Shell Game Read online

  “And you let her see?”

  “Couldn’t stop her. It broke her, though. All at once, she just hit bottom. I don’t know if anything can bring her out of it. Apart from a damn good bollocking.”

  Darren was still folded over the tiller, her whole torso wrenching in silent sobs—or maybe she was just gagging.

  “Well, then,” I said, “a bollocking she shall have. See if you can keep the others out of the way.”

  I GOT HER down to our cabin. It helped that she wasn’t really paying attention to anything, just staggering in a red mist. Once we were down there, I propped her up against a stack of crates and tried to start the conversation. “So, Mistress—”

  All at once, she came to life. “Shut up.”

  “Not one of our more successful missions—”

  “—shut up,” she went on without pause, “shut up, don’t say anything, don’t say one goddamn word, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit—”

  “I will not shut up,” I informed her. “See, you need to hear this and apparently no one else dares to say anything. You are doing this wrong.”

  “I know I’m doing this wrong!” Darren roared. “There’s a well full of broken people back there because I’m doing it wrong!”

  “You weren’t there. You couldn’t save them, because you weren’t there. And right this very minute, someone else is being killed because you aren’t there, and every minute for the rest of your life, guess what? There will be someone else, somewhere, being killed, that you can’t save, because you won’t be there. And that’s never, ever, ever going to change. Can you cope with that or not? Because, if you can’t, you won’t stay sane.” I drew in a fast breath, bracing myself. “That’s why Jess is still angry.”

  “Do not say that name.”

  “Jess understands why you left, Darren, she does. Everyone who knows you that well and loves you that much understands. Jess knows that you’re too damn noble to let people hurt when there’s something you can do to prevent it. Jess knows that you can’t sit safe in the valley, surrounded by peace and happiness and crocks of honey, while your own country burns. If you hadn’t left, the guilt would have eaten you from the inside out.”

  Darren’s fist crashed into the wall, and then she winced and cradled her hand. I let her take a second before I went on.

  “Jess understands. She does, Darren. So does Regon. So do I. So does everyone. You couldn’t have made a different choice and continued to be yourself. You had to come back to Kila.” I paused. “You really did a number on that fist, didn’t you? Give it here.”

  Darren must have been dazed; she let me take her hand and inspect the shreds of skin dangling from her raw, bloody knuckles. I clucked impatiently, found a handkerchief and wrapped it.

  “But here’s the thing, Darren,” I continued. “Jess understands why you can’t spend your life with her. But she is royally, mortally pissed that you are just going to throw that life away.”

  Mechanically, Darren pulled her hand away from me. “I’m not—”

  “You are, Darren. Never mind the fact that you throw yourself into every suicidal situation you can find. You won’t even give yourself permission to live. No matter what you do, who you help, you twist yourself in knots—you hurt yourself, Darren—thinking of the people you didn’t help.”

  “I never do enough,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, from a throat scraped raw. “It’s never enough . . .”

  “You cannot save all of Kila by yourself.”

  “After everything I’ve been given, it’s my damn responsibility to—”

  “You cannot save all of Kila by yourself!”Now I was screeching. “You stupid, beautiful, heroic, sulky, overgrown child, you cannot!”

  I broke off, my chest heaving, and rubbed my face with the sleeve of the linen shirt that used to belong to Holly. Darren’s eyes were wide and baffled. From the deck, there was total quiet, where there should have been creaking and grunting and swearing and the bark of orders, and I wondered how many of the men were listening in.

  Once I’d caught my breath, I went on. “You do as much as you can with the tools you have. If you want to do more, you have to be more.”

  “Be what?” she said, sarcastic and kind of rude. “A pirate queen?”

  “Sure,” I said steadily. “You could do that, you know. You could capture other ships, larger ships, warships, and build a fleet. Recruit renegade sailors to defend you as you go about your good works. Loot the flotillas of rich merchants to provide for the poor. You’d end up in some morally suspect situations, no question, but you could also help more people. You might even help end the war. Or you can just keep pottering around in the Badger, with men you know and trust, helping out here and there. It’s up to you, but whatever your decision, don’t beat yourself over the head with it. You don’t have to take the world on your shoulders, just because you’re a noble.”

  It actually seemed to be sinking in. She let out a long sigh, and I suspect that a few unhelpful thoughts and emotions went out with it. Her eyes closed, and her face became almost mild. And I felt my guard slipping. That was a mistake.

  “What did you do while we were gone?” she asked, as if she was changing the subject.

  “Nothing really. Spinner and I played a game.”

  “I saw the dice. Knucklebones?”

  “No. Koro.”

  “You can play koro,” she said.

  “Of course I can play—” I began without thinking. Then I stopped. The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  Shit.

  Darren’s eyes were open just a slit. “You can play koro, the Game of Kings. And you can read, and write. Well enough to spell Badger, at least. And you don’t mix up your pronouns and you don’t swear every time you open your mouth. You’re awfully well-educated, Lynn. At least for a peasant girl who grew up in a fishing village in the middle of nowhere. There are things that you’re not telling me.”

  A million panicked voices were yammering away inside my skull. I had only moments to think of a distraction, and the one that I came up with probably wasn’t my best ever.

  “Hey, look,” I blurted, pointing behind her. “Pie!”

  Dead silence.

  Well, that didn’t work.

  “Really, there are all kinds of possible explanations,” I said, talking a little too fast. “Maybe I’m not a peasant at all, did you ever think of that? Maybe I was born to a rich merchant family in Kafiru and was educated along with a nobleman’s daughter. Maybe the civil war started when I was thirteen and my parents smuggled me out to a distant village in the care of a faithful retainer. Maybe the faithful retainer eloped with a fisherman’s wife of loose morals and took all the money and abandoned me there.”

  Darren was inspecting my face as though there was writing there that she had to decipher, one word at a time.

  “Maybe I’m just a really smart peasant,” I concluded. “You don’t know.”

  “You are . . .” Darren started in wonder, and then shook her head and started again. “You are a very strange little person, do you know that, Lynn?”

  I shrugged. “But you wouldn’t have it any other way, right?”

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Darren said slowly. “But I don’t hate it. I definitely don’t hate it.”

  If you considered the words alone, it was a lukewarm invitation at best. But, as always, with Darren, the trick was to figure out what she wasn’t saying.

  Without giving myself the time to think about it, I closed the distance between us. She only took one step back, probably because that step took her up against the cabin wall. But the panic on her face seemed like the good sort. I assume you know what I mean when I talk about the good sort of total, mindless fear.

  “Lynn,” she said softly. “Are you—”

  Are you sure? Are you serious? Are you really about to do this? No matter.

  “Yes, yes, yes I am,” I answered, slipping my hands into her trouser pockets. “The question is, are you?”
<
br />   She blinked.

  She licked her lips.

  She didn’t move.

  That was enough of an answer.

  This would have been a much better distraction, I realized, belatedly, once my lips were on hers. But I only dwelt on it for a moment, since other matters now required my full attention.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AS YOU CAN imagine, I overslept the next morning. When I first woke, the hold was hot and damp rather than cool and damp and I judged that it was about noon. The blankets beside me were empty, but the depression where Darren had rested was still warm to the touch. She had left the bed not very long ago. I grinned into the blankets, turned over, and went to sleep again.

  This time, my sleep wasn’t nearly as pleasant. There were strange sharp-edged dreams that rattled back and forth in my brain, pictures that didn’t attach to each other—bitter-green fish with teeth like icicles, men with rats instead of hands. The visions all blended and fell, blended and fell, rolled over me in a great crushing wave, and I was left somewhere dark and airless, with one thing, one thought thudding at my mind like the beat of a drum: They will find you, they will get you back, they will find you, they will get you back . . .

  The heat was more oppressive, now. The heat was terrible.

  “Leave me alone,” I could hear myself saying, “damn your blood, can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Wake up. There’s no time.”

  My eyes snapped open. Darren was a blur of furious motion around the cabin, snatching up her cutlass, sheathing a long dagger in each boot. Each motion quick and precise, never a fumble. You might think it strange that she wasn’t afraid, but there’s always an air of unreality right before violence erupts. That five minutes before a battle are like the five seconds after you fall out of a boat, when you feel like you might just be able to walk on water.

  As soon as she saw me looking, her hand flew to a pocket and came out with the key to my leg chain. She threw it down beside me and it bounced three times against the boards, tink, tink, tink.

  “Get loose,” she tossed at me as she raced for the stairs. “Hurry up.”

  Still half-asleep, I sat upright, groping for the key. I wanted to refuse, yell at Darren, demand an explanation, but then there came a roaring in my ears, as though I had suddenly recovered from deafness, and a wave of sounds crashed at me.

  That hollow booming from the curved side of the ship . . . that was another ship alongside, bashing against us with every swell in the waves. There were creaks and howls as the men from that ship poured onto ours, battle roars, the shring of cutlasses, and then a thud I could feel through the planks, as a body hit the deck hard. All of a sudden, I was wide awake, and all of a sudden too, Darren’s suggestion didn’t seem so completely ridiculous. I knelt down and fumbled with the chain on my ankle, but my hands were sweating and the key slipped from my grasp. I scrabbled on the bare planks, felt metal, but, the next second, felt it slipping sideways into a crack between two planks . . . and under my searching fingertips, it fell all the way through.

  The key was gone. Unbelieving, I rattled the manacle on my ankle. It held firm, of course. I wouldn’t have settled for anything less. I scooted along the length of the chain and yanked at the end where it was bolted to a deck support. Regon had promised me that it wouldn’t come loose. Unfortunately, he was right.

  I was beginning to wonder whether perhaps I had been a little bit stupid when a body came crashing down the stairs from the deck, landed heavily on its side, rolled twice and lay still.

  It was Darren. There were two bloody slashes on her that I could see, one along the ribs and one on her shoulder, plus the bruises and scrapes from her trip down the stairs, and a swelling, gory lump on her right temple. But there was a quivering beneath her eyelids. She wasn’t gone yet.

  Yet. Yet. Shadows at the companionway paused, looking down at Darren’s body, and then moved out of sight. The battle was still crashing away overhead, and whoever our attackers were, they had decided that they could deal with Darren after they brought down the rest of the crew. That gave me time. Perhaps five minutes. Five minutes to figure out how to save Darren when I was unarmed, chained to the deck, and half the size and weight of any of our attackers.

  Blankly, I stared at the floor. There were footprints on it, Darren’s footprints. The waves must have been high that day, wetting the decks up top, because, when she rushed around the cabin getting her weapons a bare quarter-hour before, she had left footprint-shaped puddles of seawater. A quarter-hour before, Darren had been upright and walking; now she was prone on the boards. In all likelihood, someone would tramp down in five minutes and casually stab her where she lay.

  Those two pictures placed beside each other—Darren whole and walking, Darren prone and bleeding—nearly made me scream at the top of my lungs.

  Yet it was those patches of sea water that gave me the idea.

  It was absolutely and without question the stupidest idea I had ever had, and six months before, I would never have considered doing such a thing. Not to save my life. But this was Darren’s life . . . and that, somehow, was different. I don’t think I hesitated more than ten seconds.

  I reached out and moistened my fingers in one of the salty puddles, then brought them to my face and scrubbed my eyes. Within a few seconds, my eyes were stinging viciously and though I couldn’t check on the effect, I was sure that they were red and swollen. Next, I had to do something about my clothes, and as I tried to tear the sturdy cloth, I muttered curses that Holly’s cast-offs were so well-made. It was taking too long, so I just ripped out the laces of the shirt, so too much skin showed.

  Now, injuries. Here again, I didn’t pause to think. I dragged three fingernails along the length of my face, from forehead to chin, leaving open scratches that were soon beaded by tiny drops of blood. I bit my shoulder close to the breast, not quite hard enough to break the skin, but the tooth marks looked deep and convincing.

  I wanted to try for finger-shaped bruises on one wrist, but now the clamour on deck had quieted. There were shouts, some laughing voices, but none I knew and I wondered briefly how many of Darren’s crew had died . . . but now footsteps were approaching the companionway again. No time for more artistic touches.

  I was tearing up already, but just in case, I dipped my fingers in the brine again, and flecked a few drops on my cheeks, just below my eyes. Then I huddled on the boards, my arms crossed protectively over my stomach, and lay like a dead thing.

  IT TOOK SUPREME effort not to look up as whoever-it-was tromped down the steps to the hold, but I managed it.

  “She’s still out,” a man said.

  “From that little tap?” a woman responded. “She always was a wimp.”

  The woman’s accent was refined, cultured, with long drawling vowels. This was another noblewoman, then, the captain of the attacking ship.

  “Want to wait for her to wake up before you finish it?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  There was a creaking step as one of them moved forwards. That was my cue. I let out a choking, terrified sob.

  I wasn’t prepared for how fast the woman moved. Half a second later, she was at the cabin doorway, bloody cutlass upraised. My panic wasn’t all an act as I scrambled backwards, away from her, as far as the chain would allow; cowered against the side of the boat, and peeped at her from behind my fingers. She assessed me, and the tip of the cutlass lowered.

  “Darren’s got an on-board whore?” she asked lightly. “My, my, she has grown up.”

  I wet my lips before stammering out, “Is she dead?”

  The other woman glanced over her shoulder. “Nearly. Oh, by the way—”

  One second, she was nowhere near me; then her fist came out of nowhere, delivering a vicious cuff to the side of my head, and the pain was like red-hot pincers. My hand flew to my ear, cradling it, as her face loomed over me. “I am the Lady Mara, of the house of Namor. Don’t let the formalities slide, just beca
use we’re on a boat.”

  The circumstances didn’t bode well for my relationship with Mara of Namor in any case, but I think that I would have hated her—instinctively, immediately—if we had met in any other place and at any other time. It was the voice, the spoiled sweetness of it. That, and something about the eyes.

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” I said automatically. My teeth were chattering, in spite of the heat. “But—please—my lady, are any of her sailors dead?”

  There was a flicker of interest in those eyes now. “Just one, unfortunately. The big one with ears like a monkey.”

  Oh, Kash. I didn’t let myself show any sign of shock or grief as Mara continued to speak.