Free Wren the Fox Witch (Europa #3: A Dark Fantasy) by Joseph Robert Lewis

dragging the anchor and moving away from the Turkish shore! Now they’ll have to get back on their own ship unless they want to be dragged all the way to Constantia!
    Wren looked down at the ship again and her satisfaction evaporated. On her left, a Turk shot one of the Espani in the belly and then charged up onto the quarter deck. Wren let go of the wheel and reached out for the Turk with her right hand, willing the frail aether in the fog to rise up against the man. A swirl of white rippled up from the deck and slapped the man sideways, sending him tumbling over the rail and into the water.
    A second Turk in blue jogged up the steps right behind his fallen comrade, and Wren felt a cold hollowness in her arm. The aether was too thin now, too scattered. She’d barely managed to push the first man overboard. So she shook her right hand, unwinding the sling around her wrist, and yanked a stone out of the pouch on her belt as the second Turk charged across the deck with his cutlass raised to strike her down. She’d only just managed to get the stone in place when the man slashed at her.
    Wren dodged back, keeping the huge wooden steering wheel between her and her attacker. She hurled her stone at him through the spokes of the wheel, only to have it glance harmlessly off the man’s armguard. “Omar? I could use some help here!”
    The Turk dashed around the wheel and she dashed back toward the stairs down to the main deck, where she saw yet another man in blue waiting for her. She shouted, “Nine hells!” and threw up her right hand. The aether answered, rolling up against the man and sending him reeling back several steps. And while he kept his footing and he kept his weapon, the momentary distraction was time enough for Wren to wrap the leather strap of her sling around the man’s neck and yank him off balance and wheel him about to use as a shield against the swordsman charging down from the quarter deck behind her.
    The swordsman lunged, Wren shoved her hostage into the attack, and blood spattered the deck. As her prisoner went limp in her hands and the swordsman raised his blade again, the armored woman on the gunboat shouted “Bas-ast!” and the swordsman stepped back and lowered his weapon.
    I know that word. Stop? Enough?
    Out of the corner of her eye, Wren saw the fighting across the deck stutter to a standstill, leaving the men bloodied and leaning and panting. She loosened her grip on her sling and the dead Turk slumped down onto the deck, and she scampered back a few steps to stand beside one of the injured Espani sailors.
    Captain Ortiz shouted something as well, and his men slowly sheathed their knives and straightened up, though they continued to cast black glares at the men in blue.
    Her heart was still pounding and her palms were slick with sweat, but Wren shivered and tugged her black scarf a bit more firmly forward over her forehead before she wrapped her sling back up around her wrist. Across the deck, she saw Omar talking to the armored woman, who had jumped down from her ship onto La Rosa . For a moment she hesitated, not wanting to break the semi-mystical trance that had seemingly frozen all of the Espani and Turks in place on the deck as they waited to hear whether they could truly stand down or would be called upon to resume butchering one another.
    She swallowed, and then started walking, slowly at first and then more quickly, heading toward Omar and the woman he had called Nadira. And as she walked toward them, she saw a pair of hands appear on the railing behind Omar and Ortiz. And then two more. And then five young men, little more than boys and dressed only in gray tunics and belts, with bare feet and only a single knife clenched in their teeth, came swarming over the side of the ship.
    Five, then ten more, then twenty, all in the same drab state of undress. But after the ones with knives came the ones with guns and they poured across the deck, tackling the Espani to the ground as they