I was so deep in thought that I didn’t see Lynn approaching until she plonked herself on my lap.
“Rejoice, O Mistress,” she said, settling herself comfortably. “For I am over it. Come ye out of the doghouse, and bask in the sunshine of my smile.”
I perked up at once. “You’re not mad?”
“I needed to cool down, but it’s fine, we’re good. I’m still breaking you of a few bad habits. It’s a work in progress.”
She gave me a lopsided grin as she snaked an arm around my shoulders. With that touch, the tension all floated out of me in a big puffy cloud, and I smiled back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I was being an ass. I won’t try to pump you for information again. Not until you’re ready.”
“Yeah, she said that you wouldn’t.”
“She?”
“Jess put in a good word for you. She said that you take a while to learn things, but once you do, you don’t forget them.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Like a horse?”
“Like a parrot,” she suggested.
“Like a pirate queen.”
“Now you’ve got it.”
LYNN REFUSED TO budge from my lap, and my legs were asleep before ten minutes had passed, but I still remember that as a perfect evening.
The largest cask of ale I had bought at the Freemarket turned out to taste a little better than goat piss, for a change, and we celebrated by drinking just about all of it. Somewhere halfway down the cask, people got to dancing, and if you haven’t seen a drunken pirate do a staggering jig, then you’ve missed something in life. Jess didn’t get into the action, but she sat near the mast, flickers of lantern light on her hair, and her eyes warm with amusement and interest. Sometimes Lynn talked, and sometimes she drank, and sometimes she sang, loudly and tunelessly. But whatever she was doing, she kept her right hand on me, rubbing her thumb back and forth against my shoulder, or drawing small circles on the skin of my back. It was like an unspoken promise that the next thing to happen would be even better than the last.
Times like that never last, do they?
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WAS NO warning. Lynn had been telling a fairly shocking limerick about a walrus in a brothel, with great gusto and accompanying hand gestures. All at once, she glanced up, and her body froze. If you think of a doe grazing, who suddenly snaps to high alert when a noise sounds nearby, then you’ll have the right idea. I had seen her do this before, and had learned not to question her instincts. Motionless, I waited.
Her head tilted ever so slightly as she listened to something that only she could hear. Then she reached above her head, flicked open the door of the lantern, and pinched out the flame.
Twenty different conversations, bawdy jokes, and peals of laughter went out along with the light. Wind whispered, a board creaked underfoot. Lynn’s voice sounded cool and calm in the darkness. “Weigh anchor, set the sails. Quietly. If anyone makes unnecessary noise, then my mistress will stuff your own feet down your throat.”
I scowled around, to let the crew know that I would do just exactly that, but then realized that no one could see me in the moonless night. Anyway, there was no need. Regon and Latoya were swiftly prodding the sailors into place. We had been moored in the shallows off a coral atoll; now the crew prepared us to get back underway. Ropes rustled as men sprang up the rigging, and then came the rattle of anchor chain. Lynn, meanwhile, had peeled herself off my lap and hurried to the Banshee’s starboard side.
I joined her there. “What is it?” I hissed.
Instead of answering, she took my index finger and used it to trace a patch along the horizon. A dark patch, a ship-shaped shadow where the stars were blotted out. There was no way to see detail, but I could gauge the size roughly, and it was too big to be anything but a war galley. I swore under my breath. “How did you know it was there?”
She angled her head so she could speak in a whisper, directly into my ear. “There are gull’s nests on the atoll. The ship frightened some of the birds into taking wing.”
“Why the hell are they running without lights?”
“Because they like a challenge? Because their eyes are sensitive? Or because they want to sneak up on us and stick pointy things in our flesh.”
“Bugger it. Well, at least we got some warning. All we can do now is wait to see if they follow us.”
THEY FOLLOWED US.
It was the rattle of the anchor chain that gave us away. The clink of iron on iron spooked a flock of the gulls on the atoll, sending them shrieking and wailing into the night sky. The other ship was in motion before I had time to curse properly, and we settled down to a grim and silent race.
Night sailing is not a thing to be undertaken by the faint of heart. It feels a lot like riding blindfold on a galloping horse. I knew the area well and my mate Regon knew it better, but knowledge can only take you so far in the dark. Sheer dumb luck is more important, and sheer dumb luck is never something you can depend on.
Again and again, I lost sight of our pursuer and felt a great bound of hope—but each time Lynn shook her head. Shortly afterward, I would see the telltale silhouette against the starry sky, and every time, it was a little closer to us than it had been before.
Regon and I left Latoya in charge on deck while we made a hasty trip into the captain’s cabin to consult a chart by a tiny candle flame.
“There,” Regon said, his voice a hoarse whisper, jabbing at the map. “I’m fair-to-middling sure that if we bear west, we’ll reach Jinak Isle before dawn. We’ll thread the needle up the strait between Jinak and the barrier keys. Not one ship in a thousand knows that channel. If they manage to follow us through there, then I’ll shake their helmsman’s hand, I will.”
“If you get us up that strait in the dark, then I won’t bother with shaking your hand. I’ll take you to the mainland, drop you off at Madame Lydia’s, and put six bars of silver on deposit. You won’t put on trousers for a week. Go take the helm and make magic happen.”
If night sailing is like riding a galloping horse blindfolded, then threading through the Jinak channel at night is like getting a horse to balance tiptoe on the head of a pin. Still, I think my man Regon could have done it. Regon had been born shipside (his mother’s pains began while she was hauling up a shrimp net) and he learned to sail before he learned to walk. When he did learn to walk, it was only so he could get more easily from one side of the boat to the other. To Regon, a ship was a living being, with nerves and a pulse and breath, and his senses reached out along the wood and canvas as if he could hear and see through them as well as with his own body. Yes, I think that Regon would have gotten us up the channel. I wish to every god in the deep that he’d gotten the chance to try.
Three hours before sunrise, and leagues away from Jirak, the wind began to die. We crowded on more sail, but I could feel the Banshee slowing, minute by minute and hour by hour, until she was all but crawling through the water.
Lynn was the one who ordered half the men below to sleep. I doubt I would have thought of it on my own. She herself refused to go down so of course, I couldn’t either. When I was in my teens, it barely bothered me to stand an all-night watch, with a full day of work before and after, but these things change as you get older. By dawn, I was moving at a fraction of my normal speed and slurring my speech like a boozer after a week-long spree. Lynn still looked fairly fresh and whole, though, every so often, her right eyelid twitched.
By now, we could see the pursuing vessel. It was a war galley, fresh off the shipbuilder’s stocks, planks still gold with varnish. The grappling hooks, with their freshly-sharpened barbs, hung like claws along the galley’s sides, ready for use. The figurehead was—
“That’s the Silver Hind,” I told Lynn, recognizing the deer’s head. “I saw it at the Freemarket. Damn it, we never should have anchored. The bastards followed us.”
“Not good,” Lynn murmured. “Ten different kinds of not good.”
At that moment, there was
a flap—flap—flap above us, the tell-tale sign of a loose sail. The red canvas flopped against the mast in limp folds, heavy and empty.
The wind had died completely.
“Eleven,” Lynn amended.
THE CAPTAIN’S CABIN, barely big enough for two, was cramped as a sack of rats when all of us had crowded inside. Spinner, Regon, and Jess sat side by side on the bunk. Latoya stood in the doorway, stooped because the ceiling wasn’t high enough to let her stand erect. Her expression promised a dreadful fate to anyone who dared suggest that she sit on the floor. Lynn perched on the closed lid of my sea chest. All that left just enough room for me to pace two steps back and forth, up and down the cabin.
“All right,” I said, to open the session. “Suggestions.”
Regon spoke first, as always. “We sit tight and wait for the calm to end. Best we can do, captain, and you know it. The Banshee’ll run away from those bastards under a fair wind.”
“We were running under a fair wind half the night,” I said, pacing. “The Hind is a new ship. Smooth planks. We can’t race her.”
“Wait for help, then. The Badger and the Sod Off will be somewhere nearby, working their way north from the Freemarket. They could arrive here any time.”
“Not in a calm. Besides, for all we know, the Hind is waiting for reinforcements too. They followed us, remember. They wanted to take on the pirate queen. If they’ve got enough sense to pour piss out of a boot, they came with some kind of plan for taking me down. Spinner, your turn.”
He shrugged. “Spike and scuttle?”
By this, he meant a tricky, near-suicidal manoeuvre that works about once a decade. To pull a spike and scuttle, you pick out one or two of the most insane of your sailors. They swim or row to the enemy ship, armed with a saw and a drill, and try to bore holes in the keel. The idea is to start a slow leak which will eventually sink the ship. Almost always, the enemy sailors realize what’s going on before long and smash the skulls of your volunteers by hurling down the anchor at them.
I shook my head impatiently. “They’ll be on the watch for something like that. Not like they have anything else to do. Latoya.”
My bosun cracked her knuckles. “Have to fight them sooner or later. Let’s get it done. Lower the longboats, board them, and finish it.”
“There’s an appealing simplicity to that,” I admitted. “But they’ve got more troops. The Hind could ship anywhere up to seventy men, and we’re under strength from the fight with Tyco. How many do we have now? Fifty?”
“Forty-six, but you and I are two of them,” Latoya pointed out. “I can handle fifteen of theirs. You can handle five.”
I wasn’t at all sure of that myself, and was relieved when Lynn’s head snapped up.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “We don’t have a single advantage here. We know nothing about the enemy, we can’t surprise them, and we can’t manoeuvre. If we swarm onto the Hind and start hacking and slashing, half of us are going to die, whether or not we win. I won’t accept odds like that.”
Privately, I agreed, though I didn’t know whether we had a choice. “Lynn, it’ll make me very happy if you say you have a plan.”
“Buy him off,” she said simply. “That ship isn’t flying colours, so whoever’s in charge, it’s probably another damn bounty hunter. He’s being paid to go after the Banshee, so make him a counter offer. Give him a way to get paid without risking his hide.”
“That makes us look weak,” Latoya objected. “He’ll just attack.”
“Not if the offer’s good enough. We can afford it. Anything else is too risky.”
I mulled the idea over. It wasn’t quite in keeping with the pirate queen’s fearsome reputation. But there are times when staying alive just has to take priority.
Jess cleared her throat. “For what it’s worth, I would agree.”
Jess’s opinion was, I decided, worth a lot. In spite of everything. So that clinched it. “Fine. Lynn, talk to Corto, find out what we have aboard, fill a chest with shiny stuff. Regon, the parley flag. And Latoya, don’t sulk. Chances are good that you’ll still get to kill something later on.”
IT TOOK HALF an hour of shouting and flag flapping to get the captain of the Silver Hind to agree to a parley. It took the better part of four hours to decide where it would happen.
I tried to cut the discussion short by offering to go to the Hind myself. Lynn responded with a flat “no,” which was obviously meant to cover any and all noble, self-sacrificing suggestions that I might make during the course of the day.
“We can’t make it that easy for them,” was how Lynn put it. Now, it’s against all the laws of the sea to murder an envoy during a parley—and those laws may be unwritten and unspoken, but they’re enforced viciously by the people who know them. Still, as Lynn patiently reminded me, I was an exile, a person outside the law’s protection. Any Kilan had the right to kill me on sight if we met outside a truce zone. So it would not be altogether brilliant for me to swagger onto an enemy ship unarmed and alone. I couldn’t fault Lynn’s logic, but I could grumble and I did. She patted my cheek and told me not to be a brat.
Finally, after a long, sweaty time of waiting, a longboat began to inch over from the Hind.
During the wait, Corto had prepared the deck for visitors. He’d stacked biscuit boxes into a kind of lounge shape, dragged a bolt of crimson cloth up from the hold, and draped it over the boxes to form a makeshift throne. I eyed it askance. Sitting on the thing, I felt, would make me look like twenty kinds of twat, but what the hell. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’d humiliated myself in order to feed the legend of the pirate queen. It wouldn’t be the last.
Unless this thing went south and the men of the Hind cut us all to pieces, I thought morbidly. In that case,it would be the last.
Spinner bustled around the deck, setting goblets ready on an upturned barrel, but I roused myself from my funk when he produced a bottle of wine. “Not that stuff. That’s the foul kind that tastes of pine juice. Go get some of the red. Where’s Lynn?”
“She went below,” he told me, as he dusted the goblets fussily with his sleeve. “Said she needed to change.”
“Thank the gods,” I muttered fervently. I was edgy about Lynn being around during the parley, but keeping her out of the way was not an option. I needed her to read faces and intentions. Still, I didn’t want her noticed, and Lynn’s usual taste in clothing—namely, not a lot of it—was noticeable, to say the least. It was reassuring to know that for this occasion, she would be in the same drab woollens as the rest of my crew, showing only a few square inches of skin.
But she hadn’t resurfaced by the time that a longboat bumped against the side, and seven men from the Hind pulled themselves on deck.
The sight of them made my mouth go dry, if you want to know the truth. In the ancient game of intimidation, there’s one thing that matters more than anything else, and that’s confidence, self-assurance. It doesn’t matter how strong you actually are. If you’re going in, go in with a swagger and that may be enough to end the fight. Birds know this, with their colours and plumage; lizards and moths know it, and above all, Lynn did. Even I know it, and it’s saved my life more times that I can count.
But I’m not immune to the trick just because I understand it. They looked so bloody confident.
The man in the middle was obviously in charge, three sailors flanking him on either side. Dressed simply, in black jerkin and high boots, he wore no obvious weapon. Yet he didn’t bother to glance around the Banshee’s deck, where my heavily-armed crew stood or sat in silent clumps. He strolled past them as if they were a bed of petunias. Without waiting to be asked, he seated himself on a box in front of my throne.
“Lady Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan,” he said by way of greeting. “You have been busy.”
I inclined my head briefly. “Your name?”
He smiled. “Timor,” he said—and nothing else.
In Kila, when you’re asked your name, you�
�re expected to give your lineage or rank or allegiance as well. It’s a soft kind of snub to do otherwise. It’s also a way to deny your questioner any useful information. Timor’s face and clothes gave no sign of what he was—noble or merchant, hired man or mercenary. I couldn’t remember a lord named “Timor” but there are so many of us that it’s hard to keep track.
I didn’t rise to the insult. After all, Lynn had been insulting me that way for over a year. Instead, I leaned back in my ridiculous throne, folded my hands, and waited.
As I had hoped, Timor grew impatient after a few moments of silence. “Well? You were the one who suggested this. Don’t you have something you want to discuss?”
“Since you ask so politely, I do,” I said. “I want to discuss how we can stop this situation from erupting into stupidity.”
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