He was staring at me, only his face wasn't stony and angry no more.
"I thought you could help me." I looked down at my feet, my face hot like we were out in the sun. "Marjani's so busy, you know, and I thought – and you spend so much time by yourself."
"Oh." He took a step or two closer to me. He was close enough that I got these little shivers up and down my spine.
"It'd give you something to do," I said.
"Yes." He paused, and I lifted up my head to look at him. He had his eyes on me. They were the same color as the ocean at night. "Mathematics were not my strong suit, I'm afraid."
"You still know more'n me."
"I suppose I do." He took a deep breath. "I would be happy to help you, Ananna."
"Really?"
He nodded.
I hugged him. Just threw my arms around his shoulders without thinking, like he was Chari or Papa or one of the Tanarau crew. I realized what I did quick enough, though, when he stuck his hand on my upper back all awkward, like he wasn't sure what to make of me touching him. I pushed away, dropped my arms to my side. "Sorry," I muttered.
"Your enthusiasm for learning gives me hope for the future," he said. "We can start now, if you'd like. You don't seem to be… working."
"I'm the daytime crew." I squinted. "I thought you wanted to go down below."
He took his time answering. "Well, the air up here is much more pleasant."
"Yeah, never was clear how you could stand the smell."
He looked like he wanted to laugh, but cause he's Naji he didn't.
"We'll need something to write on. And some ink."
"I'll ask Marjani." The whole night seemed brighter now. Naji wasn't glowering no more, and I was about to learn something neither Mama or Papa'd ever saw fit to teach me proper.
Naji nodded at me, and I ran off to the captain's quarters, to find some ink and scraps of sail.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marjani taught me the basics of navigation in the evenings, mostly, after mealtime when the bulk of the crew was up on deck drinking rum and watching the sun disappear into the horizon line. It was a lot of measuring and taking notes, and at first she just had me work off the records she took so I could learn how to do the calculations. And Naji gave me practice equations during the day, when there wasn't no sailwork for me to do. He came up on deck and everything, and we sat near the bow of the ship while I worked through them.
The crew ignored us the first few days, just went about their business like we weren't there. Then Ataño picked up on us and took to swinging down when I was working, asking me what I was writing for but staring at Naji while he asked.
"Ain't none of your business," I told him, scribbling with Naji's quill. It didn't work no magic for me. Wouldn't even tell me the answers to the equations.
"I dunno, looks like you're charming something." He dropped to his feet and squinted at Naji. "You know magic, fire-face?"
"Ananna's learning mathematics," Naji said.
Ataño howled with laughter, too stupid or too intent on acting the bully to notice that Naji hadn't answered his question. My face turned hot like it had a sunburn but I kept scribbling cause I wanted to learn navigation more than I wanted Ataño to like me.
"The hell?" Ataño asked. "That's even better'n the idea of her writing spells." He laughed again.
"Don't you got deck duty?" I muttered. It was hard to concentrate on the equation with him standing there gaping at me.
"You can't tell me what to do," he said.
"She will once she learns navigation," Naji said, "and you're serving under her colors."
I stopped writing, embarrassed as hell but also a little bit pleased that Naji thought I could be a captain someday.
There was this long pause while Ataño stared at Naji. "She ain't never gonna be my captain."
"Yes, that's probably true," Naji said. "Since I doubt she would require the services of someone as incompetent as you."
I bit my bottom lip to keep from laughing, but then I noticed Ataño staring at Naji with daggers in his eyes. Naji didn't seem to care much, but it occurred to me that we probably shouldn't be stirring up trouble when we were riding on this boat as guests.
Fortunately, the quartermaster stomped up to us and cuffed Ataño on the head before he could say anything more. "Get your ass to work," he said to Ataño, before fixing his glare on me.
"Doing something for Marjani," I said real quick, which was what she'd told me to say if any of the other officers caught me practicing. The quartermaster wrinkled up his brow, but he nodded and sauntered off.
"You shouldn't have said that to Ataño," I told Naji. "You made yourself an enemy just now. You see his eyes?"
"I'm not afraid of children."
I frowned and started working real hard on the next equation so Naji wouldn't see my face. The ink blotted across the sail.
"You're pressing too hard," Naji said.
"I ain't a child," I muttered.
"What?"
"Ataño's the same age as me." I didn't mean to tell him but it came out anyway. "And I ain't a child."
Naji stared at me. I stared back as long as I could but Naji was always gonna win a staring contest. I dropped my gaze back down to the equations. They looked like scribbles, like nonsense.
"You're the same age as him?" he asked.
"Uh, yeah. Seventeen."
This long heavy pause.
"Hmm," Naji said. "I put him at thirteen."
"Oh, shut up. You did not."
"Well, I'd put him at thirteen by his actions. Thirteen or seventeen, it doesn't matter. He can't hurt me." He hesitated. "I won't let him hurt you–"
"Oh please." I tossed the quill and sail scrap down to the deck. "You think I'm scared of Ataño? You really think–"
Then I saw that sparkle in Naji's eye and knew he was laughing at me.
"See?" he said. "Now you know how it feels."
I glared at him for a few seconds. He looked so pleased with himself, but he also looked kind of happy, and that was enough for me to turn my attention back to my equations. I was happy, too, about finally learning navigation, and the possibility that I could become an officer on a ship, which was the first step to having my own boat. And there hadn't been any whispers about the Hariri clan, either. I was starting to see my future again.
As long as I didn't think about the Isles of the Sky. As long as I didn't think on how Naji's curse was an impossible one. Cause I knew that just cause I could see my future again, that didn't mean it was going to happen.
After a while, Naji started coming with me to my lessons with Marjani. He didn't ask – of course he didn't ask – but he did show up at the captain's quarters one evening after dinner looking sheepish. Marjani had me perched over the maps with a divider, tracking a course from Lisirra to Arkuz, the capital city of Jokja, where she told me she had been born. She'd asked me my birthplace but I just said Lisirra, cause the stormy black-sand island where I'd been born wasn't even on the map. And then Naji was banging on the door, asking to come in.
"I hope you don't mind if I join you," he said. "But I find the crew…" He hesitated. Marjani looked like she wanted to laugh.
"A pain in the ass?" I offered.
"Tiresome," Naji said. He tugged at his hair, kind of pulling it over his scar, and I frowned, wondering what the crew had said to him.
"I have to go with Ananna on this one," Marjani said. "But you can sit in here if you want."
Naji settled down in this gilded chair in the corner and watched me and Marjani work without saying nothing. It took me awhile to chart the course from Lisirra to Arkuz – I was using some calculations Marjani had given me, from an old logbook. I felt like I'd taken way too long to get it done, but when I finished Marjani looked sorta impressed.
"Nice work," she said. "You're a quick learner." She smiled. "You would've done well at university."
That made me real happy, cause nobody had ever said nothing like that to me before.
"Yes," Naji said. "She would have."
Marjani glanced at him. "Where did you attend?"
"In Lisirra. The Temple School."
"Oh." She flipped through the logbook and handed it back to me. "Lisirra to Qilar," she told me. "Go."
I sighed like I was annoyed but really I thought the drills were fun. Marjani turned to Naji. "The Lisirra Temple School," she said. "That's a school of sorcery, isn't it?"
Naji nodded and said, "I didn't study ack'mora there, if that's what you're asking."
"I'll admit I was curious." Marjani smiled. "I've no ability for sorcery, myself. I studied mathematics and history. At the university in Arkuz."
"I've been there. It's lovely."
"The city or the university?"
"Both."
It was like they were speaking a whole other language. Universities and history and sorcery. I wondered what I would've studied if I'd got to go to university. Piracy's probably not an option.
"I've been to Arkuz," I said. "We sailed up the river into the jungle to trade with some folks there."
"Really?" said Marjani. "I always hated the jungle. You never know when it's going to rain." She leaned over the map. "Oh, good work," she said.
"I've got it?" I'd been so wrapped in listening in on Marjani and Naji's conversation that my hands must've kept on working while my brain lagged behind.
"You've got it," Marjani said.
After that, Naji came to my lessons about every day, I guess cause he and Marjani had bonded over both going to university. He didn't have a lot to offer in the way of navigation, but he and Marjani would tell me about other stuff they'd learned, like all these weird stories about the different emperors over the years, or how to calculate the volume of an empty container without having to fill it with water first. It was fun.
Then Marjani got me to start helping her with the true navigation, the navigation that was taking us around the sirens and three weeks out of our way and, as far as me and Naji were concerned, delaying the trip to the Isles of the Sky. One morning she called me down from the rigging and handed me her logbook and a quill and the sextant.
"I need measurements," she said. "You know how it works. Get going."
The crew stared at me while I stood there fiddling with the sextant. Marjani trotted off to speak with the captain up at the helm, and I felt real conspicuous with everybody's eyes on me. But then I lifted up the sextant and peered through it up at the sky and the whole boat fell away.
I stopped doing as much work in the rigging after that, since Marjani had me taking measurements for her every day. Seems that charting a new course on the water's a bit risky, as you're creating a new path in addition to the usual work of checking where you are in the water. But we stayed on course, still moving up toward the north and to the east, and Marjani said it was partially cause I helped her. I didn't necessarily believe that, mind, though I suppose I had no reason not to.
One afternoon I crawled up on deck to make the usual round of measurements and noticed immediately that something was off. There were a lot of voices shouting and yelling, but it wasn't about rigging or wind or none of the usual complaints. At first I thought we must be under attack, that some tracker from the Mists – or worse, the Hariris – had followed me and Naji all the way to sea. Immediately my heart started pounding and I went for the knife at my hip. Which I still hadn't replaced. Stupid. I needed to ask Naji for his knife or nick it off him while he slept.
But then I realized I didn't hear the clank of sword against sword, or the pop of a pistol. And nobody'd sent out the call to arms, neither. It was just yelling. And jeering.
And my heart started pounding all over again.
I raced across the deck to where Ataño and a couple of his cronies were crowded around the railing. Naji was there, too, staring at them stone-faced. Ataño said something I couldn't make out, on account of the wind blowing in off the waves and beating through the sails, but he pushed up the skin of the left side of his face until it snarled the way Naji's face did sometimes and his cronies laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd seen in a year.
Me, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.
"Fuck off!" I screamed. All three of 'em turned toward me and I took off running. Half the crew was up in the rigging or clustered over on the other side of the ship, not participating but not doing nothing to stop it neither.
And then Ataño was flat on his back, Naji crouched on his chest with his sword at Ataño's throat.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Naji made this hissing sound through his teeth and pressed his sword up under Ataño's chin. A trickle of blood dripped onto the deck, glistening in the sunlight. Ataño whimpered, his eyes clenched shut.
"Look at me," Naji said in a voice like an ice storm.
Ataño opened his eyes.
"This is the last time you will ever look at my face. If you see me coming, look the other way. Because if you look at me again, or speak to me again, I'll make sure your face comes out worse than mine."
Nobody on deck was moving. Even the wind had stopped. In the silence, all you could hear was Ataño's pitiful little moans.
"Do you understand?"
"Y… Yes," Ataño said.
Naji pulled his sword away. Ataño scrambled backward, his head twisted over to the side, looking everywhere but at Naji. His cronies stumbled after him.
Naji wiped the blade of his sword on his robe.
And like that, the spell broke. A couple of the bigger crewman bounded across the deck and grabbed Naji by the arms, pulling him into a lock, though I could see that Naji didn't have no intention of fighting back.
I could see that if Naji had wanted to fight back, both of those crewman would've been dead.
And anybody else he wanted, too.
When he'd attacked Ataño, he'd covered close to five feet so fast I hadn't seen him move. He hadn't even moved that fast during the fight in the Lisirran pleasure district – this time, I hadn't seen him go for his sword, or even noticed the twitch in the arm that meant he was thinking about it. One second he'd been standing there like a victim, the next he could've slit Ataño's throat before anybody knew what was happening.
The two crewmen dragged Naji down to the brig, and all I could think about was that night in the desert, and how he hadn't done what he just did to Ataño – to me.
The brig smelled like rotten fish and piss and the air was thick with mold. Saltwater dripped off the ceiling and down my back as I made my way over the dank floor. I had Naji's desert-mask tucked into the pocket of my coat.
He was curled up in the corner of his cell, sitting with his chin on his knees. His eyes flicked over to me when I came in but he didn't say nothing.
I stared at him for a minute, his hair all tangled up from the sea wind, the lanterns illuminating the lines of his scar. Looking at it I got this phantom pain in the left side of my face.
"They take your knife off you?" I asked him.
He shook his head.
"Can I see it? I'll give it back."
Naji stared at me.
"C'mon, I ain't gonna do nothing bad."
He reached into his cloak and then there was a thwap and the knife wedged into the wood of the ship a few inches from my head. I was real proud of myself cause I didn't even blink, though I did see him go for it this time – something told me it was cause he wanted it that way. I yanked the knife out of the wall and walked up to the lock on the bars. Shoved the knife into the keyhole and wiggled it around like Papa'd taught me. When the lock clicked I snapped it open and stepped into the cell with Naji.
"I brought your desert mask," I said, pulling it out of my pocket and dangling it in front of me. Naji didn't move. I started thinking this might've been a bad idea.
But then he took the mask away from me and straightened it out on his knees.
"You sure it won't look suspicious?" he asked, his voice full up with sarcasm, and I looked down at my feet, shamed.<
br />
"I'm sorry." My voice kinda cracked. "I didn't think – on Papa's ship they would never–"
"Forget it." Naji pulled the mask across his face, hiding his scar. "Of course you're correct, the young men on your father's ship never once jeered at a disfigurement. Upstanding citizens the whole of them, I'm sure."
I didn't know what to say. My face got real hot, and Naji kept glaring at me.
"You have no idea what it's like," he said. "To look like me. To be what I am on top of that – people think I'm a monster."
The Assassin's Curse Page 16
