Shir shrugs off her jacket and strips her workshirt. She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.

“What are you doing?” Ormsment says, not out of surprise but curiosity. “Are you willing to be lashed?”

“No lashes.” Shir kneels to untie her boots. “I volunteer for the keel.”

“What?” Ormsment stares in astonishment. The sergeant-at-arms and his marines flinch as if Tain Shir has just doused herself in lamp oil and reached for a smoke.

“I volunteer for the keel.”

She walks barefoot to the prow. Here the keelhauled are shackled and thrown under the ship to drag against the razor barnacles of the copper-jacketed hull. Most pop out the stern drowned or mad.

The sailors stare at Shir in warrior awe. The scar-streaked hatch of her back, clamped shut over brute muscle. Her pillar-thick legs. Heavy arms and strangler’s hands all limber and loose. Upon her tall torso one of her breasts is cut crosswise by an old and devastating scar. The soft of her gut would disqualify her from the gymnast pageants in Falcrest but she is not a gymnast nor is her work a pageant.

“King of fucking kings,” Ormsment breathes. “What a wreck they’ve made of you.”

In Falcresti poems they say that women are the fairer sex, blessed with smooth skin and bright eyes and a shape ineffably more compelling to the artist. Men write these poems, mostly. In Segu Mbo, where there is a matriarchy of sorts, they write that men are the fairer sex, beautiful, disposable ephemera who pass among women and die young of violence.

Shir doesn’t care who’s fairer. She knows her birthright. A body that can survive the wilderness while sick and wounded and bearing child. She knows that she can dash brains with a stone. She knows how to take a punch on the chin, or the breast, or the gut. She knows that the best of men have strength and speed beyond her own, as the bear has strength on the wrestler and the catamount has speed on the runner, but still they fear the human for the human is more violent. She is more violent.

“I can’t keelhaul you,” Ormsment says. “If you don’t drown you’ll die of infection in your cuts. I need you to fight.”

“I won’t die.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re flesh like anyone else.”

Shir looks back at the sailors. They are on the deck and in the rigging, on mast-top and yardarm, caught at their posts by the sight of her scars and her muscle and her fat. She is flesh like anyone else.

And what the flesh can do when it knows itself.

“Behold,” she says.