Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The morning sun burned orange over the cove, and Hollow Tide stood atop her barrel like a queen addressing her subjects—except this queen was barefoot, hungover, and radiating the specific kind of righteous fury that made sensible people consider diving headfirst into the surf just to escape her line of sight.

"LISTEN UP, YOU USELESS BARNACLES!"

The beach went dead silent. A hundred pirates—some still clutching bottles, others hastily buttoning shirts they’d abandoned hours ago, all of them looking like they’d been dragged through a tavern fight backward—turned toward her with the kind of automatic, worshipful attention that Milo had only ever seen soldiers give a king.

Except this wasn’t fear.

This was love.

And somehow, watching it happen, Milo felt something crack open in his chest that he hadn’t known was closed.

"Some of you," Hollow Tide announced, pacing the barrel with the coiled energy of a storm about to break, "might’ve heard a rumor going around last night about some stiff-necked new fool in a bad pirate coat asking questions about me at four different ports."

Milo, standing at the edge of the crowd, felt his stomach plummet straight through his boots.

"Turns out," she continued, her voice climbing, "some of you thought it’d be funny to rough him up a little on his way here. Test the new blood. See if he cried." She let the words hang, scanning the crowd with a look that had transformed into something genuinely dangerous. "I heard about it this morning. From him. Very calmly. Which is somehow worse than if he’d been furious about it."

Uneasy shuffling rippled through the pirates. Milo blinked, utterly lost—nobody had touched him since he’d arrived. He’d spent the evening being fed, danced with, and interrogated about beetles. Nobody had roughed him up. Nobody had even looked at him sideways.

What is she talking about?

But nobody else seemed confused. The crowd had already, collectively, decided this story was real. They were nodding. Some of them looked genuinely guilty. One man in the back actually winced and rubbed his knuckles like he’d just remembered a fight he’d never been in.

"He’s mine now," Hollow Tide declared, jabbing a finger toward Milo with absolute, unshakeable conviction. "He fought a golem made of a hundred books. He taught magic to actual children. He dressed up as a pirate on a rumor and sailed clean across four ports on nothing but stubbornness and a terrible coat—and somewhere in the middle of that, he became my friend."

She paused, and her voice dropped into something quieter, more dangerous.

"And I have decided, as of this morning, that anyone who so much as looks at him wrong is going to learn exactly why smart people don’t test me twice."

The crowd erupted. Pirates cheered, stomped, hollered, entirely unbothered by the total lack of evidence for the crime being avenged. They loved it. They loved her. And Milo stood at the edge of it all, mouth slightly open, trying and failing to locate the exact moment reality had diverged so sharply from his own memory.

We met yesterday, he thought, watching her whip the entire beach into a righteous frenzy on his behalf. She forgot my name this morning. She is currently declaring war on my behalf over an incident that did not happen, to a crowd that has no reason to doubt her—and there is nothing I can do to stop this from becoming real in about four minutes.

He pushed forward through the crowd toward her barrel anyway. "Hollow—wait, there wasn’t actually an incident. I think there’s been some—"

"There’s a plan," he tried instead, catching her attention, keeping his voice low and urgent. "A real one. We need time. Weeks, maybe, to gather the right allies before anyone marches on a King who commands an army built from stolen will. If you go in loud, unplanned, right now, you could ruin every quiet piece I’ve already set in motion."

Hollow Tide blinked at him, genuinely puzzled—the way a person blinks at a sentence spoken in an unfamiliar language.

"Don’t bother," said a voice at his elbow—a lean, sharp-eyed man Milo hadn’t properly noticed before, apparently her first mate, judging by the easy, long-suffering familiarity in his tone. "She’s not a plan person. Never has been. You could draw her a map with every step numbered and she’d set the map on fire by lunch because the flames looked pretty. Save your breath, friend. This ship sails when she decides it sails."

Milo looked between the two of them, feeling the entire careful architecture of Osmund’s letters, his months of patient positioning, threatening to come apart at the seams over a fight that hadn’t even happened yet.

And then he made a decision.

He slipped away from the crowd, found the small, ornate cage he’d kept tucked below deck, and opened it with hands that weren’t entirely steady.

The bird inside blinked up at him—sleek, dark-feathered, entirely unbothered by the cage or the sea air. Osmund’s voice echoed in his memory: Expensive. Rare. Keeps a bond with its owner strong enough to find him anywhere, so long as it survives the flight. Use it only if the alternative is genuinely worse than the cost.

"I’m sorry," Milo told it, scribbling a hasty warning onto parchment with shaking hands. She’s coming. Now. No warning, no plan, straight for the throne. Whatever pieces we’ve placed, move them today or lose them entirely. "I really am. Please survive this."

He released it into the wind, and watched it climb fast and sure toward the horizon.

If that bird dies delivering this, he thought, he and I are both thoroughly, completely finished.

He didn’t get long to worry about it.

The water at the mouth of the cove erupted.

Something vast and slick-scaled tore up out of the surf in a wall of spray—easily three times the height of the tallest mast in the harbor, jaws unhinging wide enough to swallow a longboat whole. The entire beach dissolved into screaming chaos in the space of a single heartbeat. Pirates scrambled for weapons, for ships, for anything resembling cover. The party’s easy warmth was replaced instantly by raw, animal panic.

Hollow Tide didn’t run.

She walked toward it.

Milo watched, frozen, as the monster’s massive head snapped down toward her with a speed that should have ended the fight before it began.

And then she simply planted her feet in the wet sand, drew one arm back, and drove a single punch straight into the center of its descending jaw.

The impact cracked like the whole world had split open.

The creature’s head snapped backward. Its entire massive body lifted clean off the water and slammed down into the shallows hard enough to send a wave surging up the beach that knocked half the fleeing crowd off their feet. It didn’t get back up. It simply lay there, twitching once, then not at all, its skull visibly, catastrophically caved in around the point of impact.

Milo stared.

And felt every careful assumption he’d built about her quietly rearrange itself.

Her arm, in the split second before the punch had landed, hadn’t looked entirely like an arm anymore. It had stretched, impossibly, the flesh pulling and coiling like something closer to rubber than bone, snapping back to its normal shape the instant the blow connected as though it had never once been anything else. Not a Talent he recognized. Not a skill from any manuscript he’d ever touched. Something else entirely—something her body simply was, the same easy, unthinking way his own body had once been a scholar’s.

She’s not just reckless, Milo thought, watching her turn back toward the beach already laughing, already shaking seawater out of her hair like nothing remarkable had happened. She’s actually, genuinely that strong. Strong enough that I couldn’t stop her from doing this even if I tried with everything I currently own.

He thought of the King’s private demonstration in a cold throne room—a guard’s knees bending against his own will, absolute and total and entirely without effort.

But is she stronger than him?

He didn’t have an answer. Watching her stride back up the beach, grinning, utterly unbothered by the sea monster she’d just killed with one punch, Milo found he wasn’t certain he wanted to find out the hard way.

Hollow Tide reached him, seawater streaming from her hair, her grin wide and wild. "You were saying something about a plan?"

"You just—" Milo started, and stopped, and started again. "You punched a sea monster to death. With one punch. While I was trying to send a message to someone who might help us not die."

Her grin softened into something almost gentle. "I know. That’s what I do. I punch things so people like you don’t have to." She reached out, gripped his shoulder, and squeezed. "You’re clever, Fool. You think circles around everyone I’ve ever met. But you’re not a fighter. And you don’t have to be. That’s what I’m for."

She turned, scanning the beach where her pirates were already recovering, already laughing, already dragging the dead monster’s carcass up onto the sand like it was a prize catch.

"You want a plan?" she said, tossing the words over her shoulder. "Fine. I’ll give you until sunset tomorrow to make me a good one. But after that—" She glanced back, and her eyes glittered. "After that, we move. Fast, loud, and straight for his throat. And if I die doing it?"

She shrugged, utterly unconcerned.

"At least I’ll die punching something that deserved it."

Milo watched her stride away, her pirates falling into step around her like she was the sun and they were planets caught in her gravity.

She’s impossible, he thought. She’s reckless. She doesn’t plan. She doesn’t think. She just—

She just acts.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, he realized something that made his chest tighten.

She didn’t do any of this for any logical reason. She did it because someone was mean to me, and that wasn’t acceptable.

She doesn’t even know me. She forgot my name this morning. And she still went to war for me.

He stood there, alone on the sand, watching the woman who had just declared herself his protector without hesitation, without condition, without any reason beyond having decided he was worth it.

And for the first time in months—maybe years—Milo felt something that wasn’t fear or calculation or careful, measured caution.

He felt safe.

The bird was already a speck on the horizon, carrying his warning toward Osmund and whatever pieces they’d managed to place. He didn’t know if it would make it. He didn’t know if Osmund would act in time. He didn’t know if any of this would work.

But for the first time, standing in the aftermath of a monster killed by a woman who had chosen him for no reason at all, Milo thought maybe—just maybe—it didn’t matter if the plan failed.

Because somewhere along the way, he’d found something better than a plan.

He’d found a friend.

And she could punch a hole through a mountain.

That’s got to count for something.

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