Shell Game

by Benny Lawrence

  A chill breeze. I glanced up at the sails—saw them flutter. The calm had ended.

  Perfect. Just perfect. Regon had been right. We should have held the fuck on and waited for wind, instead of coming up with some daft-ass plan involving a crimson throne and a chest of gold. If Lynn was on board, then we could be running now, running straight downwind, the Hind leagues away. Lynn and I could be squashed together in our tiny bunk, pretending that the rest of the world didn’t even exist. If only she hadn’t done it . . .

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Jess said.

  I grunted again. “You always think you know what I’m thinking.”

  She ignored that. “Maybe you’re right, maybe we could have escaped, but we can’t be sure of that, can we? Maybe Timor would have attacked as soon as the wind rose, if you hadn’t made the deal.”

  I rested my elbows on the gunwale, and my chin in my hands. There were lanterns moving about on the deck of the other ship, pools of orange light. Any minute Lynn would emerge from the captain’s cabin, stepping into the lantern glow. Any minute, surely . . . it had been so long already.

  “Do you know why it took Lynn so long to get back up to the deck?” Jess asked abruptly.

  “She was getting dressed. Picking out the outfit most likely to seduce that revolting rat-bastard—”

  “She was throwing up. Repeatedly. Or so Corto tells me.”

  I stared at my hands. “Are you blaming me for that?”

  “Darren, no . . .”

  “I didn’t want her to do this.” I felt the tears coming, and could only keep them at bay by speaking more savagely. “I didn’t ask her to do this. I begged her not to. We could have come up with another way but hell, no, she’d made her decision. Why the hell wouldn’t she listen to a word I said?”

  Jess smiled sadly. “Because she loves you.”

  I carved off another chip of wood and tossed it over the side. “So what?”

  “What do you mean, so what?”

  “She did it because she loves me. I asked her not to do it because I love her. We’re partners, for fuck’s sake. Why is she the only one who gets a vote?”

  “Darren.” Now Jess was back in her schoolteacher mode. “It is her body. She decides how to use it. You can plead and argue and cajole, but if she doesn’t change her mind, that’s it. She made her choice.”

  My gorge was rising. “So she can do whatever she damn well pleases, and I get to sit and take it. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Jess’s voice was filled with strain. “Of course you don’t have to sit and take it, any more than she has to cope with your temper tantrums. You could leave each other. Any time. For any reason. But if you don’t—let me finish, Darren. If you don’t choose to leave her, then you’re choosing to deal with what happens—I said, let me finish. I’m not saying that what Lynn is doing is right, necessarily, but she’s doing it with courage and love, and she’s doing it to protect all of us. You don’t have to be grateful for that, but try to respect it.”

  “But she wouldn’t listen—”

  “Now you’re just whining. The girl you adore is over on that ship, going through things that neither of us want to think about. And frankly, I don’t know whether you’re worried about her, or pissed because she left without your permission. When she gets back, what are you going to do? Deliver a stern lecture about how Your Word Is Law? Mope because someone else had a chance to play with your favourite toy?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “None of this is fair. The point is that she’ll need you. More than ever. I hope to heaven that you realize that.”

  I dug the tip of my dagger into the wood and wiggled it, making a deep hole. I knew that Jess probably had a point, but the bitterness in my stomach wouldn’t go away. It felt like gall was eating away at the edges of a torn, jagged hole.

  Suddenly Jess stiffened beside me. “Something’s happening on the Hind.”

  AN INSTANT AFTER she said it, a door banged over there. Whether it banged shut or banged open, I couldn’t tell, because just at that minute, all their lanterns went out. I straightened up, every muscle in my body suddenly taut.

  “Captain?” Regon called out. He was never very far away from me in times of trouble.

  “Look alive,” I told him. “Wake the watch below, get the men at their posts. If that ship so much as twitches, then we’re coming down on Timor like the hammer of god.”

  It only took seconds. The men turned out silently, many of them still pulling on their trousers or fastening their belts as they hurried into position.

  Jess’s eyes were wide. “This is bad, isn’t it?”

  Twenty different sarcastic responses occurred to me at that moment. I pushed them all aside and went with, “Yes.”

  One minute passed, two minutes, three . . . no sounds from the other ship, no lamps, no nothing. I made my decision. “Regon, get the Banshee underway. Corto, prepare a boarding party. We’re taking our people back.”

  I had barely finished talking when a door banged on the Hind again. This time, though, the noise was followed by the clump clump clump of hurrying feet. Though the deck of the other ship was almost invisible, I could just make out a cluster of men approaching their starboard side. Approaching it, and carrying something in their arms. It was a sort of long, cloth-wrapped bundle, the length of a person. It took me an instant to realize that the bundle was moving, struggling—

  Then they bent, and heaved, and threw it over the side.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A SECOND OF no time, when everything seemed suspended—then the struggling body crashed into the water. The sailors of the Hind didn’t even wait to see whether it hit. They were already springing to their posts. The Hind was moving, setting its sails, preparing to run.

  “Move, move, move!” I screeched, dancing from one side of the deck to the other. “Get in the water! Get in the water, you useless dogs!”

  Five men plunged overboard before I could finish talking. Jess, more composed, snatched up a coil of rope to throw. I pulled off one boot, getting ready to jump in the water myself, but then realized I couldn’t do much in the way of commanding from that position. Instead, I waved the boot for emphasis as I screamed, “Lights! Lights!”

  Someone rushed to the side with a lantern, casting a glow on the men in the water. Regon had been the first one overboard, and he had already reached the struggling swimmer. It was Spinner, half his face covered by a purple-black bruise. Regon held him steady on the surface, and I saw why Spinner was thrashing—his wrists were bound together. His ankles too, judging from the way he floundered.

  Spinner was in the water. Lynn and Latoya were still on the Hind. The Hind had gathered speed, flying under full sail. My men wasted no time getting a line around Spinner and hoisting him up to the deck, but it still took too long, too goddamn long. I nearly howled in relief when the last of my sailors was finally aboard. Then I couldn’t make any sound at all. I pointed furiously at the fleeing ship.

  Regon, his dark hair slicked back with seawater, took up the call for me. “After them, you lazy scum!”

  We crowded on every stitch of sail the Banshee could carry. She trembled, then surged forward, the waves churning around us. I stormed my way to the prow. With the breeze rushing past me on both sides, I could convince myself that we were going a little faster than we actually were. I would kill Timor, I promised myself. I would pop his eyes like chestnuts, shred his skin, knot his guts into ornamental baskets. If he had touched Lynn with one fat finger then I would do far, far worse . . .

  It wasn’t my imagination. We were gaining. The Hind was looming larger. I rocked back and forth, with eagerness and terror. Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes . . .

  No. More movement on the deck of the Hind. No. Another body was being hauled out of the cabin. This one was far larger, and this one was motionless. I knew what was going to happen, and though I screamed my fury into the teeth of the wind, there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do to pre
vent it. The sailors of the Hind didn’t throw the second body. They rolled it over the side, and it crashed into the waves like a sack of wet sand.

  Latoya. Dead? If she wasn’t dead already, she had maybe two minutes. But if we stopped now to make the rescue . . . I pounded the rail in fury, not caring whether I broke the rail or my hand.

  “Captain?”

  Regon’s cry was desperate. We had almost reached the spot where Latoya had fallen, and there was no sign of her. The water was bare, glassy, and black. She had already sunk.

  I shut my eyes, gripped my cutlass hilt. “Oh gods . . .”

  The obvious thought occurred to me.

  I considered it. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t.

  But the next second, I gave the order, Regon bayed it back in total relief, and the Banshee swung about. Again, the lanterns were trained on the surface; again, there were splashes as my sailors plunged over the side. This time they had to dive, and the sea was full of bobbing heads, gasping for breath before they plunged back beneath.

  The Hind was gaining ground again, soaring rather than sailing. I tore out a literal chunk of my hair and hurled my boot down to the deck.

  My instincts screamed for me to abandon the Banshee, leap over the side, and start swimming after Lynn. Instead, I stalked amidships to find Spinner. He was hunched over by the mast, curled in a puddle of bloody brine. The blood was coming from a sword slash in his side—not deep enough to pierce the guts, but ragged and ugly. His face, the half of it that wasn’t crushed purple, was marble white. Jess knelt beside him, matter-of-factly folding rags into makeshift bandages,

  But Spinner was talking, rasping out the words. “Latoya,” he gasped. “Latoya—is she alive?”

  “We don’t know yet,” I said tightly.

  “They took a cosh to her,” he said, his tone falling to a whisper. “Back of the head—soon as we went into the cabin. Then me. Then they just sat. Heard them talking. They were waiting for the wind. Getting ready to run. Captain, I think they played us.”

  Fan-bloody-tastic. That explained everything, except the thing I really needed explained, which was this: Fucking why? What the hell were they trying to accomplish? What did they want?

  My stomach lurched. Who did they want?

  The image of Timor’s face swam up in front of me. Someone hired you to hunt me down, I had said. More or less, he had said.

  He had been hired to hunt someone down.

  But not me.

  “Spinner,” I said, “what did they do with Lynn?”

  His eyes rolled until I could only see the whites. Jess stopped packing the rags into his wound long enough to hold a flask to his lips. He swallowed convulsively.

  “Let him rest—” Jess tried to say, but Spinner’s eyes fluttered open.

  “He didn’t touch her,” Spinner managed to say. “Timor—he didn’t—”

  I grabbed his wrist; it was icy. “Spinner, tell me or I swear on your mother’s grave I will kill you myself.”

  “He d-d-d-d-d-d-didn’t hurt her,” Spinner stammered, his whole body trembling. It was the cold, I guess, and the pain. “He said—he said—”

  “Don’t try to talk yet,” Jess cut in. “Take a moment first.”

  “Gods’ teeth, he’ll talk or he’ll bleed!” I roared.

  Spinner’s eyes rolled up to me. “Timor said, ‘It’s time for you to come home.’ Lynn said . . . she said, ‘Oh gods.’ Then she tried to talk, but he . . . he . . .”

  “He what?”

  “He said . . . oh shit, I’m cold . . . Timor said, ‘Save your strength. It’s a long way to Bero.’”

  I pulled him close by his gory shirt. “Bero! Bero? You’re sure?”

  Spinner nodded, head wobbling on his skinny neck. “Sure . . .”

  I staggered to my feet. Bero, the northernmost island in Kila. Bero, the stronghold of the most powerful royal family in Kila. Bero, home of the House of Bain.

  Ariadne’s home.

  Spinner’s body was giving little lurches now. “He s-s-s-said—”

  “Stop it,” Jess put in quickly. “Darren, you have to let him rest.”

  But Spinner persisted. “He said, ‘Lord Iason can’t wait to have you back.’ ”

  MY BRAIN CONVULSED, reeled, splintered. I wasn’t all there for the next few minutes. Some part of me was watching as my sailors hauled Latoya back on board, twelve of them straining at the rope. Some part of me watched while Regon and Corto hurled themselves onto her chest and stomach, forcing out the water. I even felt vaguely relieved when she started to cough and choke. But it was all happening at an impossible distance.

  The first thing I noticed, when I was ready to notice things properly again, was Jess. She was standing silent beside me, her hands stained red up past the wrists.

  “I think Spinner will make it,” she said softly. “As long as you let him rest a while before you do any more interrogations.”

  “You said that Lynn couldn’t possibly be Ariadne.” My voice grated painfully in my throat. “You said that was my inner snob, fantasizing.”

  Jess threw up her hands. “All right. All right. I may have been wrong. It hardly matters at this point, does it?”

  “No,” I agreed hollowly. “It doesn’t really matter at all.”

  The last of Latoya’s rescuers swung over the gunwale and squelched to the deck.

  Regon snapped upright. “Ready, captain!”

  The three seconds that followed seemed to stretch and stretch. Images from the past year flooded me—Lynn, chained to the mast of the Badger and dozing; Lynn’s shoulder, bruised and bloody, the day that she was tattooed; Lynn sick as a dog during an eight-day storm the winter before; Lynn, just that afternoon, kneeling at my feet, head bowed.

  I shut my eyes.

  “Bring the ship about,” I said hoarsely. “We’re going south.”

  There was a chorus of smothered sound. Disbelief and confusion. The fury soared to my head, and I spoke in a snarl. “Move, you puking scuts. You heard me.”

  They scattered, most of them. Regon still stood in front of me, his hands clenching and unclenching. Jess’s mouth was open and round.

  “Turn about,” I said again, just so there would be no mistake. “Let them go.”

  MAYBE, I THOUGHT, maybe giving up lovers was something that got easier the more often you did it.

  By this time, I was safely down in our cabin—my cabin, I corrected myself, my cabin, mine mine mine. There was very little in there to remind me of Lynn, now she was gone. Once I’d closed the sea chest to hide her clothes, the cabin was as bare and dour as any cabin on any ship I’d ever commanded.

  But I had a brandy flask. Half empty now. I took a long, rattling pull.

  In the weeks and months after I left Jess, when I was wandering around the islands crazed with fear and guilt, I used to do this just about every night. Sit alone and drink and think about her and get disgusted with myself. As the months went on, the memory of that time seemed more and more rose-tinted, more and more dreamlike. I mean, honestly. The Lady Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan, master merchant, battle-tested warrior, learning to birth babies and tend beehives? My time with Jess was soul-renewing, in a way, and I would always be grateful for it. But our relationship had been doomed from the start.

  My time with Lynn—Ariadne—had been just the same. A blip in her life as the all-privileged daughter of an all-powerful man. I wouldn’t forget about her, certainly, but the wound would scab over and become an ordinary kind of scar. She had given me new energy, a new purpose, and that’s what I would carry away. So it wouldn’t really matter (my throat seemed to be dry; I swallowed hard) that Ariadne would come to her senses once she got back home.

  They would ask her what she had been doing for the past couple of years.

  “Oh, you know,” she would say, scratching the back of her neck, “stuff.”

  And then she’d quickly change the subject to horses or jewellery.

  I downed th
e last of the brandy and realized that I hadn’t drunk nearly enough to render me unconscious.

  I could always beat my head against the wall, I supposed.

  AND THEN THERE was a knock at the door.

  “Go ’way,” I said dully.

  There seemed to be a whispered consultation going on out there.

  I pulled off my last remaining boot and hurled it at the planks. “Go ’way, I sss-ss-aid. Geddout of it, or, by crumbs, I’ll have your heads!”

  The whispers grew a little softer.

  Then there was a great splintering wham, and the door flew inwards in two separate pieces. Latoya shook out her hand and stepped inside. She was still unsteady on her feet, but she was moving on her own power. Spinner, who came in next, had to lean heavily on Regon’s shoulder. Last of all came Jess.