Bodies littered the beach. We hadn’t heard the musket fire because we’d been deep in the barrows. Or maybe, the necklace didn’t want us to hear. Mother lay dead next to my sisters, face down in the bloody sand, a chunk out of her skull visible where the musket had blown away her ear. Letta lay next to her, face up, only they’d shot her in the face and from the nose down there wasn’t anything left.
“You bastards!” Nesh launched himself at Jammer.
An explosion rocked the night. The fire from the pirate’s musket flashed right by my shoulder. The ball caught Nesh in the back, tore a hole through his ribs big enough to shove an arm through. He staggered forward and collapsed in the sand. The two men behind us grabbed Coltt and me by the arms before we could move.
“You gave your word you wouldn’t kill anyone!”
Jammer gave me that smile again. “I said I wouldn’t kill anyone. I didn’t. My men did.” He clucked his tongue. “If you’re going to bargain with pirates, you need to be more specific.”
I didn’t have to look at Coltt to know what he was thinking. We both lurched forward, ready to rip Jammer apart, ready for a musket ball to tear through us the way it did through Nesh.
My head seemed to explode as the man behind me brought the butt of his gun down on my skull. I could feel the blood rushing through my ears as the moonlight turned to darkness.
“Take them,” I heard Jammer say from a far distance. “They’ll be useful.” Then, I didn’t hear anything else at all.
“Dante?”
I heard Coltt’s voice but it was faint. Must be imagining it.
“Dante?”
Louder now, close to my ear. My head was pounding, and I was afraid to open my eyes. I groaned. My hands pushed down against wood. Wood? As my senses returned, I felt rocking. I knew that feeling. We were on a boat. We were Jammer’s prisoners.
“Where are we?” I tried to sit, and Coltt grabbed my arm, pulling me up. It was a dumb question. I knew. We were on Jammer’s ship.
“They must have bashed you harder than they got me,” he whispered. “I thought they’d killed you. I woke up in the dinghy. We’re out to sea by now.”
I could feel the magic. It was always stronger near water. I listened for the wind although I couldn’t see the stars. “We’re headed south. Towards Chasston.”
“Figures.”
Chasston was down the coast from Netter’s Cove. The whole coastline was a haven for smugglers and pirates, the bane of the king’s navy. Chasston was the main port, and no matter how many of the king’s ships were in port or how many soldiers were in town, it didn’t seem to bother the smugglers. Father said the smugglers and pirates paid the soldiers better than the king, so they looked the other way. Might be. Of course, Jammer might not stop at Chasston. He had hot cargo. He might meet his buyer somewhere else, someplace a little quieter.
“Dante, why did they bring us? Why didn’t they just kill us, like—” He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. Like Nesh. Like everyone else.
“Because of the magic.” It hurt to talk. It hurt to think. “We were too good at finding the necklace. There must be more things like that, and Jammer figures we can retrieve them for him. He’ll keep us as long as there’s a use for us.” And then… we’d join the rest.
Coltt helped me bind up the gash on the back of my head. He had a bruise on his temple, but otherwise, he seemed in pretty good shape.
“I can’t hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“The necklace.”
Coltt gave me a funny, sideways glance, but I figured he knew what I meant. Actually, what I said wasn’t exactly true. If I listened hard, I could hear something, muffled and far away. And then I knew. Jammer must have put the necklace in the lead box. And the necklace didn’t like it.
I looked around as soon as I could move without wanting to pass out or throw up. My head seemed to pound in time with the swell of the waves. But I knew how the magic worked. The longer I was at sea, the stronger the magic got. Not that it would do us much good. We weren’t likely to get lost. We were locked in an iron cage.
I started to get up and thought better of it. “Don’t bother,” Coltt said. “I had time before you came around. The lock is solid. No other welds or joints. Bars are tight. Tried to pick the lock with my knife but I couldn’t.”
“They left our knives?”
Coltt nodded. “Guess they were too busy to pat us down. Or they don’t care. Maybe they figured we weren’t likely to kill each other.” Or ourselves, I added silently. I wasn’t letting myself think too hard about what I’d seen in the village. There’d be time enough for that.
“They say anything else?”
“Jammer said they were due for ‘the meeting’ by midnight tonight. Whoever hired them didn’t give them much time. Wonder who it is and what they want.”
I wondered if anyone had asked the necklace what it wanted, but I didn’t say anything. That sounded crazy even to me.
I could see the angle of the sun change from the light through the portals. We sailed all day. No one fed us. Maybe Jammer didn’t mean to keep us for too long, after all.
The sun went lower and I slept.
In my dreams, the sea turned wild and the sky turned dark. Lightning struck on the horizon, and I could smell the way it charged the air. My dreams changed from the stormy sea to the massacre at Netters Cove. I saw the bodies of the people I’d grown up with, my mother, my sisters… all of them gone. In my dream, I fell to my knees on the shore and wept as grief and anger washed over me, as strong as the pounding waves.
What do you want?
I looked up from the bloody sands. “I want revenge.”
What do you want?
“I want Jammer dead. I want them all dead. I want to kill the men who did this.”
What do you want?
My voice tore from a throat raw from weeping. “I want to avenge them. I want blood.”
Then blood you shall have.
Coltt’s hoarse scream woke me. Our iron cage was sliding across the hold as the ship tossed like a cork. I didn’t have time to brace myself before the cage slammed into a wall of crates and I hit the bars on the other side hard enough to make my teeth rattle. The cage thrummed as the shock vibrated through the iron. It felt as if all of my insides were shaking.
The cage door swung open.
Coltt and I exchanged glances, and went for the knives in our leg sheathes. We stumbled from the cage as the ship pitched hard to port, scrambling to stay out of the way of the cargo, which had begun to shift. Just then, we heard footsteps on the stairs from the deck. We hid behind the most stable thing we could find, the forward guns.
“Son of a bitch!” The first man to the bottom saw the empty cage. He was ugly even by raider standards, with a poxy face and one hollow eye socket he didn’t bother to cover with a patch.
The second man’s curse was more creative, but anatomically implausible. “They didn’t go far.” By comparison, he was the better looking of the two, although whatever fight had flattened his nose had also left a deep crease up his forehead.
“They’d better go nowhere, or Jammer will skin both of us.”
We held our breaths as the two men began to search the hold. Around us, the wooden ship creaked and moaned, rushing forward as it rose with the waves and then dropping, freefall. I eyed the hold filled with barrels, crates, and logs warily.
“I think I see something!” One-eye headed straight for us. I gripped my knife, resolved to go down fighting.
The ship pitched starboard hard enough that I thought it might rip apart. Coltt and I barely kept a grip on the heavy gun that strained against its chains. One-eye and Flatnose weren’t as lucky. They went tumbling. A crack like gunfire echoed in the hold. I winced, expecting musket fire. The ropes on the timber broke, and the logs surged forward, propelled by the violence of the sea. Barrels and wooden crates tore loose from the ropes that secured them, crashing into the center of the hold. Flatnose and
One-eye screamed as the logs rolled over them, and their blood ran like wine from a press across the filthy hold floor. When the screaming stopped, the hold was silent, quiet in a moment’s lull.
Coltt’s face was ashen. I pried his hand from the gun and motioned toward the stairs as the ship began to rock once more. Carefully, we crept to the top of the stairs, holding on as the ship began to pitch once more.
Waves twice the height of a man pounded the ship’s deck. Coltt and I barely kept our footing as the ship seemed to dive nose first down a steep wave. Behind us, we could hear the bloody cargo scrape across the hold as it shifted. A massive wave caught the ship from starboard, and a man screamed. Coltt grabbed my arm and pointed skyward, toward the top of the mast where the lookout had been thrown from his perch, falling to land on the deck with a sickening thud, only to be washed overboard as more waves followed the first, sweeping two of his fellow pirates with him.
Two dead down below. Three washed overboard. I’d only counted seven of them.
What do you want? I could hear the necklace, louder now. Take what you want. Take your due.
Rage clouded my vision. All I could see were the bodies of my family, my neighbors, left on the beach to rot. I could smell their blood above the musket smoke, could taste blood in my mouth.
Blood for blood.
I knew Coltt couldn’t hear the necklace, but I saw a fury in his eyes I’d never seen before. I could guess his thoughts, or maybe the necklace told me. They killed Nesh. Killed Letta. Killed them all. Kill them all.
“Jammer’s mine.” I barely recognized my voice. It sounded more like a growl. Coltt nodded. After all, it had been Jammer’s lieutenant who murdered Nesh. It was time to prove two fishermen could hunt.
I couldn’t see Jammer, but I could hear him cursing even above the roar of the wind. I was betting he was at the wheel. The lieutenant had dragged himself forward to drop the sails and blunt the power of the wind.
We had a moment’s reprieve between waves. Coltt and I sprang from our hiding place. Coltt was on the lieutenant before he ever saw him coming. Coltt tackled the man from behind with a cry, and I saw a streak of silver as he drew his blade across the man’s throat as neatly as he’d learned to do hunting wild boar. He dropped the man’s hair and spun the lieutenant around, sinking his knife hilt-deep into the man’s chest for good measure, then grabbed for the rigging and watched the next wave wash the dying man into the sea.
I knew Jammer didn’t dare leave the wheel, although his curses made it clear he’d seen Coltt. I’d been unconscious when they’d brought me aboard, but I recognized the type of ship, knew where to find the wheel. The storm kept pounding us, soaking me to the bone. Twice, I almost lost my grip as the ship tossed and pitched.
Take what belongs to you. Take what you want.
The necklace was screaming in my mind, or maybe I was screaming. I lurched up the last two steps to face Jammer. He stood with one hand on the wheel and one on his musket. As I cleared the last step, he pulled the trigger; musket leveled at my heart.
Nothing happened. Wet powder’s a bitch.
Before he could draw his cutlass, I was on him, even as I spotted Coltt climbing his way up to help. But Jammer was mine, all mine. I think he meant to run, but just then, the ship dropped beneath us as we ran down a wave, and Jammer fell against the wheel. His right arm snapped as the wheel spun against it, out of control. He was pinned, with no way to draw his cutlass, like a jaundiced fish.
I’ve been killing fish all my life.
My knife rammed into his chest just below the ribs, and I let the momentum and the ship’s movement force the blade all the way down. Guts spilled in a steaming mass to the deck, just like a fish. Jammer’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly, and his whole body started to quiver until he gave one final flop against the knife and hung dead from the wheel.
I tore him loose to steer, and I didn’t look back. I think Coltt threw him overboard, or maybe the next wave took him. The ship wasn’t built for two men to sail, but Coltt and I had been on the sea since we could walk. It took all my strength to hold the wheel against the storm, but I knew that the worst was past. Whether my magic had called the storm or whether it had just fed its intensity, now that Jammer and the lieutenant were dead, all the fight seemed to go out of the wind, and out of me. I was shaking so badly I think my knees would have buckled if I hadn’t been holding the wheel, and for someone who never was seasick a day in his life, I wanted to retch.
Little by little, the storm lost its fury, and the sky turned from pewter gray to twilight blue. As the clouds parted, I could see the stars. I knew where we were.
Coltt trimmed the sails and climbed back up to where I stood at the wheel.
“We can’t go home.” He said it flat, without emotion. But I saw his eyes. “The men’ll be back. We’ve got no proof of our story, only bodies.”
“We’ve got the ship.” But I knew what Coltt meant. If we went back, the murders would dog us the rest of our lives, and the men would look at us with questions in their eyes forever.
“Now what?”
I shrugged. “We head for Chasston. It’s thick with pirates, smugglers, and thieves.”
“What if Jammer’s friends come after us?”
A bitter smile crossed my face. “Doubt he had many. We know how to fish, so we won’t starve. We know how to sail. We’ll go to Chasston, find someone who needs a fast ship.”
“And be pirates, like Jammer?”
My nerves were shot. I wheeled on Coltt. “We can smuggle whiskey and broadleaf. Father said the king’s entire navy hasn’t been able to plug up all the coves and inlets, no matter how many ships they send. We know the coastline. Way I figure it, cheatin’ the king out of his taxes doesn’t hurt anyone, and whisky and broadleaf give a good bit of satisfaction to our fellow man. Makes it almost charitable.”
“We stole a ship and killed the crew to do it. That’ll earn us a noose.”
“If they catch us.”
I put in for the night in a hidden inlet up the coast from Chasston. Exhausted, hungry, and soaked to the skin, I crawled down onto the lower deck and went looking for Jammer’s quarters. Coltt had slept some while I steered us; he took night watch.
Everything in Jammer’s cabin had been tossed around by the storm. Doors were open, drawers were spilled out, and most things lay in a heap on the floor. Near the heavy wooden captain’s desk, I found it. The necklace lay near the empty lead box.
I can make you rich.
Dead tired, I knew I had one more task before I could sleep. I used my magic to shield my thoughts as I approached the necklace, keeping my face blank. Its voice was sultry, like the whores we’d find in Chasston, full of promises, lies, and clap. I sprang at it, shoving it into the box and slamming the lid closed even as I heard it shriek at me like a cheated tinker. I found a length of rope and wrapped it around the box, sealing the lid closed, and then I tied it to the sturdy leg of the desk, to keep it from “accidentally” opening. The storm had washed Jammer’s blood from my hands, but I knew what I’d done and how I’d done it.
Coltt was right. We’d done murder. Stolen a ship. Jammer’s “friends” might want us dead, and his enemies might want the ship. The king’s men wouldn’t care. They’d hang the lot of us. But not tonight. Every bone in my body ached as I crawled into a dead man’s bed and for once, I slept without dreaming.
The next morning, the sky was bright and clear. I woke just after dawn, and went looking for Coltt. Found him dangling from a rope off the bow of the ship, and for a moment, I thought he’d saved the king the trouble and hanged himself. Then Coltt hoisted himself over the rail, and I saw the make-shift rigging he’d made.
“Can’t paint the whole boat, but I struck Jammer’s flag and scraped off the name on the hull,” Coltt said in a matter-of-fact tone. I knew that meant he’d struggled with our outlaw status all night and come to terms with it. He wasn’t much for talking about things like that. “Went down in the h
old and found some black paint. Should do until we get to Chasston, or wherever.”
I peered over the edge. “Vengeance” had been painted over a scraped-bare spot on the hull. Probably not original, but Coltt had summed it up.
I turned to find him seated on the deck, looking at me, or maybe past me at the sky.
“What now?”
I dropped to the deck beside him. I didn’t look at him; I looked at the clouds. Looking at Coltt would make me think of Mother and Jana and Nesh and I wasn’t ready to mourn them, not yet. So I looked at the clouds instead. “Father had an uncle in Chasston. Took me down to meet him once, a long while ago. Cagy old man. Father said he ran a curio shop. Said that meant he bought and sold old and unusual things, no questions asked. According to father, Uncle Evann had a foot on both sides of the line when it came to the law, honest enough to not make trouble with the king’s men, dodgy enough to not care about where his treasures came from.”
“You think he’d help us?”
I shrugged. “If he doesn’t, we find a tavern to set up shop and look for someone who needs cargo run cheap. It’s worth a try.” I was quiet for a moment. “I’m going to take the necklace,” I said quietly as if I was afraid it would hear me, lead box or not. “I don’t want the damn thing around, and I don’t want blood money for selling it. I just want rid of it.”
“Can’t blame you.” Coltt might not have heard the necklace talking to him, but he was good about taking me at my word. I was glad because I had enough trouble shutting out the memory of how the necklace had fed my bloodlust. I’d killed Jammer without remorse, and I didn’t like knowing that I could do such a thing, even if he deserved it. If I got rid of the necklace, maybe I’d never feel that way again. Ever.
By night, we’d hiked into Chasston. We’d looted the dead pirates’ quarters for some coin, enough to buy dinner and some ale. We were unshaven and smelling of salt water, but the whores in the narrow Chasston streets came on to us anyhow. I gripped the box under my arm a little tighter and kept on going, weaving my way through the crowded alleys and ginnels, to a small shop a few streets back from the docks.
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