I Kissed an Earl

by Julie Anne Long

  “Hercules—tell me what is wrong!”

  “Pirates. Stay here.”

  Anyone else might have said that with less glee.

  Quick as a vicious terrier he scrambled out of the galley and clambered up to the deck.

  Dear God. She thought quickly through the rush of terror. Could it be Le Chat? But how could it be? They weren’t carrying cargo. Did he know she was aboard?

  What the bloody hell was happening?

  Flint would kill her if she went up on deck. Perhaps even literally.

  But if Lyon were indeed among the pirates, he would never harm Flint if he saw her.

  She fingered the knife, and eyed the cleaver, and opted for the second one.

  When a blood-congealing scream cut through the battle din, Flint grinned, knowing he would see Hercules flying up the stairs from the galley swinging his scimitar. Howling his inimitable battle cry, he leaped toward a bug-eyed pirate in a moustache and ludicrously festive striped shirt aiming a pistol straight for him, and whipped his sword up beneath the man’s hand. The pistol flew in a spiraling upward arc and came down, crashing to the deck, skittering across it.

  And came to a halt at Violet’s feet.

  She reflexively seized it and slunk to crouch behind the long boat, her heart clogging her throat. Thumps and roars of pain and shouts of “Duck, Greeber!” and “Look out, Captain!” ricocheted around her. She tucked up her knees and bent her head between to make herself as small and invisible as possible, but not knowing whether Flint was unharmed or whether Lyon was on board was unbearable, so she peeked.

  She ducked when she could have sworn the glittery amber stare of a pirate met hers from across the deck. It was only the flat lozenge of the sun, burning through the fog at last, glancing off pirate jewelry.

  The second thing she saw was a disarmed pirate holding a sliced and bleeding wrist in one hand while Corcoran and Hercules hooked their hands beneath his armpits. He kicked and swore in a language she’d never before heard as they heaved him overboard. His screams ended when the water engulfed him.

  Sweet Mother of God.

  If she survived, she vowed she would never long for novelty again.

  She rose to her knees again, her eyes just above the edge of the longboat. She watched in a special kind of hell, a heart-swelling awe, as Flint threw his beautiful body ruthlessly into the battle, wading into it, taking and giving blows, bringing up that great sword and hammering it down again against other blades coming at him with murderous intent. He seized any pirates pummeling his men and hurled them to the deck, ruthlessly stomping them breathless; he nimbly, almost happily, ducked swords and fists swung at him. The blood of other men spattered his shirt.

  She didn’t see Lyon.

  Saw instead scattered amongst the pirates Lavay’s golden head, Corcoran’s stocky body, Greeber’s shining ginger hair. She couldn’t bear it if any of them were harmed.

  She turned her back on all of it for an instant, leaning against the boat, eyes squeezed closed, her lungs bellows in her chest. She rallied her wits; her breath came in short terrified gusts as she inspected the pistol; it was unlocked. A miracle it hadn’t discharged when it had been kicked across the deck. She didn’t have time to fumble it open to see whether it was loaded. If it had already been fired, it was now useless.

  She could always use it as a club or a projectile.

  She peeked up again, and in that instant saw Lavay’s golden head flash like a guinea as he fought to disarm a man raining sword blows at him.

  And she saw what he couldn’t see: a pirate running toward his back with a sword.

  She clapped a hand over screams that would have torn her throat ragged.

  But with Flint’s finely honed instincts, his knack for seeing everything at once meant he was there in a bound. The point was inches from Lavay’s back when Flint ran the pirate through.

  He pulled his sword free; the body flopped sickening to the deck as though it had never been animate.

  Lavay acknowledged his rescue with a salute of a single bob of his head to Flint, his own sword still a graceful, whipping blur in deadly play for perhaps a second or two longer before he disarmed the pirate and ran him through, too.

  It was all so savage and hideous and glorious and obscenely…proficient.

  She trembled. She couldn’t bear to stay there and she couldn’t bear to leave, and she prayed in a way she’d never prayed before, with a wordless passionate sincerity and desperation.

  She hunched when a deafening roar sent acrid smoke mingling with fog. A great fountain of foam sprayed up over the port side of the ship: The pirate ship was firing upon them.

  “FIRE!” Flint roared, even as his sword swiftly parried two men coming at him. “Corcoran!”

  The men on the guns obeyed. Flame hissed the length of the fuse and The Fortuna shuddered with the force of the cannon shot. The next sound was the triumphant sickening crack of splintering wood.

  The main mast of the pirate ship was cleaved in two, the top still dangling like a man strung on the end of a rope.

  And all at once the edge of Violet’s terror was strangely blunted by thrill and the unfamiliar beginnings of bloodlust. She wanted them to win.

  They could win.

  Even though she knew The Fortuna’s crew was outnumbered.

  Bodies were now strewn haphazardly as rag piles on the deck. She saw Hercules’s bald head shining like the butt of a pistol as he swung his cutlass and mercilessly fended off then slaughtered two more pirates who were doing their best to slaughter him. But two more were upon him nearly instantly. He was terrifying indeed. But he was small.

  Oh, Hercules.

  But Flint was there in time—how did he move so quickly? And together he and Hercules neatly and gorily dispatched the pirates.

  But when Flint turned again a pirate stood right behind him, pistol aimed at his chest.

  He froze instantly.

  Oh, God, oh God, oh God.

  And somehow it took only seconds for awareness of the captive captain to ripple throughout the deck

  “Hold your fighting,” the pirate roared.

  “Hold!” Flint shouted to his own men.

  The commands were unnecessary. Apart from the writhes and moans of men beaten to the deck, all was now stillness. Men stared at the standoff; a few muttered.

  Flint’s sword was stilled, gripped in his hand at his flank. His own pistol was tucked into the band of his trousers.

  Reaching for it would mean instant death.

  “Surrender, Captain Flint. Lay down your arms now, and you will be our hostage. We will not kill you. But if any of your men so much as twitch a muscle, I will shoot you now. Does anyone care to twitch?”

  The pirate captain’s accent was mysterious but featured extravagantly rolled L’s. He was tall, bony and rectangular; his coat flapped from his shoulders like a flag strung from a line. A red scarf was tied over oily black hair roped back in a queue. His eyes were flat and black. She suspected this was a man who had long ago learned to kill remorselessly, and perhaps had even grown to enjoy it.

  Violet remembered a description of another pirate at the viscomtesse’s dinner party. Ugly, they called him. This must be him. He certainly fit the description.

  This wasn’t the work of Le Chat, then.

  Flint coolly assessed his circumstances. His chest heaved from the exertion of battle; Violet breathed along with him, as though she hoped to breathe for him. His shirt clung to him with sweat and blood, his and the blood of other men.

  She’d never before seen him at the mercy of anyone or anything.

  It was unnatural, like watching the sun sink permanently into the sea. It should not be allowed.

  “Come now, Captain Flint. Hand your sword to me, and my men will cease fighting. You know you are outnumbered.”

  “We were outnumbered. Count the bodies on the deck, sir. You were outmanned. Our numbers are even.”

  “And yet I’m the one pointing the pi
stol at The Fortuna’s captain, which means I’m the one who holds the life of her captain in his hands, which means we have won. Come now, Captain Flint, lower your weapons and we will lower your men in the launch and take your ship. Since you were so unkind as to disable ours.”

  “How do you know my name?” Flint was so conversational they might have been sharing a pint in a pub.

  “Your legend precedes you, Captain. We know you sail The Fortuna, and that she carries a rich cargo, for we learned of this from Captain Gullickson. We want it. Surely I needn’t explain this to you. You’re not new to the notion of pirates.”

  But Violet knew they carried no rich cargo. Gullickson had tried to lure pirates to them! He must have wanted them dead.

  “And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Flint made the word pleasure a masterpiece of irony.

  “You speak to Le Chat himself, monsieur.”

  Astounded silence followed by a splintering crack as another piece of the pirate ship’s mast crashed to its deck. Which clearly did nothing for the pirate’s temper.

  “What bloody nonsense.” Flint sounded amused.

  Oh God, Flint. Don’t anger that creature.

  “Why do you insult me in such a manner, Captain Flint?” he hissed with apparent nonchalance. Violet saw that his mouth possessed teeth and gaps in equal measure, and felt certain when he spoke his words sprayed over Flint like sea foam.

  “From what I understand, Le Chat and his crew do not fight like frightened vermin,” he said easily. “In other words, they do not fight sloppily and without regard to honor. You are not Le Chat.”

  Don’t goad him, don’t goad him, don’t goad him.

  The captain stiffened. “Very fine words from a man who has everything to lose in this moment, Captain Le Snot.”

  Juvenile chuckles around the deck, even from the pirates.

  Was he trying to get killed? Violet was sweating with terror. Her hands were damp; an ice floe sat in the pit of her stomach.

  The pirate captain’s black eyes narrowed viciously, assessing the earl, and he shifted restlessly on his feet. He made a great show of adjusting the pistol in his grip so that the barrel of it aimed directly at Flint’s heart. That heart she’d felt hammering beneath her fingers when he’d carried her down the steps safely to his cabin after she’d nearly drowned. That she’d felt beating against her own when he’d kissed her.

  The ice floe migrated to her throat.

  This can’t be happening.

  The pirate’s matted beard hiked up when his fleshy lips curled in a contemptuous snarl. “Captain Flint. The time for questions is over. Lay down your arms. If you do not do so now I regret that I will need to shoot you.”

  “Flint,” Lavay said quietly. A warning.

  A pirate poked the tip of a blade into Lavay’s throat. A bead of red, brilliant in the foggy light, appeared there.

  Violet touched her own throat. The bile of rage filled it.

  “Oh, I would surrender to a man,” Flint said easily. “But I feel rather silly surrendering to a rat, sir. So I fear my surrender is impossible.”

  Oh, Flint.

  He stood, solid as his own ship. Hand on the hilt of his sword. Like a gorgeous cornered savage, seemingly relaxed, at ease, at the mercy of this man. In truth, ready to spring like a beast for the kill, even if it meant he would die in the process.

  Violet bit down hard on her lip to keep from screaming out his name.

  She wanted to look into his eyes just one more time before he died.

  Because she knew what Flint likely knew: He was going to die anyway at the hands of this filthy man, who wasn’t burdened by anything like his sense of honor. She knew his own men were likely doomed no matter what he did, or what this pirate said. So he would not allow this fiend to use his honor as a weapon against him, and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of even the pretense of respect. The pirate was vermin. He’d been lucky, and that was all.

  And then Flint’s men would die at the hands of pirates after watching their captain die with honor.

  And then they would find her of a certainty. She had no illusions about what pirates would do to her when they did.

  “Very well, then,” the pirate captain snarled. “I will give you to the count of five to lay down your arms.”

  Violet also knew instinctively that the pirate was the sort who would fire on four. And then laugh about how clever he’d been afterward over Flint’s body.

  “One…”

  Everything about the day suddenly seemed frozen, delineated sharply. The Fortuna’s crew stood perfectly still, helpless, breathless. Above, fog and gunsmoke inexorably drifted away, the work of the sun and a freshening breeze. Encroaching sunlight glanced oddly, picking out things that shone: stilled swords and pistol stocks, earrings glinting in filthy nests of hair.

  “…two…”

  Sounds were painfully crystalline, distinct. The lap of water at the side of the ship. The sudden flap of a seagull wing. A bird mocking them with its freedom to fly away from all of this. All sounds, all sights, were blows against Violet’s nerves.

  Violet stood slowly. She didn’t know how she managed it. Her limbs were numb.

  “…three—”

  BOOM!

  The silence was smithereens.

  And the pistol shot echoed endlessly.

  Roars of rage, bloodcurdling battle cries split the air. But the groans of misery and protest settled into confused murmuring, then eerie silence, when the impossible seemed true:

  Flint remained upright.

  But his face was expressionless. He held his body utterly still. Hand frozen on the hilt of his sword.

  A moment of surprise before the agony sets in, Violet recalled.

  And that’s when understanding collectively took hold of the men on deck.

  And every head swiveled to look at the pirate captain.

  His face beneath that beard was almost comically stunned.

  When realization dawned, his features contorted into surprise, and then horror, and then slackened. The pirate captain’s fingers loosened, splayed, the pistol spilled from it to the deck. Before the stunned eyes of everyone on deck, as red bloomed brilliantly over his heart, and then spread rapidly on his shirt, burbled from the corners of his mouth.

  And like a sail abandoned by the wind, his body sank, and then he toppled to the deck.

  Quite dead.

  Instantly that primal rustle and clank, the sound of warfare, muscle and weaponry shifting into immediate action to hold captive every pirate who wasn’t dead.

  And every single man capable of moving spun about to see who’d fired the shot.

  Violet lowered the pistol in shaking hands.

  Flint’s beautiful blue eyes—the word alive, alive, alive sang a hosanna in her heart—bored into her. She nearly sank to her knees. She felt weightless with fierce gratitude he simply existed.

  She would think later about what she’d done to ensure that he lived.

  His face was pale, his skin drawn tight over his face. The fierce emotion in it held her upright.

  He was the kind of man who could hold up the world, she thought.

  “I apologize for disobeying orders, sir,” she said softly.

  She turned, her skirts whipping about her ankles, and disappeared briskly down the ladder.

  Chapter 23

  Flint knew from long experience that the blood-buzz and fury-haze of battle receded only gradually, like a red tide, unless he walked it off, paced the deck to point of physical exhaustion.

  Violet. Violet. Violet. Her name thumped like a war drum in his mind, calling to him. He saw in his mind’s eye again and again her precious, singular face, cold and terrified and brilliant with fury and purpose.

  But he was a captain, and he had a duty, and he did it.

  Briskly, officially, he sent Corcoran to see to whether she was safe below decks; he reported back quickly that she was. He supervised the throwing of two more of the pirate de
ad over the side of the ship into the sea. Wounded men were sent to the ship’s surgeon to be salved and stitched. He’d lost no men to death in battle, but several were seriously wounded, and Mcevoy had taken a bullet to the thigh, and would be in the sick bay for at least a week, likely, though he’d have the use of his leg.

  With cold, swift efficiency, he issued orders for weapons to be collected and inventoried, the deck to be scrubbed, the sails and rigging inspected; he issued compliments for bravery, words of comfort and gratitude for the wounded. There was no room on his ship to house prisoners and he had no interest in keeping pirates alive. The fog had receded enough to reveal a listing pirate ship, its main mast snapped, its hull filling with water from the hole made by the cannon shot. It would sink unless the pirate crew repaired it—if they could repair it.

  He didn’t care.

  Two living pirates remained on board The Fortuna: a surly, startlingly hairy brute who spoke not a single word of English, and after much experimentation with a smattering of words in every language Flint knew, was revealed to be Portuguese; and a boy who couldn’t be more than twelve years old, and who was scrawny, filthy, English, and terrified.

  “Shall I drop them over the side, sir?” This was Greeber, nursing a great throbbing blue lump from where he’d taken a sword hilt to the forehead.

  “Sir, please, sir…I s-s-served the real Le Chat. I can help ye find ’im!”

  The boy stuttered and twitched like a trapped insect. Enormous brown eyes, a pink, pinched nose. His collarbone formed a sharp ridge beneath the filthy shirt. His wrists were bony, attached by knobs, from the looks of it. Potentially a tolerable looking, even handsome lad if he were fattened up a bit.

  “Are you lying, boy? You’ll go right o’er the edge, if so, and I will know.”

  To illustrate his point, Greeber seized him by the scruff and hiked him up onto his toes and passed him to Lavay as though he were a sack of potatoes, and Lavay got him by the trousers waist and collar and made as if to hurl him overboard.

  “Nay, sir! Please, sir!”

  “Oh, very well.” Lavay settled him down again, sounding peeved.