“You’re a lucky stupid thing,” she said to him. “That you’re thin as a skeleton, and that you’ve got me for a sister.”
Alfie twitched in her grasp but managed to find his feet beneath him. He laughed, but it was a distant sound, more like the memory of a laugh than a real one.
“Fish with legs,” he said. “Crawling onto the shore.”
“Sure. Let’s get you home.” Her voice was much softer than she might have liked.
As they drew close to the Dove, Alfie insisted on walking of his own accord. His legs were shaky, but he pushed her and her help away.
“Oh, save it,” Alfie groaned. “Don’t let them see you.” His voice trailed off, but Flora knew what he hadn’t said: Don’t let them see you being a girl.
The men of the Dove knew she was a girl. Or had been one. But after the captain had ordered her to kill — and she had, unflinchingly — she had earned the respect to be something better than a girl. Something safe. From then on, the crew had only ever called her Florian. It was the name that Rake had given her. It was the name of a murderer. It was the name of a survivor. It was a spell that allowed her to blend in with the crew.
Florian was the captain’s man now, everyone knew. And so grudgingly, she’d been granted respect.
“I’ve got no love for you anyway,” she shot back. And Alfie’s laugh transformed into a retch as his body rejected the black blood he’d paid so dearly for all over the ground.
The question of how much he’d spent dogged her. They always talked about going to Tustwe, about leaving the Dove. Just one more voyage, he’d say. There was always one more.
She may as well square herself with it. With the Dove and her horrible purpose. With the life she couldn’t escape, the brother she loved and hated.
She deposited Alfie in his hammock, and he groaned with relief.
“Just you and me, Florian,” he said. “Just us against the world.” His voice was hoarse from vomiting.
Beneath the hammock, Flora pulled out their rucksack. In it was a silver dagger, a woven bracelet from Tustwe, and the leather sack they kept their wages in. Years of wages she’d saved. She knew right away, could tell from its weight and the obvious lack of dimension, but she still opened it to be sure.
It was empty.
It smelled of rot on the Dove, of decay and mold. But it was home.
At least the Dove did not look like a pirate ship, or even a merchant ship. Rather, she looked and felt like a fine passenger vessel, with a vast set of upper decks that befit the wealthy people suckered into paying for passage aboard her.
As Alfie slept off the last clutches of the mermaid’s blood, Flora set about her duties to prepare the Dove for voyage. She wasn’t sure how many voyages of this manner she’d taken with the Dove, but this one felt different.
This was probably because it’d be their first time abducting Imperials. From the heart of Nipran.
There was no looking away from what they did — the crew of the Dove hoodwinked people into paying for safe passage, then instead sold them into slavery. And as hard as Flora’s life in Crandon had been, it was not, she knew, enslavement. That institution was illegal in the Empire — supposedly, though she had seen her fair share of enslaved people in the colonies — but it was fully and actually barred in Tustwe. Not that she’d ever live there now.
While the captain took a great many precautions — he hit new ports each time with his con and did not force the passengers belowdecks until they were far enough from their homeland to preclude any possibility of escape — coming to the Nipran shore, to Crandon itself, not even a day’s walk from the Emperor’s palace? It seemed like madness.
Despite Flora’s small frame, her body was wiry with taut muscle after all her time aboard the Dove. It had taken many trips with the crew taunting and teasing her before she’d built the strength to see to tasks like hauling barrels of seawater from the gunwales to the stores on her own. If they were attacked, if the Emperor’s fleets found them, these stores would put out the fires that would follow. The stores of water did little to salve her fear, but they were something.
And wasn’t it better to do something?
To keep busy?
As she worked, she sang the only song she knew. It was an anthem for pirates, if drinking songs could be anthems. Flora was no great singer, but now in her solitude, she carried the tune quietly:
Mermaid caught
Returned to Sea
By witch taught
To be free
Two souls bound
By love, by knife
True love found
Restored to life
Two souls fight
For love, to be
True love’s might
To save the Sea
“That’s a good man.” Rake’s face was split into an uncharacteristic shape. Was that a smile?
He wasn’t as big as the captain, not as tall. But the men feared him more. He was tightly wound, always ready. She’d seen him slit more throats than she could count, and not always those of prisoners. He was the hammer the captain brought down. “Just in case, sir,” said Flora.
Rake made her nervous. Always had. Not just in the way he frightened the whole crew, but also because she desperately, deeply, wanted to please him. She had not known her father. But she liked to think he might have been something like Rake.
“I know, Florian. And that’s a good song for the work.” The name rang like a bell. Flora smiled. It was magic, the name, a spell that kept her safe. And when Rake used it, it sent a shiver of something rare through her.
Pride.
Florian was never a better man than he was in Rake’s regard.
“You ever hear the one about the Pirate Supreme and the Emperor’s crown?” Rake asked.
“No.” This was a lie. Of course she had heard it. All pirates had. But she loved stories. And she wanted so badly to hear Rake tell it. He motioned for Flora to sit, which she did, ignoring the wet of the barrel through the seat of her pants. It was not every day the first mate offered to tell a crewman a story.
Nor did any prudent sailor speak too highly of the Pirate Supreme in the captain’s presence, or even aboard the captain’s ship.
The Pirate Supreme may have been the undisputed lord of pirates, but the captain was the captain. He paid his tithes. But the word was that the Pirate Supreme had gotten word of the captain’s misdeeds and was angry. That the wrath of the Pirate Supreme would soon find the Nameless Captain. The Supreme had operatives, men and women with secret identities who did the royal bidding. The captain had ordered the deaths of more than one man under the suspicion that they were operatives.
This was likely because the captain regularly broke the Supreme’s only and most sacred law: never drink the blood of a mermaid.
And now Alfie had broken it, too.
They said the Pirate Supreme and the Supreme’s operatives found those who broke the sacred law and saw them dead. There was a time that Flora wished that were true. That justice might even find her captain. But she’d stopped believing in justice years ago.
“When the Emperor’s eldest son was to wed, they say the Pirate Supreme came to Crandon. They say this because all could see, even from the shore, the long shadow cast by the Leviathan.”
Just the sound of the ship’s name made Flora’s breath catch in her throat. The Leviathan. It was the Pirate Supreme’s ship — a gift, they said, from the Sea herself.