, the Captain of the ship heading to Paratheen saw only a woman.  And the only use he could think of for a woman on his ship was as an assistant for his cook and as someone who could clean the animal pens.  

It was degrading, but Joslyn needed to make her way back to Terinto, and  traveling by sea would be faster than traveling by land.  And so she cooked, something she hadn’t done since she was a child slave traveling with the tinker’s family.  She cooked, she mucked out the pig pen, the sheep pen, and the chicken coup in the ship’s hold.  On good days, Joslyn also swabbed the ship’s deck, a job which at least kept her in the open air.

“Cookie?” she called, standing at the entrance of the ship’s cramped galley.

“There you are,” said the grumpy Islander, turning to eye her from his spot by the brick-lined fire pit.  

A large pot swung slightly above the coals; Joslyn could feel the heat even from where she stood by the narrow doorway, and despite the warmth on her skin, she shivered.  Fire reminded her too much of the undatai.  

“Noontide meal’s already prepped,” Cookie said.  “You’re lazy even by nomad standards.  Don’t know why the captain bothered with you.”

“Should I… prepare for the evening meal?” Joslyn asked.

“Aye,” he said gruffly.  “Go dump the pig shite, or whatever it is the captain has you doing that makes you smell like that, then try to wash some of the stink off and find me.”  He waved at her with a ladle.  “I’ll let you chop vegetables for the stew tonight.  With all the blades ye carry, ye ought to at least be able to manage that.”

Joslyn gave a single nod and left, heading back down to the cargo hold to do her daily mucking of the pens.  She didn’t mind Cookie’s insults.  She’d weathered insults most of her life; the ones on this ship were tamer than most.

She appreciated that about soldiers and sailors.  In general, they cared more about competency than origin or sex, and would spare you from more dangerous abuse — beatings and rape, mainly — so long as you proved that you were more useful to them whole than broken.

#

Joslyn was aft two hours later, engaged in the every-other-day task of swabbing the ship’s decks, when she spotted the dark shape on the horizon.  She stood slowly, hand automatically going to the dagger strapped to her belt, watching.  A few seconds later, she abandoned the mop and the bucket of seawater and sought out the Captain.

“There’s a pirate vessel starboard,” she told him when she found him consulting a map in his quarters.

The Captain looked up.  “You don’t enter the captain’s quarters without a knock, woman.”

“I apologize,” Joslyn said.  Then she repeated:  “There’s a pirate vessel starboard.”

He straightened, tugging at the trousers that always seemed to be slipping lower from the force of his hefty belly.  The Captain squinted at Joslyn, making the star tattoo around his eye morph into a crumpled web of blue-black lines.  Star tattoos were common amongst Adessian sailors, especially high-ranking ones, though Joslyn wasn’t exactly sure what their significance was.

“Pirate vessel?” he said.  “What makes you sure?”

“It’s a longship,” Joslyn answered.

The Captain grunted and snatched up his farscope as he strode from the room.  Joslyn followed him, as he hadn’t told her not to.

He walked to the starboard side of the carrack’s mid deck, putting the narrow end of the farscope to his eye.  The star tattoo flattened again as he studied the ship in the distance.

The first mate wandered up to him, hands on hips.  “Is it trouble, Captain?”

“Maybe,” said the Captain.  Then a moment later:  “Aye.  ’Tis.  Tell the boys we’ll be boarded before the hour’s up.  Get as much as ye can into the hidden compartments before then.”

“As you order, Captain,” said the first mate, then turned away, shouting out orders to the sailors.

Joslyn studied the longship without the aid of the farscope, trying to estimate how many fighting men such a vessel could hold.  The oarsmen were likely to be slaves, and unlikely to fight.  And the pirates themselves?  What numbers would they have?  What weapons had they scavenged?  Were they professionals — career thieves and marines who’d deserted the Imperial Navy?  Or were they like many in this part of the world — desperate fisherman whose family’s survival depended on what they could plunder from the few remaining merchant vessels that still carried the East’s agricultural wealth to the Capital Lands?

“May I see the farscope, Captain?” Joslyn said.

He looked at her.  Snorted.  “Why would you need the farscope, woman?”

Joslyn caught herself a moment before she clenched her jaw and ground her teeth at the arrogant stupidity of this man.

River, she told herself, putting her mind back into the space of her morning movement and breathing routine.  Bird aloft.  

“As I told you when you hired me,” she said with perfect calm, “I am a veteran of the Imperial Army.  I have fighting experience.”

“You’re improving,” she could hear her ku-sai saying from inside that place near her heart where she kept his voice.  “But next time, remember that the river teaches how we move without ever hesitating, flowing around our obstacles rather than trying to move them with brute strength; the bird aloft teaches how we ride on currents rather than struggling against them.”   

“Fighting experience?  We’ll not fight,” the Captain said, his star tattoo still jumbled as his eyes studied the distant longship.  “The more we cower, the less they will think us worth their trouble.”

But he handed her the farscope anyway, and Joslyn put it to her eye.

The ship was approaching faster than she had thought possible, but then, Joslyn had rarely had occasion to travel by sea.  She didn’t know how quickly or slowly ships could move.  Even still, she suspected the long, narrow ship with its single billowing sail and sixty coordinated oars — thirty on each side — had been designed to move far faster than most ships.

It was close enough that the farscope gave her a good view of the men on deck.  They were silhouettes, made dark by the sun’s downward descent behind their stern, but she could still count them.

Twenty-two.

It was likely she could fight off twenty-two, if some of the ship’s crewmen could be relied upon to hold their own in a fight.

If.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, Joslyn slipped into the breathing pattern of panther prepares to spring.

She handed the farscope back.

“Captain,” she said, “the oarsmen on that ship are slaves, and although the lighting makes it difficult to tell, they appear to be Imperial citizens.”  

She paused a moment to let the news sink in.  As a proud Adessian, the Captain cared little for the political turmoil of the Empire.  But he knew that if the longship’s crew had been bold enough to take Imperial citizens as slaves, they would be bold enough to take his own crew as slaves.  And slaughter those not willing to cooperate.

“In ordinary times, cowering might work as a way to bring your crew and your cargo through this raid,” Joslyn went on.  “But these are no ordinary times.  I doubt that any amount of cowering will stop your ship from being taken.  If you do not fight, you will lose your ship and your crew.”

He gave her an uneasy glance.

He knows I’m right, Joslyn thought.  But will he be too proud to admit it?

It was a rare sea captain who would defer to the wisdom of a shabbily dressed female nomad who’d had to barter service for passage upon his ship.

The captain slipped the farscope into a jacket pocket and let out a long, slow breath.  He widened his stance and crossed his arms against his chest, watching the longship’s oars jump up and down in the water.

He hadn’t told her to leave, or to shut up.  He hadn’t responded with an insult.  

She decided to push a little further.  

After all, her fate was tied to his.  Land was a distant smudge on the horizon, and Joslyn was not a strong enough swimmer to make it there on her own.  And despite her fighting prowess, twenty-two armed, experienced fighters on the rolling, shelterless deck of a ship were not good odds, even for her.

“Captain,” she said, “how many men do you have who can fight?”

“Not enough,” he answered.

“How many?” Joslyn pressed.

He rubbed the wisps of beard that had grown across his heavy jowls since they left Reit.  “Men who aren’t useless cowards?” he mused.  “Eight.  Nine, maybe.”

Joslyn subtracted three out of habit.  Six decent fighters, three poor ones.  Plus the Captain himself.  She could make that work.

“We need to gather them, Captain,” she said.  “Along with whatever weapons they can hide on their person.”

The Captain gave her a sharp glance.  “Don’t give me orders, woman.”

“I can organize a defense of your ship,” Joslyn said, ignoring his umbrage.  “But it will be here in a matter of minutes.

He studied her, spending a long few seconds looking her up and down.

A normal woman, especially a woman who had once been a slave, might have held her breath under such scrutiny, or unconsciously shrunk back from a powerful man so much heavier than herself, but Joslyn’s mind had already filled with the cool decisiveness of panther prepares to spring.  

And Joslyn was not one to shrink, anyway.