Immediate need won out. My mother would have to see me, eventually, and the pirate had been right; I was freezing in my current gown, and I could manage my situation more efficiently once I was clean and warm, not to mention out of my wide panniers. I’d also feel considerably less exposed without my bodice’s gaping neckline.
The bath was heavenly, though at any moment I expected a burly cook to saunter in, or my supposed guards to open the door and torment me in some way. Working quickly, I found a sliver of soap and scrubbed every inch of myself, from toes to scalp, then dried before the fire.
My new clothes were quite nice. There was a short shift, a clean pair of stays and a man’s shirt, all of which I tucked under two layers of wool trousers and a belt. Over that I shrugged a heavy, double-breasted coat, slit at the hip, lightly embroidered and forest green. I buttoned it from waist to collar and spent my remaining moments in the galley hovering before the stove, trying to speed the drying of my hair.
It was then, with my head upside down in front of the grating, that I heard running feet. I looked at the deck above me, half blinded by damp waves of hair, and listened.
Shouts. More footsteps. My eyes dragged to the ladder just as someone ran across the hatch. They issued a desperate obscenity as they went, and their voice—a voice from a nightmare of two days tied to a mast—made the warmth flee my cheeks.
I knew that voice. My shock faded into grim need, I grabbed a fire poker and made for the ladder.
I lifted the hatch just as John Randalf hit the end of a dark passageway, clad in nothing but trousers and a dirty shirt. He kicked at a locked door with a bare, frantic foot, a candle lantern swinging madly in one hand. He swore, each word punctuated by an impact.
“Saint’s. Bloody. Fucking. Crown!” One last kick and the door broke in. He vanished through, leaving me skulking in the hatchway like a suspicious groundhog.
What was Randalf doing here? Alive? It had been over a month since Lirr burned his ship. I’d seen his crew gutted, strung from the yards and roasted alive. I’d heard them. Smelled them.
Had I been mistaken? I’d never seen Randalf without a wig and this man wore none, but his face and voice…
I had to know. I peered back down into the galley, but the main door was still closed. My guards must have heard the commotion, but retrieving me evidently hadn’t been their first thought.
I climbed up into the passageway and closed the hatch. With careful steps I followed the strange man, but no sooner had I reached the doorway than he reappeared.
His feral eyes fell on me and went very, very round.
I leveled the poker at his chest, claiming the space between us. “Why aren’t you dead?”
He looked from me to the makeshift weapon, trying to recover himself, and slowly raised his hands. “Where have you been? Hell, it doesn’t matter. Help me, woman, and I can protect you.”
Protect me? I pressed the tip of the poker into his chest. “My name is Mary Firth, and if you haven’t forgotten, you bought and tortured me. Why would I help you? Why are you here?”
Randalf’s eyes flicked over my shoulder to the empty passage—footsteps and shouts drew closer with every passing moment—but at the tone of my voice his gaze dragged to me, and he looked cautious for the first time.
“I should stick this in your belly and leave you to die.” I meant it. The words felt dangerous on my tongue, hot and deadly and primed with potential for violence that both satisfied and unsettled me.
He heard my sincerity too. He inched back from the poker and I followed him, keeping the point flush with his bedraggled shirt. My trained hand did not waver.
“I’m not the only prisoner,” Randalf spat. I heard an echo of the man I remembered then, coldly ordering me starved and left to the wind. “I’m sure you’ve heard their cries? There’s a hundred of us in that hold, witch. A hundred!”
“Why?” I asked. I hadn’t heard anything of the sort, but I hadn’t been here long. “Why would Lirr keep so many prisoners?”
Footsteps thundered closer and pirates shouted, coordinating their search.
“Saint knows!” Randalf hissed, as if that could keep us from being found. “He feeds us, even sends the surgeon to us, but he’s never breathed a word of why. We haven’t time for this! Help me, damn you! If you won’t help me, let me go! Are we still near the Usti coast?”
I held two thoughts, one on each side of a scale, and weighed them.
One was the memory of bitter cold, and the pain of bloodied wrists. The other was a hold full of prisoners, trapped in the dark. One was vivid and real, sharp with remembered pain; the other was the babbling of a despicable man. Even if it was true—and I would find out if it was—Randalf’s part in my story had ended a long time ago.
Pirates thundered past our passageway and slowed. Lanternlight swelled.
“Fleetbreaker?” someone called, deferential.
I looked over my shoulder. The pirate, a small man, startled when he realized I wasn’t my mother. But when I spoke, I sounded just like her.
“Your quarry is here.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Tane
MARY
Lirr’s pirates dragged Randalf into a grand cabin. A balcony stretched the length of the stern, vaguely revealed by bottle-bottom windows. The small panes, each lined with black wrought iron, diffused the dawn light over the rest of the room.
There was a long, central dining table, a writing desk, ranks of heavy chests and bulkheads laden with prizes from every corner of the world. There were swords and flintlocks, pieces of armor, small round shields painted with bright colors of Sunjai, and various eccentricities I didn’t have time to identify. But it was obvious that Lirr liked his talismans, and his travels had been broad.
Despite these myriad distractions, two things demanded my focus as Randalf was shoved to his knees, surrounded by a gang of six pirates.
One was the figureheads, or rather, the fragments of them. Shattered and charred, they were arranged on the bulkheads between the trophies—half of a roaring lion’s face, a reaching hand, the outline of a splintered sword, the curve of a feminine hip. But I sensed no ghistings attached to them.
The other was my mother. She stood before the windows. The light filtering through the foggy glass was pale, pastel and cool on her skin apart from a shaft of pure arctic light that cut across her face through an open pane. It bleached the darkness of her eyelashes and softened the lines around her eyes. She looked almost ethereal then: the sorceress. The Fleetbreaker.
Her eyes fell on me but she didn’t move, arms laced loosely under her breasts and heavy coat open to show her worn bodice.
It’s an act, I reminded myself, but her lack of emotion was a fist in my gut, and Randalf’s impending punishment did little to soothe me. I drew the same blankness she wore over myself and stood off to the side.
“I offered you mercy.” Lirr stood in front of his prisoner. He, too, had cleaned up since our departure from Hesten and now wore a fresh shirt, tucked into breeches. His coat and waistcoat lay over a chair and his brown hair was bound into a short braid at the nape of his neck. “I fed and kept you. This rebellion, Captain Randalf, it does not befit one with your grand destiny.”
“Destiny?” Randalf choked. “Destiny! To be butchered? Dragged off like the others? I heard their screams, you bastard, there’s no mercy here. What did you do with them? Eat them? Sacrifice them?” Randalf’s voice rose into a shriek at the last words, hitching and tumbling into hysterics. “I heard them, I heard them! What did you do?”