Shell Game Read online

  I got the rest of Darren’s story from Spinner, what there was of it. It didn’t take long to tell. Six months after Darren went off to the valley with Jess, she reappeared in a port town on the mainland, one of those places that survives by selling drink and women to Kilan sailors. When she rolled into town, Darren had a single battered ship, a fierce expression, and a mission. She was looking to recruit.

  I actually slapped my face when Spinner explained this to me. Dumb, dumb, dumb. As an exile, a criminal, Darren wasn’t entitled to any protection under Kilan law. Even a commoner could kill her without facing punishment. With that hanging over her head, it was simply heart-stoppingly stupid for her to walk into a tavern filled with sailors she didn’t know. It made about as much sense as drenching yourself in gravy and then prancing up to a dragon’s den with a sign around your neck reading PLEASE EAT.

  “It worked out,” Spinner said. “She found Regon almost right away, and he’s her man, from his skin to his soul. They’ve sailed together more than half their lives. He stashed her away in a dark room, and he went out and found the rest of us. We’d all served under her before.”

  “But why was she recruiting in the first place? What did she want to do?”

  Spinner shrugged. “Honestly? I think she’s still figuring that out. Defend the Weak. Protect the Helpless. Save Kittens. Really, we’re just wandering from place to place until we find something to do.”

  I’d been afraid of that. It was very noble, and all, but it wasn’t the wisest strategy imaginable in a time when there was a warship on every other wave.

  The Badger, being a little two-masted trader,was not the kind of ship you’d choose for travelling across a war zone, if you had any options. It was too light for ramming, too small for grapnels, and though Darren’s sailors knew which end of a cutlass to hold, there were too few of them to fend off a serious attack. Darren’s only choice, if trouble came calling, was to try to outrun it. Outrunning trouble is one of those strategies that works until, all of a sudden, it stunningly, devastatingly doesn’t.

  “Holly said that you had a close call a while back,” I told Spinner, fishing for details.

  He nodded. “The captain’s father put a price on her head when he learned that she was back in the islands, making trouble. The captain’s got this cousin. Distant cousin. Bounty hunter. Totally insane. She almost caught up with us when we stopped to take on water. We got away, but that night, the captain worked her way right to the bottom of a beer barrel, tankard by tankard, and she didn’t speak to any of us for hours.”

  Darren didn’t speak to any of them, I realized, because the narrow escape had forced her to acknowledge what she must have already known: sooner or later, her luck would run out. Any band of marauders with a few hours to kill would consider the little Badger a juicy target, even if they didn’t know that it was captained by an exile. And if they did know . . . well.

  It was just a matter of time, and Darren knew it.

  Her men knew it too, so I couldn’t figure out why they were following along so tamely. They had all sailed with Darren for years before her banishment, that was true. But was that enough of a reason for them to keep heading straight into the centre of the storm? Were they like Darren, possessed by some kind of stupid guilt that made them incapable of looking after themselves? Were they just do-gooders at heart? Or did serving on the Badger offer opportunities for profit that I hadn’t yet seen?

  “Why the hell do you follow her?” I asked Spinner. “What’s in it for you?”

  He scratched his beardless chin for long moments before he responded. “I dunno.”

  Which made me suspect that I’d been overthinking the whole thing.

  DARREN SHRUGGED WHEN I told her what Spinner had said. “If I were a better person, I’d send all of them somewhere safe.”

  “Send them somewhere safe. Right. Because it’s not like they could choose to leave on their own. That’s just crazy talk.”

  “They won’t leave me. Not unless I force them to go. Most of them have served the House of Torasan all their lives. A noble whistles, they jump. That’s how things are.”

  “They love you.”

  “Oh, piss off.”

  She was tense that day.

  She was tense most days. As we worked our way deeper and deeper into the islands, she was just getting worse and worse. She slept badly, and almost never sat still for an entire meal. Halfway through, she would pause in mid-mouthful, as if the bread or beef or beans had suddenly rotted on her tongue, and push her portion away, and wander off. The rest of us would look at each other, and then return our attention to our food.

  It wasn’t bad food, either. By then, I was cooking more often than not, since I still wasn’t up to some of the harder work shipside. But Darren never finished. Teek and Regon would divide her share between them.

  We were three weeks into the journey by the time Darren decided on our destination—one of the granite isles over on the far west side of the archipelago. The idea was to start at Isla, the largest village, and work our way along the coast, picking up whatever unfortunates we could find. When we had a full load, we’d ferry them back to the mainland, to Jess and Holly and their protective hands, to their valley full of peace and plenty. It was a longer trip than Darren had tried before, but the need was getting desperate on that side of Kila. War galleys were being sunk by the dozen and as fast as they sank, new ones were launched to replace them. Galleys need crews, so anyone with a pulse was at risk of getting conscripted as a rower. Teek and Regon had stories of the things they had seen: seven-year-old boys chained to oars, old men being dragged from their beds as they begged to be allowed to die at home, families murdered over a few dried fish.

  During the day, I mostly managed to keep Darren distracted. One evening, though, I caught her vomiting over the rail when she thought no one could see. I know what it looks like when you vomit from sheer terror. There’s a lot of bile in it.

  I brought her some water. She took the cup from me and stared blankly at the ripples on the surface.

  “You must think I’m an idiot,” she said abruptly.

  “Well . . . frankly . . . yes. But you’re the very best kind of idiot.” I tugged at her sleeve. “Come on. Bedtime.”

  AFTER DARREN CHAINED me up that night, she paced up and down the tiny cabin, two-and-a-half steps either way.

  “All right,” she said at last. “How about I take your shoes?”

  I was getting dizzy, watching her. “What will that accomplish?”

  “If I take your shoes, you can’t run. Hard to run without shoes. You’ll be stuck on board where the decks are smooth. So I won’t ever have to bother with chaining you to anything.” She nodded, satisfied. “I think that’ll work. Don’t you think that’ll work?”

  There were a few seconds of silence.

  “Don’t you?” she asked, crestfallen.

  “It’s a good plan,” I told her, as gently as I could. “It’s a very good plan.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “But?”

  I lifted a bare foot and wiggled my toes at her.

  “Oh cripes.” She sank down and raked her fingers through her hair.

  “It was a good plan,” I said, still trying to reassure her. “You’re getting better at this.”

  “You don’t wear shoes? Ever ever?”

  “Fishing village, remember? It’s not as if the nobles came through distributing footwear.”

  “Mpmph.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Well, don’t be embarrassed. You’ll think of something.”

  We lay alongside each other in the comfortable dark. There were sailors sleeping just a few feet away from us, on the other side of the cabin wall. Somehow, it was easy to forget about that. Somehow, I could believe that we were worlds away from the rest of the human race.

  Darren sighed, and then mumbled into her folded arms. “It’s not too late, you know. For you
to leave, I mean.”

  “Helpless prisoner. Helpless prisoner, captain. Do I have to explain all over again how this works?”

  “Give the bullshit a rest, just for a second. You know that I don’t have a hope in hell of surviving another six months.”

  “If you really believe that, then why are you doing this?”

  “Gods on high. Some days, I don’t even know anymore.”

  “Liar. You know perfectly well why.”

  Slowly, not making any sudden movements, I reached out and laid a hand between her shoulder blades. She twitched, but she didn’t flinch, so I rubbed her back gently, up and down, up and down.

  “Did you ever hear the story of the Clever Lass?” I asked, once her muscles loosened.

  “Yes. No. I don’t remember. What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a farmer’s daughter who attracts the attention of a wicked king. The wicked king, being wicked and all, sets her a bunch of impossible tasks. If she fails at any of the tasks, she has to marry him. If she performs them all, then she’s free.”

  “Hang on.” Darren lifted her head. “Isn’t it the other way around? If she performs all of the tasks, then she gets to marry the king?”

  “Hey, I’m telling this story. Besides, my way makes more sense. Who wants to marry someone who spends all their time thinking up impossible tasks? ‘Darling, will you pass me the toast?’ ‘Not until you solve the toast-passing puzzle, strumpet!’ No. That would not do.”

  “All right. Fair enough. How many impossible tasks are there?”

  In the version of the story I’d heard, it was seven, but that didn’t seem intense enough. “Sixty-three,” I improvised. “None of them gave her any trouble, though. Not until she came to the last one, which was the very worst.”

  “And what was that?”

  “It was this. The king told the Clever Lass that she had to come to his castle the next day. But she couldn’t come in the daytime, nor in the nighttime, and she couldn’t be walking, or riding, or driving in a wagon. She couldn’t be clothed and she couldn’t be naked, and she had to bring him a present which wasn’t a present.”

  “I don’t think I remember this part.”

  “You should. It’s the best part of all. The next day, at dawn, the Clever Lass strips down to her skin, and then she takes a fishing net and she wraps it around herself. She catches a bee and traps it between two plates. Then she gets a goat, and she puts her right leg on its back. And she goes up to the castle like that, hopping on one foot while the goat walks beside her. As soon as she gets into the king’s throne room, she lets the bee escape from between the plates. A present that isn’t a present, you see.”

  Darren turned her head towards me. “How the hell could a person even do that? Fishing net? Goat? Hopping? While juggling plates?”

  “I don’t know how she did it. Maybe she’d been practising for just such an occasion. Or maybe she had a natural talent when it came to shenanigans involving goats.”

  “Was there a point to all this?”

  “I just like that story. Does there have to be a point? All right. All right. I guess I’m just saying, impossible things aren’t impossible. They require some additional imagination, that’s all. And you have to accept the fact that you might end up looking like an idiot.”

  In the darkness, I heard her inhale. It was a deep, steadying breath, as though there were things she wanted to ask me, if she could only summon the courage. Instead, with a sudden jerk, she rolled over, ending the conversation. “We have to be back on deck in four hours. You think you can keep it down and let me sleep?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out together.”

  “Just shut up, Lynn.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  “Stop that.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or . . . oh, just shut up.”

  “Of course, Mistress.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  WE REACHED ISLA the next morning.

  If I have a special talent, it’s this: I can sense trouble. I might not be good at getting out of the way once I’ve sensed it, but at least I know that it’s coming. And I knew, that day, what we were going to find. I knew it before the charred husks of huts showed up against the green of the horizon. I knew it before a thing that looked like a whale skeleton reared into view—the shattered bones of what once was a granary.

  I can tell you the way it looked; that’s easy. What I can’t really describe is the stench—choking, acrid, but with a horrible sort of sweetness. That’s what people smell like when they burn, and once you’ve smelt it, you don’t forget.

  The final touch was the dead seal that had washed up on the village beach. It slapped heavily on the damp sand as the tide rolled it a few inches forward, a few inches back. Gulls, tearing at the eyes, hopped daintily whenever the carcass moved beneath them.

  I stood with my elbows on the rail, chin resting on my cupped hands, contemplating the corpse of the village. Sometimes a dead town can be revived. Survivors straggle back, bury their families, replace the thatch of the huts, mend their nets, and get on with things. That wouldn’t happen for Isla. The massacre had been too systematic, the destruction too complete. No one would live in this boneyard again until a century’s worth of trees grew and fell and rotted to soil above it.

  Around me, the men were moving. Monmain and Kash, sombre as gravediggers, let the anchor chain rattle out, bringing the Badger to a halt in the calm water. Spinner tottered up from the hold with an armload of cutlasses and passed them around. Regon, who hated fighting, nevertheless shrugged his way into an ill-fitting sword belt, muttering as he cinched the leather tight around his middle.

  Darren had her back to all of this. She was by the rail, trying to lower the small boat, working both winches by herself and generally making a mess of it. I understood Darren too well, by then, to be confused about why she wasn’t asking for help. I could read it in her bent head and the tightness of her back muscles. She was trembling on the edge between screaming and bursting into tears. I shifted my weight, about to join her, but Teek and Regon got there first. They took over the lowering of the boat, and Darren moved a few steps away, staring out at the horizon as if she had caught sight of a particularly interesting cloud.

  Once the small boat hit the water, she was the first one down the ladder. The rest of the crew joined her, one by one. When Kash, the seventh, climbed in, his weight pushed the gunwale of the small boat almost level with the sea. Regon shook his head in warning at Spinner and me, the only ones left on deck, and pushed off from the Badger with his oar.

  Spinner and I exchanged glances.

  “Don’t tell me that they’re going to look for survivors,” I said. “Don’t tell me they think that there could be survivors.”

  He shrugged. “The captain’s like that. Don’t worry, it won’t take them long.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But we might as well keep busy.”

  I had stolen a set of bone dice from Darren the night before, and now I took them from my pocket. “Come on, have a seat. Do you know how to play koro? Never mind, I’ll teach you.”

  THE SMALL BOAT came clanking against the Badger’s side before we were done with our second round of koro. Spinner was quick on the uptake but he’d never played before, and my mind wasn’t on the game either.

  Darren practically rolled over the side, her chest heaving like she was a half-drowned swimmer. At some point, in her pain and rage, she had bitten her own arm, and a trickle of blood was making its way unhurriedly down from the puncture marks. She went straight for the tiller and gripped it with both hands. To try to stop herself from hitting something, I guessed.

  Without warning, she drove her own head against the wood, three times—crack, crack, crack.

  I started forward, unthinking, but Regon caught my elbow.

  “What happened?” I whispered fiercely. “I wasn’t going to let her go in the first place, but I thought she’d be all right with you.” />
  Regon gave his head a single, grim shake. “She was all right. Until we found the villagers.”

  “You found the villagers?”

  “They were in the well.”

  “They were in the . . . oh.”

  “The ones we pulled out of there, all their fingers were broken, so we figure they were thrown down alive. Drowned or suffocated while they were trying to get out.”