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  “. . . and pretend that you don’t care what happens next. Fooling no one, by the way.”

  I gave her my best frosty look. “Will you please come to bed? I’m starting to feel neglected.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” She eased up next to me. “What do you want me in the bed for? Are we sleeping, or are you doing unspeakable things to me?”

  Good question. “It would be nice if we could combine the two. Fact is, I’m exhausted. I don’t know if I could manage any unspeakable things. Maybe something mildly impolite, if I exerted myself.”

  “We’ll save the ravishing for another time, then. For now—roll over onto your stomach, Mistress.”

  I did, with a shiver of pleasurable anticipation. Then gasped, as fingertips began to probe into the exact parts of my back where they could accomplish the most. Lynn knew all my muscles and nerves the way a minstrel knows the strings of his lute, and with effortless strokes, she began to take me apart and put me back together again. It was the extraordinarily good kind of pain, and it made me realize that I wasn’t nearly as exhausted as I had believed.

  “That offer of unspeakable things,” I murmured into the blanket. “Is that off the table?”

  “Oh, Mistress.” I couldn’t see her smile, but I could hear it. “As if I could stop you from taking what you want from me.”

  Why do words like that make my blood run twice as hot? Why do they make my heart skip three beats, and then start to pound harder than ever? Why do they send electricity crackling through my veins, as power surges into my every muscle? I don’t know. But they do, every time.

  It was wrong, I knew, with everything that had happened that day, but for once, I didn’t care. I pulled Lynn down and flipped my body on top of hers, pinning her with my full weight. As my hands closed around Lynn’s wrists and guided them up over her head, the last thing on my mind was apologising for the way I was feeling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lynn

  DARREN WAS YAWNING when we went up on deck the next morning, and Regon smiled tolerantly as he fell into step beside us. “No need to ask what you were doing last night.”

  On an ordinary day, Darren might have blushed at that. But I had put in some good hard work on her the night before—and a little bit in the morning, as well—and that had done wonders for her ego. Instead of stammering out something like an apology to her first mate, Darren gave him a dirty look. “I was saving the country, as usual.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Right. Well, captain, I’ll give you this. You two are surprisingly quiet when you’re saving the country. I didn’t even hear any squeaking.”

  Darren jerked a thumb at me. “Lynn’s a pillow-biter.”

  “Captain, you don’t have a pillow.”

  “No, but I have an arm.” Darren pushed up her sleeve, exposing a row of teeth marks. “Same theory.”

  Then her tone turned businesslike. “Where’s my brother?”

  Alek’s body lay on the quarterdeck, wrapped in clean white canvas. Ariadne and I had done a quick amateurish embalming job the day before, cutting out the bits that would start rotting first and packing the gaps with coarse salt. With luck, the body would be more or less intact when it arrived at Torasan Isle after its three-day journey, but it was not going to look very pretty.

  It would have been smarter and easier to wrap the body in a hammock, tie a good-sized rock to the feet and tip it overboard. Nobody had mentioned that option. Nobles get buried on land, in their family tombs, so that they can mingle with their own kind in the hereafter. I might have tried to persuade Darren to break with tradition, if it hadn’t been for one thing: Spinner would be buried at sea when his own time came, and Alek didn’t deserve to share the water with him.

  Darren knelt over the corpse, and she stayed there for an awfully long time. I didn’t know what she was doing—praying, maybe—but Regon and I stood well back to give her space.

  It was one of those blinding blue mornings that you sometimes get down south, though the pale sun didn’t have any heat in it. I hadn’t slept much, so I felt glassy and not-quite-there as I massaged a sore spot on my shoulder. Darren wasn’t the only one who got bitten when the two of us were fooling around. She was the only one who complained about it, that was all.

  Without warning, Regon spat over the rail. His saddle-brown face was flushed with anger, which almost never happened. Regon was so even-tempered that he wouldn’t cuss you out even if you stole his last clean shirt. (I did that, a couple of times.)

  “Out with it,” I said. “Come on.”

  Regon stared at Alek’s corpse, disgust thick on his face. “The captain hasn’t forgotten what that son of a whore did to Spinner, has she?”

  Ah. That made sense. Regon was a gentle person, but he had his limits, and when people messed with Spinner, the top just about blew off of his head.

  “She hasn’t forgotten,” I said. “But you have to understand. It’s not Alek she’s mourning—it’s her childhood. It’s a long hall that smells of milk, and a washbasin of pink marble, and ghost stories at night, and everything else that she’s lost. Besides—Alek was her brother, even if he was a thug, and he was murdered.”

  He snorted. “The captain murdered your father, and you didn’t go all gooey.”

  “Well, no, but I’m very special and magnificent.”

  I scanned the deck. “Where’s Spinner? It’s not his watch below, is it?”

  “I sent him down. If the captain’s going to blubber over that stinking dog, Spinner doesn’t need to see it.” He spat a second time, hard and with feeling. “I can’t bear this, Lynn. I’m going below. If the captain asks—”

  “If the captain asks where you are, I’ll tell her that you ate some bad fish and are puking with mighty abandon.” I waved a hand. “Go.”

  He didn’t answer—just stomped down the steps to the hold, arms rigid at his sides.

  I watched him leave, brain buzzing. There was a sweetness in Regon’s protectiveness towards Spinner—always had been—and it was tempting to think that the sweetness could become something more. But I knew better. Regon liked the ladies, and Spinner, like me, was too practical to spend his life pining after impossible things.

  Still. Regon was too good a man to waste. Maybe I should throw him at Ariadne after all, if she and Latoya couldn’t work things out. Regon liked breasts, Ariadne had two of them—relationships have been built on less.

  Darren straightened up, rubbing her eyes with one sleeve, and snapped her fingers blindly in my general direction. Obediently, I trotted up to the quarterdeck. “Mistress?”

  “Signal to Flint,” she said, naming the captain of the Sod Off. The harshness of her voice almost concealed the fact that she was close to tears, but not quite. “I’m ready for them to come and take Alek.”

  “I’ll signal,” I said, and waited for more.

  She sniffed and groped for her handkerchief. “That letter I wrote to my father—it’s pretty terse. Maybe I should add another page.”

  “You shouldn’t. Not unless you’re going to write BUGGER OFF over and over and over, and then wrap the paper around a dead fish. And that’s not your style. Anything else?”

  “I’m thinking of lending Flint some of our men.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s going to have to give my father bad news. If worst comes to worst, he ought to be able to defend himself.”

  “Flint will only have the one ship. If worst comes to worst, he won’t be able to defend himself no matter how many men you lend him.”

  “Still,” Darren said doggedly. “He’ll be a little safer if we beef up his crew.”

  He’d be a lot safer if Darren didn’t send him off on corpse delivery detail in the first place. Sometimes, though, Darren got so stuck on something that even I couldn’t change her mind.

  “Flint’s no fool,” I said. “Give him space and let him work. It won’t help if you clutter up the Sod Off with a bunch of spare sailors he doesn’t even know.”r />
  “Maybe,” she admitted grudgingly. “I know what, though. I’ll lend him—”

  “You’re not lending him Latoya.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we run crying to her every time we have a problem, and it’s messing with her love life, and I’m starting to feel a little bad about that. No. You’re not lending him Latoya. I’m going to make sure she gets a few days off, even if it kills me.”

  “What if it kills Flint? I know I’ve been relying on Latoya too much, I’ll make it up to her, but I need her now. I can’t send a ship to Torasan Isle unless it’s equipped to deal with a little rough-and-tumble and she’s the best bruiser we have. She’s going.”

  “But—”

  “End of story. My decision. Me am boss.”

  She said this in her gruffest, sternest, most piratical voice, the one she used when she was explaining to callow young recruits that they would jump when she hollered or by god she’d know the reason why. I wasn’t a callow young recruit and it took more than a few gruff words to make me hop, but still I sighed, and surrendered.

  “All right, Darren,” I said.

  Darren, I said, not Mistress, and that was so she would know why I was giving in. Not because she was the pirate queen, not because she was the senior partner, not because she was being an ass and throwing her weight around—but because her brother had died the day before. Also, I could tell from the tightness along her jaw and cheek that she had a headache. Again.

  Piracy has its points, but it’s bad for your health.

  “All right,” I repeated, more softly. “I’ll tell Latoya and see that she gets to the Sod Off.”

  Darren nodded, but she looked apologetic, now that she had won. “Your sister is going to kill me, isn’t she?”

  NOT QUITE, BUT it was a near thing. Ariadne went chalk white when she heard the news, except for two brilliant red splodges on her neck.

  “You want Latoya to go where?” she asked, in a voice like thorns and razors.

  Darren still looked sheepish. “I just want—”

  “You. Just. Want. Darren, for the love of sainted trout! When your father finds out that Alek was murdered, he’s going to take a swing at everyone in reach. Isn’t he? Isn’t he?”

  “But that’s why—”

  “That’s why you want my woman to be within swinging distance? I know you’re jealous of her good looks, but that’s still mighty cold.”

  “Ariadne.”

  “Don’t you ‘Ariadne’ me!” My sister puffed out an angry breath of air. “You listen here, pirate queen. Everyone else seems to be tiptoeing around this, so I’ll give it to you straight. Your brother was a brutal dipshit. We’re all happy he’s dead. He’s not worth mourning. And you have no right to send Latoya into danger, just so that you can feel better about the whole thing. He’s dead. Throw his body over the side, get drunk, write a sad poem and move the hell on.”

  Darren had been standing in a hangdog kind of posture, shoulders slumped. But now she drew herself up to her full height, and lifted her chin. It wasn’t a fighting stance. This was how an aristocrat looked when she had suffered a terrible insult.

  In the chilliest of tones, she said, “Lady, you forget yourself.”

  “Oh, do I?” Ariadne snapped back. Almost unconsciously, she too drew herself upwards, mirroring Darren’s pose. “Let me remind you of something, so there won’t be any confusion: You’re not my mistress, and you’re not my queen.”

  “You are on my ship. You stay on my ship, you submit to my authority.”

  “I’m on your ship so I can be with my sister. That’s all. You have no authority over me. You never did. You never will. Stop pretending otherwise or you’ll only embarrass yourself.”

  Both their faces had frozen into stiff, haughty masks, with their eyes narrowed and their lips curled as though there was a bad smell in the room. (Which I suppose there was, but if you live on board a ship, you have to learn to get used to that sort of thing.) I don’t think either of them knew how ridiculous they looked, nor would it have done any good if I’d told them. They were, both of them, obeying the call of something deeper, impulses ingrained in them before they’d even learned to walk.

  Almost unconsciously, I exchanged a glance with Latoya, who was silently stuffing her kitbag. We both rolled our eyes.

  “I don’t have any authority, do I?” Darren asked. “So I suppose you’ll be taking over as captain in the future?”

  “Why not?” Ariadne asked tartly. “I know how to stomp around the deck, drink too much, and cuddle with Lynn. Those seem to be the main job requirements.”

  “Splendid. Then I can take over your responsibilities. What were they again? Eating, sleeping, whining, and sarcasm?”

  This was stupid and would only get stupider. I jerked my head towards the companionway, Latoya nodded, and we both climbed from the forecastle.

  Once we were out on deck, with the gull cries drowning out the argument, I asked, “Would you rather not go?”

  She shrugged as she tied her kitbag shut. “Captain wants me to go.”

  “Give me a couple of hours alone with her, and the captain won’t remember what she wanted you to do. Or what year it is. Or what her name is. Or what anyone else’s name is. Or whether she has feet.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t ask. And I wouldn’t exactly be suffering during the operation.”

  She slung her kitbag over her shoulder. “There’s no need. But walk with me.”

  She headed for the longboats at the ship’s stern, with a quick, swinging stride that forced me to trot to keep up.

  “Hang on,” I said. “You’re not going to leave without speaking to my sister, are you?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “I hate that plan.” I got in front of her and walked backwards so I could keep her face in view. “That plan is crap. Come on. Say something to her. It doesn’t have to be well thought out. Start with one syllable and go from there.”

  Latoya shrugged. “I’ve never been much for goodbyes. Besides. I don’t know what to say to her when she’s like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know what. When she’s a lady.” Latoya shot me a quick, searching look. “She’s not like you, your sister.”

  “No,” I agreed, without needing to think about it. “You’re lucky. She’s the nice one.”

  “Maybe. But you’re the adult. Ariadne—she has some growing up to do. Doesn’t even know who she is yet. It’ll be good for her to have some space to do her thinking.”

  Latoya slung her kitbag into a longboat and fiddled with the oars. Without any change of tone, she asked, “Why is she pulling away from me?”

  This was getting dangerous. “I’m not the one you should ask.”

  “I know. Asking anyway. As a favour to me, Lynn—please.”

  It was hard to ignore that appeal, considering how many times Latoya had saved Darren’s life. (Seventeen, if you count the time when she explained to Darren that you shouldn’t eat dragon fish even if you’re sure that you didn’t puncture the poison bladder. And I do count that.)

  “I’d just be guessing . . .”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But . . . you might be too whole for her.”

  Latoya raised an eyebrow. I grimaced and stared down at her hands—brown hands roughened with callous and criss-crossed with scars. Those hands, with equal ease, could break a man’s neck or carve an apple into a swan, make a rope fast or calm a frightened horse.

  “Like I said, it’s just a guess,” I said. “But Ariadne finds things easiest to love when they’re half-broken. When she was a child, she could have spent all her time sitting on satin pillows and playing koro with dice made of diamonds, but she wasn’t interested. Her favourite things were dolls without heads, and three-legged cats, and mangy horses . . .”

  I faltered, but Latoya understood, and finished the thought. “And you.”

  “And me
. Granted, I’ve caused a lot more trouble for her than any of those three-legged cats did. Well, except for Marvin. He was a bad cat, Marvin was. But it’s the same kind of idea. She likes to be needed. She needs it.”

  “So you think I’m not broken enough to keep her happy.”

  “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”