I grinned, would have responded, but a whistle split the air, coming from the direction of our sentries on the beach. Instantly, I hopped to my feet.
“What does that one mean?” Ariadne asked, getting up herself. “I don’t know all the signals yet.”
“Short-short-long, long-short. A ship’s heading in, but it’s not a warship, not an attack, and it hasn’t noticed us yet.”
“Not an emergency, then?”
Maybe not, but I hadn’t survived as long as I had by toying around with dangerous things like optimism.
I WAS THE first to reach the lookout who had given the warning, and he answered my question before I had a chance to ask it.
“Small dinghy,” he said. “Looks like it’s being washed in on the tide.”
I squinted at the little boat, bobbling aimlessly as it made its way to shore. The oars were missing, and the sail was ripped to rags. “Unmanned?”
“Not quite.” The lookout pointed.
It was hard to make out, but I saw it—a white hand and arm flopping against the dinghy’s bleached white wood. A corpse, I thought, until the fingers clenched into a fist.
“Get your kit!” I called back to Ariadne, who was panting up towards us. She nodded and changed direction. As she sprinted off, I yelled for Darren’s first mate. “Regon!”
He was already wading into the waist-high water, his strong, stocky body fighting the breakers. The lookout followed him, and then two other sailors. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, wanting to help, but knowing that I was of limited use in the hauling-heavy-things-around department.
The four of them together managed to manoeuvre the boat close to shore. Regon hoisted a weakly moving body from the boat into his arms, sloshed to dry land with it, and laid it in the sand.
I saw the wounds first: a deep one slashing across the torso, another in the gut, gaping so wide that there was a shiny gleam of entrails. Ariadne ran up with an armload of rags and set to work plugging the holes.
Then I saw the victim’s face, and my heart flipped over. Was this Darren? There were a few seconds of raw, desperate panic before my vision cleared. It was a man, a whole head taller than my pirate. Still, he had Darren’s lean, hawkish features, her shaggy dark hair. They looked too much alike for it to be coincidence.
I glanced up. “Regon?”
He knew what I was asking. Squatting down beside me, he explored the remains of the man’s shredded clothing with his fingers. “Black tunic, silver piping. Lord Stribos’s colours. And the hawk’s head emblem. Yes. He’s a noble. House of Torasan.”
I swore under my breath. “Darren’s brother, then.”
“Or a cousin or an uncle, at least. I don’t recognize him.”
“I do.” That was Spinner, behind me. He must have been repairing a sail, because he still had a lump of beeswax clasped in one fist, gripping it so tightly that ribbons of warm wax curled out between his fingers. “That’s Lord Alek.”
“Alek?” I brushed hair from my eyes. “You mean, the one who—?”
“Yep.”
Worse and worse. “Regon, get the Banshee afloat. His wounds are fresh, so there are probably warships nearby. I don’t want company coming while we’re still landlocked.”
“I’ve already given the orders,” Regon said. “But it’s nice to know you agree.”
“And Spinner,” I said. “Maybe . . . maybe you should go.”
Spinner rocked back on his heels. “Why? You think I’m panicking? He’s not going to beat any cabin boys any time soon.”
“No, but somebody has to tell my mistress that he’s here. That might as well be you. No reason for you to stick around unless you want to kick him in the head few times while he’s unconscious.”
“Tempting,” Spinner said tightly. He shoved the wad of wax into his pocket. “But I like to think I’m a bigger man than that. I’ll get the captain.”
Ariadne had Alek’s wrist now, checking his pulse, and she looked grim. “Better tell Darren to hurry, if she wants to say goodbye.”
OVER THE NEXT few minutes, Ariadne and I did what little we could for Alek. The seawater washing over his wounds had kept them clean, but it had also kept the blood from clotting, so the gashes still oozed pink-red. We bandaged the cuts, and dribbled some fresh water between his parted lips, but we were just going through the motions. He had lost so much blood already that his skin was bluish-white, like the underbelly of a fish, and that was something that we couldn’t repair.
I wished that I hadn’t sent Spinner after Darren. Alek was going to die whether she was around to watch or not, and what difference would it make whether she spoke to him one last time? Darren had been cast out by her family, and while Alek may not have made that decision, I doubted that he’d taken any heroic stand in her defence. And once Darren was exiled, her ties to the House of Torasan were—at least officially—severed. She was clanless, orphaned, with a place on the social hierarchy just above mine as a runaway servant, and slightly below that of a naked mole rat. If Darren came racing up to comfort her brother in his last moments, he might just spit in her face.
“How does Spinner know this man?” Ariadne asked suddenly.
I glanced up. “Alek is Darren’s brother, a Torasan noble . . .”
“I got that much, thank you.”
“Spinner first went to sea as a ship’s boy, when he was about ten. Alek was his captain.”
My sister hissed and pulled a bandage tight with more force than strictly necessary. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Alek made his life miserable.”
“I don’t think it was anything personal, or calculated. Just offhand cruelty. But offhand cruelty is enough if you’re a skinny kid with a terrible stutter who gets seasick every time you smell salt. Spinner went through hell until he ended up on one of Darren’s ships.”
“How did that happen?”
“He stowed away. Dammit. This man’s waking up.”
Alek’s limbs jerked and twitched. His breath rattled in his chest.
“Broken ribs,” Ariadne said. “A lot of them. He’s had a bad day.”
He probably deserved it, I wanted to say, but I bit the words back and yelled, in no particular direction, “Mistress, hurry!”
Footsteps. The slushy sound of someone trying to run through soft sand. Darren appeared, loose-limbed, flailing, floundering through the dunes. She reached us seconds later, threw herself down by her brother and gasped, “Alek!”
Now here’s the thing: she sounded worried, and her face was drawn, as though she was under horrible strain, but it didn’t seem all that sincere to me. She was like an actor in a melodrama, playing a grieving woman.
His rolling eyes focused on her, and there was a flash of recognition. He licked his lips with a tongue like leather and croaked, “Darren.”
“It’s me,” she said, in between gulps of air. “Gods, Alek. Is there anything I can do for you?”
He stared at her, pulse ticking faster and faster as if he was wrestling with himself. Then he lunged and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Warn . . . our . . . father.” The voice was raspy and grating, but the words were clear enough. “Warn . . . him . . .”
He fell back after he got that far, exhausted. Darren grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Warn our father about what?”
Alek took a deep breath and gave a strangled sob of pain. That was his broken ribs, I figured—with each breath he took, he was tearing his own organs apart.
“Ambush,” he whispered. “Three warships . . . in the Refulon Strait. We were betrayed . . . Darren . . . our father has to know—”
“I’ll tell him,” she promised. “I’ll tell him, Alek. Tell me who betrayed you. I’ll tell our father.”
Another wave of pain wracked him. His entire body went into a spasm, his chest jerking.
Darren caught his wrists and held them tightly. “Alek, who?”
More desperate breaths. “Traitor . . . one of us . . . it was one of our own. Betraye
d us. Backstabber . . . you have to . . . not much time. Darren. Darren, it was my—”
The words were cut off by Alek’s own moan of anguish. His body jerked again, and again. Bloody foam dribbled between his lips and down his chin.
Darren waited, gripping his hands. For a while, she tried asking questions. First about the traitor, and then, when that failed to rouse him, about their father, about his wife, about his home. But Alek was beyond talking now.
In stories, wounded people pass out once the pain gets intense. In real life, it’s a little bit different. Alek was conscious—more or less—for over an hour, gouging trenches in the sand as he kicked and writhed. Sometimes he screamed in agony; sometimes he cried. All that weary time, Darren sat beside him, sometimes touching his hand, sometimes trying to talk, sometimes just staring dumbly.
Finally, Alek reached the deep stage of suffering: too exhausted to scream any longer, but not too exhausted to hurt. He lay still, sunken eyes fixed on the sky, seeing nothing, and Darren rose shakily to her feet.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispered, and headed for the nearest set of bushes at a run. The sound of retching wafted back to us.
But we didn’t dwell on that. Latoya had come to join us at some point during the festivities. The moment Darren was out of sight, she turned to me, one eyebrow arched up questioningly. I nodded my agreement.
Latoya stooped down beside Alek and cracked her knuckles. I couldn’t see what she was doing down there; her broad back blocked my view. There was just the tiniest rustle and a soft little click, and then no more sound of tortured breathing. Latoya was about as good at killing as she was at everything else.
Ariadne couldn’t conceal her sigh of relief. She pushed down Alek’s eyelids firmly, as if closing a terrible book. “That’s that, I guess.”
Of course, it wasn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Darren, formerly of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)
THEY GAVE ME space for the rest of the day.
Regon and Lynn took charge as my crew launched the Banshee and loaded the stores. I barely noticed any of it. The hours slipped by blurrily, until, at twilight, I found myself sitting on my bunk and staring at my own hands.
I tried saying the words to myself, as if I was prodding a bruise. “My brother is dead.”
Nothing. Not even a flicker of pain. Weren’t you supposed to feel something when your brother died?
Then again. Alek was my second-oldest brother, ten years my senior. We hadn’t spent much time together while we were growing up. Young nobles are sent to sea to captain the merchant ships as soon as they’re old enough to stand a chance of surviving the experience. Alek was given his first command and went away just as I was getting old enough to toddle around and notice things. Shortly after Alek was summoned home to take charge of my father’s army, I was sent on my own maiden voyage. It would be an understatement to say that we weren’t close. For most of my childhood, I didn’t say anything to him more meaningful than “Pass the salt.”
I did have one vivid memory involving Alek, though it wasn’t one I especially relished. It involved the night when I began to live the glamorous life of a noble in exile—the night when I was banished from Torasan Isle.
YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD the story, or at least bits and pieces of it, so I don’t need to go over every detail. What happened, briefly, was this: I invited Jess to visit my father’s court.
That was, to say the least, a bad move. Jess was a beekeeper and a midwife, a peasant from her tanned face to her muddy boots. Life at court, with all its intrigues and pretensions, alternately bored and repulsed her, and she wasn’t very diplomatic about it.
I should have expected that, and I think I did, really. But Jess and I were together back then—these being the days before she decided I was a pervert, and I decided that a life spent with her in peaceful agricultural pursuits would drive me barking mad. An invitation to my family home, even though I knew the visit would be a disaster, seemed like an offering worthy of my love. Or something stupid like that. I was young then—too young to realize that things aren’t always worth doing just because they’re painful and difficult.
Whatever. I invited Jess to Torasan Isle. It was a disaster. She spent all her time sneering at the nobles, with their lace-trimmed shirts and their velvet pantaloons, and they spent their time sneering right back at her.
Even the nights were bad. Being a peasant, Jess didn’t rate a guest room. She was supposed to sleep on a reed mat in the Great Hall with the servants and the tradesmen, and I didn’t have the balls to protest. So, every evening, she would bed down dutifully among the commoners. Once the castle was asleep, I would sneak out, fetch her from the Great Hall, and smuggle her back to my own quarters. We would spend the night lying a foot apart in the billowy plushness of my feather bed, both of us staring, glum and wakeful, at the ceiling.
It came to a head after we’d been there a week. An ambassador had just arrived from eastern Tavar. My father hated Tavarenes, but he liked Tavarene gold and Taverene rubies, so he ordered up a welcome feast and wrenched a smile onto his face.
I was seated at the high table for the feast, of course, but they put Jess somewhere well below the fourth salt, so far down the hall that I could barely even see her, let alone speak to her. I caught a glimpse of her every now and then, but mostly I just sat hunched over my roast boar and apple cake, scowling at the food instead of eating it.
All around me churned the hubbub of tipsy nobles enjoying themselves. Two of my brothers were playing their favourite dinnertime game: balance a ripe fig on top of a wine bottle, and slash it in half with a rapier swipe. My father had pulled a young serving girl onto his lap, and was whispering in her ear, as he held her chin tightly between two fat fingers. A few ladies-in-waiting were clustered together, and their laughter was like the shrieks of parrots.
I sneaked a look towards Jess for the thousandth time and found that she had pushed her bench back from the table. She was staring, arms folded, at the drunken scene before her, her expression so foul that she could have been contemplating rotten meat.
Why did I do what I did next? Why did I push my own chair back from the table and stomp down the steps to join Jess? It was one of the pivotal moments in my life, so you’d think I would remember it better. Fact is, I really don’t know what I was thinking. Probably I wasn’t thinking much. I’d put back more than one goblet of Torasan’s famous cherry wine that evening, and usually just a swallow of the stuff was enough to make me slide happily under the table.
I stomped down the whole length of the hall, rigid with self-consciousness. People were staring already. When I reached Jess, I thrust out one hand. “Dance with me,” I ordered gruffly.
Jess had her eyebrows raised high. “Is this a good idea?”
“No. Come on.”
“Oh dear,” she muttered. She took my hand, but very gingerly, so I would know that she was acting against her better judgment.
Feeling worse by the moment, I led Jess into the centre of the floor. Some wit among the musicians struck up a slow dance tune, and the others followed. I don’t know what happened to those musicians in the aftermath of my little display of defiance. They were probably whipped, at the very least. Maybe a couple of them lost a finger or two.
“Darren,” Jess said warningly. There was a parental note in her tone, as if she was speaking to a child playing with a live coal. She always did think of me that way.
“Just dance,” I said, desperate now, and already aware that I’d made a terrible mistake. Dancing had never been one of my special talents, but it had been years since I’d even tried it. I’d spent almost a decade away from court, stopping at the Isle for only a few days here, a few days there, to pay my respects to my father and take his orders. I couldn’t remember any of the steps that I had memorized so painfully while I was growing up. I wasn’t even sure which of us was going to lead.
More than ever, I wanted to retreat back to my chair, but
it simply wasn’t an option. I grabbed Jess’s right hand and slapped it on the small of my back, and then pulled her in towards me. Together we executed just about the clumsiest dance in the history of our nation. It was kind of a back-and-forth shuffle and then we did a little twirly thing that didn’t go anywhere.
At least the absurdity of the situation had Jess amused. She laughed helplessly and tossed her hair back from her face.
In spite of everything, it wasn’t lost on me how beautiful she was, amber hair aflame in the light of the torches. Her long tunic was only woollen homespun dyed with nut hulls, but it caught the contours of her body, riding her breasts and hips. She was a vision, and she was my lover, and for some reason she hadn’t abandoned me in the middle of the dance floor, so I did what seemed appropriate. I leaned in to kiss her.
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