The back door wasn’t locked, but barred with a massive oak beam set into thick brackets. I spat on my hands and got a good grip, but I barely managed to shift it until Jada took hold. Even then it was a strain, but we managed not to drop it on our feet.
“It feels so strange to open it,” Jada said, shaking out her hands. “How many times did they threaten to spank us bloody if we unbarred the door without permission?”
“Enough that I’m feeling a twinge in my backside right this moment. But I’m a pirate. I’ve got the bold and fearless thing going on.”
The door opened into a short passage; the passage opened into rock and sky. Two cliffs stood sentry on the sheltered cove where all Torasan children learned to swim and sail. The stone steps down the cliff were older than the Keep itself; you could tell from the way each of them dipped in the centre, the hollows worn into the rock by thousands on thousands of feet.
Jada followed me down the steps, dodging the white splatters gulls had left on the stone. “So you really are a pirate?”
“Yes. Didn’t you hear? I haven’t exactly been sneaky about it.”
“I heard, but I figured that you were just spreading rumours. You know, to piss off Father.”
“Pissing off a brutal tyrant may sound like a fun time, but it doesn’t lead to happiness and cake. I would not have pretended to be a pirate just to yank on Father’s ballsack. Even if I had, I would have stopped around the time he sent the tenth assassin. Watch out for that rock, it’s wet.”
Jada ignored the hand I held out to her and clambered over the rock on her own. “The things people have been saying about you, the things they say you’ve done . . . it doesn’t seem anything like you. Not the Darren I remember.”
She sounded maybe a little jealous, maybe a little bitter, maybe a tiny bit impressed. I trod carefully. “You were a very small person when I first went off to sea. People change.”
“How much do they change? There’s this story that Konrad likes to tell. He says that when you were seven, you asked him how babies were made. So he explained sex, and the thought of it scared you so badly that you cried all night.”
“Most of the night. Not all of the night. Don’t exaggerate.”
It was good, so good, to see her, and so painful, all at once. Her movements were stiff and awkward, like she had broken glass in every joint, like she wasn’t sure where her body had come from or what to do with it. The sight made me want to pounce on her and tussle her until she unclenched. It was a strain to keep my distance.
“Really, though,” she said. “You were afraid of everything when you were a kid. Everything from sex to snakes to speaking in public. Now, all of a sudden, you’re looting villages and rescuing maidens and you have a ship in your fleet named Thundercunt.”
My toes curled unhappily inside my boots. I knew that name would come back to bite me. “Now, see, that wasn’t planned. Lynn was . . . I mean, I was in a screwy sort of mood that day.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, uh, it means that ‘I’ was on the rag and hadn’t slept much, and then ‘I’ missed dinner and then drank ‘my’ body weight in spruce beer, and then . . . well, then things got strange.”
I didn’t elaborate. What had, in fact, happened was that “I” had convinced the crew to dress up an innocent pig that happened to be on board ship, for reasons that are still a mystery to science. It went better than expected, up to the point when “I” tried to add shoes.
“Anyway, there are worse names than Thundercunt. It was going to be Nippledragon, Destroyer of All Testicles before she . . . before I sobered up a bit.”
She huffed out a strained half-laugh. “Do you have one called I Hate My Father And Want Him Dead?”
“Well. Not quite.”
Lynn had, in fact, tried to name a war galley Darren’s Fucking Father Is Driving Me Off My Fucking Tit one time, after he sent an especially nasty assassin. I wouldn’t let her, so we compromised on a rowboat.
By then, Jada and I had reached the dock. It had been repaired since my time—fresh-cut planks lay among the grey weathered boards—but the boat was just the same. It was an old ship’s longboat, heavy and clumsy, rigged for sail by inexpert childish hands. You had to feel sorry for the thing. Every inch of it was dented and scratched.
I slid my hand along the rudder and found the smooth indent where hundreds of other hands had gripped the wood. The last time I’d sailed in this bay, I’d almost capsized the boat by holding onto the jib too long in a hard gust of wind. My sisters and brothers ragged me raw for the mistake, but, by snarling a lot and swearing under my breath in a steady stream, I managed not to burst into tears. Our nurses and tutors let us have a fire in the cove that night, and we roasted apples and made ships out of driftwood, setting them afloat with a twist of burning tow on top, so the flames seemed to spring right out of the water.
“Are you crying?” Jada asked.
“No,” I said, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. “Look, don’t judge me. I know it’s just planks and rocks and rope, but this is where we learned to sail. This is where we started to matter.”
Jada’s lip twitched, and, as usual, I realized my mistake a second too late.
“Crap. Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—I shouldn’t have—oh pissnuggets. That wasn’t supposed to be a dig at you, Jada. I don’t give a goat’s scrotum whether you ever go to sea again. But, see, sailing was the first thing I ever learned to do well. Before that, I was just the kid who was forever tripping over her own big feet. A lot of our tutors never even bothered to learn my name. They just knew me as the family wimp.”
“They just called me ‘the baby,’ so count your blessings.” She squinted at the shape of some distant bird—a wandering albatross, probably, judging from the size. “Can I ask a strange question?”
“People rarely ask me any other kind.”
“Did you like being one of Father’s captains?”
There was a note of challenge in her voice that took me off guard. It was as if, from long experience, she knew not to expect an honest answer. So I gave her one.
“Yes. I did. I mean, once I figured out what I was doing and no longer felt consumed by pants-shitting terror every moment of every day.”
“Even though you were serving a—what did you call him? A brutal tyrant.”
“I know I was, but it didn’t feel that way when I was at sea. There was just my ship, my command, my ocean. I didn’t think about Father more than every other week.”
“And yet you gave it up—your captaincy, your command, everything—to kiss a peasant girl.”
This was becoming an interrogation, but at least she was talking to me. “Well. Can I tell you a secret? Very little planning went into that decision.”
“Are you still with the girl?”
“Jess? No. And, word to the wise, just in case you ever meet her: she’ll kill you bloodily if you call her a ‘girl.’”
Jada squinted at me hard. “So you set your life on fire for this woman, and then you just left her to hook up with someone else?”
“Why do you assume that I hooked up with someone else?”
“It’s not really an assumption, since I can count three different hickeys on your neck from where I’m standing.”
Oh, damn. I adjusted my tunic collar and lowered my chin. “Doesn’t mean anything. They could be bites. I could have been fighting an army of small bitey people, you don’t know. Um. Anyway! What about you, are you seeing anyone?”
She turned a blank face towards me. “You know that Konrad’s trying to marry me off.”
“And we both know that means nothing. Everybody sows their oats.”
“If they can get away with it. Konrad’s desperate for allies, and I’m the only sibling he’s got who’s alive and single, which makes me the only piece of marriage meat he has to work with at the moment. He’ll be furious if I soil the merchandise before he has the chance to close a sale.”
“Yeah. So are you s
eeing anyone?”
She huffed. “What did I just say?”
“You said a lot of things. But you didn’t say, ‘No.’”
She laughed at that, in a startled, against-her-will kind of way, and looked at me with slightly more respect. “You’re not stupid.”
“Don’t worry. I’m bound to do something stupid before the day’s out. So—is Konrad involving you at all in the search for your husband? Did he let you screen his top ten list? Or ask if you had any dealbreakers? You know—bad breath, violent perversions, boring perversions . . .”
Again, the startled laugh. “You’re kidding, right?” She studied me, searchingly. “I know you’ve been gone for a long time, but have you forgotten how this works? Konrad’s lord of the Isle now. He owns my fealty and everything else about me. Why would my lord and master give a singular shit how I feel? Would our father have cared?”
“No, of course not. I just thought that . . . well, I hoped that . . .”
“That Konrad would be different?” She pulled a rotten bit of wood from the waterlogged dock and tossed it into the shallow water, watching it as it sank. “You have to know better than that, pirate queen. If there’s one thing we can count on in life, it’s that our family is never going to change.”
CHAPTER NINE
Lynn
I DON’T SULK. That’s a Darren thing. It’s not in my repertoire.
So, if it looks like I might be sulking—if I retreat to my cabin, say, and refuse to speak to anyone or come out for lunch—you can take it for granted that there is something else going on. Maybe I’m planning a very violent assassination. Maybe I have decided to give myself seventeen orgasms in a row. Maybe I am burning goats on a small improvised altar as a sacrifice to the gods of hell. But I’m not sulking. Because I don’t do that.
“Are you still sulking?” Spinner asked through the cabin door.
I didn’t bother to get up from the bunk, or even to raise my head. “Spinner, I don’t know how many more ways I can tell you to fuck off.”
“Aren’t you in charge right now? The captain’s ashore, and the first mate, and the quartermaster . . . we’re short on important people.”
“Latoya’s on deck. Go bother her.”
“Don’t you outrank Latoya?”
That was sort of a complicated question, or, at least, it could be, on a day when I felt like grappling with complications. I wasn’t in the mood for complexity right then, so I skipped to the easy answer. “I’m Darren’s slave, dumbass. I’m not in the chain of command, I just pass along her orders. I’m pretty much a parrot, except that I have nicer legs, and the ability to clean stuff.”
“Right.” Spinner drawled the word out skeptically. That was kind of fair, since I had been known to take some, well, liberties, when passing along Darren’s commands. Not every time. When I reported something like The captain says to weigh anchor and head south, then Darren usually had said that, or something like it, or at the very least she would have said it if she’d been thinking clearly. On the other hand, I sometimes came out with things like The captain says you have to give me the last banana, or The captain says you have to help me plan a surprise party for the captain, and the captain says that if you let any of the details slip around the captain, the captain is going to rip your head off and let me wear it as a hat. In those cases, it was reasonable for people to assume that I was not repeating Darren’s words with one hundred percent accuracy.
“All right, fine,” Spinner said. “I’ll tell you the problem, and you can let me know what ‘the captain’ thinks we should do about it. But could you open the damn door first?”
“No.”
“I can’t stand out here screaming. It’s bad for my throat.”
“Then I invite you to refresh yourself with a tall, cool glass of I don’t give a fuck.”
“You’re being a pissy little brat, you know. Oh, Latoya! Give me a hand here? Lynn’s having emotions and she won’t open up.”
“That so?” A powerful fist hammered at the hatch, the planks almost bowing inwards with the force of it. “Lynn?”
“Oh, don’t you start.” I pulled a fold of blanket over my face.
“I haven’t started yet. When I start something, you’ll know. Look—I’ll give you a fair choice. Would you rather mend your ways, or mend your door?”
Damn it. At that moment, I wanted company about as much as I wanted a mysterious oozing rash on a part of my body the sun never touched, but I also wasn’t keen on the idea of Latoya breaking our cabin door, again. Darren got squeamish about doing bad horrible things to me when there wasn’t a sturdy lock between her and any potential witnesses. I could work around that reluctance, usually, but it required time and effort that could be better spent in other ways.
I rolled off the bunk, unlatched the door, and pulled it open a crack. “All right. I’m listening. You might want to talk fast, though. I have a strange premonition that I might start punching random people in the nads sometime very soon.”
Spinner crossed his arms. “You’re not going to win any prizes for good manners today.”
“Oh, I’m ever so sorry. Talk to me when my mistress isn’t playing footsie with a bunch of people who think I’m an animal, and maybe I’ll be in a better mood. What’s going on?”
“Come on. We’ll show you.”
Outside, the air was grey and wet with a fine, fine mizzle that wasn’t quite fog and wasn’t quite rain. It was still enough to make my arms throb. Turning up my shirt collar against the damp, I squinted through the shifting mist at the ship Spinner pointed out to me. It wasn’t moored at one of the harbour jetties, but anchored a hundred yards or so offshore. In the dimness, it was just a shadow at first, rocking in the changing tide, until I saw a flash of yellow.
“Oh crap,” I muttered, and took the spyglass Spinner held out. The smeary glass brought the plague flags into focus. They were makeshift, bits of rag really, dyed yellow—hopefully with onion skins, and not with the other yellow-type things you can find on board ship. Dozens of the flags were tied all over the ship’s rat lines and braces, making it look like the rigging had sprouted dead leaves.
I shut up the spyglass. “What’s the disease?”
“Cholera,” Spinner said, folding his skinny body forward over the rail. “But here’s the fun part. The ship—she’s called the Iris—just came back from a supply run to Yag Sin Tor. That’s the plague port.”
“ . . .oh, sixteen different kinds of shit.”
“Yeah. They were there about a week ago.”
“And we were there . . . twelve days ago? Thirteen?”
“We thought you’d want to know.”
“You were right.”
Spinner arched one fine eyebrow. He had very shapely eyebrows, now that Ariadne plucked them for him. “I’m sorry, would you mind repeating that?”
“Fine. You were right, I was wrong. I forgive you for that, just . . . try not to make a habit of it.”
The Iris seemed much closer than it had before, now that I knew it was a vat of disease. “You know, if there’s one thing that I don’t need this month, it’s a ship full of sailors shitting their brains out.”
“It’s not our idea of a good time either,” Latoya said, stretching. “We might have lucked out, though. None of our sailors have shown symptoms yet.”
“Yet.” I counted on my fingers, counted again. “But cholera usually shows up pretty fast. If no one’s come down sick yet, chances are no one will. You’re right, Latoya—we might be lucky.”
Latoya nodded. “You know your cholera.”
“We had an outbreak back on Bero when I was . . . I want to say six? Before my mother died, anyway. For weeks on end, she did nothing but rinse out chamber pots.”
Spinner’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you didn’t remember anything from back then.”
“I don’t remember much, but trust me, if you live through a cholera outbreak, you don’t forget it. Anyway. Can we be sure that no one from the
Iris snuck onto shore? And when you answer, bear in mind that the universe hates me.”
“The harbourmaster says that the quarantine’s solid,” Spinner said. “And we’ve been keeping a watch. But we should warn our men anyway—and we might want to limit shore leave as much as we can. Keep most of the crew aboard.”
“Maybe.” I raked my fingers through my hair. “What do you think, Latoya? Can we do that without rousing the crew to bloody foaming mutiny?”
“Lynn, you know as well as I do—feed them enough beer, and anything’s possible.”
“That’s one option, but we’ll be moored here a couple of weeks. I’d like them to be sober at least half the time. Can’t we get them to stay put through the force of quiet menace?”
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