The Girl
Sebastian stepped out of Hilka’s room, and closed the door softly behind him so as not to wake her. His body felt pleasantly spent and heavy, and after a short sleep, his head was clear of all the mead he’d drunk. Even so, he had to pause a moment in the hallway to get his bearings. As sponsor of the voyage, Selena had paid for rooms for the crew of the Black Storm. Had they been anywhere besides the Ice Isles, Sebastian would have refused. The men would expect such luxuries forever after and that was unacceptable. But Nanokar was too bloody cold to allow his men to suffer frigid nights in hammocks on the ship, cradled in icy water. He had agreed to take rooms and Selena had paid for a rather extravagant one for him on the top floor of the White Sail that boasted views of the township and the bay in every direction. He found the staircase that led to the upper floors but didn’t take them.
The inn was quiet now. The notes of the bard’s ballad seemed to hang in the air, reverberating around the eaves, like echoes. Selena was sleeping in her room, Hilka in hers. The pleasant heaviness evaporated. Suddenly Sebastian wanted the solitude of his cabin aboard the Black Storm. Instead of going up, he went out.
The innkeepers’ living quarters were situated behind the common room. He took the hallway and slipped into the large room where the boisterous revelries had gentled down to snapping remnants of the dying fire and the snores of a half a dozen revelers who slept among their cups. Sebastian opened the front door and Grunt was there.
The old crewman made a sign and Sebastian shook his head. “Outside.”
They slipped onto the empty street. The township was small; he and Grunt stood just outside the light of a streetlamp, their breaths pluming like smoke.
“Helm and Cook are missing,” Grunt said.
“How do you know? Since when?”
“Since yesterday,” the old man replied, his voice rough with disuse. “Since you were at the library.”
“And you’re just now telling me?”
“I wanted to be certain they weren’t holed up in some tavern, drowned in rum.”
Sebastian frowned. “They’re not aboard the Storm?”
“I’ve looked all over. They’re not in their rooms here,” he inclined his head at the inn, “nor aboard. They’re gone.”
“This place is too small for them to disappear to if they’re deserting.”
Grunt nodded. “No ships have left port since we’ve been here. Only arrivals.”
“Stowing away then,” Sebastian said. “Or dead.”
The old man’s face looked a tad pale under his bushy beard and wind burnt skin. “I thought the same,” he said. “Should I put the word out to the whalers to look for stowaways?”
Sebastian wiped his hand over his mouth, thinking. He turned his gaze to the sea. The fires from the tryworks glowed like small islands of flame. “I aim to sail at dawn. That doesn’t—”
The stillness of the night was broken by the scuffling of feet, the creaking of a door, and a muffled scream. Sebastian detected every individual sound— and their direction—like a shark sniffing blood.
“The cask house,” he said. His long black coat whipped behind him as he ran. Grunt followed.
They slipped around the inn, keeping to the shadows until the cask house came into view. It was shrouded in night but for a soft glow of lantern light limning the doorframe. Behind the door, the scuffling continued followed by the distinct sound of a scream barricaded behind a hand. Sebastian made a motion to Grunt to wait, out of sight. The old man nodded and took to hand the club tucked in his belt.
The sounds behind the door demanded urgency but Sebastian moved cautiously. Dagger in hand, he pressed himself flat against the door and pushed it open in time to see a young boy with shocking orange hair gripped from behind by a man with a short black beard. A second man knelt on top of the table where Selena and Niven and ‘Julian Tergus’ had painted their faces just the morning before. The man twisted a knife into the boy’s mouth. Sebastian hesitated, shocked, as blood spurted. The kneeling man dropped the knife and reached his fingers past the boy’s lips, pulled out a hunk of flesh and slapped it onto the table. Sebastian tightened his grip on his dagger and started to push the door open and then his body seized up, every muscle rigid and unbending.
The boy was not a boy but a young woman. Sebastian saw the swell of her breast underneath her man’s shirt before she was pressed, gurgling and spitting blood, onto the table. The man who’d cut her tongue out slipped to the other side and took hold of the girl’s wrists, pulling her tight.
“You might dress like a boy,” said the bearded man behind the girl, tugging at her trousers, “but we don’t mind digging for treasure, do we, Pate?”
The other man, Pate, laughed, and yanked the girl taut across the table as she struggled and tried to scream through a mouth full of blood.
Sebastian’s hands shook and his throat constricted as like to strangle him. When the man had her trousers down revealing a glimpse of the girl’s thighs and naked backside, a red fog of rage descended, releasing him from the paralyzed shock that had gripped his body in a vise.
Mina…
The assassin burst through the door hard enough that it slammed back and busted a hinge. His long coat flapped behind him like black wings as he flew at the man who had the girl bent over.
His instincts screamed through the red haze. Without thinking, he ducked and felt the whoosh of air as a weapon—a plank of wood, maybe—passed overhead from his right. Sebastian’s dagger hand—also his right—shot out, found flesh, and jabbed in. The third man, a bulky figure who’d been hiding on the outskirts of the meager lantern light, made a sucking sound. A club of wood studded with nails dropped from his hands as he clutched the dagger buried in his gut. Sebastian let him keep the blade; his eyes were on the two men at the table.
The first rapist had turned to face the intruder, his face ashen and his mouth hung open in shock. One hand made a feeble try for the pistol on his belt but Sebastian was too fast. The assassin drove his knee into the man’s groin, spun him around, gripped his hair on either side of his head, and yanked left and then right. The snap of bone sounded twice, and the man dropped beside the girl who was cowering under the table. She’d tugged up her pants and sat on the ground staring wide-eyed at Sebastian and then at the corpse that slumped beside her.
Sebastian was on the table before the second man hit the ground. The last man—Pate—stared in dumb shock as the assassin used the table to propel himself over, descending like a bird of prey onto its catch.
Pate stumbled backwards. “Wait! Wait! Wait!”
Sebastian flew onto Pate, knocking him onto his back and slamming his head against the wood floor. The assassin straddled him and slammed his right fist through the man’s mouth. Teeth and blood flew, and a strangled cry tore from Pate’s throat. The left fist followed and Pate’s nose cracked beneath Sebastian’s knuckles and flattened across his grizzled cheek. Sebastian’s right fist came down again, then his left. Blood spurted up at Sebastian but he didn’t see it or the carnage he wrought. He saw the Zak’reth, bent over his sister. The man beneath him could no longer scream but Mina did, and Sebastian drove his fists down again and again until the only sound was his own breath, panting and snorting like a charging boar.
Hands grabbed Sebastian’s shoulders and hauled him off the corpse. He scrambled back on his hands like a crab, bleary and dizzy. Grunt stood over him, held his hand out, like a man warding off a wild animal. He made a slashing gesture with his club. Enough.
Sebastian stared at the old man, at the corpse, back to the old man. The room rematerialized around him, morphing from his sister’s home in the Farendus Isles back to the cask house on Isle Nanokar. His arms and shoulders and knuckles each began to glow with pain, but a woman’s soft whimpering cut through it all.
“Where…?” Sebastian croaked, struggling to his feet.
Grunt grunted, and pointed with his bloody club to the where the girl sat near the table, legs drawn up to her blood-splattered chin. She hugged herself, mangled noises erupting now and then from behind her closed mouth. She wore sailor’s gloves and above them, her wrists were bruised with Pate’s fingerprints. Her gaze swept along the cask house, to what was left of Pate’s face; to her attacker whose neck bones bulged obscenely; to the first man who had tried to ambush Sebastian from the shadows. He was still alive, wheezing and burbling blood out of his mouth.
The girl’s petrified stare found Sebastian and she cowered when he stood over her. Without a word, he swooped down and picked her up, cradling her small form with ease. She loosed a muffled squeal but did not struggle.
“Selena,” Sebastian said hoarsely.
Grunt nodded and started to lead them out of the cask house, but Sebastian stopped and loomed over the dying man, staring down at him for a moment. Then he adjusted his hold on the girl, withdrew his pistol, and aimed between the eyes. The man’s head flopped from side to side, and blood burst from his mouth as he tried to speak. He held up a bloody hand, as if he could ward off what was coming, his eyes begging for his life.
Sebastian cocked the hammer on his flintlock. “No.”
The report ripped through the cask house, and the girl uttered another muffled scream behind closed lips as the man’s head gave a jerk and then was still. The girl began to sob.
Outside, Grunt showed Sebastian another man lying face down on the ground. Blood pooled around him, black in the dimness. Grunt pointed at him and made the signs for “lookout” and “ambush.” He then lifted his club, dark with blood with sentry’s blood.
“Good.” Sebastian jerked his chin. “Go.”
They returned to the White Sail and Sebastian climbed the stairs after Grunt. The young woman in his arms buried her face against his chest and whimpered. She smelled of salt and sweat, and a strange, sweet-smelling oil that he couldn’t place. Every sound she made came from the back of her throat, as if she were gagging.
But that’s all they took, he thought as Grunt pounded on the Paladin’s door. They got her tongue but nothing else, the bastards. Nothing else.
Ilior opened the door, his sword in hand. “What is this?”
“Wake Selena,” Sebastian said. “Now.”
The door opened wider and Selena was there, in a sleeping dress and a robe. Her hair was down, flowing over the left side of her chest. Sebastian stared, filling his eyes with her beauty to replace the image of Pate’s mangled, bloody face.
Shock arrested Selena momentarily as she took in Sebastian and the woman, but then she hurried them inside.
The rage Sebastian had known in the cask house was dying, and his fatigue overwhelmed him. He dropped to his knees but Ilior was there to take the girl. The fire in the hearth was roaring with a makeshift bed before it. Ilior didn’t sleep, it seemed, but kept the fire fed for Selena. The girl screamed behind her teeth as the Vai’Ensai took her in his huge, scaled arms, but Selena soothed her. Ilior set her before the fire on his pallet.
“Gods, what happened?” Selena asked, stroking the girl’s cropped orange hair that looked as if it had been cut with a dull blade.
“She was attacked,” Sebastian muttered. “I killed them. They cut out her tongue.”
Ilior rumbled a foul oath and Selena gasped. Sebastian heard her tell Ilior to fill the basin with water and bring a cloth. The girl whimpered her guttural whimper and Sebastian hauled himself to standing.
“Where are you going?” Selena demanded and he ignored her. She whispered words of comfort to the girl, and then rushed to the door, blocking him. “Are you all right? You’re covered in blood.”
“It’s not mine.”
“You’re hurt. Let me…”
Sebastian waved her off. “We leave at dawn.”
“It’s dawn now.”
“Then tend to her and meet me at the docks.”
“But your hands. Let me heal you.”
Sebastian pulled away from as she reached for his bruised and swollen knuckles. “One hour,” he said. “Then we sail.”
He pushed past her, Grunt in tow.
“Pack your things. Tell the other crew,” Sebastian said when they were down the hall away from Selena’s room.
Grunt nodded, though his eyes were dark with concern. “Cook? Helm?” he whispered.
“Fuck them.”
Grunt started to go, then reached out and patted Sebastian’s cheek. The assassin’s hand shot up, gripped the old man’s wrist, and squeezed. Grunt didn’t struggle. Sebastian closed his eyes for a moment and then released him.
“Go.”
Grunt obeyed his captain in silence.
Selena closed the door after Julian and Grunt had gone, and turned back to her patient. The girl was, on closer inspection, not a girl but a woman not yet thirty years old. Her small stature and boyish clothes and hair made her seem younger. She sat hunched by the fire, knees pulled up to her chin, gloved hands covered her mouth and she stared at the flames with eyes wide with remembered terror.
Ilior had set down a bowl of water and a clean cloth. Selena knelt beside the woman. Gently, she pulled her hands from her mouth and wiped the blood from her chin.
“Please,” Selena said. “I don’t think I can heal you unless you…show me your wound.”
The woman regarded her with dark blue eyes fringed with black lashes. The firelight caught her orange hair so that it looked aflame itself. She motioned with one gloved hand, miming holding a quill and scribbling.
“You can write?”
The woman nodded.
“But you must be in pain,” Selena said. “Please, let me heal you first.”
This was met with a silent stare.
Selena nodded to the desk and Ilior retrieved quill, ink and piece of parchment. He handed them to the woman who took them from the Vai’Ensai, watching him warily.
“What is your name?” Selena asked.
Quill scribbled on paper.
Cathryn. Cat.
“Very well, Cat. What happened?”
Her hand trembled as she wrote. Bad men. Bad crew. Tried to hide but they found out.
“You’re safe now,” Ilior said, but Cat didn’t appear much comforted.
“Let me see your wound,” Selena said. “I can ease the pain, at least.”
The woman shook her head. Her quill scratched. I am ugly. Uglier now. Tears filled her eyes but she swiped at them with a gloved hand.
Selena thought of her own hideous wound. “You’re not ugly, but…I understand.”
She moved closer to Cat and filled her palm with water from her ampulla, then cupped her hand under the woman’s jaw. With her other hand, she found the moon in the sky and murmured, “Illuria.” The orange glow—as orange as the woman’s hair—emanated along her jaw and throat. Cat slumped with relief and looked at Selena with eyes full of gratitude.
Selena smiled. “Are you hurt elsewhere?” She indicated the gloves. “Your hands?”
Cat shook her head again. Sailor. Pull rigging. Ugly hands too. She wrote faster, quill flying. Then she took the paper and pressed it into Selena’s hands, imploring.
Take me with you.