“Doomed, I know. I have an idea. Loosen the cord and push me at Mara just as she’s stepping over the side.”
Mara’s men were stepping over the rail, back to their ship, one at a time.
“Please don’t ask me to risk your life.” Darren’s voice was tiny, desperate.
“I’m not,” I assured her. After all, I wasn’t asking. “Just . . . just trust me, all right?”
The sun beat down. Mara’s sailors hopped the rails, one by one.
Finally Mara stood alone, Darren a few feet away, me between them.
Darren slid her hand between my neck and the cord. Slowly, she loosened it. A smile was creeping around Mara’s face.
“Step up onto the rail,” Darren instructed. Her voice was shaking, but not so you’d notice. Not unless you knew her well. “Step up, and . . . she’s yours.”
Mara stepped, adjusted her balance, held out a hand. Her nails looked like claws.
The loop of the garrote lifted up and over my neck. Darren’s hand reached for my back, as though she was going to push me, but it was more of a caress. Her fingers were still shaking.
I stepped forwards, and Mara’s hand closed around my wrist and pulled me up . . .
I’M NOT DARREN. Never have been, never will be. Sacrifice comes as easy to Darren as navigation, but Darren, you see, is noble. Noble in the real sense, I mean—noble in her core. For all her faults, Darren’s inner nature was sound to the heartwood, completely free of any kind of meanness or selfishness. Most of her sailors were the same way, which was why they stayed with her in the first place. But that’s not me.
Before I met Darren, I never felt any urge to suffer for other people. The idea would never have occurred to me at all. I did enough suffering on my own behalf. The world couldn’t expect more of me than that.
For someone like me, someone who specializes in survival, sacrifice is a strange and unnerving concept. After all, it’s about as far from survival as you can possibly get. It’s suicide, with side benefits.
So why did I do it?
I guess I’d found a reason that made sense to me. I could still feel Darren’s hand on my back. That was enough.
THE INSTANT MARA pulled me up to the ship’s side, I grabbed her around the waist with one arm, then locked my knees behind hers and bent them. This was the move Darren had used two months ago to bring me down, and it worked on Mara just as well. Her balance was thrown; one foot came off the rail entirely. She staggered, one arm windmilling, and tried to jump down to the deck, but I held tight and pushed off with both legs. Together we slipped down the canyon between the two ships, bashing against the wood planks, and then into the water. There were shouts from above us, which I ignored.
Mara was lashing out, her scream a furious gargle. I snaked my arms around her and went limp, a dead weight, pulling us both under. The waters closed above our heads—a green milky spill with the sun bobbing on the surface. Our heads clanged against barnacled wood. Mara was tearing at my arms, striking at any flesh she could reach, but now even the blows seemed very distant.
It got darker, darker, darker, and my last thought was this. Sacrifice was surprisingly easy, with the right motivation.
CHAPTER SIX
THERE FOLLOWED A wonderful glorious time of nothing. It was soft and dim and peaceful, something like being dipped in black cream. But it didn’t last. There was a terrible, crushing blow to my chest, as if a mule had kicked it, a boulder dropped on it; as if a bull had pinned me against a wall and was pushing, pushing, pushing. The black around me shattered into spiky pieces with razor edges that glittered before they embedded themselves at the back of my brain.
I was forced to take a long strangled breath, which felt like inhaling a million red-hot tacks. My whole chest bucked. And the next instant, the donkey kicked me in the chest again. I only managed to give a weak gurgling kind of sound in protest.
“Breathe, damn you, breathe, breathe, breathe—”
It was Darren’s voice and she didn’t sound good. Through the headache and the chest ache and the everything-else-ache, I tried to flop my hand a little to reassure her. My hand ached too, I discovered.
“Will you open your eyes, damn you! Damn you! Open your goddamn eyes or I’m not going to be responsible for what happens next!” She was still pounding on my chest (it hurt as much as ever) and her words came out in time to the blows. “You—stupid—bloody—idiot—KID!”
My chest was about to cave in. I made a huge concentrated effort and managed to pry one eye a slit open.
“Darren, stop, she’s awake,” came Teek’s voice, deep and reassuring. Then his horn-hard hands were there too, gently prying us apart. “It’s all right, captain. You can stop. You can stop.”
She was breathing more heavily than usual. Had she been running, screaming, or crying? All three?
Without warning, she lunged, twisted her hands in my wet shirt, hauled me up, and gave me a bone-splintering hug that almost stopped my breathing again. Just as quickly, she let go, and I flopped back to the deck boards.
“Ow,” I complained, opening my eye a little wider this time.
Her hands: shaking; her hair: wild; her eyes: wild; her tunic: damp and salt-crusted; her face . . . oh, this is pointless. You know. Or at least, you know if you’ve ever felt anything like it. It was the pure explosion of feeling, at least half madness, that makes you drunk and dizzy and elated and terrified all at once, and which, once felt, you want to feel forever. She took my face gently between her hands, and that was it, that was the moment, when the game was up for Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan. She had been claimed, and she knew it, and she wasn’t going to resist it any longer.
It had taken her long enough. But it was worth the wait. I let her ride out the emotion for a minute before I asked the obvious question. “Where’s Mara?”
Darren made a thumbs-down. “Spinner and Teek and I had a little disagreement about who was going to go in after you. By the time we got in, it was over. She must have swallowed a lot of water, screaming that way.”
“What about her crew?”
Darren glanced up, ruefully, and I followed her eyes. I’ve heard people say that the first step towards peace is learning to understand your enemy. There may be a glimmer of truth to that, but I personally think it’s more accurate to say that the first step to peace is learning that your enemy has beer and is willing to give you some. Three open barrels stood side by side on the deck. Dozens of sailors, Darren’s and Mara’s alike, stood around in clumps, dipping cups into the deep brown brew. They were chugging, making loud satisfied ahhhs as they wiped their foamy beards with the back of their hands, smacked each other on the backs, and called each other glorious bastards.
“Mara had them on short liquor rations for the past month,” Darren explained. “I think she was trying to save money. They weren’t all that sorry to see her go.”
Blood is rank and blood is right, blood alone is rulership . . . old habits die hard. With Mara dead, her sailors had automatically fallen in line behind Darren, the only other noble around. She might be an outcast, but she was a captain, she knew how to navigate, and she had beer. Plus, she was not crazy, which made her a big improvement on Mara in at least one respect.
It wouldn’t always be this easy. We wouldn’t always be fighting sailors with a batshit crazy captain. We wouldn’t always be fighting sailors who fell so easily into the old patterns of power and obedience. We wouldn’t always have this much beer. But it was a start.
“It’s better than having them kill us all,” Darren admitted. “But what am I going to do with them? What am I going to do with that monstrosity?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Mistress?” I shaded my eyes and looked up the long masts of Mara’s war galley. Heavy reinforced timbers, sharpened prow for ramming, grapnels for boarding . . . now that was a ship for a pirate. “That’s the next addition to your fleet.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Sure it is. You see any other pi
rates around here?” I took Darren’s hand and let her help me into a sitting position. “You’ll have to rename it, though.”
“Oh, really?”
“Of course we do. Where’s your sense of etiquette? I think we should name it after me.”
“What?” She glanced at me sideways. “The Lynn?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Idiot Kid.”
THE REST OF the day was work—inspections, interrogations, funerals, meals, inventories, even accounting. You’d be amazed how much math is involved in piracy.
It was a long, weary day, but after that long, weary while, Darren and I finally got to go back to our cabin together. Even then, she was brooding.
“You know, Ariadne,” she began.
“Don’t call me that,” I said, cutting her off. “That’s not my name.”
“You know, Lynn, those sailors would all follow you if they knew that you were heir to the house of Bain.”
I shrugged. “I’m not . . .”
Darren raised one eyebrow.
“ . . . I’m not really,” I finished, sort of limply. “I mentioned that it was complicated, right?”
“Is this one of the things that you’ll tell me someday but not today?”
“Probably. I hope so.” I flopped onto the blankets, wondering whether I did, in fact, hope that I could tell her one day. Telling people about that part of me was not something I had ever been interested in doing before. Well, whatever. I shrugged all that away, and asked, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
I pointed to a length of anchor rope which I had brought to the cabin earlier.
Darren appeared bewildered. “What’s that for?”
“This is for me. You lost the key to my chain. Which was pretty bloody careless of you, if you want to know the truth.”
“You lost the key,” she said automatically, and it was only after a second that she added, “Um, what?”
I held out my ankle. “Get knotting. And you’d better make it good if you don’t want me to slip loose in the middle of the night. Show off some of that sailor ingenuity.”
“Oh, you’re not going to make me keep doing this . . .”
“You really don’t know the first thing about being a feared and dreaded pirate, do you?” I petted her dark shaggy head as she crouched by my ankle, knotting the tarry rope around it securely. “Never mind. I’ll get you there.”
“If I don’t go berserk and throw you overboard.” She swivelled so that she could tie the other end of the rope to the deck support.
“No, I don’t think you’ll do that,” I said serenely. “Besides, you won’t have to keep me tied up much longer. It’s just until we design the mark.”
Her face came up, baffled. “Until we design the what now?”
“The mark. Your mark. The one you’re going to put on me.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Are you talking about a brand? Because there is no chance I’m branding you. Not a flaming chance.”
“Damn right you’re not branding me. Ow. You’re tattooing me. But only after I’ve come up with the design. I wouldn’t want a stupid-looking one.”
“Lynn,” she said, finished now with the rope, as she scooted on the blankets beside me. “Why the hell do you want me to tattoo you?”
“It just makes sense. It’s the simplest way to keep me from escaping. You mark me so that if I run, anyone who finds me will send me back. So obviously I won’t bother to run.”
“Oh, Lynn . . .”
“What?”
“What happens next?”
She had never sounded so lost. Part of me wanted to stop everything, take her chin, force her to look at me, and explain. Explain how she worried about all the wrong things; explain to her why her guilt was needless; explain how I both understood what she wanted to be and knew what she could be . . . or I would never have bothered with her at all. I know you’re tired, I wanted to say, I know you think everything rests on you. If you trust me, if you only trust me, I can make things get better, I will make things get better; I won’t accept anything less.
But I wouldn’t ask her to trust me that way. Not yet. Too soon. For the time being, I would just have to make explanations unnecessary. For the time being, I would carry the weight for both of us—and I would simply give her what she needed.
“I’ll tell you what happens next,” I said, taking her shoulder and easing her back with me onto the blankets. “You keep me on this ship for oh, at least a couple of years, until I become an expert sailor and a proven fighter. You capture more ships, and expand your fleet, and your fame spreads wider and wider. Eventually, after years in your service, I learn to believe in you and your cause, and, though I’m still bound to serve you, I become your most trusted vassal. Together, we turn your fleet into the most powerful fighting force in the east, feared by the rich and guilty and loved by the innocent. Admirals surrender as soon as they catch sight of your flag; entire armadas betray their leaders and flock to your command. In the end, you don’t even have to fight to take the islands. Hordes of people demand that you take your rightful place on the throne of the High Lord, and they welcome you with cries of joy. And I’m at your side as you walk into the palace.”
She looked at me . . . and she didn’t roll her eyes, for a change. “Is that what’s going to happen?”
As though the answer really mattered. As though I knew something she didn’t.
I shrugged. “You tell me, Mistress. You’re in charge, after all.”
Then I took her by the back of the neck and pulled her towards me.
PART TWO
WHAT SHE SAID
Narrated by Darren,
formerly of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)
CHAPTER ONE
ALL RIGHT, I admitted to myself, ten minutes into my duel with Tyco. I am losing.
It’s a bad idea to reach that conclusion in the middle of a fight. You make more mistakes when your confidence is rattled. Better to believe that you’re a wizard, a sword saint, a god of war, right up to the moment when someone slits you up the middle and your entrails come boiling out.
But it’s one thing to keep a positive mindset, and another to ignore the obvious. I hadn’t even marked Tyco yet, while his big sabre had carved a long furrow along my side, and left a deep slash in my sword arm. He’d cut dangerously close to the tendon. I winced every time I tried to extend and even when I managed a thrust, Tyco batted my blade away with embarrassing ease. My own blood was streaming down into my right boot, making it squish when I took a step. We were beyond the denial stage. I was losing.
I’m not bad with a cutlass, but there’s always someone better. I should have known that Tyco would be good. Before the war, he had been armsmaster to the House of Namor, training young nobles in the ancient art of sticking pointy things into other people. Now that the governments had crumbled, and the seas had turned wild, he was showing the world all the exciting things that he could do with sharp objects.
Tyco’s ship, the Kraken, had struck three coastal towns over the past month, with a speed and ferocity that left little but red-churned soil in its wake. Tyco led every assault. They say that he foamed at the mouth while he was fighting, and each time he impaled one of his victims, he let out a shuddering pant, as if he had just—well, you know.
And his crew was much the same. Many of the sailors that I fought in those days had been ripped from their homes and sent to the warships against their will. Oftentimes they would fall at my feet in mid-battle and beg to be allowed to surrender. But not Tyco’s men. They fought with bared teeth, snarling like hounds; the hilts of their weapons and the hems of their shirts bore a crust of dried blood.
We’d been hunting them for weeks, always a step behind on their gory trail. But even beasts need to take on water, and we finally ran them to ground in a little cove where they’d landed to fill their casks. My new flagship, the Banshee, hooked Tyco’s monster just before dawn. His crew managed to th
row off the grappling hooks, but not before thirty of my best troops flowed over the Kraken’s side.
Now, on the deck below, my sailors were slowly forcing back Tyco’s wildmen. Near the bow, my quartermaster, Corto, was slicing up the Kraken’s mate, his cutlass moving so fast that it looked like a tangle of silver wire. Amidships, Latoya was fending off three bandits at once with a length of heavy chain, making her weapon shrill as she whipped it through the air. Even skinny Spinner was holding his own. So what was the matter with me?
I wasn’t the only one wondering. Tyco wasn’t giving the battle his full attention anymore. Now he was toying with me, flicking his sabre in quick slashes that left my shirtsleeves in bloody ribbons. His grin was wide and ugly. When I lunged too far and overbalanced, he actually sent me stumbling with a boot in my rear.
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