“And there are too many other examples to count,” Lynn went on. “Walk into a neighbourhood tavern, put on a blindfold, and throw a bread roll. Chances are, it’ll bounce off the forehead of someone whose childhood was just as crap as mine. That’s the kind of world we live in.”
I wanted to argue—but there swum up in my mind, unbidden, the image of a long-ago child with wide eyes like a startled fawn. The servant girl who used to wait on me and my siblings when I was growing up on Torasan Isle. My sisters and brothers used to slap her around mercilessly when we were children. They were born noble, so they practised mistreating peasants the same way that kittens practise chasing mice. And—no use in pretending otherwise—I landed a few hard slaps on that girl over the years. Why? Probably just so I would fit in. I shook my head, banishing the memory.
“All right, so it wasn’t special,” I said doggedly. “It still matters. Everybody’s pain matters. No one deserves to be treated the way you were treated. Isn’t that the whole reason why we’re doing this?”
She looked back at me. “Doing what?”
I gave a little wave around the beach, to indicate the guard pickets, the tents holding my sleeping crew, the row of torches stuck into the sand, and my flagship, its newly-scraped hull reflecting the firelight and star glow. “Saving Kila. Being pirates.”
“I thought we were being pirates because you had no hope of getting an honest job.” She picked up my heavy embroidered coat and drew it over her lap like a blanket. “I think I’m about ready to be touched now.”
“You sure?”
“No, I’m only saying so to trick you . . . of course I’m sure, twit. Come here.”
I snaked an arm around her and counted five under my breath. She didn’t throw things or try to beat me away during that time, so I pulled her back against my chest. She spread the coat over us both, and I tried to rub some heat into her arms, but I might as well have been rubbing two icicles.
“All right, that’s it,” I said. “You’re coming back to the tent.”
She glanced over her shoulder, eyebrows arched. “Is that an order, Mistress?”
So she was feeling better. Good. “Damn right it’s an order, girl. You need your sleep. I fully intend to work you into the ground tomorrow.”
“Oh. Spiffy. What are we doing? Wait, don’t tell me. Burying treasure.”
“Well, don’t sound all excited or anything.”
“I was plenty excited the first time we did it. But honestly, Mistress—once you’ve seen one huge chest crammed full of gold, you’ve seen them all. If you want to hold my interest, you could—”
“I’m not going to sit naked in a chest of gold again. I told you, that was a one-time-only kind of adventure.”
“Pity. It suited you.”
“It chafed, darling.”
“Wimp.”
As we walked to our tent, we were both soaking wet from the damp sand and spray. It was blue cold, the kind of cold that sinks so deep into your bones that you don’t stop shivering for hours.
So why had Lynn gone outside wearing nothing but one of her holy-crap-that’s-short tunics? Was she hardened to cold, after a childhood spent in threadbare clothing? Or maybe she was afraid to wear anything that might blunt the edge of her senses. Lynn had always been hyper-aware of her surroundings, almost animal-like in the way she could detect danger. Maybe that came in part from her reluctance to put layers of cloth or leather between herself and the world. She didn’t even wear shoes, unless we were walking over razor coral or hot rocks. Even then, I had to beg.
Wounds in the mind, scars in the mind. No way for me to check whether they’d scabbed over or were still bleeding.
I circled her with one arm as we walked. Absent-mindedly, she stroked icy fingertips along my cheek.
“I’m going to be fine,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know . . . but you’ll see. You’re being so patient with me, Darren. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. But you may have to be patient for a while longer.”
“I can be patient for as long as it takes,” I said, and did my best to mean it.
CHAPTER TWO
Lynn
THE NEXT MORNING, Darren “left me in charge of the camp” while she went off with two treasure chests to play buccaneer. Really, she hoped that I would catch up on my sleep while she was gone. Normally, I wouldn’t have let her get away with that kind of nonsense, but she was so worried about me and trying so hard to hide it that I decided to give her a break.
I did go down to the beach to see them off. The chest of gold was loaded onto a wooden sledge, hauled along by six sailors. Behind them strode Latoya, who carried a second chest, this one empty. Darren followed, balancing the shovels on her shoulder.
We’d started to bury money a few months earlier. I wasn’t really comfortable with this, didn’t like leaving chests of treasure lying around on various beaches, but with Darren’s fleet growing richer by the month, we had to do something with the loot. The only other option was to keep it aboard, and that would never do. If word got out that every one of Darren’s ships was stuffed with gold up to the rafters, then not even the pirate queen’s mighty reputation would be enough to keep the sea-wolves at bay.
So we buried it, but I insisted on taking precautions. Some of the stashes were hidden under heaps of seabird guano. Others were lodged under rocks beneath the tideline, in places where the current could suck you down unless you knew exactly where to put your feet. Sometimes we sunk a deep shaft for the chest of gold, filled in the hole halfway, and then put an empty chest on top, as a blind. Scavengers who found the empty chest almost never dug any deeper. People are so quick to give up.
With the treasure party gone, I settled down to real work. First came a tour of the sentry posts. Darren had done this already, first thing in the morning, but some added caution was in order, since we were in the southwest part of Kila.
The southwest was the domain of Lord Stribos of Torasan, Darren’s father. That was a problem because ever since Stribos exiled Darren, the two of them had not been on the best of terms. By that, I mean that Stribos had hired a number of mercenaries to go after Darren and try to chop her into tiny bits. It had been a while since he sent the last bunch, but with horrible fathers, you could never be too careful. That much I knew from personal experience.
All the sentries were at their stations and alert. The water was rippled glass, the horizon broken only by a ship’s silhouette. That was the Sod Off, one of Darren’s smaller vessels, which was anchored in the bay, standing guard while the flagship was beached. No sign of danger, no hint of an approaching storm, not so much as the puffiest little cloud overhead.
The next job on my list was something that Darren called “taking the pulse of the crew,” and I just called “snooping.” It involved drifting around between sailors, listening to their conversations, but more than that, listening to what they weren’t saying. You had to be alive to the meanings hidden in a shift of stance, a fidget, the downward flicker of an eye.
A ship at sea is a little world, with its own wars and alliances and fashions and fads, its own culture and climate. A good captain knows that world so thoroughly that she can read the moods of her men like the wind and weather. A good captain knows that Sal can’t eat the salt pork because his teeth are wobbly in his gums, and that Gurny is so homesick that he blubbers in his hammock when he thinks no one can hear him. If two sailors start taking their pleasure with each other of an evening, a good captain knows what it means to each of them and how long it’s likely to last. A good captain knows whose toes are aching and who eats too much, who sings below-decks and who can’t stand music, who wanks on the foretop and what he thinks about when he’s doing it.
The smallest things become important when you’re on board a ship. When you’re at sea—that is, when you’re trapped in a wet wooden crate with seventy or so other people—you’re never alone. You eat and work and sleep and fight with someone a
t each elbow, and if you are secretly longing to step on Sal’s face and stuff Gurny’s hammock up his nostrils, then life gets very difficult very quickly.
A good captain can track grumbling and bitterness to the source and roust them out before they grow into something worse. A bad captain understands none of this and acts surprised and almost offended when a mutiny suddenly erupts.
That morning, I learned that half the crew of the Banshee was snubbing Deriak because they thought he was swiping rum from the galley. I had my doubts, but never mind—they all believed it, and that could be enough to get Deriak bumped off the side of the ship some foggy night. We would transfer him to another ship, a smaller one, and warn its captain to keep an eye on the booze.
It was late morning by the time I was finished making the rounds. Time to think about feeding the crew. The day before, while most of us were careening the Banshee, a few sailors had scoured the coast for fresh food, but came up empty-handed. That meant the meal was made up mainly of salt beef, a large lump of which had been soaking in brine overnight. I shredded it and boiled it for a couple of hours until it was almost soft enough to chew, and thickened the resulting mess with crumbled biscuit.
It’s impossible to make anything from salt beef which tastes genuinely good, but the stew was, at least, recognizable as food. The sailors made no complaints as they lined up at the pot with their tin pannikins. But they were sailors, and sailors don’t complain if you give them rat for dinner, as long as you double their rum ration for the day. We had someone else on the Banshee who was a little bit pickier about her diet, and she didn’t show up to eat.
It was no big surprise, but I wasn’t about to ignore it, either. I filled a bowl with stew and went looking for my sister.
I FOUND ARIADNE a few minutes’ walk away from the campsite, at the line where trees met sand.
She didn’t look anything like the ornamental princess who had joined us on the Banshee a few months before. Gone were the long gowns and petticoats and corkscrew curls, replaced by the same woollen shirt and trousers that most of the sailors wore. Her hair was braided and pinned around her head in a neat flaxen crown. Her face was bare of paint and powder, but between the wind and the weather, her cheeks were always vivid pink.
“What are you doing?” I asked when I reached her. It was a pointless question in a way because I could see what she was doing—she was ripping up handfuls of a long, spotted grass. But damned if I knew why.
She shook dirt from the grass’s hanging roots, and glared at them angrily. “Scurvy grass.”
“That’s scurvy grass?” I’d heard of the stuff. It was supposed to be good for bleeding gums.
Ariadne wiped her face, leaving a muddy trail. Her mouth looked pinched. “I don’t know whether it’s scurvy grass. I think it’s scurvy grass, but I’ve only ever seen drawings. For all I know it could be ‘looks like scurvy grass but is actually poisonous as all hell’ grass. And since I don’t know whether it’s scurvy grass, this whole exercise of picking it is pretty pointless. Which is why I’m pissed.”
She threw away the handful of grass. Then she sat down with a bump in the sand. Then she screeched at the top of her lungs, “Balls!”
I squatted down next to her. “What’s going on? Are you and Latoya on the outs?”
“No! Well, yes, but that’s just part of it. Lynn, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. You never warned me that women are insane.”
I raised an eyebrow. “If you couldn’t figure that out for yourself, then women might not be your thing.”
“That’s occurred to me.” She rubbed dirt from her hands, pondering. “Maybe I should give the other side another try. Regon’s available, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and you could do a lot worse. But what’s going on? You and Latoya were all over each other until a couple of weeks ago. Which of you is being the asshole?”
“Neither of us. Not really. Everything is just so . . .” She made vague, grabby hand gestures at nothing in particular. “I swear, marriage was never this complicated. Not that I miss Gerard, but at least he was low-maintenance. Two tugs in the right spot, and he was done for the night. Now there are all of these conversations, and feelings, and more conversations . . . honestly, it’s a full time job.”
And Latoya already had one of those. She was the bosun of the Banshee, which officially meant that she was in charge of the deck crew, and unofficially meant that she solved most of our problems while everyone else was screaming and running in circles. Invading barbarians? Call Latoya. Dry rot in the captain’s cabin? Latoya again. Mast snapped in half? Call Latoya, tell her to bring a hammer. Raging flood? Call Latoya, tell her to bring a bucket. No doubt that cut into the time that she had available for romance. I made a mental note to try and adjust her workload.
“I won’t interrogate you if you’re sick of talking,” I said. “But you’ve got to eat.”
Ariadne’s eyes flicked to the bowl of stew I was holding. She swallowed hard and jerked several more handfuls of the spotted grass out of the ground. When she spoke, it was in the same soft, self-damning tone that Darren always used when she thought that she had disappointed me. “I can’t eat that stuff, Lynn. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
My sister was having trouble adjusting to ship’s biscuits and salt beef after a lifetime of roast peacock and sweet almond cakes. Of course, if she got hungry enough, the problem would disappear, but I was holding that in reserve as a last resort option.
I abandoned the stew, found the handful of sugary lumps that I’d been carrying in my cleanest pocket, held them out.
Ariadne studied them warily. “What are these?”
“Figs. Pretty dry, but still good. Try them.”
She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Is the rest of the crew getting dried figs?”
I briefly considered lying, decided against it. “No. These are from Darren’s private stash. Don’t worry, she won’t mind. It’ll save her from having to fret about whether she deserves a private stash of food in the first place.”
“I don’t want special treatment!”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to want it.”
She flounced. “Well, I don’t need it.”
“You kind of need it. You haven’t eaten all day.”
“I’ll survive.”
Why were all the women in my life so stubborn? “All right, you’ll survive. But why suffer? What’s the point?”
“I’m not pulling my weight.”
She said it very abruptly, blurting out the words before she could change her mind. I leaned back on my haunches and closed my eyes. It was going to be one of those conversations.
“I’m not, am I?” she asked. “I’m not doing any work on the ship that’s worth the cost of my keep.”
“What do you expect of yourself?” I asked, feeling tired. “It’s only been five months since you came aboard. There’s a learning curve.”
“There’s no learning curve when it comes to swabbing down the deck, and I can’t even do that.”
Fact. She’d only tried it once. A few minutes in, she fell down and started wheezing. She had to nap in the shade for half an hour before she recovered enough to speak. Latoya finished the job for her. Embarrassed, I looked in the other direction.
She was in full flood now. “You do three times the amount of work that I do, and you’re half my size, and you hardly ever sleep! How the hell do you handle it?”
I couldn’t help it—I had to laugh. “I’ve been working since I was five.”
“You were a house servant!”
“Exactly. If you’re a servant in a noble house, you work every minute that you’re not unconscious. Compared to that, the work I do shipside is peanuts. Tiny little peanuts.”
She flounced again. “You’re not making me feel any better.”
“Just take the damn figs, would you?” I rattled them in front of her. “When we were kids, you spent half of your life bringing me food. Consider this payback.”
&
nbsp; She rolled her eyes, but she took the figs.
“Besides,” I said, once she was eating. “You’re our surgeon, remember? You’ll pull your weight once we have injuries on board.”
“Oh gods,” she said thickly, through a mouthful of fruit. “I’m no surgeon. I don’t think you realize how little I actually know.”
“You know more than the rest of us.” That, at least, was true. After all the years that Ariadne had spent tending my various injuries, she could split a broken toe or wrap a cut while half-asleep. “The important thing is that you’re willing to learn. You’re new to all of this. Let yourself grow into it.”
Still chewing, she upturned her face to the noon sun. “Lords of the deep preserve us, Lynn. When little squirts like you are the only ones talking sense, then the world truly is in trouble.”
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