The Lady Hasegawa pointed her pistol at the captain, her hand unwavering. “I have already shot one of your men today. You would do well to respect Florian.”
“You must be joking,” the captain said. “You must be joking!”
“Have you anything to bind him?” Rake asked.
Florian produced a pair of shackles. So he’d already been by the brig, looking for Alfie, Rake assumed. Florian tossed them to Rake.
“Drop your weapon,” the Lady Hasegawa commanded.
Several moments passed as the captain looked around him, clearly trying to understand not only what had happened, but what was happening, and also if he had any means for recourse. Even a fool could see that he did not. His pistol hit the deck with a clatter.
“Kick it to me,” Florian said, and the captain obliged. Florian scooped up the pistol with a smooth motion, the motion Rake himself had taught him. “Hands behind your back.”
Rake snapped the shackles into place, relishing the deep metallic click as the locking mechanism shifted into place.
“We cannot escape with you,” Rake told the captain. “Nor can I abide your survival. So you will stay in these stores.”
The captain snorted. “They’ll find me, you know. After they’ve killed your fool Supreme.”
Rake smiled. It felt so strange to smile. It had been so long. “Floria — Flora. You know where the barrels of gunpowder are.”
“Yes, sir,” Flora said.
The captain’s face paled — clearly he understood. From the look of shock on Flora’s face, she did, too. It was, Rake knew, a dicey plan. But it’d do the trick.
“You can’t destroy the Dove,” the captain interjected angrily, but Rake ignored him.
“We need to ensure we have enough time to make our escape. Can you see to this?”
Flora’s face crumpled with worry. “But Alfie, sir —”
“Is on our way out.”
The Lady Hasegawa caught Flora’s eye and smiled at her. Trust passed as clearly as words. Flora nodded her consent, and the two of them set off to create the trail of gunpowder that would lead to the many stores of it. To blow up the Dove. To kill the Imperials. To end the Nameless Captain.
“You.” Rake turned his full attention to the captain. For once, he would allow the full brunt of his hatred free. “You we will leave down here, among the rats and the rot and the bilge water where you belong. And while my Supreme no doubt would have preferred to have presided over your trial, they’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that you have been blown into dust, into nothingness, into a form more befitting your character.”
“You should have killed me years ago,” the captain said.
“I could not agree more.”
Rake wanted nothing more than to cock a fist, punch the captain in his gut, hear the grunt of his pain. But he knew the dry drowning had left him diminished and weak. He’d already wasted so much energy on his escape. He could afford no more frivolous expenditures of strength.
He would not make the same mistake as the Imperials, though. He would not underestimate his enemy. “Sit,” he told the captain, and the captain did as he was told. How refreshing it was, Rake reflected, to give him orders for once.
The Lady Hasegawa returned before Flora, but she said nothing and Rake bid her tie the captain’s legs together. Rake watched as she struggled with the knots. If she wanted to be a pirate, she’d need to learn.
“You’ll die here, nameless, unloved, and unremembered. Your body will be given to the Sea, and if she wills it, she will forgive us for your many crimes against her.”
“I didn’t see it coming. I’ll give you that,” the captain said almost wistfully.
“Have you any last words?” Rake asked. Because it was the right thing to do. Because it was tradition. But only for those reasons.
“The Sea is not your ally, son. She’ll see what’s best for her, and that’s all.”
“I am not your son,” Rake replied tartly. “You have no family. Remember?”
And with that, Rake left the captain to his fate. With Death, who, for once, did not follow.
Flora was all impatience. She said nothing, but Evelyn could see it. The way her eyes darted constantly. The strange, tight way she held her fists closed.
They passed by the cabin that had once been Evelyn’s. It felt odd to run right by it, that place where her life had, in a sense, both ended and begun. Inside, she knew, likely remained her things, her dresses, vestiges of a life all but gone now. An empty casket waited for a body that would not come. Not today. And how marvelous it was to pass those things by, knowing how soon they would be gone.
Rake had caught them up on everything as they ran, and even though she already knew, it had been startling to hear of the Lady Ayer’s ruthlessness, of her high rank. The Lady Ayer and her girl Genevieve, too. How foolish Evelyn had been to trust them, to assume they were bonded in womanhood, as Imperials. Some niggling little part of her, the part where she kept her pride, ached to confront them both one last time. To flaunt her escape, to punish them. As if somehow in confronting them she would be confronting her whole family, and by extension the whole Empire, the Emperor himself. But this moment would not come and Evelyn knew it.
Flora flung open the door to the cabin Alfie now rested in and gasped. Evelyn could see why — the boy had clearly been whipped, though the wounds had the soft pink edges of healing. She swept to her brother immediately, and even though Evelyn could not see her face, she knew Flora was crying.
“Come, brother,” Flora said. She made to lift him from his bed. But Alfie did not move.
“Florian?” he murmured. His voice was blurry. He must have been sleeping, or drinking. Or sleeping off his drinking. Evelyn felt a pang of sympathy for him, his broken body, his pain. He did not deserve the life he had been given.
“We don’t have time for sweet reunions,” Flora whispered, but she kissed his forehead anyway before handing him his tattered, bloody shirt. “We have to move.”
She turned to Evelyn, who stepped forward and helped to lift the injured boy as carefully as she could. She and Flora each inserted a shoulder beneath an arm, and soon Alfie was on his feet. They helped him loosely pull on his shirt.
“I thought you’d left me,” Alfie said. His voice was thick.
“I did,” Flora said.
“But she came back,” Rake added quickly. “We can discuss all the various logistics once we are well and safe, but right now we have about three more minutes until this boat is blown into sawdust.”
“The Dove?” Alfie asked. But no one answered. Instead, they hustled him out of the cabin. There would be time for answers later.
Assuming they survived.
“Do you hear that?” Rake whispered. Flora nodded.
Then, the unmistakable sounds of men shouting, fear obvious in their voices. Panic.
Rake caught Flora’s eye meaningfully. “Battle’s started.”
Evelyn’s heart raced. She’d read of battles. The Empire’s history was full of them. But it was one thing to read of violence, another to witness it. Fawkes’s death had been proof enough of that. She could feel her stomach turning with anxiety, and she wondered if she might be sick again. Flora squeezed her hand.
“OK,” Flora said. She looked to Evelyn. “Keep your head down. Move with purpose. We’ll go in a straight line, as best as we can, straight for the gunwales. Got it?”
“Yes,” Evelyn said. Then, “What are gunwales?”
Flora smiled. “Just follow me.”
Genevieve woke slowly. She knew she should not be lying down. Why was she lying down?
Then the memory of what had happened came back in a rush.
Rake.
She had to tell the Lady Ayer. But first she had to stand. It was difficult. Her legs shook with effort. She rested on her hands and knees, trying desperately to work the worthless appendages she needed to get abovedeck.
But Genevieve could hear the telltale sounds of battle al
ready. Cannons blared from the gun deck below, and the Dove shuddered and shook with every explosion. She had to find the Lady Ayer. To confess her terrible mistake.
She pushed herself to her feet, grunting in a way that made her glad for her solitude. She wondered if the Lady Ayer had ever made such a foolish tactical error, but doubted it. She’d likely lose her post as the Lady’s student, sacrificing any chance she ever had of becoming an operative. Shame pulsed through her, hot and fast, setting her heart racing in her ears. She could hardly lift her head from the burden of it.
None of that meant she could give up now, though, Genevieve knew. And though she’d already failed so pitifully, she would not yet abdicate the day. She had her honor to tend to, at least.
The crawl up the stairs was slow going, and Genevieve had to use the handrail to haul herself up, step by awful step, the pain in her sides and in her head blaring. Still, as she went, she could hear the cannons, could hear the men that screamed for reinforcement here or bullets there. But curiously, she could not hear any return fire.
As she finally poked her head abovedeck, she saw it. The Leviathan undulated in the water just beyond the Dove, its cannons pointed to the Imperial fleet. It was huge the way a sunrise is huge. It was like the horizon, spreading infinite. Bigger than the Dove, of course, but also bigger than all three of the Imperial galleons. Its name was well earned. It loomed, enormous, like some horrible sea monster of tales, its mermaid flags snapping in the wind.
Genevieve was jostled back into awareness when a man ran by her, easily knocking her aside. The pain of it tore through her, through the bruises she’d already sustained from Rake’s beating. And the reminder of that brought her back to her purpose.
The Lady Ayer.
Genevieve ran about the deck of the Dove calling her name, but everywhere there was only chaos. Men called and they ran and they fired uselessly on the Leviathan, which did not seem to take any damage despite the constant fire, from all four ships now.
But then.
There she was — not the Lady Ayer, but, looking bizarre with her head shaved and her peasant’s clothing, the Lady Hasegawa, of all people. Genevieve’s head whirred; perhaps Rake had hit her harder than she’d realized. But no, there she was, the Lady Hasegawa, along with the missing sailor, toting a boy Genevieve scarcely recognized.
And Rake.
Fury boiled in Genevieve and she pointed a finger, screaming like a ghost from one of her mother’s stories. “There!” she called. “Rake!”
It was as she sprinted toward Rake that she spotted the Lady Ayer. Her hair streamed behind her like some ancient goddess of war as she ran through the tumult and the madness. She was Imperial power embodied.
The Lady Ayer had also spotted the Pirate Supreme’s operative and was running at him, too, her pistol outstretched. She fired, but Genevieve could see from the explosion of splinters in the gunwale just beyond him that she had missed, if only by inches.
Rake turned, and it was then that many terrible things happened at once:
The Lady Hasegawa and the two pirate boys jumped clear over the gunwale, directly into the sea.
Rake raised and fired his pistol. Genevieve saw the instantaneous fiery blossom of ignited powder, and then, to her absolute horror, she saw the Lady Ayer buckle, her hand to her neck.
The Leviathan fired its cannons for the first time that day, and Genevieve learned why tales of that ship did not die. The crack of the explosion was deafening — like death itself, it was so loud. Her ears rang.
And then, nearly as loud as the Leviathan’s cannons, the Dove itself exploded from underneath her.
She tastes the blood in the water and she knows — her bidding is done.
Traces of the memories she’d lost, sipped in the blood he’d stolen from her mermaids, sift back into her mind.
Of a legged fish, crawling from her grasp for the first time.
Of the volcano that erupted and formed the Forbidden Isles, though the memory is faint and she cannot tell when it was, only where.
Of daughters long since gone, their faces vague.
Memories the Nameless Captain had stolen from her returned, if only in fragments.
Men fight against her currents, fight against the force of the explosions that sent them kicking and screaming into her midst.
There, one still wears his uniform, though the trickle of blood that comes from the back of his head tells her that he is already gone. She does not know him, and so she does not care. Already, a shark circles beneath him, ever ready, ever hungry.
Here, this one has bright-red hair. She watches as he struggles upward, his eyes bulging against the pressure of her depth. On his ribs, a tattoo of a mermaid flashes beneath his shirt and then
is obscured once more. He kicks furiously, but his progress to the surface is slow.
She reaches with her great arms and topples another ship, crushing its wooden bones beneath her.
More men fall, more bodies to be lost in her depths.
They will tell tales of this battle, of the Sea and her might. They will say sea monsters emerged from her depths and reached up their long tentacles. They will say this because they cannot comprehend her truth, that she can pick and choose, that vengeance burns deep within her.
And all the while, the Leviathan fires her cannons, sending splinters and shrapnel flying.
But there —
She knows these two.
They have shared their blood with her mermaid; she has saved them once before. They have found her surface, and so with as gentle a push as she can muster, she guides the floating piece of wood they cling to toward the closest land.
Her daughter follows.
She’s bleeding,” Alfie said. And though the siblings had only just been reunited, and though she’d risked her life to accomplish it, annoyance flared in Flora, fast and brilliant, like a piece of paper suddenly engulfed in flame.
Yes, Evelyn was bleeding. Flora could see that. How could I not see that? She could see the blood that spilled from her gut more clearly than she’d ever seen anything in her life. It was black from volume. Alfie was bleeding, too, though only a trickle from his forehead.
They’d managed, somehow, to float upon a wooden door into a shallow volcanic rock cave in what was, Flora guessed, the Forbidden Isles. Despite her better judgment, she felt sure she’d been here before, more than once. There was some cool, black sand, which the waves only kissed, where Alfie and Flora had pulled Evelyn, who could neither stand nor speak much with any clarity.
She hadn’t been hit by a bullet, but rather by a large, splintered piece of wood. Flora had heard the shot go off, had seen the explosion as they’d tipped overboard into the sea. But she had not seen a piece of it embed itself in her love’s belly.
“Do we pull it out?” Alfie asked. He sounded nauseated at the thought of it.
“I — I don’t know.” Flora pressed the palm of her hand gently to Evelyn’s forehead. It was clammy to the touch, her face pale from blood loss. “It may only cause her to bleed faster.”
Evelyn blinked, as if only just realizing where she was. “Florian?” she croaked.
The weakness of her voice was a blow. Florian felt it — the first rock thrown in a stoning, a punch to his gut. He squeezed Evelyn’s hand, his mind reeling with his terrible new reality.
“What do we do?” Alfie asked. He looked wildly about the cave, as if there’d be a clue. There was nothing, though, save for the sand, the drip of cool water from stalactites. The gentle caress of the Sea.
“I don’t know, Alfie!” Florian shouted. Alfie recoiled, but Florian could not care.
The flies are always the first to know.
It was a truth Flora had learned on the streets in Crandon. Even before a body fell, the flies would come, circling the wounds, the eyes, and the nose. And here, even in this cave, so far away from her life in Crandon, the flies came, and Evelyn was too weak to bat them away.
Their buzzing turned Flora’s
stomach, sent angry shivers through her limbs.
She thought furiously of what Xenobia had taught her — surely she could bind the wound with her knife. But she’d have to pull out the wooden stake first, have to risk Evelyn bleeding out there in the cave, gambling her life against Flora’s dubious competence as a practical witch. It had taken the best part of a day to get to the Dove with her magic. It was hardly trustworthy.
“I’ll be all right,” Evelyn said.
She was, Flora knew, categorically not all right, but she forced a smile anyway.
“I know, my love, I know.” It would be impossible in their short time left to tell Evelyn how much she loved her. To tell her what she had meant to her — that love was even possible in her life had been a revelation, never mind that she should receive it from someone as pure and kind as Evelyn. Tears dripped from her nose, unceasing. Her fear was a tangible thing, heavy in her chest.
Alfie sprang to his feet with an exclamation that was either fear or surprise; Flora could not tell which. He pointed toward the entrance of the cave, his finger shaking. She whirled to see what had startled him so, only to see the mermaid.
Her head protruded from the water as she swam, slowly and deliberately, for the shore.
“You,” Evelyn said. Her voice was like a breeze, barely there.
The mermaid pulled herself onto the shore so that she lay at Evelyn’s other side. She was beautiful, like the illustrations from Evelyn’s books. The golden scales of her tail shone even in the dim light of the cave. She held Flora’s eyes, then opened her fist.
She revealed in her hand the stone, that small plain stone, which Flora had sent into the Sea. At the sight of it, Flora knew. The Sea had seen Flora, had seen her love for Evelyn, and had sent the mermaid to their side. Hope floated.
Alfie gaped at the mermaid openly, his mouth slightly ajar, for once at a loss for words.
“Can you help her?” Flora asked, unable to keep the desperation from her voice. Why else would the Sea have sent her?
But the mermaid only shook her head sadly. She reached out her hand and ran one long finger down Evelyn’s cheek affectionately.
The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea Page 26