Jagger threw her a warning look.
“Haere mai,” the warrior repeated, gesturing them outside.
“All right, keep yer hair on,” she muttered.
Ebba ducked out of the hut, Jagger behind her.
The tribesman halted, spear clutched tight as he spotted Jagger’s chest. The dark-brown tribal man came closer, eyeing Jagger’s chest—who didn’t drop his gaze for a second. In fact, his eyes were rounded, like he was daring the man to approach.
“You are tribe?” the tribesman said in a deep, melodic voice, thickly accented.
“Neos,” Jagger replied.
The man looked at Ebba next. “You Neos tribe?”
Ebba looked to Jagger for an answer. He shook his head. “Nay, she ain’t tribe.”
The tribesmen looked confused by his answer. By the look on Jagger’s face, the reaction made sense to him.
“I take you to chief.” Politer now that he’d seen the pirate’s tattoos, the man made a motion for them to walk ahead.
Not much was visible from the pole on the way in. Flat-topped huts that were raised on thick stilts dotted the spaces between the trees. There was no clearing in the forest; it appeared as though the tribespeople had merged into the bush, rather than force the forest space to accommodate their presence.
“The huts be raised to protect them against animals,” Jagger explained without prompt.
She didn’t give a flying pufferfish why the huts were raised, but to her memory, it was the first time he’d made a comment without any other agenda. If she didn’t know better, Ebba would say Jagger was excited.
The beaded knee-length skirt the man wore was apparently commonplace for both male and female. Neither gender wore anything on top. The children didn’t wear anything at all, running around without a care in the world. A few of the elderly they passed wore great capes made of feathers. Honestly, when Ebba got out of this mess, she’d adapt some of their fashions. With a few pirate tweaks here and there, she could have that new look Plank had talked about.
Ebba stopped walking.
Her fathers. Shite. What if they got back to the ship and no one was there? The last thing she’d said to them was that she hated them. They might think she’d run away. They might leave without her!
Horror rooted her to the spot. How would she ever get to Zol by herself?
Jagger sighed. “Stop stressin’ yerself.”
“My fathers,” she whispered back.
“Aye, well, what can ye do about that right now?”
She managed to throw a glare over her shoulder but couldn’t force a reply through her lingering fear.
They arrived in front of a large building. It wasn’t on stilts like the flat houses but was easily six times the size.
The tribesman nudged her up the two wide steps toward the entrance of the building, allowing Jagger to walk without harassment. He stopped them at the open doorway and gestured to a bucket and scrubbing brush. “Waewae.”
“Ye need to wash yer feet,” Jagger said. He took off his boots and placed them by the door, stripping off his socks and stuffing them inside. Ebba peered at the bucket. The water was already dirty; she didn’t see how it would make her feet any cleaner.
With a sigh, she wet her feet and took up the scrubbing brush, giving them a rough clean. “Aren’t ye goin’ to do the same?”
“Nay, I’ve had boots on.”
Ebba rolled her eyes. “That makes sense.”
“It does, actually.”
Her eyes settled on a carving bordering the doorway from above. It was an intricate work of interlacing swirls with a face in the middle—though the face didn’t seem human. More like a monster with the body of a large snake. Looked heavy enough to have needed ten people to put it up.
Ebba ducked into the large hut.
The communal space was filled with tribespeople. Unlike those they’d passed to get here, these men and women stopped to watch Ebba and Jagger approach. Having the attention of thirty or so people made her want to check her clothing was all in the right place.
Ebba hadn’t interacted much with tribespeople, but was immediately struck by their age-old eyes. They watched with a confidence of what was about to happen, and with a manner that stated it did not matter what she was or what happened to her because it would not affect or change them in any way. They knew who they were.
No one gave her this impression more than the man sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room. Yet beneath his confidence, she sensed a restrained violence. This one had survival skills. He could fight dirty. She’d watch him.
“Noho,” the man ordered—the chief, she assumed.
Jagger sat, and Ebba followed suit, flinging her legs out and crossing them at the ankle. The chief surveyed her in obvious distaste, and she hadn’t even opened her gob yet. They weren’t going to get on.
“Where are you from?” the chief asked. “Why are you in our waters? Why do you send men into our forest?”
Blood drained from her face. Was he talking about her fathers? Jagger cast her a warning glance. “I be from the tribes of Neos, though I haven’t lived there for two years.”
The chief watched Jagger closely and dropped his eyes to the pirate’s tattoos. Ebba seized the chance to do the same. The detail in the piece always took her breath away. The swirls and various animals in the work flowed from one to the other, and she would not have been able to tell where it all started if she’d had an entire day. Solid in places, and shaded in others, when Jagger’s chest muscles moved, the tattoos seemed alive.
“You are Rangi’s adopted son,” the chief stated.
“Aye,” Jagger replied in a low voice.
Ebba narrowed her eyes on him. He’d said his family was dead.
The chief tilted his head back. “I have heard of you. Of what you bear.”
She leaned forward to hear, but he didn’t answer.
The chief dropped his eyes, shifting. “Neos has been overrun. We have not heard from the tribes there for two moons. The last men we sent to make trade with your people did not return. Their wakas were found floating off our shores, full of snakes. I do not think it likely your people still live.”
Jagger’s face lost all color as he stared at the chief.
In that moment, Ebba came to understand that, yes, Jagger had lied about his people being dead . . . and that he’d just been torn into several pieces by the knowledge they might be. He swung horrified eyes to Ebba, and a pinprick of light in their silvery depth became a burning torch. “That’s why ye were laughin’. Ye knew about Neos.” Something else struck him. “What were yer crew goin’ to do? Maroon me? Throw me overboard?”
Ebba lifted her chin, about to say it was no different from him telling them Malice no longer had a hold over him, but the look on Jagger’s face—as though his every hope had been extinguished by a rogue wave—stilled the words on her lips. Their crew might not have laughed about the death of his people, specifically, but they had sniggered over their own cleverness, and they’d certainly been intending to toss him to his fate on Neos. What they’d done was cruel.
Jagger staggered to his feet and away from them both.
The chief’s dark brown eyes came to rest on her. She held his gaze as she’d seen Jagger do. It seemed to irritate the man more than anything. “Why are you here?” he snapped. “Which tribe are you from?”
“Just visitin’,” she replied.
“And the seven men who are currently my prisoners?”
Her heart thumped. Her fathers. Ebba feigned disinterest. “Who? It just be Jagger and me on my ship.”
The chief smiled wolfishly at her. “I haven’t had time to introduce myself to these men, but perhaps you will be my guest while I do so?”
The man spoke clever like Barrels—he hardly had any accent that she could tell—but she saw the slyness of Stubby and Peg-leg in him, too. Very dangerous, indeed. She studied her nails. “If I have to. Then can I get a bite to eat?”
“Only those who don
’t mean my people harm may eat here.”
She shrugged. “Then there shouldn’t be a problem.”
For a moment, it seemed the chief might strike her. A few seconds passed before he relaxed his tensed muscles and turned to the door. He called to a young man there in his language. The warrior disappeared, and the chief returned his attention to her with a threatening smirk.
Shite, shite, shite. Her fathers and Cosmo were captured. This was bad. There were a lot of warriors about. Everyone carried a weapon, or several. Plus, she’d heard of the way tribespeople fought their enemies: from the shadows of trees with great cunning. If Ebba and the others managed to escape the tribal lands, they’d still need to navigate safe passage back to the ship, and she, and Jagger had been carried for hours.
Shite, shite, shite.
A woman crossed to the chief’s side and bent down to kiss his cheek. He transformed as she did so, losing twenty years from his face and the large stick from his butt. Ebba kept her head bowed, watching the scene from under her lashes.
The chief stood and ordered Ebba to stand also with a disinterested wave of one finger. Her eyes narrowed, but she got to her feet. Better position to defend herself in anyway.
“Ye’re kiddin’? I haven’t washed my feet in years,” someone protested from outside.
She held back a grin at Grubby’s voice, hurrying to smooth it away at a suspicious look from the chief. The woman beside him cast her a quick glance, but her green eyes were as solemn as his were mistrusting.
“Ow. Ow! All right, I’m doin’ it.”
Ebba winced at the sound of a stick connecting with flesh.
Time passed at an agonizing pace, and she thought her spine might crack under the tension filling the air. She peered back as Jagger came to stand behind her. He didn’t return her look, and his presence didn’t earn more than a sad glance from the chief and then from his woman, after the chief murmured in her ear.
What was so bad about Ebba? The chief seemed to have taken an instant dislike to her, and an instant liking to Jagger. In what realm did that make sense?
Her fathers filed into the communal room and were lined up in a row facing the chief. The chief took one self-assured step in her fathers’ direction and froze in his tracks like a panther that had sighted its next meal. His eyes went first to Peg-leg’s leg. Then to Locks’ eye patch. The chief stalked up the line, eyeing Barrels’ cravat and doublet, and Grubby’s toothless smile.
A wailing sound rose in the throat of the chief’s wife, raising hairs on the back of Ebba’s neck.
She couldn’t take it anymore. Throwing off Jagger’s attempt to restrain her, Ebba sprinted to her fathers, throwing herself into Stubby’s arms.
“Ebba-Viva!” he said in shock that quickly turned to terror. “What are ye doin’ here, lass? Ye shouldn’t have come.”
She pulled back, looking at Plank on one side and Peg-leg on the other. “They stole me and Jagger from the ship and tied us to a pole and brought us here,” she said in one breath. “Then the chief said he’d caught ye.” She squeezed Stubby tight. “What are we goin’ to do, Stubs?”
Stubby stroked her hair, rocking her side to side. “Don’t hate us.”
Her fear was swept aside by bewilderment. “What?” Whatever Ebba had expected, it wasn’t that. Horror that she was captured, aye. A weary plea, no. What did he mean?
Strong hands turned her from her father. Ebba looked into the chief’s wide brown eyes. The woman with green eyes came to stand beside him, tears falling over the dark-brown skin of her cheeks in torrents.
The woman reached up to stroke Ebba’s face, sobbing so hard the chief had to help hold her upright.
“Tamahine,” the green-eyed woman choked. “You have my eyes and part of my soul. Daughter.”
Thirteen
A low buzzing sounded in Ebba’s ears. What did the tribe wench just say?
Hands clawed to reach her. She blinked at her fathers, who were being forced to their knees by the row of warriors behind them.
“Ebba,” Locks cried. “We’re sorry, lass. We didn’t want ye to find out this way.”
Find out what? She didn’t understand.
But her heart had frozen.
Numb, she glanced from the crying woman to the frozen chief to her shouting fathers. Cosmo stood alone, and his eyes were full of pity as he watched the scene before him. His eyes dropped to her arm and as blood pounded in her ears, she dropped her gaze there as well. To where the woman rested her slender hand on top of Ebba’s forearm.
Brown on brown.
They had the same skin.
In her confusion over whether to question the difference in color between her and her fathers, she hadn’t yet thought past the fact that she wasn’t theirs. In no way had Ebba made the connection to where she was really from. She hadn’t thought her skin was as dark as that of a tribesperson, but with her arm next to the arm of this woman, the evidence was . . . .
. . . Undeniable.
Had Cosmo known from the start? Was that why he’d asked about the way she spoke on the very first day she met him? She’d assumed it was her pirate lingo, not her skin. Had Jagger known, too? Was that why he looked at her so strangely and shrugged away the guard’s confusion when he’d let them out of the hut? Regardless of the answers to any of that, her dark skin certainly explained why the chief had asked what tribe Ebba was from.
They all thought she was a tribesperson.
And her mind was spinning so hard that nausea rose through her throat because Ebba believed them.
“I’m yer daughter?” she whispered through cracked lips.
The watching crowd was still, and Ebba winced violently as her question carried easily through the hut, sounding unbearably weak.
The woman nodded, still blubbering.
“Nay, ye’re our daughter,” Plank roared, making to stand. A young warrior strode forward and wrenched back his spear in readiness to strike.
Ebba took two steps and caught the spear, halting the downward movement of his weapon. She snapped him in the nose with her other fist. He dropped the spear, and she turned the tables, bringing the wooden end down on his head. The warrior crumpled.
“Little nymph, let us explain,” Plank pleaded behind her.
She couldn’t turn.
She couldn’t look at them.
Instead, Ebba focused on Jagger, whose face was an expressionless mask, listening as the warriors dragged her shouting fathers away. He held her gaze, not looking away, and not blinking.
“Not him,” Ebba said hoarsely, pointing at Cosmo. “He’s sick.”
Surprisingly, the chief nodded. Cosmo came to stand beside her. “Mistress Fairisles—”
“Kill the others,” the chief said.
Terror clamped her stomach in a vice. “Nay!”
The room went quiet, and the woman finally stopped her tears. She looked at Ebba in shock. “You do not want them dead, tamahine?”
Ebba didn’t know what she wanted. No, she didn’t want them dead. Ebba wanted them to hurt. Not physically, just as much as she hurt inside right now. She wanted an explanation. She wanted her fathers to sit her down and tell her that what was happening was a load of fish shite. A joke. A cruel joke that Ebba could pretend to laugh at. She wanted to reverse the events of the last few hours and return to the ship ignorant of the truth.
But she couldn’t.
“Nay,” she said after a beat. “Not dead. Not . . . yet.” Not ever. The chief didn’t appear to be on board with that. If he tried anything, she was going to shove the spear she held right through his stupid face. Part of her still didn’t believe this was happening.
The fearful look on Locks’ face.
The chief shook his head, but stooped to listen as the woman spoke in a rush of their language. The chief held her eyes for a long time, and then bowed his head. “We will not hurt them,” he declared. “Yet. Only because of your mother’s request.”
Ebba glanced at the woman with t
he green eyes. Moss-green eyes. Her eyes. But why was her mind screaming no? Her chest tightened, and the spear fell from her grip, clattering on the floor. Ebba backed away and Cosmo made to grab her. As she shoved him back, the faces of the tribespeople began to blur around her. They looked on in a silence that was no longer passive.
“Rangatira Tahaetia,” an old man boomed in a seasoned voice.
The words were taken up by the others. “Rangatira Tahaetia, Rangatira Tahaetia.”
Jagger took ahold of her elbow and herded her toward the door. The look in his eyes was unfathomable.
Ebba couldn’t breathe. She had to get out. “What are they sayin’?” she choked out as he ushered her from the building.
Jagger stopped her at the bottom of the wide steps. “Rangatira Tahaetia,” he said as though he couldn’t believe it. “Stolen Princess.”
Ebba rolled to the side of the pallet she must have slept upon. She sat cross-legged and blinked into the rays of the morning light. Noticing that she was sitting like the chief had yesterday, Ebba straightened her legs, crossing them at the ankle, like a pirate. Except that didn’t feel right either.
She’d left the communal room with Jagger last night, and it all turned to one big storm after that. Eventually an old raisin of a woman limped up and handed him something for her. Not long after drinking it, Ebba had fallen into a dreamless sleep.
. . . When the blubbering woman called her daughter, and when her fathers confirmed the truth. . . It hadn’t just been the shock of discovering who her parents were, and not just that her fathers weren’t her fathers, or that one of them wasn’t her true father as she’d thought. Her skin color had never held any significance. She’d never registered that her dark-brown tone made her different from her fathers. She felt so completely stupid now; so different from the person she’d been yesterday.
Something had altered within her and shaken her perception of who she was.
Ebba was a tribesperson. Did that mean she wasn’t a pirate?
She didn’t feel like one anymore.
Her whole life, they’d never uttered a hint about her heritage, or sat her down to tell her. They’d known. Every one of them had known who her real parents were. Why else were they so alarmed by the thought of going to Pleo? Why else had Stubby screamed at her to stay on the ship? They’d not only known she was a tribesperson; they’d known exactly where the tribe was and how to find them. How to avoid them. Her fathers had betrayed her. They’d led her to think one way about herself her entire life.
Ebba-Viva Fairisles: Stolen Princess (Pirates of Felicity Book 2) Page 14