The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

by Mackenzi Lee

  “Why is he breathing like that?” Monty asks, swiping at his face again. “He was awake and speaking right after it happened, and he wasn’t breathing like that.”

  And maybe it’s the fear in his voice. Maybe it’s that I notice Monty has tried to stop the blood by pressing that ridiculous hat Percy knit for him against the bullet hole, but it’s slipped down and nestled against his side. Maybe it’s that Percy isn’t just precious to me, but he’s half my brother’s heart. I’ve never seen fear like this in Monty. I’ve never seen fear like this in another human, as Monty presses his hands to Percy’s face and his forehead to his and begs him to open his eyes, to breathe, to survive.

  I’m struggling to focus. Struggling to think. My mind has fallen into the trenches of habit and coursed straight to Alexander Platt’s Treaties, every paper of his I read about the chest cavity, the lungs, the heart, the circulation, the rib cage. And it’s nothing. Not a note, not a blot, not a single comment about a clean gunshot caving in a chest. Platt never wrote a word on what to do when every breath seems to be killing a man slowly.

  So I don’t think of Platt. I don’t worry what Platt or Cheselden or Hippocrates or Galen or any of those men may have written on the subject or how they would have directed my hand. I can do more than memorize maps of vessels and arteries and bones; I can solve the puzzle of what to do when those pieces come apart. I can write my own treaties. I am a girl of steady hands, stout heart, and every book I have ever read.

  You are Felicity Montague. You are a doctor.

  Percy takes another sickening breath, and it’s like a diagram unfolds overtop of him, showing me where the bullet would have lodged, what it struck, and how it’s disrupting everything else. An open chest wound like this, with only a knit cap and a hand pressed intermittently to it, is an airway in both directions. Blood is escaping, but air is entering, filling up everywhere it shouldn’t be, collapsing the lung and separating his chest cavity from the tracheobronchial tree. It’s like a map in my mind, a muscle memory, a poem I can recite by heart. I know what to do.

  “I need something sharp,” I say.

  Monty gropes behind him on the deck and comes back with the cannon worm, passing it to me by the corkscrew tip that goes down the barrel of the cannon before each shot to probe out debris. The handle is slick when he presses it into my palm.

  With a chest wound collapsing the lungs, suction should be applied through a blunt-tipped flexible tube, and anticoagulant fluids injected posthaste. Being short on either option, I make do with what I have, and start in on a counterincision between the two lowest true ribs, four fingerbreadths from the vertebrae and the inferior scapular angle.

  I press my fingers to the base of Percy’s chest, counting his ribs, then hold the tip of the cannon worm to the same spot. I don’t doubt myself for a second.

  I jam the corkscrew tip in with the heel of my hand until it breaks through the skin and I feel it test his bones. Percy’s body jerks, and when I withdraw the screw, he takes a gasping breath, like surfacing from water. I gasp too. The cannon worm clatters from my hand and skids across the deck.

  “Keep pressure on it!” I shout to Monty. The gunfire is making my ears pop—I can hardly hear my own words over it. I turn down the deck, ready to run back to the cannons or anyone else who may need me, but Sim pushes me back, shaking her head until I stop. “Dry!” I finally hear her shout, and I realize suddenly how quiet our gundeck has gone—we’re nearly out of firepower. What we have left will be single cannonballs or musketballs that expose us to the enemy. Across the water, the bowsprit of the Makasib is on fire, flames climbing up the masts and licking the sails, but they’re still putting up a valiant fight. One of their cannons bellows and the Kattenkwaad answers with a shot through our rail. Splinters burst and skitter across the deck, and I throw my arms over my face. Dust fills my lungs, dust and smoke and the thick metallic smell of blood.

  Through the fog, I can still see the island waiting for us, and all I can think is, This can’t be how this ends.

  It is not what I had expected to think as I stared death in his hungry eyes. It’s not hopelessness, it’s just pure stubbornness. Not even so much a will to live as a refusal to die. Not yet, not now, not here, not when we have so much left to do. There isn’t a goddamned chance I’m dying on this rig.

  A scream rips the air suddenly, so harsh and otherworldly and at such an impossible pitch it is more a vibration than a sound. I clap my hands against my ears, doubled over with the pain of that sound bellowing up from the ocean and coursing through me. I can feel it in my feet, in my lungs, in the way my teeth knock together. All over the deck, pistols fall and rifle barrels drop. Men grab their ears, screaming alongside it, and the humanness of that sound is almost comforting. The fighting stops, just for a moment on both sides, as everyone reels.

  Beside me, Monty shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear the ringing. “What was that?”

  The ship shudders. Not with a cannon hit, but like something has passed beneath us. A wave crashes over the deck, soaking my knees. “We’ve run aground!” Sim shouts, but we’re still so far from the shore, and the ship settles again almost at once. We’re not stuck on anything, nor have we caught our keel on a reef or bar.

  But something has passed under us.

  I fly to my feet and splash to the rail, just as Johanna claws her way up from the lower deck. Her hair is a wilted heap around her shoulders, face speckled with burns from the gunpowder, but she reaches out for my hand to steady herself, undeterred by the blood. We both peer over the rail, as far as we dare look lest we expose ourselves to British guns. “Felicity!” I hear Sim shout. “Johanna! Get down!”

  Neither of us moves. We both recognize the sound, from the miniature version we heard in the bay in Algiers. Beneath the bow of our ship, the water shimmers sapphire, something iridescent and gleaming passing under the waves.

  Johanna grabs my arm. “It’s a dragon. It’s under us.”

  As though in answer, the ship lurches again like we’ve crested a wave.

  “It’s not a reef!” I shout back to where Sim is crouched against the helm. “It’s one of the beasties! She’s under us.”

  There’s that unholy scream again. A ripple goes through the water, knocking the waves flat. The ship heaves. “We have to stop firing!” Johanna shouts. “She’s doesn’t want to fight; she wants her eggs!”

  “She?” Sim shouts back.

  “The dragon!” Johanna does a frantic pantomime of pointing down, then miming a snaking motion with her hand. “The warship has her eggs! There’s a sea monster under our boat, but if we’re still and don’t disturb her, she’ll leave us be. That’s why they leave your father’s ships alone! You don’t fight them! We have to stop shooting. No cannons, no guns, no anything. We can’t move.”

  “Are you insane?” Sim returns.

  “Signal your father. They have to stop!”

  Scipio is staring at Sim, looking for an order, though from his face it’s apparent what he wants that order to be. His bloody leg is trembling under him. Sim’s jaw tightens, the hard set of her mouth betraying her. She doesn’t want to surrender. She’s a girl raised to claw her way through a fight by her fingernails, to never give up. Always be faster, be smarter, be the last to call halt. Show no weakness. Show no mercy. Sink before surrender.

  But across the deck, she looks at Johanna, and then to me. When our eyes meet, I see her chest rise in a single, deep breath.

  “Cease fire!” she shouts. “Don’t make a movement.”

  “Belay that!” Scipio cries, snatching at her arm. “We’ll be sunk.”

  Sim jerks from his grip. “No guns, no cannons. Send up flags to my father.”

  “We won’t survive,” Scipio cries, but Sim is already scrambling across the deck and slinging herself down to the stairs. Scipio mumbles something under his breath, then shouts up to his men on the upper deck, “Cease fire and take cover!”

  “We aren’t yet dry!” o
ne of them shouts, but Scipio returns with a sharp “Do as I say!”

  It takes a moment for the message to go through the ship, but when it does, an eerie stillness falls over us. The sound of the battle is replaced by the shush of the water breathing against the side of our boat, the creak of the ship bowing under the damage.

  Sim staggers up from the deck, back to where Johanna and I are crouched at the rail. We watch the signal travel in flags between our ship and her father’s—since there isn’t a signal for don’t upset the dragons, it’s just a call for surrender.

  “Please,” I hear Sim whisper beside me, her eyes on her father’s ship. “Please trust me.”

  She reaches out and takes my hand, her palm damp and shaking. I take Johanna’s in my other. She’s so fixated upon the sea, watching for that flash of emerald, that I don’t think she notices, until she squeezes my fingers in return. A reminder that she’s here. That she’s got me. We’re holding each other up.

  The next round of artillery rips into the ship, a barrage of gunfire and cannon blasts. The top is blown off one of our masts, spraying the deck with shards of wood. The three of us collapse into one another. Sim’s hand is pressed against the back of my neck, sheltering my face with her own.

  And then there’s that scream again, so high that there is no sound to it, just a vibration that makes me feel as though every blood vessel in my body is straining to burst. I swear my teeth come loose. And then there’s a different sound, a cracking, crumbling, like something scrunched up in a giant’s fist. I raise my head just as a massive coil of blue scales with a barbed back rips itself from the water, looming high above the English masts and whipping into the air like a snake striking. Another tidal wave hits our boat, this one spilling off the dragon’s back, and we tip precariously. I seize one of the rails, both my arms wrapped around it, fighting to keep my head up against the spray. Sim makes a snatch, misses, and instead catches me around the waist, clinging to me. The dragon flails, the middle of her body collapsing overtop of the English ship and splitting it in half with a crack like a tree falling. The masts collapse. Sails shred against her back. She loops her tail once more around the hull, the long barb on the end wicking at the air like a punctuation mark before she dives, pulling the English ship down with her so that it disappears entirely, even the colors swallowed by the water. The eggs float to the surface, still webbed together and glowing.

  A moment later, the water ripples again and the dragon’s nostrils break the surface, just to the side of our boat. I hold my breath.

  The dragon lets out a great puff of misty air, then hooks her nose around the net of eggs. She shakes her head, ripping the sailing ropes apart with the sharp hooks above her nostrils. The eggs bob to the surface, still webbed together by the thin membranes that knotted them to the shallows around the island. The antennae at her eyebrows hook around them, pulling the eggs onto her back, where they nestle like barnacles clinging to her scales.

  The dragon raises her eyes. Sees our ship. Snorts another puff of damp air that catches the breeze and blows hot and salty into our faces.

  Then she takes a breath—gasping and fathomless, like it made the wind—and dives, the barb of her tail flicking up through the waves before she disappears into the dark water.

  And at last, the sea is still.

  21

  It would have been a dramatic sight indeed for Johanna and me to step off the longboat and march to Platt’s camp on the island, alone and powerful, two ladies with cutlasses and no fear.

  But that’s simply not practical, so instead we are two ladies sans cutlasses, still shaking from battle, doused in blood, and accompanied by a flock of pirates—the ones with the grisliest scars and the most threatening stature. It took several hours after the water settled for us to actually make the expedition to the island. At our backs, the Makasib has put out its fire, but the front half of the ship is a charred, smoking shell. The Eleftheria is attempting to salvage the fallen yards and repair the broken masts. It’s no small task. My fingers are stiff from bone setting and the delicate work of extracting bullets from injured sailors. We didn’t lose many men, but almost no one escaped without a mark on them. Johanna trailed me around the deck, helping where she could, holding skin and bones in place, unaffected by the sight of exposed muscle and organs.

  When we departed, we left Scipio with his leg stitched, cleaned, and bandaged, and Monty curled against Percy on the floor of the captain’s quarters, neither resting easy but both resting. I’m sure they’ll still be there when we return, likely with Monty stroking Percy’s hair as he sleeps, his breathing even and his chest bandaged. Survival not a guarantee—infection and gangrene and all those other sneaky sons of bitches still have time to get their hooks in—but a likely prospect. I’ve read accounts of duelists shot through the chest who, when treated via intubation, were seen on their feet the next day. The danger now is the sort that comes with any wound. When he returns to his senses, the pain will be brutal, and I wish ferociously that I could give him something to ease it or speed the healing. Some version of opium or the dragon scales that doesn’t get its paws around your throat before it’s done you any good. There’s got to be a way.

  We row for the shore when the tide goes out, and drag the longboat onto the only beach that isn’t a sheer cliff. The black sand squelches under our feet as we hike, then turns to flaky slate slick with algae and kelp. Milky strands of the sea monster eggshells dot the shore, though whether they were hacked apart by English blades or long ago hatched and washed up with the tide is hard to say. The mist is low, the ocean so still it’s almost standing water. It collects in the hollows of the rocks, making pools where sea stars and tentacled sponges wave at us in a paintbox of colors. They seem too bright for nature, these small rose windows beneath the sea.

  We find first the camp of sailors Platt brought with him to the island to collect his specimens, all of them fickle-hearted and more than willing to surrender before our pirates have even had a chance to properly threaten them. “Where’s Dr. Platt?” I ask one of them, and he jerks his head up the hillside, where smoke is still trickling into the sky.

  Johanna and I hike along the hillside, trailed by a few of the men. We have to scramble on all fours in places where the shelf steepens. The trees are bare up to their necks, and the green, shrubby tops sit in the fog, flat and symmetrical. A few patches of yellow flowers dot the hillside, unbent by the winds and waves that batter the island. Rare and wild and impossible to forget.

  Platt is sitting alone upon the hill, a burned-out shell of a man. He must have seen the fight, seen the monster sink his ship. His skin looks thin as smoke, and so pale I can count the blue veins in his neck. His hands are raw and blistered as he feeds Sybille Glass’s notations one by one into the fire, but he’s either so doused or so resigned that he doesn’t seem to feel the burn. The flame jumps each time a new page falls upon it.

  He raises his head as we approach. His eyes are bloodshot, cheeks sunken and taut so that he looks like a wallpapered skeleton more than an actual man. He does not leap or run or fly into a rage when he sees us coming, nor when we stop on the other side of his fire. Instead, he stands, calmly, though his legs shake beneath him, and takes up Sybille Glass’s map of the island from where it sat beside him. He extends it toward us, and I think for a moment he’s handing it over, all the fight puddled in his boots, but he stops as the map rests over the fire. The smoke stains the backside black.

  Johanna freezes, her boots slipping on the rock. I think it might be a panicked pull-up-short, but instead, she’s calm as a summer sky. She crosses her arms. Surveys Platt. Gives him no power. “You can burn it,” she says. “If that’s what you want.”

  His hand is shaking. The paper quivers. If he had expected hysteria, her calm must be unsettling.

  “It was your work too,” she goes on. “Whatever happened between the two of you, my mother wasn’t blameless. And if you want to destroy it, so be it.”

  “It
wouldn’t have stopped her,” he says.

  “It won’t stop us, either,” Johanna replies.

  Platt lets go the map, but instead of dropping into the fire, it floats upon the smoke, defying all known laws of gravity for a moment as it hangs on a gust of hot air. Then Johanna reaches out and plucks it from the trench of smoke, her hands returning sooty and leaving a trail of black fingerprints down the edges of her mother’s map.

  Platt lets the pirates take him. He doesn’t struggle against them or resist in any way, and I wonder what it’s like to be too beaten down to fight anymore. I hope I never learn.

  Johanna and I meet Sim upon the black sand beach. She comes in a longboat from the Makasib, the two men with her swapping her space in the boat for Platt and taking him back to the ship.

  “Where’s your father?” I call as she hikes toward us.

  “With Scipio on the Eleftheria, making a plan for their repairs.” The wind picks up suddenly, and she presses a hand to her head, holding her headscarf in place. “Did Platt give you the map?”

  Johanna holds it up for her to see with a grin. “Should we draw straws for which of us gets which map? We needn’t pretend the petticoat is the most desirable version. Or should we each take half of each and then pin them together? Just to be fair. Or perhaps—”

  Johanna keeps going, but Sim isn’t looking at us. She’s staring at the ground as she turns the sand over with her toe, then glances over her shoulder at the longboat rowing back to her father’s ship. “Sim,” I say, and when she looks back at us, Johanna falls silent.

  “You can’t have the map,” Sim says.

  Johanna pulls back, pressing the leather portfolio of her mother’s drawings rescued from Platt against her chest. “We had an agreement.”

  “I know. But my father . . .” Sim looks down again, her eyes shining. “I wish it could be different.”