I glared murderously at each of them in turn. “And whaddid I tell you?”
“Begging your pardon, captain,” Regon said gently. “But you never told us not to smash in your door.”
“Goddamned technicalities,” I muttered, and took another pull at the brandy bottle, forgetting that it was empty.
They were all glancing at one another, as if trying to appoint a spokesman. After a few seconds of this, Latoya lost patience and shoved Jess forwards.
To Latoya, Jess said, “Thank you.” To me, Jess said, “You total moron, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”
I blinked at her owlishly. The brandy had gone to my head faster than expected. “Iss perfectly simple. Me am boss.”
“You am—what?”
Latoya had to catch Jess’s arm and drag her back to stop her from leaping at me. “What the hell do you mean, Darren?” she yelled. “What is the matter with you? Did you think for two consecutive seconds before you decided to abandon Lynn to a bounty hunter? Did you even have a reason?”
“I did so. Four reasons.” I counted them off on my fingers. “Four reasons why. One, iss better for her. Two, iss better for me. Three, iss better for the ship. Four . . .” Well, I couldn’t remember reason four, so I just waved the fourth finger around emphatically. “So there.”
Jess’s mouth was opening and closing, but the noises coming out were totally incoherent.
Regon took hold of her, gently, and moved her to the door. “Right. I don’t think we’re going to get any farther until we take some drastic measures.”
Latoya nodded agreement. “Bath time.”
“Wait,” I said, feeling much more sober all of a sudden. “I don’t think that’s necessary—no, I really don’t—oh, you bastards. You bastards!”
Latoya caught me around the middle and hauled me dispassionately up to the deck, ignoring my flailing and pounding as I tried to loosen her grip. Once I was out in the open, all my crewmen busily whistled and looked the other way while Regon tied a rope around my waist. Then, for the third time that night, a body went crashing into the cold water.
They let me thrash around for a few minutes, swearing and yelling, until the last of the brandy had oozed from my pores. Then they hauled me up, gasping, freezing, soaking, and horribly clear-headed.
Jess had a blanket ready, I’ll say that much for her, but her eyes hadn’t softened any. As soon as I had coughed up my lungful of water, she went on as if nothing had happened. “You were saying?”
“Jess,” I said through chattering teeth, “you bleeding she-demon—”
“Takes one to know one. Continue.”
“I didn’t abandon Lynn to a bounty hunter. She’s going back to her father, and that’s probably best for both of us.”
“I’ve heard this before,” Regon murmured.
“So have I.” Jess glared at me. “When are you going to stop leaving people for their own good, Darren?”
I clutched the blanket more tightly around me, trying to assemble my thoughts. Though I was less bleary after the saltwater dunking, I was soaking wet and freezing cold, which did not put me at the top of my game so far as arguing was concerned. “Hell, Jess, I was right to leave you. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. You needed something I couldn’t give you, and I needed to go and do my work.”
Jess’s voice sawed up through the octaves, growing high and shrill. “You . . . were . . . afraid, Darren! Don’t try and make it sound noble, don’t try to defend it. You were swaggering around making out you were macho, and all the time, you were this terrified girl-child who didn’t believe she was good enough to be loved. You left me because you decided you would rather be alone than be with someone who might, possibly, someday, leave you. That’s what happened, so don’t delude yourself.”
“That’s a fucking lie. And anyway, what the hell does that have to do with Lynn?”
She made an incoherent sound of rage. “Don’t you see? You’re doing the same damn thing. You can’t even pretend that it’s about your damn work this time. Because Lynn accepts your work, she’s part of your work, you couldn’t do a fraction of what you do without her.”
“I know that, Jess!” I howled at the moon. “It’s time that I stopped fucking taking from her.”
“Taking? Taking?”
“You heard me. That man Timor, he was sent by Lynn’s father. Sent by Lynn’s father to bring her back to the castle where she lives. And what did he find when he got to us?” I didn’t have anything to throw or kick, so I smacked my thigh. “He found Ariadne kneeling beside me like a goddamn terrier! He found me whoring that girl out to save my own skin!”
“Captain,” Regon put in. “Captain . . .”
“Don’t you ‘captain’ me. It’s sick, you hear me? It’s sick and I won’t be that person!”
“Captain,” Regon said stubbornly. “She left that castle. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“She ran from her husband, and he’s feeding worms. It doesn’t matter anymore. Besides, even if she does need help, who the fuck am I to give it to her? I’ve been groping around in the dark, because she won’t tell me anything. The only things that she does say are riddles or lies. I don’t know how to fix anything. I’m only making it worse!”
The crew had stopped pretending to ignore me. There was a ghostly circle of faces all around. I pressed a hand to my heaving chest.
“Ariadne’s being taken home to Bero,” I said dully. “We couldn’t reach her there if we tried, and anyway, there’s no need. She’ll be with her family. They have every reason on earth to treat her well.”
Spinner, of all people, spoke up. “So why was she so afraid?”
I paused at that, not having a ready answer. There was such total silence from my crew, I could hear the drops of water as they slid from my clothes and hit the deck.
“She was terrified, captain,” Spinner went on. “Totally green. Close to puking. And it happened as soon as that man Timor mentioned the word ‘home.’ Of course, I only saw her face for a few seconds before they put the hood over her head.”
“Before they put the what over her what?”
“Hood. Head. A thick cloth bag. And they tied her hands. That’s all I saw before they dragged her away.”
Silence.
Drops of water on the planks.
“You couldn’t have told me this before?” I floundered.
“Would you have listened?” Jess countered. “You’re not one to let reality get in the way of a good rant. It’s always the same, Darren. You hear what you want to hear. Why are you so ready to believe that Lynn is better off without you?”
I looked off at the dim horizon. The Silver Hind was nowhere in sight.
“Captain,” Regon said, “you’ll forgive us for going so far. We wouldn’t, if you were the only one at stake. But you’re not, you see.”
Spinner took up the thread. “We don’t know everything about Lynn. But all of us know what she wants.”
Jess nodded. “I’m not going to pretend I understand the situation. Maybe she’s Ariadne and maybe she isn’t. But the point is—”
“Would you all, please, just shut up for one moment?” I asked, my eyes tightly closed.
Deep in my mind, rusty gears were finally starting to turn.
“You can ask for anything you want,”Lynn used to assure me. But what had she ever asked me for?
Nothing, directly. But what if, in her way, she was just as bad as I was at asking for what she needed? What if she had to use hints, sideways nudges?
Why did she make me tie her to the mast the first day we met? Why did she insist for so long that I had to keep her chained? Why had she tattooed my signature on her shoulder? What had she been saying? The answer was obvious. You have to keep me with you.
And what about the things she had done to me? Why did she prod me towards building a fleet? Why did she help me assemble an army? Why did she turn me into a pirate queen? Because she believed in my mission to help
Kila? That was part of it, I was sure. But Lynn had always said that she wasn’t a selfless person. Was there something in it for her as well?
I’d seen Lynn hold her own against bounty hunters and raiders, lightning storms and ocelots, but if Jess was right, there was something in the world that she couldn’t face. What if—what if—she had been slowly, determinedly turning me into a person who was strong enough to protect her?
If that was true, my first instinct was to quit the job. I was not doing well. I hadn’t even managed to figure out what I was supposed to be protecting her from. I’d let her row off to the Silver Hind, when I should have knocked her down and sat on her to keep her where it was safe. Then, when the Hind started to run, I just let it go.
I felt the familiar black wave of guilt rising, but for once I wrestled with it, and managed to crush it down. My guilt had never done anything for anyone. It was just another thing that Lynn had to carry for both of us.
Lynn had always done the believing in our relationship. And now it was my turn to take a leap of faith.
I opened my eyes.
The stars on the horizon were tiny points of ice. My chest felt tight and hard.
“We’re going to tear that girl from the bosom of her family,” I rasped. “And we’re going to drag her back into slavery, where she belongs.”
Jess nodded. “That’s more like it.”
PART THREE
WHIPPED
Narrated by Darren,
formerly of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)
and by Lynn
CHAPTER ONE
Lynn
Afternoon, Day III
I GUESS I should have seen it coming. I guess, in a way, I did. When the Silver Hind hoved into view, my first instinct was to run, in no particular direction, and without stopping so long as I had feet left to run with. But when you’ve been a runaway for a while, you stop trusting that inner voice that tells you when it’s time to panic. You stop trusting it because there’s always some reason to panic, and you can’t spend every minute of every day retching and cowering.
My emotional waters grew still muddier after I offered to go to Timor. As you can imagine, the prospect didn’t exactly thrill me. You’d be able to imagine it even better if you’d seen the bastard up close. He had the over-smooth, over-starched look of a man who keeps his fantasies bottled—and that kind of man tends to go too far when he suddenly gets a chance to do whatever he wants.
When Darren was yelling at me in our cabin, I was more than a little distracted by the thought of what I was about to do. I have a pretty vivid imagination and the scene wasn’t hard to picture—the weight of Timor on top of me, the rasp of his bristly face, his smell. (I’d caught a whiff of him earlier, and he wasn’t the sort of man who kept a pomander in his pocket, if you know what I mean.) I’d done worse things to stay alive—hell, I’d done worse men to stay alive—but it had been a while, and I was out of practice. That’s the problem with being with a person who loves you more than her own soul. It kind of ruins you for anything else.
So, while Darren was ranting at me, I could only give her half of my attention. I was mostly concentrating on not throwing up, for the sixth time that day. My instincts were screeching at me in seven part harmony, Don’t do it. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. And maybe if Darren hadn’t been so priggish, so self-righteous, so goddamn noble, I would have listened both to her and to my own gut, and let her talk me out of it. But she was. So I didn’t.
Whatever. I didn’t see it coming. As Latoya rowed us over to the Silver Hind, my insides were crawling, but my mind was made up—I was going to go through with it. I would give Timor whatever he asked for, do things that he hadn’t even believed to be biologically possible, if that was what it took. I was going to finish it as fast as I damn well could and I’d go back home to the Banshee. Maybe Darren would be over it by then. Maybe she’d still be sulky and I’d have to let her mope for a few days before she came to her senses. I could cope with that. A moping Darren is a living Darren and, in my book, that counts for something. When I swung onto the Hind’s ladder and started to pull myself on board, I was tired, I was nauseous, I was pissed as all hell— but I wasn’t really afraid.
Not yet.
THIS IS NOT my favourite memory, so I’m going to make things easy on myself and keep this short. Besides, the memory itself is kind of blurry. You have to understand, it happened so fast.
Latoya went through the cabin door first, so she was the first to get dropped. There was next to no warning—just a faintest whirring sound as the cosh whipped round to take her on the back of the skull. She turned slightly as she fell. I remember her eyes, round and almost thoughtful, before they rolled into the back of her head. They grabbed me just as they hit Spinner. I didn’t see him go down.
At some point, I might have yelled for help, I’m really not sure. There wouldn’t have been much time. I was hooded and bound within a few seconds. But those few seconds were enough for Timor to tell me what was going on. He knew who I was, and he knew who wanted me back.
That moment—that moment—was the thing I had been dreading since the day I escaped. I had pictured it happening in so many ways, in so many times and places. I’d woken so often in the middle of the night, sweating, close to screaming, and thinking that it had happened for real. It overpowered my imagination whenever I let myself brood. It was the single thing that had the power to scare me speechless.
So I should have seen it coming.
I just didn’t, that’s all.
THE SILVER HIND didn’t have a brig. They kept me in a storeroom. Timor was the only one who ever opened the door. When he came, he took the hood off briefly, so I could eat, but he wasn’t a great conversationalist.
“They’re alive, so far as I know,” he told me, the millionth time I asked about Latoya and Spinner. “Which is more than they’ll be if they try to follow you to Bero. So you’d better hope they’re smart.”
“Let’s talk about smart,” I said. With my hands still tied in front of me, I was rapping a biscuit against the wall, trying to scare the maggots out. Ship’s maggots are plucky little things that don’t scare easy, so it was taking a while. “Do you really think that the word ‘smart’ applies to what you’re doing? It’s safer to swim naked in boiling tar than it is to discover one of Lord Iason’s secrets. Now that you’ve seen me, do you really think he’ll just hand you a bag of cash and send you on your merry way?”
“Shut your mouth.”
“Timor, would you listen? I don’t know whether he told you the truth or whether you guessed it, but either way, he can’t afford to let you live. Don’t you see that? What do you think is going to happen?”
“You know what I think?” Timor said. “I think you’re done eating.”
He grabbed the biscuit away and tied the hood over my head again. After that, he gave me a sharp cuff on the ear every time I tried to talk.
On the third day (my guess—it was flat dark down there), he led me upstairs, and let me put my tied hands on the rail, and then pulled the hood away.
When my eyes stopped burning from the glare, I saw it all at once. The great cliff of white limestone. The white limestone castle that roosted at the top, like a pale gargoyle, its crenulations spiking up like teeth and claws. And surrounding us on every side were white-bannered war ships, gliding through the calm waters of the bay. It was the exact same view that I had stared at for over ten years, from one of the towers somewhere up on that cliff. Back then, though, I saw it in reverse—first the battlements of the castle, then the harbour and warships, and beyond that, free and wild and wonderful, the ocean.
Of course, I had known from the start where Timor was taking me, but I’d kept the panic at bay by telling myself that we would never reach Bero. Something would get in the way. A freak waterspout, maybe. An attack by a giant sea serpent. Failing that, I’d escape. I’d done it three-and-a-half years ago, and since then I’d learned some useful new skills, like how to strangle
a man with his own tongue. I could have done some damage to Timor when he was down in the storeroom delivering my meals. I didn’t need to see him to aim a blow—his boots clicked in the dark—and though he was twice my size, I was big enough to reach his groin, which was all I really needed.
But I’d forced myself to bide my time. There was no point in rocking the boat (so to speak) until the Silver Hind reached some place that was better suited to an escape attempt. Like oh, say, some place with land. The best plan was to act meek and innocent, in the hope that Timor and his men would have lowered their guard by the time my chance came.
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