Beggar's Flip Page 3

  At last, I dashed the tears from my eyes and tried to think of something tough and piratical to say. “They better have taken good care of my ship.”

  I DIDN’T GET the chance to inspect my ship right away. My entire crew charged me as soon as I swung on deck, all of them flailing various body parts and screaming like—well—like banshees.

  There was Teek, the helmsman, and Corto, the quartermaster. There was Jess, who had been my lover what seemed like a couple of lifetimes ago, and Holly, her wife. Holly was very fond of Lynn, and now she looked like she didn’t know whether to hug me for bringing her back or strangle me for losing her in the first place.

  And then there was Spinner, the young sailmaker whom I’d sort of left in charge while I was away. He seemed ready to give up the title of pirate king, judging from the way he dashed towards me and all but hurled my cutlass back into my hand.

  I raised the blade high, roaring at the top of my lungs, and drew Lynn tight towards me with my other arm. My sailors cheered so loudly that I felt a prickling at the corners of my eyes and knew that I would collapse into sobs then and there if I didn’t get things back under control. So I called them all puking scuts and dirty sonsabitches and damned them to hell and back, and they cheered at that even louder. And though Lynn was exhausted, the purple circles under each of her eyes as deep as bruises, she smiled, too.

  LYNN SAID THAT she would cook that night, and everyone in earshot said like hell she would cook that night. Jess and Holly, our resident landsmen, took over. They rolled up their sleeves, rowed to shore, and set to work wreaking havoc on the local population of chickens. When they rowed back a few hours later, their boat was groaning with a load of roast fowl, loaves of bread, plump red cheeses, slabs of honeycomb, and a whole bucket of cream.

  It was a ridiculously lavish feast. I thought I should protest, tell Jess and Holly that they didn’t need to waste so much food on us, but Jess’s hard eyes warned me that she wasn’t going to listen. I gave up and piled my trencher so high that I had to use both hands to heft it.

  We all stuffed ourselves until the stars came out. Half the crew got drunk off their faces and danced in the torchlight; the other half sat back, lost in silent dreams. I nursed my third cup of wine and watched Lynn. She and Ariadne were leaning on the gunwale, staring out to sea, their heads almost touching as they talked about whatever sisters talk about. Every so often, I heard them laugh: Lynn low and soft, Ariadne quick and bright.

  Jess was watching the two of them as well, but unlike me, she was frowning.

  “Why did they dye Lynn’s hair?” she asked, out of nowhere.

  I had taken aside the people who mattered—Jess, Holly, Spinner, Teek—and told them a very little about what had happened back on Bero. Enough for them to understand why Lynn had been taken. Not enough for them to understand all the finer points. It was only natural for Jess to ask about Lynn’s hair. It was usually as pale as flax, but Melitta had dyed it an unhealthy liver brown. It didn’t suit her.

  “I don’t know why they did it,” I said. “Probably because Lord Iason was blond, and Ariadne, too. They must have been trying to hide the family resemblance.”

  Jess snorted. “Lynn doesn’t look anything like Ariadne.”

  “She does so. You can tell that they’re sisters. Ariadne’s just . . .”

  I weighed my words. Ariadne was taller and bustier, her hair was thicker, her lips were fuller . . . Lynn was short, bony, and boyish, flat where Ariadne had curves.

  “Ariadne looks healthier,” I admitted. “And yet I’ve got no interest in her whatsoever, and Lynn leaves me a puddle on the floor. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “Yes. You’re a pervert.”

  I glared. “That wasn’t what you were supposed to say.”

  “Then why did you bother to ask? I’m not one of your adoring followers. I’m not going to blow smoke up your behind just so that you can feel better about yourself.” Jess took a long slow swallow of wine. “Is that why our relationship didn’t last? Were you secretly pining for a scrawny little woman in a skimpy little tunic who would call you ‘Mistress’ and kneel at your feet?”

  “Apparently, our relationship didn’t last because you think that I’m a pervert.”

  “Stop being so sensitive.”

  “Stop calling me a pervert. I didn’t plan to end up with Lynn—it just happened. And don’t even pretend that I’m exploiting her. I can’t make Lynn do anything that she doesn’t want to do. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  Jess sighed. “I know.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re still a pervert.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  She smiled crookedly, but the lines of worry in her face didn’t smooth away. “I have a proposal for you, Darren.”

  “I’m not going to marry you. I’m over that phase of my life.”

  “Save the sarcasm.” Jess nodded towards Lynn. “She’s wounded, you know.”

  I grimaced. Things were getting serious. “She’s a lot better than she was. Her ribs have knitted some and she doesn’t hunch over when she walks.”

  Jess shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. Lynn’s wounded somewhere deep.” She paused. “I don’t know if she’s really going to heal.”

  This was uncomfortably close to what I had been thinking myself, but I wasn’t going to let it be true.

  “She’ll heal,” I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. “She needs time.”

  Jess cocked an eyebrow. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Lynn’s mother was murdered when she was eight. Lynn’s stepmother took her as a servant and tormented her for the rest of her childhood. Lynn’s father didn’t give a damn for her as a person, but he did plan to use her as a brood sow and force her to bear his grandchildren. This because five-day fever withered up his testicles and left his trueborn daughter as barren as a piece of toast. These were the people who kidnapped Lynn from you. These were the people who had their way with her for a couple of weeks. And the end result was, when you found her, she was cowering in a closet, too whipped to even tell you she was there. Darren, she needs more than time if she’s going to heal!”

  As usual, I could have done without the lecture, but Jess did care for Lynn, in her own pushy mother-knows-best kind of way. If she wanted to help, so much the better. I forced down my defensiveness. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I think the two of you should come back to the valley with Holly and me. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not asking you to give up piracy for good. I tried to keep you away from the ocean once, and it didn’t work out so well. But the valley is a good place for healing. It’s quiet, and it’s safe. No need to risk your lives or battle barbarians every other day. And now that the harvest’s over, there isn’t too much work to be done. The two of you can take it slow for a while. Read a few books, milk a few cows, eat too much and . . . Darren. Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You’re not. You’re just waiting for the chance to say ‘No.’”

  “I’m not,” I said. (I was, of course I was.)

  She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Why won’t you at least consider it?”

  “I will consider it. All right? I will ask Lynn. But she won’t want to come.”

  “Why not?”

  A few months earlier, I wouldn’t have known the answer to this question. Now, as I watched Lynn leaning on the gunwale, the moonlight touching her bare shoulders, it seemed all too obvious.

  “Because,” I said, as if I’d known it for years. “She loves the sea even more than I do.”

  NOW, JESS HAD the soul of a drill sergeant combined with a granite cliff, so she didn’t give up her master plan just like that. Instead, she cornered Lynn later that night and made her pitch, about the peace and quiet in the valley, about reading books and eating too much and healing. And cows. Lynn heard her out, and then said, “No, thank you” with cheerful finality.

  J
ess’s lips were a tight line. “I worry about you.”

  “Do you?” Lynn said lightly. “I worry about shellfish.”

  “ . . . why shellfish?”

  “Because nobody else ever worries about shellfish. Whereas people worry about me all the time. Which saves me the bother of doing it for myself.”

  Then, without even needing to look, she reached back and took my hand. “We’re leaving tomorrow. Aren’t we, Mistress?”

  And I shrugged, because, apparently, we were.

  So we did. The Banshee sailed the next day. We left Jess and Holly behind on the mainland, to return to their peace and quiet and books and bovines. Lynn was still so mottled with bruises and scratches that she looked like a piebald cat, but without a pause for breath, she took up her old place in the ship’s routine: standing watches, conducting daily inspections, listening for murmurs of discontent from the crew, managing the supplies, plotting our course, planning strategy, boiling stew.

  Even after everything Lynn had been through, she wouldn’t slow down. She couldn’t, I suppose. You can’t sail out onto the high seas with a war raging all around you and sort of be a pirate. Less than two days after we left the harbour, we encountered our first post-Bero crisis: the House of Jiras, short on oarsmen for its war galleys, had started to kidnap entire villages at a time. So we gathered up six ships of my fleet, all of us flying my storm petrel banner, and sallied off to cause trouble. When that was done, there was the famine in the southern islands, and then the outbreak of plague, and the cannibals in the west, and . . . well, we kept busy.

  Lynn’s hair grew out pale gold, and when I trimmed her hair into its usual short cut, all traces of the ugly dye vanished. The bruises faded. She started to breathe more easily, walk without that trace of a limp. Her mind was as sharp as ever, her senses as keen. She could outthink a warlord cross-eyed and dead drunk and pummel me at koro with only half her mind on the game.

  She was so much herself—her tricky, conniving, slightly ruthless self—that for days at a time, I could make myself believe that she really was all right. And then something would happen. She’d wake up screaming, ripping gashes in her arms with her own fingernails. Or she wouldn’t sleep at all for a week.

  Once, after a particularly bad night, I spent some time kicking a couple of empty barrels into splinters, pretending that they were Iason and Melitta. It didn’t really help, but that wasn’t surprising. I’d already killed the real Iason and Melitta and even that didn’t make me feel much better.

  Latoya happened on me when I was staring glumly at what was left of the barrels. “You can’t fix her yourself,” she told me. “Just be patient.”

  It was good advice, I knew, but patient I am not.

  “FIVE HUNDRED AND one, five hundred and two, five hundred and . . . You know what? Screw this.”

  Abandoning the count, I pushed open the tent flap and stalked out onto the beach in search of Lynn. The sand crunched beneath my feet like damp sugar. I sniffed the air. Wet. We were in the southern part of the islands, where I had grown up, and where it rained for most of the year, with a hurricane or a blizzard now and then for variety.

  Lynn was sitting near the waterline, pale in the wan moonlight, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. Despite the damp and the chill, she wore nothing but one of her thin tunics. It was slicked against her body like wet paper. She had to be freezing.

  Most of my crewmen were asleep in a single great tent made of the Banshee’s mainsail. But it was Regon and Latoya’s watch, and those two were huddled together on an upturned longboat next to our campfire, passing a bottle back and forth. I ambled towards them, casually, as if I just wanted to ask some question about the weather.

  Both of them showed surprise when I got close.

  “Lynn’s over there,” Regon said, pointing.

  “I know where she is.” I shoved his hand down. “Stop it. You’ll give me away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m trying to be smooth. Subtle. I’m pretending not to know that she’s upset. Oh, stop that,” I snapped, as they exchanged weary glances. “I can be smooth, you know. I can be smooth like a bandit. A smooth bandit.”

  “Captain,” Regon said gently. “Remember how Lynn has frighteningly good hearing?”

  “So what?”

  Regon pointed again towards the spot where Lynn sat by the waterline. She didn’t turn her head, but she raised her hand and gave a little wave.

  Crap and crap and crap again. It’s a real challenge to keep secrets from a girl who can hear a whisper from twenty yards away.

  I tried to recover some dignity by snarling something incomprehensible at Regon and Latoya. They didn’t seem fazed. Latoya just saluted me with the bottle as I went.

  I walked slowly, descending the slope of the beach. Lynn’s head cocked to the side when I neared her, but she still didn’t turn. Her sleeveless tunic left bare the angry red lines that formed a criss-cross pattern on her shoulders and back. Fresh scars. Gifts from Melitta. I didn’t know what kind of weapon had inflicted those blows, but it must have been something heavy. Five months after Bero, they still hadn’t faded.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” Lynn echoed. “Just so you know, I don’t want to be touched right now.”

  “Understood. I kind of figured. It’s cold out here. Want my coat?”

  “Thanks. No.”

  I laid it down on the sand beside her, in case she changed her mind, and then sat down myself, leaving a clear six inches between us. For some time, we watched the breakers roll in.

  It startled me when she finally spoke. “To answer your question, I don’t really remember what my mother was like.”

  “What are you talking about—oh. Oh. Do you always wait five months before answering a question?”

  She half-smiled. “Only if it’s important.”

  I dimly remembered asking Lynn about her mother while we were dashing around in the cellars beneath Iason’s castle. We got interrupted by half of an army before she could answer, and, somehow, we’d never come back to the topic in the time since.

  “You know what’s stupid?” Lynn asked. “Ariadne remembers my mother better than I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I don’t even remember what she looked like, not really. Red hair, I think. Freckles.”

  “Didn’t you live with her until you were eight? In the castle kitchens?”

  “I remember the kitchens. Or the colour of the kitchens, anyway. Orange bake ovens and saffron in the festival cakes. Russet apples, yellow pears. Copper kettles. And the smells. Venison and butter and cumin and cinnamon. I remember all that. But my mother . . . She was always just there, so I guess I never paid any attention to her.”

  “Oh, Lynn.”

  “Stop that. No being maudlin. That’s the rule. We’ve discussed it.” She was quiet a while longer, then said, “I hate the cold.”

  “My coat’s right there.”

  “No.”

  “You’re hardly wearing anything. It makes me colder just looking at you.”

  “So don’t look. Look up instead. There’s a ring around the moon tonight, see it?”

  I squinted up through one eye. The ring was pale frosty blue, which did nothing to make me feel warmer.

  Trying to be casual about it, I asked, “Do you want to tell me what you dreamed?”

  I wasn’t touching Lynn, but I still felt her shrug. “You know what I dreamed. I dreamed that I was back with Melitta.”

  “I mean, details.”

  “What do the details matter? I dreamed that she hit me. I dreamed that it hurt.”

  “It seemed like a bad one.”

  “I dreamed that she hit me a lot. I dreamed that it hurt a lot. I’m not trying to be coy, Darren, I just don’t know what else there is to say.”

  “You could tell me exactly what Melitta did to you while you were growing up. If you wanted to, I mean.”

  “Can’t you just imagine
it for yourself? It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

  Somehow, her offhand tone made it all worse. “Lynn, what they did to you was disgusting!”

  She was drawing in the sand with her forefinger: a cup, a sword, a wiggly-tailed fish. “It wasn’t fun, no. It also wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I was a small helpless person. Small helpless people get hurt, every day and everywhere. There are child servants in every wealthy house in Kila. And what about the kids who end up on the ships? Remember where you found Spinner?”

  I raked up a handful of sand, and let it slip through my fingers. “I remember.”