Amos shrieks with pain, but Milligan holds him still, grabbing the poker resting in the fire, and pressing it hard on the stump to cauterise it.
I can’t move, frozen in shock. There could be no better reminder of why I stopped coming here.
‘Go,’ Milligan says to Amos, ushering him out of the room. I suspect he’ll pass out the moment he returns to his bunk. If he makes it that far.
Now she turns her attention to me. Milligan’s face is sallow from lack of sunlight as she virtually never surfaces from her quarters, always preoccupied with some unpleasant experiment. She insists on drinking rum while she works, the smell of alcohol permanently heavy on her breath. Thankfully my injury means I can’t detect it today.
‘What is it you want?’
‘Something for my nose.’
Milligan grabs my chin, and turns my face one way, then the other, before she grunts. ‘Broken.’
‘Yes, I know.’
She spits on the floor. ‘Nothing to be done. Just wait for the swelling to go down.’
‘I’m not leaving until you give me something for the pain.’ She forgets I know her well. Her desire to have me gone will outweigh her indifference to helping me.
‘You know where the second-salve is,’ she says eventually. ‘Get it and get out.’
I do as I’m told, grabbing a pot of the ointment from one of the cluttered shelves and fleeing before she can change her mind.
Not wanting to be the subject of prying eyes, and sick to death of the suffocating four walls of my cabin, I make my way to a favourite hiding place down in the hold where the spare sails and rigging are kept. There is a nook between the beams just large enough for me to squeeze into and remain undiscovered.
Second-salve is made from extracts of the peculiar black brambles indigenous to the Second Isle, and when I rub some on my nose, cold instantly penetrates deep into my face, numbing the pain. I spread some over my burn as well. It’s heavenly. Relieved from my discomfort, I take a needle and thread from my pocket and set to work repairing the tear in my dress before it catches on something else.
It’s a shame Milligan is so utterly vile, because of all the people aboard the Maiden, she’s the one with the knowledge I crave. When I was younger and found my first injured bird on deck, I took it to my cabin and attempted to nurse it back to health. My ignorance killed it. But it awoke my desire to discover the secrets of the body, to heal, to save.
For several years I spent more hours than I care to remember alone with Milligan in her dank and foul quarters. To start with I worshipped her as she showed me how to mix tonics and remedies for various ailments, how combining silverbud and swampnettle aids healing or how blending earthenwort with ground mettleroot mends wounds. She’s nothing like the Mages of old, whose magic merely began with potions and then stretched without limit, but she knows enough of the alchemy to make decent medicine and I was quickly enchanted by the art.
But of course I learned the hard way that Milligan isn’t driven by a thirst to heal – all her skills exist to hurt. My lessons began to change from herbal remedies to basic anatomy – but these were practical lessons, not merely theory from books. Prisoners caught acting against the Eastern Isles, or crew who had misbehaved, were brought in for my studies. I remember those lessons with horrifying clarity, especially the ones when Milligan sought to teach me the fundamental pain points on a human being. She showed me how the simplest of things could undo a man – flaying the skin from the soles of his feet, for example. That produced a sound that haunted me for weeks.
She didn’t teach me any of this because it was necessary. She showed me to scare, to impress, but most of all – because she enjoyed it.
Soon after that I pretended to lose interest in her lessons. Milligan had succeeded in teaching me how stupid I was to believe a healer could be nurtured on a ship of killers. And more importantly, I realised that if my father discovered my fascination with how bodies work then he would force me to become Milligan’s successor. I’d rather be an honest assassin than have to torture anyone.
Since then I’ve had to make do with occasional explorations of dead birds or rats, but they haven’t taught me nearly enough, which is frustrating. I’ve learned no new potions, nothing of the alchemy that bewitched me most. And Milligan’s barely acknowledged my existence after what I think she perceived as my abandoning her – and she’s not someone you want as an enemy.
‘There are more comfortable places to be, you know.’
I hadn’t heard him approach and I jump, stabbing the needle straight into my finger. Filthy and glistening with sweat, Bronn’s clearly been hard at work repairing storm damage to the ship, his ripped shirt revealing glimpses of scars on his otherwise perfect body, and I’m suddenly absurdly self-conscious. My hair is a tangled mess and I’m about to flatten it when I realise his black mane is equally wild. I’m startled by a sudden urge to run my fingers through it. I shake the thought away, mortified at the desire stirring in the pit of my stomach. I search his face for any sign he feels as conflicted as I do, but his flint eyes betray no emotion. As always. Suddenly I want him to go away, resenting him for the way he makes me feel, hating him for discovering my secret sanctuary, but there is the small matter of his saving my life last night.
‘Listen, I should thank—’ I begin but he cuts across me.
‘The Captain sent for you.’
Of course he did. Why else would Bronn come looking for me?
My father is the last person I want to see today, not with the evidence of my disobedience all over my swollen face. And yet I can only think of one reason why I’m being summoned.
‘He heard about last night?’ Even as I ask I know the answer.
Bronn nods. ‘We shouldn’t keep him waiting.’
Like I don’t already know that. I climb out from my cosy hiding hole and together we make our way up. The ship is bustling with activity as the crew go about their duties, and I walk slightly ahead of Bronn, taking care not to get in anyone’s path, half hoping to lose Bronn in the crowd, hating being escorted by him as if I’m a prisoner.
Errant water seeped down to the gun deck last night during the storm, making the steps here slippery, and when several men rush past me, shoving me out of the way, I slide and lose my footing. I expect to fall, but before I can, hands slip round my waist, steadying me. On reflex I try to break free from Bronn, but the stairway is narrow and I only succeed in turning, forcing our bodies together, his chest pressed against mine so that I can feel his heart beating in time with my own, his breath warm on my forehead. He’s staring down at me with unnerving intensity and I lower my eyes, furious with my blushing cheeks and racing pulse.
Of all the ways Bronn could have saved me last night it had to be from drowning, didn’t it? The very reason I hate him so much.
Because ignoring me after his Initiation wasn’t enough for Bronn. It was as if the boy I knew disappeared the day he left to undertake the challenge, and in his place returned a cruel man who seemed to delight in causing me pain.
A man who one wet day shattered years of trust like a mallet on bone.
I had gone searching for him, tired of his silence, determined not to give up on him. On us. I’d found him on the quarterdeck, taking some shelter beneath the sails, gambling with a group of the crew, drinking rum as if it were water. I’d asked him if we could talk, and when he ignored me I’d tried to order him, unwisely attempting some sort of authority as the Captain’s daughter. The others had started to laugh, called Bronn my pet, said he’d better go when whistled for. I remember the look he had in his eyes; it was pure rage.