Revek’s expression turned pensive, and Mazana could guess what he was thinking. Benaldi was four bells’ travel from the Uscan Reach, meaning the pirate’s former companions would by now have scattered among the islands. He must have reached a decision at that instant, for he smiled. For a condemned man, he was looking remarkably relaxed. “Can I let you in on a secret?” he said.
“Oh, I love secrets.”
“You won’t like this one. Because there’s one small problem with your scheme. One flaw that could put a flame under your ambition.” He paused to let the anticipation build. “I am not Revek Swiftsail,” he said. “I am only his Second. You got the wrong man!”
Mazana stared at him.
“Don’t you see? From the moment you raised your standard this morning, we knew we were in trouble. We knew we couldn’t outrun you or outfight your soldiers. But we also knew that you wouldn’t recognise Revek, so it was decided I would swap places with him. That way, if we lost, maybe Revek would get a chance to sneak off.” When he shifted his weight, his chains rustled. “And you have to say, it worked a treat. Because even in losing, Revek won. Now he’s not just a pirate, he’s the man who outsmarted the Storm Lords. His legend will grow. Our cause will grow.”
Mazana’s voice was flat. “And that was worth giving up your life for?”
Revek—or rather, his Second—feigned confusion. “My life? No, no, that’s not how it works at all. You promised to let Revek’s crew go, remember? And since I’m just a humble crewman, you have to let me go, too. That’s what you promised, isn’t it?” He stopped to gauge Mazana’s reaction, perhaps thinking she didn’t believe him. “You got the wrong man!” he said again.
Mazana turned her glass in her hands, holding his gaze all the while. Then she leaned forwards in her chair and said, “I know.”
“What?”
“I know,” she repeated. “I knew it as soon as you opened your mouth on the Firedrifter. That’s why I had the real Revek—your Second—locked in the brig before I let your other friends go.” Mazana sipped her brandy. “Did you honestly think you could fool me just by tying a few ill-fitting scarfs around your arm? Maybe I didn’t know what the infamous Revek Swiftsail looked like, but I did know what sort of man he was. A man who, before he became a pirate, had amassed a rather impressive list of convictions for petty smuggling. A man who once crucified one of his own crewmen simply for questioning an order. Not the sort of man, in other words, who would take the moral high ground with me over the conduct of the Storm Lords.”
The Second remained silent. He wanted to believe she was lying, Mazana saw, but there was a grim edge to his features.
“What surprises me most,” she went on, “is that you were willing to sacrifice yourself for him. You must have known his history. So why do it?”
“Because history is all it was!” the Second said. “Revek had changed. You saw the Firedrifter. Those weren’t mere pirates on board. Every one of the crew was loyal to Revek. Every one of them was hand-picked because they believed in what Revek was doing. He wanted the same things I did. He wanted an end to the Storm Lords. That’s why he only ever attacked Storm Lord ships.”
“For a man of principle, he was remarkably quick to let you take the fall for him back there.”
“A fall that you set up!”
“Gracious of you to say so, but I can’t take all the credit. You say Revek has changed, yet the first time his credentials were tested, he failed.” Mazana’s smile was rueful. “People are so easily corrupted.”
“No, they are easily led,” the Second corrected her. “The direction you choose to lead them in, that is down to you alone.”
Mazana swirled the brandy in her glass. There was a challenge in the Second’s gaze, yet she met it without flinching. “I cannot lead people in a direction I am not going myself.”
He scowled, but said nothing.
From the belly of the ship came a scream as the cutters started work on a wounded soldier. Above, steps clomped across the aft deck. Mazana drank again, and the Second watched her. He seemed to have aged ten years since he’d sat down at the desk. Today’s events had taught him a hard lesson, but in Mazana’s experience the hard lessons were the only ones worth learning.
“So what now?” he asked.
“Now Revek goes to the Storm Lords. His reign of tyranny is cut short, and order is restored to the empire. A happy ending, in other words.”
“And me? If you knew all along who I am, why are we talking? Why didn’t you leave me behind with the others?”
“Because you present me with something of a problem,” Mazana said. “Strictly speaking, you are one of Revek’s crew. But you are not like the others, are you? You are that most uncommon and dangerous of men: one who will follow a cause beyond the stage that it costs him to do so. If I release you, you will go back to the Reach and try to round up Revek’s crew. It might take months or even years, but one day we will meet again, and when that happens, you may be lucky enough to come out on top.” She gave him a chance to reply, then cocked her head. “Stop me if you disagree with any of this.”
“Oh, I disagree, alright,” the Second said, his smile returning. “When I beat you next time, luck won’t have anything to do with it.”
Mazana laughed. It was the answer she had expected. Indeed, if he had given any other, she would probably have had him thrown in the brig with Revek. An interesting reunion that would be. From a pocket, she withdrew the key to his shackles and slid it across the table.
The Second trapped it with one hand, then unlocked his chains and rose. For a heartbeat he considered the cabin again, perhaps wondering if he could grab Mazana before she could summon help. Finally he turned for the door.
Mazana’s voice brought him up short. “Tell me,” she said. “Do you have a family?”
He looked back at her warily. “Yes.”
“A wife? Children?”
The Second nodded.
Mazana threw back the contents of her glass. She felt a sudden need to get hopelessly drunk. “Then go back to them,” she said. “Don’t waste your life on a lost cause. The only cause that matters is the one you left behind.”
With that, she dismissed him with a wave.
Exceeding Bitter
- The Unwanted Women of Surrey -
Kaaron Warren
The first that Mrs Jacobs knew of the Grey Ladies were the ashen footprints she found on the front step. She blamed the chimney sweep, furious that he had come to her front door dirty like that, or at all. She sent her husband to the Chimney Master, wanting a name, wanting that child to come and clean up his own mess, but her husband returned to say no sweep had come knocking and if he had, two shillings sixpence were owed.
She got her husband settled by the fire before he bored her silly with the usual talk. Too late. “Awful man,” her husband said. “Should have been drowned at birth, most of them, and I mean that kindly.”
“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs Jacobs murmured, but in her mind’s eye she pictured the baby rats he’d drowned in a bucket last week. Dropped them in then forgot about them, and she was the one who had to scoop them out and bury them.
He was asleep within minutes and she could settle to her busy work.
In the morning she swept the ashen footprints away.
She had just put the broom away when she saw the chimney sweep through the front window. A tiny, filthy boy, and she lifted her broom to shoo him away. He’d left more footprints, she saw that, but when she raised her broom and saw him shrink away, her heart melted.
“Boy!” she said, “What are you doing here?” Her cheeks were pink from exertion and she had her mum’s old patchwork apron on.
“It looks so warm inside. The ladies showed me.” He bent forward onto his toes, making the loose plank on the front step creak.
“What ladies, dear? Your aunties?”
He shook his head. “I’ve got none of those, nor a mothe
r, neither. It was the grey ladies showed me.” He tucked his shoulders down, and pressed his hands between his thighs, as if cold to the bone. He stared inside. “You’re nicer than them, though.”
Her husband was at the office and the street was quiet so she took him inside.
“Bath first,” she said, but his stomach rumbled loudly and he seemed weak, so instead she sat him in the laundry and fed him porridge.
There was a knock on the door.
“The grey ladies!” he said. He shivered, looking over his shoulders as if someone approached.
“I thought you liked them.”
“Only they look at me as if I’m real,” he said. “But I don’t like them.”
Mrs Jacobs opened the laundry door, wondering as she did so how the ladies reached the door, being, as it was, behind their high brick surrounding walls.
“Yes?” Mrs Jacobs said, then drew a sharp breath.
Three grey ladies stood on her step. She could see the agapanthus through them, and they floated above the ground. They were tall and skeletally thin. Their skin was grey, flaccid, hanging off their cheeks in folds. They didn’t look at her, only at the boy.
One lifted her hand and Mrs Jacobs recoiled at the sight of long, sharp fingernails. They were silent as they turned, glided to the back wall and disappeared through it.
Mrs Jacobs stood staring, knowing she couldn’t tell her husband what she’d seen (Imagination is the indication of an unsteady mind, he liked to say). The boy shivered.
“You better be off. My husband will be home soon for his lunch. Come back in two hours and I’ll make you a plate.” She put the hob on to make bubble and squeak and took out the bread knife ready to cut a slab to go with it.
He didn’t want to move so she physically picked him up. He weighed as little as one of Mr Butcher’s chickens, no more. The morning had passed too quickly, though, because there was Mr Jacobs at the front door, staring at her as if she was a beggar on the streets.
“Why are you carrying vermin?”
“Oh, Alfred. He’s a poor motherless boy, that’s all. Let me just bathe him. He can spend one night here, after he’s clean. He’ll go after breakfast. We can’t send him out in the night.”
“It isn’t even close to night, woman.”
Mr Jacobs had no patience for children. Never had. If they’d been blessed, perhaps he would have changed his mind.
“Just the bath then and I’ll send him away.”
She had the boy help her heat the water in the cellar and carry it upstairs to the laundry sink. The boy stared at the water as if mesmerized. The afternoon was grey and they needed what light they could but still Mrs Jacobs pulled down the shutter. It was surely only shadow, but out there she thought she saw the three grey ladies, watching.
“You have a good scrub. I’m going to give my husband his lunch,” she told the boy. He stared at her. His eyes were ash grey and his skin had a grey pallor she hadn’t noticed before. His lips were drained of colour and she saw streaks of ash in his hair.
“You take your time. Get yourself nice and clean. Go on.”
She tugged at his shirt, trying to help, but he shied away, so she called her husband, sitting waiting in the front room for his lunch, asking him to convince the boy he needed to remove his clothes for the bath and she left them to it, moving into the kitchen to ladle soup and slice bread for their meal.
Mr Jacobs walked into the room and sniffed at the soup a few minutes later. “Vegetable again?” he said.
“How is he?” she asked him.
“You mean the vermin? He’s as he should be.”
“He’s not vermin, he’s unfortunate,” but something in her husband’s tone made her run down the hall and throw open the laundry door. He spoke like that when he’d bested an opponent and was pleased with himself.
The water was grey and murky. “He’s climbed out himself,” she thought, but then one hand floated to the surface and she plunged both hands in to pull him out.
What she thought was ash was naught but his own grey colour.
She lifted him easily (was he lighter now? It seemed so) and she cradled him in her arms, holding him as if she could bring life back to him. She began to dry him tenderly.
She heard a rustle, a hiss behind her and turned, still holding the boy, to see the three grey ladies standing tangled amongst the raincoats hanging on hooks by the back door.
One bent forward and reached out as if to stroke the boy, but instead she worked her fingers between his ribs as if trying to pry something loose. Another stroked his hair gently, but the last knelt down and began lapping at his stomach, as if drinking something spilled.
Mrs Jacobs held the boy closer, trying to keep their fingers from him, but they reached through her with an ice-cold touch, and all she saw was grey.
“How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know my husband would do this?”
She rocked back and forth. They kept still while their eyes followed, then she saw their faces change—they were aping her sorrow. They rubbed their hands together as if cleaning them, then went back to work on the boy, separating soul from body with long, sharp fingernails.
Did they gain colour? Glow?
She wasn’t sure.
It would be weeks before Mrs Jacobs could see colour again.
* * *
The grey ladies were once Julia, Amara and Magdalena. Pretty names for pretty girls, long since forgotten. How did you know? the woman asked, and they watched her, not answering her question. Truthfully, they did not know the answer and besides, they no longer spoke at all. Did they miss not talking to each other? Or had they no recollection of hours spent chattering?
They never knew where they’d knock. It was not their choice. Something moved them. It was death foretold by them, not delivered.
They knew they were doing good. A wise man (Wise. Cruel. Murderous.) told them often that one of the greatest gifts in life is to know when death is coming. It was a chance to prepare. To say goodbye.
If only people would listen. If they were stubborn, like the woman and her chimney sweep, no good was done to anyone.
She was colourful, that grieving woman, her cheeks pink, her eyes red. They were colourful once, these three.
Before.
* * *
They’d had a brighter life than many others like them, because their mother, Eliza, loved to travel, gathering friends like other people gathered pebbles or mementos. She’d been to finishing school in Paris, where she met all manner of girls from all manner of places she’d never heard of before, like Lucia from Romania and Dao from the Principality of Phuan. And she learnt that each of them had a different idea of how things should be. This benefitted her daughters, giving them more freedom of expression and behaviour than many others. Julia in particular thrived in this way, and as a girl, loved to climb trees and sit in the branches, when the neighbours weren’t looking.
There was less travel once Eliza married Phillip and the girls came along, but she had trunks of treasures to enjoy, and to share with her three daughters. “This blue one is for you, Julia,” she said, lifting out a delicate silk scarf. “To match your eyes. For Amara, this green, and for Magdalena, this golden.” The tiny girls wrapped themselves around and around until they were swamped in the lush material and they danced about the room with their mother spinning in the centre.
“What is this?” their father said. He pretended gruffness, but he wouldn’t have married her if he didn’t love her ways.
They had a good life until the Romanian came.
Eliza had written letters to her dear school friends, especially Lucia, for ten, twelve, fifteen years. They kept in touch, and then there were no more letters. “I miss you!” Eliza wrote. “I wish we could visit with each other and talk about foolish things.”
It was not Lucia who visited. It was her brother, Mihai.
The girls would not remember his first visit, alt
hough their lives changed because of it. Their mother said he arrived in a large coach, with servants following behind. His voice louder than the most raucous of men in the village and his skin bright, glowing. He arrived on their doorstep with no announcement. He said, “I am the brother of the magnificent girl Lucia.”
He was not as handsome as Eliza had imagined (the girls had told stories under the covers when they were at school, squealing at the inventions) but he was charming and vulnerable.
“I bring sad news. My dear wife died in childbirth, and the baby as well. In my sorrow I am travelling the world until now, when I reach my sister’s dear friend and this beautiful land.”
He looked out, lifting and shaping his hands as if measuring the place.
“Here I will build a castle, with the help of a great man.”
With that said, Mihai departed for parts unknown.
* * *
Their father Phillip managed the project over the next fifteen years. This was his sole job, to build a mansion for the mysterious Romanian Mihai Adascalitei.
This brought success and financial security to the family, and each night Phillip insisted on raising a glass to Mihai, “Our benefactor.”
“Our slave master,” Eliza said, because Phillip worked twelve hours a day with little time for family.
Then it was done. Word came that Mihai would arrive to inspect, that he was traveling with a large retinue and that he was anticipating great pleasure on seeing his new home.
“He doesn’t mention Lucia but surely she will come,” Eliza said. “Perhaps she and I will go to London. She always said she’d love to go.”
“They can’t come,” Phillip said. He wouldn’t sit down but paced in agitation. “He can’t see his home. Can you imagine what he will say? He will be disappointed, to say the least.”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Eliza asked. He looked at her. He didn’t say anything.
“And what if he wants to visit here? Look at our house!” He was not a wealthy man. “He’s going to think us very poor specimens,”
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 22
