by Bex Hogan
I shouldn’t be here.
Heavy rain blocks the light from the moon and we are pitching so ferociously I can barely keep my footing, but those locked in battle seem oblivious.
My father is on the quarterdeck fighting three men simultaneously, easily parrying their blows with his cutlass. He towers over them, his bald head gleaming even on such a black night. He’s never looked more alive. He’s toying with those poor lads, making them think they stand a chance, and before I’ve even glanced away he’s dispatched them all with efficient brutality.
Cleeve is pinned against the mainmast, weaponless, his captor raising his sword for the fatal blow. But Cleeve has no intention of going without a fight, and leans in to rip a chunk of flesh from his enemy’s throat with his teeth. The blood sprays so far it almost reaches me.
Horrified at such savagery, I recoil. I don’t want to be anywhere near Cleeve, and if my father catches me out here, then I might meet a similar fate. I’m about to escape back to my quarters when a flash of lightning illuminates a stack of crates, revealing a pair of wide eyes peering out from behind them. Toby. What is he doing out here? Waves crash on to the deck, mingling with blood to make it slippery, and I struggle to stay upright as I hurry over to where Toby’s concealed. Crouching down, I hold out my hand for him to take.
‘Come with me.’ I shout to be heard over the storm.
He shakes his head, too frightened to move.
‘It’ll be OK,’ I say. ‘I promise.’
For a moment I think he’s going to stay, frozen to the spot, but then he reaches for my hand and I’m able to help him out from his hiding place. We run towards the hatch and I use my body to shield him from the carnage around us. Toby hurries below deck and I’m about to follow him down the ladder when someone grabs me from behind. Strong, unfamiliar arms pull me backwards, and I kick and struggle to escape my assailant’s iron grip. From this angle I can’t get enough leverage to break free, but my knife’s still in my hand and so, bending my wrist, I slash it through the artery in his arm.
He immediately releases me and I spin to confront him. I find myself staring at his middle and swallow hard as I look up. He’s one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, his bulging muscles solid as rock. Blood spurts from where I’ve cut him open, running down his arm to fall from his fingertips on to the deck, but despite the damage inflicted he seems unconcerned. He just looks angry.
He lunges towards me, and I dive between his legs, slicing my blade through his massive thigh as I go. He groans, but doesn’t falter, just turns round, swinging his sword at me, which I duck to avoid. My dagger can’t match the sword; I need him rid of it. And so this time when I strike I target his hand, landing a harsh blow on his knuckles. The sword clatters to the deck and I strike again, but he catches my wrist in his vast hand and holds me still. I try to free myself, but my feet won’t grip the boards, making it hard just to stay upright. Though my left hand is weaker, I swing it round to punch him, but he catches that wrist too and the pain of pressure on my burn almost causes me to black out. He has me trapped, the two of us suspended in a temporary stalemate, and though I’m the one holding a weapon, considering how much stronger he is than me, I know I’m going to lose.
The Maiden lurches in the high winds and a pile of barrels we’re standing close to catches my eye. The storm has loosened the ropes holding them and I can tell that they’re going to come undone any minute. Gritting my teeth, I use all my strength to maintain our deadlock, keeping us where we are so that moments later when the barrels break free from their restraints they hurtle in our direction. My attacker is distracted long enough for me to pull my right hand away but his grip over my burnt wrist is too strong, the pain too great for me to pull free, so I’m still standing beside him as the barrels plough into us, smashing us against the railings. This side of the ship is tilted so low in the water that momentum propels us further and before we can grab hold of anything we’re flung overboard.
The force with which I’m thrown crushes the air from my lungs and I can’t even scream as my body is tossed over the side. I steel myself for the icy embrace of the ocean, but it doesn’t come. It takes me a moment to orientate myself and realise what has happened. I am upside down, crashing against the side of the Maiden, held in place by my dress, which has caught on the rigging. My attacker wasn’t so lucky – the ocean has already devoured him. But my relief is short-lived as I hear fabric tearing under the pull of gravity and my weight. I frantically try to turn myself upright, but the ship is still tossing in the storm and the barrage of fresh waves pummelling my face threaten to drown me without my body actually being in the sea.
Panic rises in my throat alongside the salty water I cough up. No one knows I’m here. I gave no cry to alert anyone to my danger. And I realise that I only have moments before my dress fails to hold and my reprieve is over, the death I’ve always feared awaiting me. Making one last desperate attempt to grab hold of something, I only succeed in smashing my face hard against the Maiden, and blood mingles with the water forcing itself into my lungs.
Half blinded and choking, I barely hear the voice shouting my name and think I must be imagining it until there is a sharp tug on my dress, a hand clutching my leg, and still the voice is calling. With an enormous effort I twist my body up and see Bronn reaching down for me, his words drowned out by the pounding water in my ears. I stretch my arm out as far as I’m physically able until my skin touches his. It’s all he needs to haul me back up and in moments I am huddled on the deck, his arms round me. For a second everything is still. Then I remember myself and push him away. He lost the right to touch me a long time ago and despite the fact he just saved my life, I’m furious.
‘What the . . .?’ Bronn says, nearly losing his balance. Clearly he was expecting a little more gratitude.
‘I don’t need your help.’ Unfortunately this is blatantly untrue, which annoys me further.
Grace swoops in beside me, stemming the flow of blood from my nose, which I’m certain is broken. ‘What are you doing out here?’ She’s as surprised as she is concerned to find me in this mess.
‘Are you insane?’ Bronn pays no attention to Grace, his anger entirely reserved for me. ‘I just saved your life.’
‘Is that why you did it? To have me in your debt? How did you know I’d fallen overboard?’ I feel guilty even as the words are coming out of my mouth, but of all the people who had to save me why did it have to be him?
‘You’re unbelievable!’ he shouts at me. ‘Would you rather I’d left you to die?’
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, I scream in my head.
But all I can bring myself to say is, ‘How about you just stay away from me?’
Bronn grunts. ‘With pleasure. Your prince is welcome to you.’
Grace clears her throat and fixes me with a look that perfectly combines her worry and frustration as she helps me to my feet.
‘Is now really the best time?’ she says, and she has a point. Between the fighting and the storm, there are more pressing matters at hand. ‘You, come with me,’ she says, before hurrying me towards my quarters.
I glance back to glare at Bronn, but he’s already gone, lost in the sea of people. Instead my gaze falls on the body of a fallen sailor – not one of ours. Lying face up on the deck, his shirt exposed, I’m sure he’s wearing the emblem of the King’s Fleet. But that doesn’t make any sense. They’re our ally, not our enemy – even if that relationship isn’t always friendly.
It’s been a long time since the Viper headed up the King’s Fleet. Now we work alongside them to protect the Isles; they uphold the King’s honour, while we deal with the less palatable side of things. Mostly we keep out of each other’s way, our missions never overlapping. When the King sends us orders, we obey, and in exchange we are free to do what we want – and what my father wants is to be feared. The Fleet would rather we didn’t exist at all, but the King likes having someone prepared to do his dirty work. We may not use the sam
e tactics, but our overall purposes are aligned: protect the King and the peace of the Isles.
The question is, why is one of them dead on our deck?
Only once we are safely in my cabin does Grace speak again. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I’m fine, thanks for your concern.’ I grab a cloth and press it hard to my nose.
‘Let’s see,’ she says, leaning in to inspect the damage and sighing. ‘Well, it’s broken, but it could have been worse. If Bronn hadn’t seen you go over . . .’
She trails off. We both know I was lucky.
‘What’s going on out there?’ I ask, still trying to make sense of what I saw, hoping she’ll explain everything.
‘Orders from the King,’ Grace says. ‘The Prince delivered them earlier. Some thieves who needed to be taught a lesson. We caught up with them sooner than expected or I would have told you.’
I can hear the lie even as it sits so effortlessly on her tongue. Because clearly the Prince wouldn’t have asked us to attack his own father’s fleet. I can think of no good reason why we would. Swallowing hard, I push back my fears, not wanting to think about what her deception means, what my father might be up to. And it hurts more than it should that Grace isn’t telling me the truth. ‘Shouldn’t we get back out there?’ It surprises even me how easily I can hide my emotions from her.
‘I should. You’re staying here. What would Torin say if you got murdered on your day of engagement?’
I roll my eyes, but don’t argue. We both know I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that I defied my father’s orders.
Once she’s gone I slide into my hammock, but with the storm still throwing the Maiden around with alarming force and the awful sound of men and women dying carrying on the wind, sleep eludes me. I hate that I’m so powerless down here. For all the danger, at least when I was fighting I had some control. My father’s orders don’t make me feel protected. They make me isolated. Helpless.
Whenever I close my eyes I see the dead man, so clearly a member of the King’s Fleet, and though I try to explain away his presence I struggle to come up with an answer that’s in any way reassuring.
I keep my knife by my side, clenched in my fist. I am trapped. Caught in a war I hadn’t even known was happening. There is no one I can trust – I’m completely on my own.
By morning all is calm and while the crew revel in their spoils I make an early visit to Milligan, the ship’s surgeon. My nose has swollen to unpleasant proportions and I am hopeful she can help, though she’s more in the business of breaking bones than mending them. Her understanding of anatomy and her skill with a blade make her an excellent doctor and an even better inquisitor. Not many withstand Milligan’s torture.
It’s been a long time since I’ve ventured to her quarters, though I used to while away more hours there than I care to remember. The stench of the room reaches me long before I arrive, a combination of brewing tonics and rotting flesh.
When I appear at her door, Milligan grunts her indifference, barely looking up from what she’s doing. I am not the only one seeking her remedies – many of the crew sustained injuries in last night’s fight and Milligan has her hands full.
‘Oh. It’s you, is it?’ I can tell she’s overjoyed to see me. ‘Well, don’t just stand there – make yourself useful.’
When she says nothing more, just continues to stitch up a large gash in a crewmember’s thigh, I reluctantly make my way in. It’s strange to be back here again, having avoided it for so long. But despite myself, I’m drawn to the simmering pot on the fire, and breathe in the fumes. Barkwood and coralpine – a tonic for pain. One Milligan clearly hasn’t given to her patient judging by the look on his face.
‘Don’t hover, girl,’ she snaps.
Realising I’m going to have to earn any treatment of my own, I offer to help a man called Amos, who’s badly broken the little finger on his left hand. The bone has pierced the skin, and infection will be quick to settle in unless it’s treated soon.
Tearing some cloth, and grabbing some kindling for the fire, I set about creating a splint. If I can push the bone back in, treat the wound with some ointment, then set it straight, it should heal without complication.
‘It’s going to hurt,’ I warn Amos, as I explain my plan. I avoid asking him how he sustained the injury in the first place. The less I dwell on the details of last night, the better.
But as I clean the skin around the wound with salted water, wanting it free from dirt before I replace the bone, Milligan shuffles over and pushes me out of the way.
‘What are you doing?’
Again I outline my proposed treatment, and Milligan narrows her beady eyes.
‘Did I teach you nothing?’ she says in disgust.
And without another word she clasps Amos by the wrist, pulls him towards her filthy workbench, slams his hand on to it, splays his fingers and brings a cleaver down, removing the offending digit in one vicious movement.
Amos shrieks with pain, but Milligan holds him still, grabbing the poker resting in the fire, and pressing it hard on the stump to cauterise it.
I can’t move, frozen in shock. There could be no better reminder of why I stopped coming here.
‘Go,’ Milligan says to Amos, ushering him out of the room. I suspect he’ll pass out the moment he returns to his bunk. If he makes it that far.
Now she turns her attention to me. Milligan’s face is sallow from lack of sunlight as she virtually never surfaces from her quarters, always preoccupied with some unpleasant experiment. She insists on drinking rum while she works, the smell of alcohol permanently heavy on her breath. Thankfully my injury means I can’t detect it today.
‘What is it you want?’
‘Something for my nose.’
Milligan grabs my chin, and turns my face one way, then the other, before she grunts. ‘Broken.’
‘Yes, I know.’
She spits on the floor. ‘Nothing to be done. Just wait for the swelling to go down.’
‘I’m not leaving until you give me something for the pain.’ She forgets I know her well. Her desire to have me gone will outweigh her indifference to helping me.
‘You know where the second-salve is,’ she says eventually. ‘Get it and get out.’
I do as I’m told, grabbing a pot of the ointment from one of the cluttered shelves and fleeing before she can change her mind.
Not wanting to be the subject of prying eyes, and sick to death of the suffocating four walls of my cabin, I make my way to a favourite hiding place down in the hold where the spare sails and rigging are kept. There is a nook between the beams just large enough for me to squeeze into and remain undiscovered.
Second-salve is made from extracts of the peculiar black brambles indigenous to the Second Isle, and when I rub some on my nose, cold instantly penetrates deep into my face, numbing the pain. I spread some over my burn as well. It’s heavenly. Relieved from my discomfort, I take a needle and thread from my pocket and set to work repairing the tear in my dress before it catches on something else.
It’s a shame Milligan is so utterly vile, because of all the people aboard the Maiden, she’s the one with the knowledge I crave. When I was younger and found my first injured bird on deck, I took it to my cabin and attempted to nurse it back to health. My ignorance killed it. But it awoke my desire to discover the secrets of the body, to heal, to save.
For several years I spent more hours than I care to remember alone with Milligan in her dank and foul quarters. To start with I worshipped her as she showed me how to mix tonics and remedies for various ailments, how combining silverbud and swampnettle aids healing or how blending earthenwort with ground mettleroot mends wounds. She’s nothing like the Mages of old, whose magic merely began with potions and then stretched without limit, but she knows enough of the alchemy to make decent medicine and I was quickly enchanted by the art.
But of course I learned the hard way that Milligan isn’t driven by a thirst to heal – all h
er skills exist to hurt. My lessons began to change from herbal remedies to basic anatomy – but these were practical lessons, not merely theory from books. Prisoners caught acting against the Eastern Isles, or crew who had misbehaved, were brought in for my studies. I remember those lessons with horrifying clarity, especially the ones when Milligan sought to teach me the fundamental pain points on a human being. She showed me how the simplest of things could undo a man – flaying the skin from the soles of his feet, for example. That produced a sound that haunted me for weeks.
She didn’t teach me any of this because it was necessary. She showed me to scare, to impress, but most of all – because she enjoyed it.
Soon after that I pretended to lose interest in her lessons. Milligan had succeeded in teaching me how stupid I was to believe a healer could be nurtured on a ship of killers. And more importantly, I realised that if my father discovered my fascination with how bodies work then he would force me to become Milligan’s successor. I’d rather be an honest assassin than have to torture anyone.
Since then I’ve had to make do with occasional explorations of dead birds or rats, but they haven’t taught me nearly enough, which is frustrating. I’ve learned no new potions, nothing of the alchemy that bewitched me most. And Milligan’s barely acknowledged my existence after what I think she perceived as my abandoning her – and she’s not someone you want as an enemy.
‘There are more comfortable places to be, you know.’
I hadn’t heard him approach and I jump, stabbing the needle straight into my finger. Filthy and glistening with sweat, Bronn’s clearly been hard at work repairing storm damage to the ship, his ripped shirt revealing glimpses of scars on his otherwise perfect body, and I’m suddenly absurdly self-conscious. My hair is a tangled mess and I’m about to flatten it when I realise his black mane is equally wild. I’m startled by a sudden urge to run my fingers through it. I shake the thought away, mortified at the desire stirring in the pit of my stomach. I search his face for any sign he feels as conflicted as I do, but his flint eyes betray no emotion. As always. Suddenly I want him to go away, resenting him for the way he makes me feel, hating him for discovering my secret sanctuary, but there is the small matter of his saving my life last night.