Lynn’s eyes flicked over to me. Not asking permission, but assessing my mood, wanting to see how I would take it.
Not well. That was how I took it. Not well at all. “Lynn, ignore him.”
Milo cursed beneath his breath. “Down, now.”
“Do not do a thing for that diseased piece of smegma. Unless you happen to feel like kicking his bollocks right through his body so they bounce off the opposite wall. In which case, carry on.”
“Lynn, you have ten seconds before I start cutting. Unless you want your mistress to pay in blood for your mistakes, get on your knees.”
“Oh, you daft wanker. Lynn knows how to assign blame and she knows better than to take on guilt she hasn’t earned. You just—”
Lynn snapped. “Darren, shut up!”
I shut up.
She’d used The Voice, you see. When she took that tone in our bedroom, I levitated straight off of her, no matter what stage of the proceedings we’d reached.
Lynn knelt and clasped her hands behind her head. Just like that. “I wish you wouldn’t always make such a big deal out of this kind of thing.”
HERE’S THE THING: I’d just spent the better part of two weeks chatting with an imaginary Lynn, and it wasn’t easy to shed the habit.
As Milo stalked back over to the desk and massaged his temples, imaginary Lynn and I had a brief but intense conversation. I said Honestly what the piss and she said Trust me and I said I do and she said Well then and I said You can’t just give in to bullies, it emboldens them; every time you jump over the stick, he’ll raise the stick higher and she said What a good point Darren, I didn’t think of that, you’re right of course.
And then the whole illusory scene fizzled and fell away, because even in my agitation, I knew that imaginary Lynn was falling out of sync with the real thing.
Milo cleared his throat, and I tensed.
“The black giant fled inland,” he said. “So, a simple question. Does she know about the hill fort?”
“How the festering knob should I know?”
Lynn raised herself up on her knees. “Darren.”
The Voice, again. I hoped to hell that Lynn knew what she was doing. “Yes, Latoya knows about the hill fort. She knows about every military asset on the Isle. I don’t hide things from my people.”
“One hundred men, in the hill fort,” he muttered. He rapped his fingers on the table and moved his lips silently as he calculated. “Well, she can’t hold it long.”
“Says you. Listen, Latoya is a master at fending off siege. A couple of months ago, she didn’t want to surrender the last piece of cake to me, but she wasn’t hungry, so she just held it out of my reach the whole day. The whole day. Even when she was taking a nap. If Latoya gets her men into the fort, then you won’t get her out of it in less than a year.”
“What’s to stop me from starving her out?”
“She’ll have brought rations with her.”
“They landed five or six barrels. That’s all they took inland. One cart’s worth.”
That was . . . not as many barrels as I had expected. That was not enough barrels. “All right, fine, call it three months, but still. That’s all Latoya needs to rip you an exciting assortment of new assholes. She’ll hole up on the ridge until something distracts you. The moment you’re looking the other way, she’ll storm down here and tie your legs around your neck in a pretty, pretty bow.”
“And you think that’s good news for you?” Milo’s voice was ice, iron, granite. “Let me make something perfectly clear: there will be no rescue. Even if the sand ape comes back, even if by some miracle she breaches the gate, I’ll cut your throat six times over before she can reach you.”
“Latoya’s not here for me, asswipe. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“You think I’m joking?” The skin under his eyes twitched, the sclera a vivid pink where a blood vessel had blown. “If I can’t hold the Isle, I can still cleanse it—kill every last parasite that got fat sucking us dry. And I swear to you, Darren of Torasan: I will rip your lungs from your chest before I let you breathe free air again.”
“Oh, for the love of syphilised scrotums, Milo, do you ever stop making speeches? We get it. You’re going to kill me. That doesn’t change the fact that you are most exuberantly and overwhelmingly and delightfully fucked.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, calculating, like a tanner trying to estimate the exact amount of leather he could get off a cow’s carcass. “You’re never going to be the least bit of use to me, are you?”
No, was what I intended to say. No, Milo, no matter what wet dreams you are entertaining on the subject, I am not going to be your tame monkey. Not when I have a chance of going out as righteously as Regon did. So go ahead and lop my head off and kick it down main street. Lynn will find a way to survive, she always does, and Latoya will be a better pirate queen than ever I was, anyway.
What I actually said was, “N—”
That was as far as I got before Lynn clawed her way across the floor, scuttling and clambering on hands and knees, and grabbed Milo by the ankles.
“Milo, Milo, Milo, stop,” she said, the words spilling out, rushing out. “Stop right now before you make the biggest mistake of your life.”
He kicked her off of him. “Are you going to tell me again how valuable Darren could be?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“She isn’t worth a damn if she won’t do as she’s told, and she never, ever will. She’s just the kind of arrogant cunt who’d rather die than compromise and—hell.” He snorted. “Look, she’s nodding as I say all this.”
“No, she’s not.”
“She is. Look.”
Lynn looked. Sighed. “Mistress, not helping.”
I stopped nodding. “Well, he isn’t wrong.”
She made a guttural sound of frustration and returned her attention to Milo. “You know what the problem is here? You’ve started to think small. Killing Darren, just for the satisfaction of wiping out one last Torasan before you’re wiped out yourself—that’s not how a winner thinks. That’s not how the Master of the Free Isle thinks.”
Oh, she was good, was my Lynn. Fired up as he was with hatred and suspicion, Milo hesitated. That didn’t make it any easier for me to hear her working on him, using that familiar wheedling, coaxing tone.
“So how does the Master of the Free Isle think?” Milo asked.
“That’s easy.” Lynn rocked back on her heels. “The Master of the Isle thinks long term. He’s planning how to win the war, not how to survive the day, and he doesn’t waste assets when they fall into his lap. He wants to use Darren, not stab her for a quick thrill.”
“So how does the Master of the Isle convince a stubborn pirate to obey?”
Lynn laughed. Hand on my heart, I swear to every god, she laughed.
“How do you still not understand this?” she asked. “You don’t have to convince Darren of anything. You have to convince me.”
Seconds crawled by, as Milo stared.
“Explain,” he said.
“I don’t know how much clearer I can make this.” She scrubbed at her eyes with a balled-up fist. “Convince me that you’ll let us live, and I’ll make Darren toe your stupid fucking line.”
“You really believe you can do that.”
“Yes,” Lynn said, tightly. “She’ll do anything that I tell her to do, all right? I can make her do whatever you want.”
“Well, now.” He smirked at me, with the same half-hidden glee that Jada had worn when she sentenced Ariadne to the whipping post. “Does it hurt that she just went ahead and said it out loud?”
Despite the fraught atmosphere, I indulged in a good long eye-roll. Of course it wasn’t a revelation or a torment to hear out loud what I’d always known, that Lynn was the one who held the reins in our relationship. Yes, I’d tied her to all manner of things and had her in all manner of ways and made her say things that tickled my ego to its darkest and deepest roots. Yes, she would kneel an
d bow and bend at my command, and act out scenes from fantasies that I wouldn’t admit to having when I was sober. But none of it would have happened if Lynn hadn’t known bone-deep, soul-deep, that I would fling myself to the far side of the room the instant she whispered, “Stop.”
But then, it was supposed to work the other way around, too.
“Lynn,” I whispered. “What are you doing?”
She cast me the briefest glance, looking harassed. “This is the only way, Darren.”
“Please don’t—”
“I made her a pirate queen,” she said to Milo, without waiting for me to finish. “You want me to make her a freedom fighter? You want her to parrot all of your kill-the-parasites crap and give it back to you double? Become a flag that your rebels can rally around? I can do that.”
“And what if I decide to marry her?”
Lynn flinched. “I—”
“Oh, come on. You sounded so confident a second ago.” Milo tapped Lynn under the chin, forcing her face up. “She is the oldest unmarried Torasan heir, as you keep reminding me. What if the Master of the Free Isle decides the best way to keep power is to hold his nose and marry the bitch? Can you make her say the right things at the altar, and act demure in public, and spread her legs when she’s told?”
“Lynn!” I yelled, desperate now, but she didn’t turn. Her attention was fixed on Milo, and she looked him full in the face when she said, “As long as you don’t care whether she likes it.”
Now, I can’t possibly describe my feelings at that moment, but if you want to replicate them for yourself, you can do the following: Stick a bunch of razor blades into your ear, and then thrash your head wildly from side to side for half an hour.
Milo stepped back, looking wary and pleased all at once, like someone who’d just received an unexpected present and had yet to unwrap it. “Stand up,” he said, and, as Lynn stumbled to her feet, “What about the ape?”
“What about her? Latoya’s here for my sister. Give her Ariadne, and she’ll go.”
A flash of suspicion. “Sounds awfully convenient.”
Lynn released a soft, exhausted sigh. “If it makes you feel better, you can threaten to starve Darren for a few more weeks or throw me into boiling jam if I’m lying. Doesn’t matter. It’s true. Tell Latoya that you’ll give Ariadne back to her if she leaves. She’ll leave. Keep your end of the bargain, and you won’t have any more trouble with her.”
“She’ll leave you and Darren behind?”
“Yes. She won’t be happy about it, but she’s picked her side and she’s good at prioritizing.”
“What about her men?”
“Her men are Darren’s men. They’re following Latoya now because she’s a masterful presence, but if Darren tells them to join your rebellion, a lot of them will do it. Same with the rest of the fleet, if we can find them.”
“Even though the Banshee’s men decided to follow the giant instead of you?”
Lynn shrugged one thin shoulder. “I’m not Darren. If there’s one thing we can all be sure of in this life, it is that.”
Milo stepped over to his desk and straightened a bunch of papers that didn’t need straightening. “Well. You raise some interesting points. I’ll give it some thought and tell you my decision. In the meantime, I’ll have you taken back to your cells.”
“Wait,” Lynn said, and licked her lips. “Could you give me some time to talk with her first? Five minutes, that’s all.”
He crooked an eyebrow at her, and she exhaled. “Please . . . my lord.”
I almost gagged. Milo looked surprised, but he couldn’t hide the flicker of satisfaction. “Five minutes,” he said, and stepped outside the door.
Lynn all but raced across the room. Just before she reached me, she hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure what kind of reception she was going to get. Her eyes were wide and shiny, which was as close as she ever came to crying in my presence.
I opened my arms and Lynn hurled herself into them, nuzzling into my filthy shirt.
“I’m sorry,” she choked. “But he was ready to kill you. I didn’t have any other play.”
“Hey. Do we apologise when we save each other’s lives, now? When did that become a thing?”
“All right. New rule. We apologise when one of us promises to manipulate the other one into a lifetime of abject servitude.”
“Speaking of lifetimes of servitude—bet you feel pretty silly now for letting me capture and enslave you.”
She pinched me hard. “Don’t be an idiot.”
“But just think! If you had stayed in that fishing village where I found you, who know what dizzying heights you might have climbed? By now, you could be the owner of your very own mud hut. Or half a mud hut. Or, well, some mud.”
She took hold of the front of my shirt with both hands, where she would have gripped me by the lapels if I’d been wearing my pirate coat, and looked up at me gravely. “I just sold you as marriage meat to the man who murdered your family, and you’re trying to make me feel better?”
“You didn’t sell me.” I’d come to my senses, now that the first rush of panic had dimmed. “Lynn, I trust you.”
She tensed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well.” There was no sign of a shadow in the crack under the door, but I lowered my voice anyway. “I know you didn’t mean what you were saying. Whatever your long game is, just keep working it. I’m ready to hold up my end, as soon as you’re ready to tell me the plan.”
Her face fell. Figuratively and literally, because she let it drop against my chest, and rolled it to and fro. “Oh, bloody hell.”
“Hey. Don’t worry. I’m not interrogating you. I know you have your reasons to keep me in the dark.”
With a look of deep concentration, she fiddled with my shirt, smoothing out a crease here and adjusting a loose thread there. As if it was one of my best coats instead of a stinking rag; as if we were home on the Banshee, and she was getting me ready to appear in public without embarrassing us both.
“You know something?” she said. “Sometimes you are such an innocent that it’s just agony.”
“Like I said, I trust you. I know there’s a reason you’re not telling me the plan.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said, as if explaining to a five-year-old that fairies didn’t exist. “We ran out of luck, and we lost, and this is the end of the line.”
“Don’t say that. We always—”
“We always what? Find another way? Darren—you think that every time you jump fearlessly out of a window, someone’s going to arrange for you to land on a mattress. But I live in a world where gravity exists and blades cut skin and the wrong people die sometimes. The Master of Storms is not going to walk out of the waves and kill all our enemies with lightning bolts.” She pulled back, studying me with near desperation. “Do you understand?”
“I . . . I understand that you’re afraid.”
“Sometimes I have to be afraid enough for both of us, Mistress.” She detached herself, took a step away. “I can’t let you die. It’s that simple.”
The door opened again. Milo glanced inside and meaningfully cleared his throat; Lynn nodded. “I’m coming.”
She only turned back once, after she’d allowed Milo to take her by the arm.
“I’ve never been a hero, Darren,” she said. “I wish like hell that people would try to remember that.”
PART FIVE
MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME WAR
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lynn
I WAS PRODDED awake with the butt-end of a spear. The grass around me was damp with both dew and rain, and lightning crackled across a dull grey sky.
“Get up,” the soldier said. “Milo wants you.”
I nodded, yawning. No point in being an asshole to him. He hadn’t kicked me or used the sharp end of the spear for prodding purposes, which alone meant that he was one of the more polite of Milo’s Freemen. “Can I tell Darren?”
“If you do it
fast.” He moved a few steps away.
Ariadne, on my left side, was still dead to the world, but when I rolled over to Darren, I found her awake. Her eyes were closed, but I could tell from her tight-pinched lips. Darren wasn’t so good at keeping her mouth shut when she was asleep. There was almost always some drooling.
I smoothed her shaggy hair back from her forehead. “Mistress.”
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