Naji stood at the side of the road, pulling his hair over his scar, the clothes lying in a pile at his feet.
“You’re getting ’em all dusty!” I shouted.
“Who cares?” Naji asked. “They’re just going to rot once we make sail.”
I picked up the clothes and shoved them at him. He yanked them away from me, his hair hanging in curls across his face.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked.
“To get you clothes.”
“You knew she would–” His face twisted up with anger. “You knew she would say something. You wanted her to.”
I looked away from him, cheeks burning.
“Why?” The question was sharp and painful a knife. It cut into me and I knew I deserved it. “Why did you do it?”
“You should change,” I muttered. “Before we go back into town.”
He glared at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think… I didn’t do it on purpose.” I still couldn’t look at him. “And your face doesn’t look like a half-roasted pig anyway.”
Silence. The wind blew in from the ocean, stirring up sand and dust.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” Naji said.
CHAPTER SIX
Marjani had already set up at the Starshot drinkhouse, claiming a table in the back, away from the singer warbling some old Confederation tunes. I threaded through the crowd, Naji behind me in his captain’s outfit. It suited him, I thought, especially the brocade coat. Before he’d covered up his face – with a scarf I nicked for him off one of the carts outside – he’d been so handsome my chest hurt to look at him.
When she saw us, Marjani folded her arms over her chest.
“Take it off,” she said.
“No,” I told her, before Naji could say anything.
She flicked her eyes over to me.
“It makes him look more formidable,” I said.
“I’m not leaving my face uncovered,” Naji said.
Marjani sighed. “No one’s going to say anything–”
“Yes,” Naji said. “They will.”
I stepped in between the two of them and said, “We should probably do this fast. Manticore’s gonna get hungry out on that boat. Don’t know how long she’ll be able to avoid temptation.”
Marjani sighed. “Yes, I’d thought of that myself. You stay here and get the drunks. I’ll go out in the street and look for the desperates.”
And then she was out the door.
It didn’t take long for word to circulate that the Pirate Namir yi Nadir was in port and that he was signing up men for his new crew. Probably helped that an Empire warship flying pirate colors was waiting out in the docks, but mostly it was the fact that pirates can’t keep their mouths shut for longer than five minutes. It occurred to me that leaving port early probably wasn’t gonna be good enough – I needed to keep my face covered, too, before some Hariri ally or wannabe-ally or plain ol’ asshole who wanted to kick up a fight spotted me and kidnapped me back to Lisirra.
All that time on the Isles of the Sky, with no company but Naji and the manticore, had left me soft. Not wary enough, like the Mist woman had said.
So I snuck out back and slipped down the street till I came to a shop selling scarves and jewelry. I bought a pair of scarves and covered my face the way Naji did and wrapped my hair up in the Empire style, though with a black scarf instead of a red one. The cloak hid my chest well enough. I figured I could pass for a man.
“And who the hell are you supposed to be?” Marjani asked when she came back in with some men she’d picked up off the streets.
“The rat who got Captain Namir yi Nadir the ship,” I said.
She frowned. I could tell she didn’t approve. Messed up his reputation, having a ship handed to him on account of subterfuge.
“A prisoner?” I said. “Who agreed to sail under his colors? And by allowing me my freedom we can see the extent of his mercy?”
“Better,” Marjani said. “And the mask?”
“A show of solidarity.”
She didn’t push that none, neither. I don’t know why I hadn’t yet told her about the Hariri clan. Felt bad about lying in the first place, I guess. And she’d had this all planned out – it was the reason me and Naji weren’t still stuck on that frozen floating slab of rock after all. I didn’t want to be the one to throw a kink in her plans.
I’d just keep my face covered, and we’d be fine.
It was mostly Marjani who did the recruiting anyway. She’d done it before, I could tell. Even now that she was back in the drinkhouse, she didn’t just sit down and wait for men to come to her – she wove through the place, Naji trailing behind her like a puppy, dodging whores and serving girls and the worthless outlaws who came out here not knowing one whit about sailing a ship. She had an eye for the ones that would know what they were doing, and she knew how to catch ’em at their drunkest, when they would slap an X on anything you stuck in front of ’em.
She left me in charge of the table, in case anyone came asking. I leaned back in my chair and sipped from my pint of beer and tried not to think about Naji.
“Excuse me? This where I sign up to sail with Captain Namir yi Nadir’s crew?”
The voice was speaking Empire all posh and educated, and when I dropped down in my chair and looked up I saw one of the soldiers we’d cut free when we made port.
“What you want to sail with us for?”
“Are you the manticore’s trainer?” The soldier reached over and plucked at the mask. I slapped his hand away.
“I ain’t her trainer. And we ain’t taking on mutineers.”
“I’m not a mutineer.” The soldier sat down at the table. “Where are you sailing?”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Well?”
Marjani had given me some story or another, but most of it had slipped out of my head due to drink. “Captain’s sailing after treasure.”
“All pirates sail after treasure,” the soldier said. “What in particular is he looking for?”
I fixed him my steeliest glare. “Gotta ask him yourself.”
The soldier looked me right in the eye. “I will. Once I’m onboard your ship. What about that manticore? She sailing with us, too?”
That, at least, I could answer. “At least as far as the Island of the Sun. She and I made a deal, and now I’m making good on it and taking her home.”
The soldier arched his eyebrow. “You made a deal with a manticore?”
I shrugged.
“Well,” he said. “That if nothing else has convinced me.” He grabbed the name sheet and the quill Marjani had left with me. I tried to snatch it away from him – no luck. “There isn’t an Empire general alive who could make a deal with a manticore and survive.” He scrawled his name across the sheet. Jeric yi Niru. The yi gave him away as nobility, I knew, and I knew too his nobility was real, since no Empire soldier would lie about his status the way a pirate would – the way, for example, Marjani had lied about the status of the pirate Namir yi Nadir. I scowled at the sheet.
“I’ll feed you to the manticore first sign of trouble,” I told him.
He gave me a smile. He was older, with streaks of gray in his hair, although his skin wasn’t as weatherworn as it would’ve been had he spent his whole life at sea.
“The Empire look suits you,” he said before turning away and heading off toward one of the serving maids. I don’t trust handsome people, and he wasn’t handsome in the slightest. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Snakeheart!”
He looked over at me. “I’m not an Empire soldier anymore. I’m afraid the epithet no longer fits.”
“We set sail at sunrise tomorrow. You’re not there, we’re leaving you.”
He gave me a nod.
“And I ain’t kidding about the manticore!”
He just laughed, which pissed me off. I wanted to shout something back to him, but he was talking to t
he serving girl again, leaning in close to her, and I figured he wasn’t gonna pay me no mind.
Marjani and Captain Namir yi Nadir came back about thirty minutes later. I hadn’t gotten anybody to sign up save for Jeric yi Niru, who seemed to have stashed himself in a corner with a pitcher of ale. Marjani handed me her logbook, folded open to the first page. There were names spelled out in her neat, tidy handwriting down one side, a row of mostly Xs cascading down the other, mixed in with the occasional signature.
She tucked my loose sheet of paper, with its one signature, back in the logbook. “Our crew, Captain.”
“Stop calling me that,” said Naji.
“Just getting you used to it,” she said.
Naji turned to me, his eyes big and dark over the edge of his mask. “Are you my decoy?” he asked.
“What?”
He ran his fingers across my scarf. I could feel his touch through the fabric, on my lips, and my whole body shivered.
“No.” I stood up, pulling myself away from him. “I need something to drink.”
He didn’t say nothing more, though Marjani watched us close, eyes flicking back and forth, until I turned and melted into the crowd.
The crew we signed up turned out decent. Not as good as Papa’s crew, but better than the Goldlife bunch. A handful of ’em were Confederation drifters, men who got the tattoo but don’t stick to one particular ship, but most were unaffiliated sailors from the Free Countries in the south. A crew like Papa’s, which is bound to one particular ship and captain, aren’t so keen to sail with outsiders. It’s an honor thing, though Mama used to tell me it was really just plain ol’ snobbery, the way Empire nobility looks down on the merchants. But the drifters aren’t so particular, probably cause they’re used to a crew like Papa’s looking down on ’em for jumping from boat to boat, and our crew blended together without much trouble.
I kept my face covered the first few days, but got sick of it soon enough, the cloth half-smothering me in the humid ocean air.
“Finally,” Marjani said. I’d taken my hair out of the Empire scarf, too. I was still wearing the cloak, though I kept it open at the neck on account of the heat. “I was starting to hear rumbling about how you and Captain Namir yi Nadir were the same man.”
“What? That don’t make no sense. They’ve seen us together before.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “They thought he could copy himself, be in two places at once.”
“They thought I was Naji? I don’t look nothing like him!”
“I told you,” Marjani said. “People will believe anything.”
In truth, I could see how the crew might’ve gotten that idea about Naji. He kept to his captain’s quarters most of the time and let Marjani do all the captaining. She got me to be her first mate – “Second mate,” she called it – and at first I wasn’t quite sure how to act. I’d seen Mama plenty, of course, so I tried to act like her. I kept my back straight and my head high and I carried a dagger and a pistol with me everywhere I went. Got real good at whipping out the dagger and holding it up to some back-talking crewman’s neck, too.
Besides which, I didn’t keep the manticore in the brig.
“They’re scared of you,” Marjani told me one morning, the sun warm and lemony, the wind pushing us toward the south, toward the Island of the Sun. We were up at the helm, the crew sitting in little clumps down on deck, not working so hard cause they didn’t have to. The manticore was sunning herself over at the stern, her tail thwapping against the deck as she slept.
“They are?”
“Sure. It’s a good thing, though.” She leaned against the ship’s wheel, squinted into the sun. “Because you’re a woman. If they’re scared of you, they’ll listen to you.”
“That’s how it works with men too.”
Marjani shook her head and laughed. “Not always. Men have the option of earning respect.”
The wind picked up, billowing out the sails. The boat picked up speed. One of the crewmen hollered up in the ropes. Probably Naji’s doing, that wind. There was something unnatural about it.
“I always wanted to captain a ship,” I said after a while. “When I was a little kid.” I didn’t mention that I’d still wanted it when I was seventeen years old and about to be married off to Tarrin of the Hariri. “Used to fancy I could dress up like a boy and everyone would listen to me. I never thought about getting some man to stand in as a proxy.”
Marjani squinted out at the horizon. “Dressing up as a man can get you in trouble.”
“What do you mean? Always figured it’d be nice. I could never pull it off proper, cause of my chest.”
Normally Marjani might’ve laughed at that, but today she just ran her hand over the wheel and said, “I used to dress as a man to visit someone I loved. It was a sort of game. I met her when my father sent me to university, since I split my time between my studies and court, like a half-proper lady.” Marjani laughed. “When she came of age she’d complain about suitors constantly – this one was too skinny, this one was too old, this one talked too much about politics.” Marjani kinda smiled, but mostly she just looked sad. “And so I decided to surprise her, and show up as a suitor.”
“Did it work?”
“For a little while. I didn’t fool her, of course, and she loved it, but I fooled her parents. One of the noblewomen figured it out, though, and I spent some time in prison for lying about my identity.”
“Is that why you left Jokja?” I asked. “Why you took to piracy?”
All the emotion left Marjani’s face. “Yes.”
We stood in silence, the unnatural warm wind blowing us toward the Island of the Sun. I knew she’d told me something important, something secret. And I felt even worse about keeping the Hariri clan from her.
I tried to tell her. I did. I started forming the words in my head. But then one of the crew called up to her about trouble in the galley over some sugar-wine rations, and she leapt over the railing to deal with it, and the moment was lost.
A few days passed, and we got closer and closer to the Island of the Sun. One afternoon I went down to the galley to get some food for myself and some scraps of meat for the manticore. There wasn’t a whole lot there, though. Fish parts and some dried sheep meat. I kept the sheep meat for myself, started dropping the fish into a rucksack.
“Still wearing my captain’s old uniform, I see.”
At the sound of Jeric yi Niru’s voice I almost dropped the sack of fish. I whirled around. He lounged against the doorway, a trio of seabirds hanging on a rope from his belt.
“What do you want?” I narrowed my eyes at the seabirds. “And where the hell did you get those?”
“Shot ’em down.” He slung the birds over the table. “I trained in archery before I was a sailor. We must be nearing land. The manticore’s island, I hope?”
“You hope?” I shoved another fish head in the sack. “What do you care? She ain’t bothering nobody on this boat.”
“She’s hungry.”
I scowled. “You don’t think I haven’t noticed?”
“I appreciate you not feeding any of us to her.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Here.” He slid one of the birds off the rope and handed it to me. I stared at it, at the black empty beads of its eyes, the orange triangle of its beak. “For the manticore,” he said.
I lifted my head enough to meet his eye. He gave me another one of his easy smiles.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Always willing to help the first mate.”
I froze. “You mean navigator.”
He winked at me. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”
I yanked out my knife and lunged toward him, but he was faster, and he grabbed my arm and twisted me around so he had my back up against his chest. I struggled against him but couldn’t break free, and my heart started pounding and I was scared, but I knew I couldn’t let him know.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he whispered into my ear. He plu
cked the knife out of my hand. “You’re going to need me.”
“Need you?” He dropped my arm and I stumbled away from him. When I turned around, he was examining my knife. Hell and sea salt.
“Yes,” he said. “To find the starstones. That is what we’re looking for, isn’t it? After we leave the Island of the Sun?”
My whole body went cold. I didn’t even bother to lie. “How do you know that?”
Jeric tapped his ear. “I pay attention. Even when I’m held prisoner aboard a pirate ship, I pay attention. You do realize starstones aren’t the sort of treasure the crew is expecting, don’t you? Even the more educated among them has never heard of a starstone – they’ll think you’re chasing after magician’s treasure.” A slow grin. “Fool’s treasure, is how you pirates would put it, yes?”
I did my best Mama impression. I kept my face blank and my eyes mean. It didn’t seem to work.
“You’ll have a difficult time keeping the crew,” he said, “once you tell them what you’re after.” Jeric tilted his head. “And you’ll have an even more difficult time if I were to let slip what I discovered about the captain and her first mate–”
I snarled and leapt forward and grabbed the knife from him. He let me have it without a fight.
“What’s to stop me from killing you?” I said, shoving the knife up at his throat. “Got a hungry manticore and–” I almost said Jadorr’a, but stopped myself in time. “I could feed you to her right now.”
Beneath the mask of his smirk, Jeric’s face went pale.
“Or I could wait,” I said. “And feed you to her on the Island of the Sun. Her whole family could feast on you.” I smiled.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Jeric said softly. “Chasing after starstones.”
I shrugged. “Don’t screw with me. Or my captain. And maybe you won’t wake with a manticore’s spine in your belly.” I grabbed the seabird off the table. “Maybe.”
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