Poseidon’s Legion

by Kathryn Le Veque

  Shaw sighed. “I did. Are ye angry?”

  Constantine simply shook his head. “I am not,” he said. “But she belongs to me. You would do well to remember that.”

  Shaw grinned. “Ye know I have a lass of my own now, Con,” he said. “What would I do with two?”

  “Knowing you, you would find a way.”

  Shaw laughed softly, looking at Gregoria, who was also grinning. “Nay, Con,” he said after a moment. “I have my Jane now and I couldna be happier. Speaking of Jane, I’m anxious tae return tae her, but it was worth the delay tae see the Leucosia put tae sea. She’s a fine vessel.”

  Constantine glanced at Lucifer and Augustin, standing on the opposite side of Gregoria. He gave the men a vague nod, and especially to Lucifer, who nodded in return. It was as if they all shared a secret, something that was now going to be brought to the forefront. Lucifer turned to Remy, who was up on the poop deck, and lifted his hand at the man. Remy, in turn, issued a command to Kerk, who happened to be standing next to him with a bow and arrow in hand. Quickly, Kerk lit the arrow tip and fired it into the air, flaming and smoking and all. As the arrow began to arc its way back to earth, something happened over on the Leucosia.

  Shaw’s standard was suddenly raised on the mainmast, the ruddy MacDougall devil-head and sword-fisted hand flying high in the wind. It snapped and danced, announcing to all who saw it that the ship belonged to MacDougall. Confused, Shaw turned to Constantine.

  “What’s that about?” he asked. “Why do ye fly my banner?”

  Constantine smiled faintly. “Because I am giving you the Leucosia,” he said. Reaching over, he took Gregoria’s hand and pulled her against him. “You went above and beyond the call to save both Gregg and me at Eynon Bay, Shaw. You did not have to come to Lucifer’s summons, yet you did. Then you risked your life and the lives of your crew in a terrible storm to save my miserable hide from an ambush, and I shall always be grateful to you. Valor such as that deserves a reward.”

  Shaw was looking at the man with great surprise, turning to watch the Leucosia as she sailed towards the Savage of the Sea, ready to take her place beside Shaw’s flagship. Realizing that Constantine was giving him this magnificent vessel very nearly brought a tear to his eye.

  “Con…,” he said, then faded off. Clearing his throat, he started again. “I dunna know what tae say, laddie. It is too much.”

  Constantine shook his head. “It is not too much,” he said. “It is worthy of you.”

  Shaw turned to look at him again, seeing that Gregoria was beaming at him. Something about the woman just caught his eye; she was so… happy. Aye, he knew the story behind the ambush at Three Crosses. Constantine had told him in confidence that Gregoria had been forced into helping her brother and a fool named Lord Wembury, that they had threatened her should she not help them lure Constantine into a trap.

  All Constantine’s men knew of the folly was that the cup they’d been taking to Three Crosses had somehow been lost in the flight from the Sassenach army and nothing more. There was no mention of ever going back to Three Crosses, or of betrayal, or of anything else. To them, she was still Miles Tenby’s daughter. Gregoria had confessed her sins before any real damage was done and Constantine didn’t see the need to tell his men the truth. He believed the matter was between him and Gregoria, and it was settled. He was so far gone in love with the woman that he was willing to forgive her everything.

  At first, Shaw wasn’t entirely convinced it was the right thing to do, but three days around the pair had changed his mind. It was clear to see how deeply devoted they were with each other, so much so that even Shaw was willing to forgive Gregoria and believe that she’d made a grave mistake for which she was truly sorry. She doted on Constantine, laughed with him, and even argued with him, something that gave her Shaw’s stamp of approval. A terrible scheme might have brought the two together, but that was quickly forgiven and forgotten.

  Now, all Shaw saw was a couple that was terribly in love.

  Constantine deserved it.

  “Then I accept,” he finally said. “I have never received such a proud and mighty gift. I will take great care of her, Con.”

  Constantine slapped him on the back, joy in the man’s expression. “Excellent,” he said. “And your first duty as captain of the Leucosia will be to marry Gregg and me. Captains can marry a couple at sea, you know. I would be honored if you would do the duty.”

  Shaw was grinning from ear to ear. “It will be my pleasure,” he said. “My good and true pleasure. Now, let me get over to my beautiful new ship and inspect her. I love ye dearly, Con. Ye’ve passed her into capable hands!”

  With that, he climbed over the top rail of the Gaia, down the rope ladder to the skiff waiting below to take him over to his vessels. As Gregoria went over to the rail to wave at him as he and his men rowed away, Constantine went to stand next to Lucifer and Augustin.

  Lucifer had recovered quickly from the stab wound he’d received in Eynon. It had missed everything vital and the man had been back on his feet within a day. Now, he stood stoically as he watched Shaw row over to what was to have been his command. But he didn’t mind. In truth, he understood the gifting completely.

  “Well?” Constantine said. “The ship is Shaw’s now.”

  Lucifer nodded his head. “It is.”

  “Regrets?”

  Lucifer made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort. “Nay,” he said. “He’ll find out soon enough that every pirate in the sea is aiming for that ship. It may as well have an enormous target painted on the broadside. Better him than me.”

  Constantine struggled not to laugh, watching Gregoria as she continued to wave at Shaw. “We should probably warn him,” he said.

  Lucifer looked at him. “Why?” he asked. “Did he warn you when he gave you that beautiful sword last year, the one with the handle that came off when you tried to unsheathe it?”

  Constantine well remembered that particular gift. It had been a stunning Spanish broadsword, but it had been a joke – when one tried to use it, the handle came off, revealing a tiny little blade to fight with. Constantine had been caught in a battle with it and it had been most humiliating. He’d drawn forth what he thought was a magnificent broadsword and ended up with a needle, enough of an embarrassment that the Spanish pirates he was fighting burst out in laughter when they saw it.

  “I remember,” he growled. “I still have not forgiven him for that.”

  Lucifer bit his lip at the memory. “It was rather humorous.”

  “It was humiliating.”

  “So, you are not going to warn him about the Leucosia?”

  Constantine shook his head. “He will find out soon enough.”

  Two weeks after the marriage of Constantine and Gregoria on the deck of the Leucosia, Shaw had to fight off the Dureau and Nicolas Van Rompay, twice, as he made his way to a port in Ireland. It wasn’t until Dureau tried to catch him off guard again and shouted to him, across an inlet with a sandbar in between them, that he wanted his ship back that Shaw began to suspect that his dear and true friend Constantine had saddled him with a cursed ship that the French were wild to reclaim. It would have been just like him to do it.

  Shaw laughed about it until he could laugh no more.

  With friends like that, the enemies of the Pirates of Britannia had better be on their guard.

  Pirates, plunder, and brotherhood… forever.

  Long live the Lords of the Sea.

  The End

  SeaWolfe

  A Medieval Romance

  Pirates of Britannia Series, Book 4

  Poseidon’s Legion, Book 2

  By Kathryn Le Veque

  Author’s Note

  A de Wolfe at sea!

  What a fun concept this has been. Pirates of Britannia has been such great fun writing – a little out of my wheelhouse, but that’s been a great challenge.

  The heroine in our tale is Genevieve Efford, a young woman that was introduced as a s
poil of war in LEADER OF TITANS. She and her sister (and her sister’s puppies) were taken from a merchant ship that was subsequently sunk, and Genevieve proved to be quite a fighter. That streak continues in this novel as she and Lucifer come to know one another, because any woman worthy of a de Wolfe must be a strong woman, indeed. It’s safe to say that Lucifer has met his match.

  Something to clarify in this novel – Lucifer’s father is Wyndham de Wolfe, a descendant of Robert de Wolfe, who was William de Wolfe’s eldest brother (remember that lineage from THE WOLFE). William’s line are the Earls of Warenton, a title that was granted to him much later in life by Edward I, so Lucifer is related to William, but only distantly. Still, he’s a de Wolfe, and they’re all pretty much the same in composition – noble, strong, driven, and passionate.

  Lucifer is, however, a direct descendant of Gaetan de Wolfe from WARWOLFE – since Gaetan was the first Earl of Wolverhampton, and Lucifer is the eldest son of the seated earl, there is a direct line from Gaetan to Lucifer. That’s not something even William de Wolfe can claim.

  So, enjoy this sea-faring adventure about a de Wolfe who really discovers himself, and gets in touch with all of those de Wolfe emotions, thanks to an unruly young woman.

  Love,

  Kathryn

  The Pirate factions:

  The English faction: Poseidon’s Legion

  The Scottish faction: Devils of the Deep

  The Spanish faction: Los Demonios de Mar (Demons of the Sea)

  The French faction: Les Porteurs d’eau (The Water Bearers)

  The Irish faction: Na Madrai Mara (The Sea Dogs)

  Pirate towns/home bases:

  Puerto de los Dioses off the Azores Islands (Spanish)

  Trésor Cove (North of Calais, a series of connected caves where pirates can dock their boats hidden inside) – (French)

  Clew Bay (Ireland – used by the English and Scottish)

  Carantec, Brittany (French)

  Scarba Island (Scottish Stronghold)

  Perran Castle/Holywell Castle/Mithian Castle in Cornwall (English Strongholds)

  Port Eynon Bay, Wales (English/Scottish controlled, also a smuggler’s cove)

  Cobh, Ireland (Irish Pirates)

  Prologue

  Near St. Ives, Cornwall

  He knew they were out here.

  It was early morning and the sun was barely up, turning the fog that had rolled in overnight into shades of gray. Everything was still and quiet. Even the sea was quiet. So very quiet.

  But he knew it was a ruse.

  The pirate commander known as Lucifer stood on the deck of The Madness of Melinoe, or simply the Melinoe, a small but fast and heavily-armed vessel that was known to fight battles against ships twice her size and win. This lady was fiery, and she was commanded by a man that no sane man would tangle with. Any pirate named Lucifer was surely a man to be feared and avoided.

  “What is wrong?” came a soft question. “What do you hear?”

  The query came from a younger pirate, but a man who had proven himself indispensable on sea or on land. Felix d’Vant, tall and sinewy and blond, stood next to Lucifer, trying to figure out what had the man so fixated. He was simply staring out into the fog as if beholding a hidden enemy. But only tense, brittle silence filled the air. Lucifer simply shook his head.

  “Hear?” he repeated. “I hear nothing. It is more a… feeling.”

  Felix didn’t like that at all. Lucifer’s feelings were often truer than most men’s facts. Without a decisive command given by his leader, Felix took matters into his own hands. He turned to the men on deck, men who were on edge because Lucifer was seemingly on edge, and began to give them silent commands. His gestures were firm, bordering on panicky, and the men began to move. Something was in the air and they needed to be prepared. But before they could get to their posts, Lucifer suddenly bellowed.

  “Hit the deck!”

  Men began to fall, for a command of that nature wasn’t mean to be ignored. As they began dropping to the damp deck, a faint whistling could be heard that very quickly grew deafening, and the masts and wooden portions of the ship around them began to explode around them as nine-pound cannonballs hurled over the decks.

  And just that quickly, they were in battle.

  “Gun crews!” Lucifer roared. “Roll out the port side battery!”

  Since the Melinoe was a smaller vessel, her gun deck was quite cramped and directly below the main deck. Lucifer found himself screaming commands to the gun deck officer, who in turn rolled out the five four-pounder cannons they had on the port side. The gun crews began to work furiously to load the long, iron cylinders.

  They were very swift in their tasks. As the Melinoe continued north on her original course, the gun crews rolled out a strategic barrage of cannon fire in the direction of their enemy, hoping it would do enough damage to them before they could turn around and level off their other battery. The concussion was staggering, and the great blasts of smoke floated up onto the main deck, making the air toxic. As Lucifer rushed to the port rail with his spyglass to get a look through the fog, one of his men shouted to him.

  “Lucifer!” Remy de Moray was a close friend and an excellent warrior. He was pointing up to the mainmast. “Look!”

  Lucifer peered up through the damp, rolling mist to see a nine-pound cannonball wedged into the mainmast, not enough to collapse it, but enough to create an interesting situation. He shook his head.

  “Damnation,” he muttered. “It is supporting the entire mainmast from the way it is sitting. We are bloody fortunate it stopped when it did and did not rip off the entire structure.”

  Remy nodded, grinning. Young and handsome, with dark hair and jet-black eyes, Remy came alongside Lucifer.

  “That’s a nine-pounder,” he said. Then, he looked out onto the fog. “That does not come from any ordinary vessel.”

  Lucifer shook his head, his golden gaze still fixed on the mist. “There are only three ships that I know of that can fire off a cannonball of that size,” he muttered. “The French, and their main warship is near Lisbon last I heard, or the Spanish, or us. And I do not see the ships in our fleet firing on us.”

  Remy wasn’t hard pressed to agree. “The Spanish, then?”

  “The Spanish. Mayhap they are here to reclaim their glorious warship.”

  Remy smirked. “Then they will have to find Shaw and his Devils,” he said. “The Leucosia belongs to the Scots now and they are welcome to the damned thing.”

  Lucifer’s lips twitched with a smile. The Leucosia was the running joke between the English band of pirates, Poseidon’s Legion, and their Scottish brethren, the Devils of the Deep. Never was a ship such a hot commodity, a 22-gun beast of a vessel that the Spanish had stolen from the Dutch, the French stole from the Spanish, the English stole from the French, and now that beautiful vessel had been gifted to the leader of the Scottish pirates because Constantine had considered the vessel far too hot to handle. Only Shaw MacDougall, his dear friend and fellow pirate leader, didn’t know it.

  But he surely knew it now.

  “I am sure they are hoping to find her,” Lucifer said, “but their efforts shall be for naught. If it is Santiago and the Santa Maria out there, the Melinoe is faster. The Santa Maria has a heavy rudder and she cannot turn easily. She cannot outrun us and we cannot outfight her, so it is best for neither of us to try.”

  “Then we run?”

  “We run.”

  They were nearing their port of Perran Castle. Once inside the cove that was protected by the enormous castle with its artillery facing out to sea, Captain Santiago Fernandez of the fearsome Spanish pirate gang, Los Demonios de Mar would be a fool to come within range of an entire battery of nine-pounder cannons. Lucifer and his men escaping into the safety of the cove was much like a child running from bullies and hiding in his mother’s skirts; the bullies were sure to run off when Mother threatened.

  But Lucifer wasn’t concerned with turning tail from the Spanish war
ship; as he’d said, a ship the size of the Melinoe couldn’t outfight the big Spanish battle ship, so there was no shame in living to fight another day. He knew that Santiago and his crew, if they even knew who they’d been shooting at, were possibly looking for men to interrogate about the Leucosia and perhaps even prisoners to exchange for the vessel, so he wasn’t going to make an easy target.

  It was better to return home.

  “Curtiz!” he bellowed. “Load the stern cannon and make haste for Perran!”

  Curtiz d’Evereux, a rather cutthroat mercenary that had been with Poseidon’s Legion for almost a year, nodded sharply at the order and began moving the men, barking orders in a strict manner. He had a firm way about him and wasn’t afraid to jump in and work alongside the crewmen, something Constantine and Lucifer liked about him. But he had an edginess that was difficult to define, making him a somewhat mysterious character.

  Had they known what the mystery was, they would have thrown his carcass to the sharks.

  But they didn’t know, and probably wouldn’t until it was too late. They were nurturing a viper in their bosom. As happened with men who roamed the seas for wealth and adventure, Curtiz hadn’t disclosed much of his background, so no one knew much about him other than he’d once served the great mercenary de Nerra army out of Cumbria. The motto among the pirate brethren was “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies”, so inquiring about a man and his background simply wasn’t done. Men proved themselves in the eyes of their commanders and comrades and that was all that mattered. Curtiz was capable and that was all Lucifer cared about.

  But that trust would possibly be his undoing.

  At the moment, however, all men were rushing to secure the ship so they could live to fight another day. The dark sails of the Melinoe were unfurled, even in the fog, to catch whatever breeze there was while, down below, a myriad of prisoners began the ancient rowing rhythm to the beat from the Row Master. Boom, boom… boom, boom. The Melinoe began to pick up speed, enough so that a second barrage of cannonballs did no damage at all, sailing harmlessly out of range as the Melinoe slipped up the coast.