In the weeks and months after Mara’s attack on the Badger, you can be sure that I kept my ears open. I never heard any rumours that Iason’s single, precious daughter was missing. But of course, if you were a supreme lord who had lost your only heir, you wouldn’t exactly announce it from the rooftops.
I could put it out of my mind for days at a time. When Lynn was stripped to the waist, scrubbing the deck with the rest of the crew, or taking her turn at the dirtiest jobs (no one else cleaned the head as thoroughly) it was easy to forget who she might really be. I could even forget about the hundreds of painful and creative things that Iason would do to me if he found out what I was up to with his daughter.
It was at night that I thought about it. Or, more correctly, in the early morning. That’s when I would wake up and scratch and turn over, and come face to face with a woman whose true identity I just didn’t know.
Sometimes, as she slept, I would ask her the same question I had asked her that day, in the darkness of the hold. “Is it true, what you said? About you and the House of Bain?”
And I would remember the only answer she had been willing to give me.
“No. And yes. And no.”
ALL OF THIS probably makes it sound as if I did nothing during those months but fret and wring my hands and watch Lynn scrub the head. Let me assure you, I kept busy.
My transformation into a pirate queen was more than half accidental, but once it began, it moved swiftly. Mara’s ship became the first of my war galleys. Only a few weeks later, we captured another while its crew was otherwise engaged. (A word of advice to my fellow mariners. If you don’t want your ship to be stolen by pirates, don’t let all your sailors saunter off to the brothel at the same time. I’m just saying.) Lynn named our prize the Banshee, and it became my flagship. And just like that, I had a fleet.
Not that it was easy. Every day seemed to bring a new impossible problem. For one thing, I had to find captains for all of my new ships—preferably, captains who wouldn’t bash me on the head as soon as I turned my back. Trustworthy troops were in short supply back then, so I gave all the men of the Badger a crash course in navigation and began parcelling them out, one by one. Monmain became the captain of the Idiot Kid; Geraint took Destiny; Vair had the Wheel of Time. I could barely stand the thought of losing Teek, my best helmsman, but, in the end, I gritted my teeth and entrusted the Badger to him. I still had a strong sense of affection for the stinking little tub; at least I knew that Teek wouldn’t sink her.
I refused to give up Regon, so he stayed on the Banshee as first mate, and I kept Spinner too, because he and Lynn got along so well. Other than that, my original crew was all gone to the four winds, and I was faced with the task of finding dozens—hundreds—of new sailors.
That was tricky. No matter what you’ve heard, and no matter what you think, the average sailor is not a gentle giant with a rough exterior and a heart of gold. It’s an uphill job just finding a crew that can stay sober more than three hours a day. I chose the best I could find and kept order in the usual way, with screamed insults and threats and the judicious application of a very pointy boot here and there.
What I had truly dreaded was the task of keeping them away from Lynn. She wasn’t the only woman on my ships, but she was the smallest, and the youngest, and she didn’t go around the ship heavily armed. More than once, in some desperation, I wondered whether I would have to keep her in a small metal box to protect her from the others. But Lynn never allowed me to protect her. She had a sharp tongue and a level head, and a strong sense of pride, and she gamely took on the job of carving out her own place on board ship. She did let me show her what parts to kick on the human body to inflict maximum pain, but that was about the limit of what I was allowed to do.
Over time, things sort of worked themselves out. Some of my sailors got to like her, and some got to respect her, and the rest came to see her as a kind of mascot. It helped that sailors are the most superstitious people alive. (If you don’t believe me, try getting one to change his lucky shirt before a raid. Just try.) As the months rolled on and we grew stronger, and richer, and better-equipped, Lynn became a talisman, the embodiment of our luck. Every time we took a new ship, my sailors would chase after Lynn to get her to name it. Sometimes she was enthusiastic and came up with names like the Black Rush and the Wheel of Time. Sometimes she was not, which was how we ended up with the Name It Yourself This Time and the Oh, Sod Off.
I still got the shakes every time we left a safe harbour and headed back to the islands. But Lynn always knew, and Lynn was always there. Sometimes it was very casual. She would just happen to be somewhere nearby, coiling a rope or scaling a fish or studying a chart. But she always knew when it was time to drift to my side and find a hand to hold.
And every time, I would whisper, “You know, I’m really not a pirate queen.”
And every time, she would whisper back, “Do you honestly think that anyone can tell?”
THE KRAKEN, TYCO’S ship, was the twelfth one we captured for my fleet.
Capturing ships is simple enough. You run your flag up the mast, redecorate a little, let out a hearty “Huzzah!”, and work from there. Capturing sailors is a much more complicated business. It’s a real chore, trying to figure out what to do with them all. You can absorb some of them into your own crew, as long as you’re good at picking out men who won’t try to stab you in the back at the first opportunity. (I wasn’t, but Lynn was.) No matter how many you recruit during the culling process, though, you’re left with a surly bunch of backstabbers that you have to dispose of somehow. Tradition holds that you throw them overboard, but I had balked at that. Fortunately, as Lynn pointed out, the sea is crammed full of tiny little islands that work perfectly well as makeshift prisons. Added bonus—you don’t have to feed or supervise the prisoners yourself. At the beginning of everything, I didn’t like this idea much either, but, as Lynn said, what was the alternative?
I got used to it. Before long, I was flinging gangs of untrustworthy sailors onto desert islands every few weeks, and thinking no more of it than of tossing fish bones over the side.
For Tyco’s men, none of whom I was prepared to take on, we’d selected a real winner of an island. Bare and rocky, with only two meagre clusters of trees. My sailors ferried the crew of the Kraken there just as they were—unconscious, or bleeding, or bound. I watched from the Banshee’s aft castle. The beach was too distant to make out details, but I knew what was going on. Latoya and Corto would stick two knives into the sand so that the sailors of the Kraken could cut their bindings. Beside the knives, they would deposit a cook-pot, a flint, a saw, a spade, and a few sacks of seed. Next, Corto would explain things to the Kraken’s crew. They could survive for several months on shellfish and the eggs of seabirds. If they wanted to live any longer than that, they would have to raise crops. If they worked like blazes, enriching the soil with bird dung and food scraps, then they would survive. Maybe.
I was out of earshot, but I could see the men of the Kraken opening and shutting their mouths furiously. It wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of language currently being used over there. I used it often enough myself.
There was a sound behind me. That was Regon, softly clearing his throat.
“I’ve put a prize crew of ten on Tyco’s ship,” he said. “Carter’s in command. They’ll sail east, meet up with the Idiot Kid, and take the galley to the coast to be manned and overhauled.”
“Fine,” I said, breaking from my funk. “Did Lynn name it?”
“She did, yes,” he answered slowly. “It’s to be called, One Law.”
It was a surprisingly solemn name for Lynn. I knew why. The history of the Kraken had been so brutal, I wouldn’t have let her end it with some kind of joke. She understood that, even though, given her druthers, she probably would have named the ship the Kumquat or the Up Yours, Tyco or something along the same lines.
“Fine,” I told Regon again. “It’s your watch. Once everyone’s aboard, set course
for the Freemarket. We’re low on supplies.”
None of my men ever bothered to salute, and I’d have smacked them if they tried, but Regon gave me a wink and a nod that served the same purpose, and went to talk to the helmsman.
I took a last look at the barren island. Latoya and Corto were rowing back to the Banshee with long, slow strokes. Tyco, his shaggy hair in strings around his face, was staggering up and down the beach, screaming something that I was too far away to hear.
You’d think that a moment like this would make me happy—that there would be a little victory glow. You’d think that, at least, the blackness would lift for a minute, the heavy, choking blackness that had descended on me when I first heard about the barbarity of Tyco’s raids. But it didn’t happen. I was glad to be alive, I was glad we hadn’t lost, I was glad Tyco was through, but I felt no real sense of triumph. There were thousands more like Tyco and I couldn’t duel them all.
Besides that, I was cold, and hurting, and I stank. I flexed my arms and they moved awkwardly; my leather gambeson was stiff with congealed blood, and it stuck to the skin beneath. Sooner or later, I would have to haul up a few buckets of freezing, fishy seawater and try to scrub off the worst of it.
It wasn’t an attractive thought. To put off the evil hour, I wandered into my cabin.
Gone were the old days of sleeping in the hold with my crew, hearing their every groan and snore and fart. The Banshee had a proper captain’s cabin, practically big enough to swing a cat. After years of life on a small ship, it was a glorious thing to have a cabin with actual walls. It was even better because I wasn’t alone in there.
As I had expected, Lynn was in the cabin already, curled up on the bunk we shared. The bunk wasn’t big enough for one person in the first place, and it was ridiculous even to try for two, but Lynn was determined. And bendy.
At some point, Lynn had traded her wet clothes for a fresh tunic. It was sleeveless, so it exposed the tattoo on her right shoulder: a storm-petrel in flight, etched in lines of black ink. That was the symbol she had chosen as my personal mark not long after we met, and it was emblazoned on the Banshee’s flag as well as Lynn’s arm. It was a bit of an odd choice. A storm petrel is a little feathery black bird, not exactly the kind of thing that screams “pirate” in my book. I wasn’t the one who had it carved into my skin, though, so I didn’t see any point in griping.
Lynn wasn’t the only one who wore my mark. Quite a few of my sailors had copied her. On a hot day, you could walk the decks of the Banshee and see black birds engraved into dozens of brawny biceps, shoulders, and chests. Lynn was not happy when she first found out about this development (I have never, repeat never, heard someone scream so long without taking a breath) but she got to accept it, eventually. It helped that her tattoo was the most intricate and detailed, each black feather crisply outlined. Some of the sailors’ marks were so crude that they could have been random splodges of ink.
Now, as she sprawled on our bunk, Lynn was studying a paper of some kind.
“What are you doing?” I asked, hanging my sword belt on a peg.
Lynn looked up. “Checking the map. I try to keep track of which islands we’ve used. Not that that matters, does it?”
“What do you mean?”
She rolled the map and tossed it into the open sea chest that stood at the bunk’s foot. “Well, when you say ‘What are you doing?’ in that tone of voice, it means that you know perfectly well what I’m doing but you’d like me to stop because you want attention.”
“I never—”
“You always. But that’s fine. I want attention too.” She swung her legs off of the bunk. “So. Tyco’s marooned, all’s well with the world?”
“All is far from well with the world.”
“All is slightly more well with the world.”
“All is marginally less fucked up with the world.”
“Keep a sense of proportion, Mistress. We’re alive, and the night is yet young. Want to ravish me?”
I looked blankly at my stained and sticky hands. “Um . . . sure, I guess. Listen, Lynn—”
“‘Um, sure, I guess’?” Lynn repeated, eyebrow arched. “You sweet-talker, you. No wonder you scored so much tail during your depraved youth.”
I felt my cheeks flush. “I didn’t really.”
“I can’t think why,” Lynn said seriously. “And you can calm down, Darren. I was just pulling your ever-so-pullable leg. I know what you need right now.”
The blessed girl had a pail of hot water ready, and rags and soap. The laces of my gambeson had gummed together, and she began on the tricky task of coaxing them loose without cutting them.
When storytellers make up heroes, they imagine people who can fly, or chop off lots of heads very quickly, or walk through fire. Lynn’s own magical gift was more miraculous than any of those and ten times as useful. She could give a complete bath to a filthy and reeking pirate queen using only a single basin of water. It took her full attention, and I closed my eyes as she worked. First she peeled off the clotted leather armour, then the ruined shirt, then the rest of my clothes down to the boots. Then she set to work on my body—scrubbing off the bloodstains with one warm cloth, wiping off the pink soapy liquid with another, slowing where the skin was gashed or stitched.
The steady motions first lulled me to a doze, making me sway on my feet. Then, as she worked her way over me again, this time with a clean dry cloth, they began to stir me up. She was taking her time with this pass, letting her hands trail over sensitive spots as if by accident. The cabin suddenly seemed very warm, and my breath rasped faster and faster. Once I gasped.
“Should I stop?” Lynn said, pausing.
“Sweet fucking mother of—NO!” I ground out, not quite coherently.
She resumed, slower still. “You’re loving this,” she commented, as she worked on one of my calves. “Not just the bath, I mean. You love having me serve you.”
“What’s that supposed to—” I began, and then I gasped again.
“I mean—Mistress—that you like being reminded that I belong to you. That you can go ahead and use me.”
I probably would have said something in reply if I’d been able to breathe.
She wrung out the last cloth and set it gently in the basin. “This part makes you nervous. But it’s so simple. You only have to ask. And you can ask for anything that you want.”
She rose to her feet. Her hands hung loosely at her sides, and her eyes rested on my collarbone. Her posture signalled that she was waiting for instructions. Not demanding, or baiting, but waiting for whatever I decided. It was a very familiar stance. I had seen Lynn take it countless times, but more than that, I had seen servants standing before me in that way since the day I first learned what servants were. I don’t know why the sight made my blood surge and my heart beat faster. Maybe it wouldn’t have, if I’d been a better kind of a person. But it did.
“Take your clothes off,” I whispered.
She must have been ready for that, because it only took an instant for her tunic to slither to the deck.
I had no idea who she was. But, times like that, I felt that I could wait a little longer to find out.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MOMENT AFTER I woke up the next morning, I felt a sense of such total peace and wellbeing that I thought I was about to float.
Two moments after I woke up, the pain crashed in. There was the sting of the sewn cuts, the web of scratches, the duller ache of the bruises, and then a throbbing in the muscles of my sword-arm, which I had overused the day before. Plus a throbbing in other muscles which I had overused the night before.
Three moments after I woke up, my brain came back to life. It started buzzing away with a kind of fizzy unease, circling around the mistakes I had made when we attacked the Kraken, listing all the things that I needed to accomplish that day.
Lynn was still sleeping, her right arm flung out of the bunk and dangling over open air, her left knee drawn up almost to her chest. She
didn’t look comfortable and I thought of waking her . . . but then she breathed deeply and a fold of her flimsy tunic fell back, exposing her chest. I recoiled.
When you’re—you know—in the moment, you don’t think about how these things are going to look when you’re—you know—done. The marks were vicious, the colour of port wine, some of them as big as an apple. They started at her neck and worked their way downwards. In between were smaller scrapes, fresh and glaring, as well as (I groaned) bite marks. One bite was right underneath the storm-petrel tattoo, the symbol of my ownership. A band around each of her wrists was mottled red . . . oh gods, the ropes. I remembered putting each of those marks on Lynn—why was it so easy to act that way when my blood was up? I buried my face into the blanket before I could see anything else.
Why the hell do I do these things to her? I wondered. Why the hell does she let me?
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