"I volunteer for the keel."

Tain Shir, from The Monster Baru Cormorant.

Tain Shir, the ‘Bane of Wives’; the scene in The Monster Baru Cormorant where she keelhauls herself as a flex. Thanks to @vi0 for commissioning ‘tain shir looking scary’.

Certainly owes a lot to @badasserywomen‘s interpretation, and of course Jen Z’s art for Hades, but I tried to make my own spin based on the book as ever!

Here's the scene in question:

Ormsment seizes her by the elbow. “Some of the marines say you had a chance to kill Baru. The ship whispers that you let her go.”

“I missed,” Shir says.

“The fuck you did.”

“Reprimand me, then.”

“You know I will. I hold this ship together, Shir. My authority. You can’t be seen to get off easy.”

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.”

So here she is, about to go for a dive!