Ten

“Grant this mercy, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to Thy servant departed,” Marcus spoke in clumsy Latin, Erik having told him the words only minutes before. For a burial, the rite was rather a farce. Whatever God thought about the dragon-blooded, the men would have found it unsettling if one of them had spoken the prayers, but they were the only ones who knew Latin.

The compromise was undignified. Then again, there was seldom dignity in death.

Erik stood and listened as Marcus continued. “That he may not receive in punishment the requital of his deeds who in desire did keep Thy will, and as the true faith here united him to the company of the faithful, so may Thy mercy unite him above to the choirs of angels. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

In dragon form, Toinette and Erik had dug the holes: simple work enough. The men filled them in though, as seemed more proper, and set a crude driftwood cross atop each of the graves.

Sence, of all the men, wept openly: quiet, but without shame. The others hung their heads, blinked tears away with some pretense of disguise, or simply stared in silent grief. Only some had known the dead men well, but their deaths were a reminder to all of what had passed—and the uncertainty in which they all now found themselves.

Toinette stared straight ahead, her arms folded under her breasts. She’d taken her blue gown out of the ship and donned it before the burial. It was damp, but whole and free of sand. She’d also brushed her hair and bound it severely back with string. Bare of that softening influence, her face was stark, her lips a knife edge. The angles of her shoulders and elbows and jaw all spoke of pain.

Standing barely inches from her, Erik longed to offer her comfort, but dared not even touch her arm as he’d done on the Hawk. Even if she’d welcome the contact at another time, it might do more harm than good in front of her crew.

“May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace,” said Marcus. He stepped back, dropping his once-folded hands to his sides.

They all lingered for a while, in the same awkward silence that attended funerals everywhere. The Eternal had touched that place and the people gathered there, if only for a time; taking up worldly duties felt alien, as a familiar house did on returning after long travel. One walked around then, looking at furnishings, until the sound of feet on that particular floor became familiar once again. With burials, there was that time of shifting, of clearing throats and looking from one to another.

“Franz has found a few rocks we could move for one side of a shelter.” Samuel was the one to finally speak. “And the cliffs could be the other wall. The lot of us could likely shift them.”

“Do what you can while we’re getting the supplies,” Toinette said, and the thickness in her voice vanished gradually as she spoke. “If there’s need, we can—” She waved a hand in the air.

“Yes, Captain,” said Samuel.

“Good work, all of you.”

That got smiles. A few of them were guilty, and others turned that way quickly. Erik knew that part of things too.

He’d been present at a great many funerals. Eventually, unless they shut themselves away from the world entirely and early, all the dragon-blooded were.

* * *

“Two holes in the hull,” Toinette said. She spoke aloud, more for her own benefit than for Erik’s, though he stood on the deck beside her and listened. “Too small and too high for risk just now, but nothing I’d want to go to sea with. Broken railing in places. And the mast, of course.”

“Can you repair it?”

“I’m no shipbuilder, but—yes. We can. It’ll be clumsy work, but it’ll likely hold together until we reach a civilized port.” She glanced over at Erik, and tried her best to phrase what came next gently. “You know we can’t go onward.”

He was silent. Toinette braced herself to make her case: sharp words, hard facts, the lives of her crew. She’d marshaled almost all of her forces by the time Erik spoke, only to have them scattered by what he said. “We may not have to. The island’s in the right position, as near as I can tell.”

“You think the Templars landed here?”

“If they landed anywhere. If they existed at all. I’ll know more when I can look around the island, but—aye, if this isn’t it, then we’ll not find it this trip. Even Artair would say we’ve done more than enough in service of this mission.”

“That does indeed absolve us of everything.” Toinette turned to the hatch. “The supplies won’t be growing legs any time soon.”

They both needed to go below this time: corpses were easier to carry than barrels. Toinette went first down the ladder after an awkward pause when she realized that Erik was letting her go ahead on account of her skirts. His voice drifted down to her along with his feet. “I would think that you’d look on him more kindly, considering.”

Toinette stopped, hands on a barrel of dried peas. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d almost forgotten I was a poor relation—other than the relation part.”

The hold was dim, but dragon-blooded saw well enough in the dark that she knew Erik had the good grace to flush. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that as it came out.”

“As it happens,” Toinette went on, pushing the barrel over to the bottom of the ladder, “I’m quite grateful for what he did. I’d have come without the debt, but it did weigh in my thinking. I believe he’s a good man. Good men still act in their own interests first. You were always surprised by that. Take hold of the top and pull. I’ll push from below.”

Between the two of them, the barrel wasn’t heavy, only awkward. Neither of them spoke until they’d gotten it onto the deck; it took too much concentration to keep the thing steady. An injury wouldn’t kill one of them, nor render them unfit for work as long as it would a human, but having one’s foot broken was far from a holiday.

They went silently down into the hold again. Toinette pushed a splintered crate to the side and stepped around its contents—formerly dried bread and now neither dry nor bread in any real sense. She picked her way around the floor and pushed another crate out, this one holding salt beef.

Erik was standing at the bottom of the ladder. “I wasn’t always surprised,” he said. “I knew there was evil in the world.”

“Yes, but…you always seemed to expect more from people. You called Artair heartless once yourself.”

“Did I?” Slowly his face changed from half-friendly argument into something more fraught, his eyes darkening and a slow smile coming to his mouth. “Ah. Aye, I did, once.”

That recollection might have been a mistake, Toinette thought. She wasn’t thinking of their argument any longer. She was remembering herself at sixteen, and the lanky golden-haired boy who’d taken umbrage to sending her away. She was remembering the feel of his mouth against hers, urgent and seeking. Toinette had hoped the kiss would be better than those she’d known when she’d barely come to womanhood, the attentions of spotty youths and old drunks who’d taken a bastard girl for fair game.

She hadn’t realized how much better it could be until she’d kissed Erik. And he’d been an untried youth then, and her own practice scarce and largely unwilling.

“You were very much the young knight, as I remember,” she said, her voice low and sensual.

“I tried. Though there are those who’d say I failed that time.”

“Best pay no attention to small minds. Besides, I gave you little choice in the matter. Assaulted your purity, mayhap.” Toinette met his eyes, which shone in the darkness of the hold, and let her mouth curve up in a teasing smile.

“Hardly an assault,” he said huskily.

“So speaks the warrior. Of course, I know little of such things.” She stepped toward him, letting her hips sway. “No surprise I didn’t do it right. If I were to have a demonstration of the proper way, now—”

Then he grabbed her—had grabbed her, really, for she didn’t realize he was going to move until she was crushed against his broad chest, with one of his hands at the small of her back and the other tilting her face up toward his. Erik took her mouth with bruising force, not asking for a response but drawing one as the moon draws the tides.

Desire made Toinette’s head swim. Opening to Erik, urging him on with lips and tongue, she clung to his shoulders just to stay upright, until he shoved her back against the wall of the hold. Then her hands were free to roam. She could dig into his back with her nails, or cup his arse, or snake one hand around to the thick bulge in his hose, tracing fingers down the side to make Erik’s breath hitch.

He was none so bad at leaving her breathless either: rough, yes, but in a way she welcomed. The hard pressure of his hands at her breasts was just what Toinette needed then, like the weight of his body pinning her to the wall and the scrape of his unshaven jawline against the tender hollow of her neck. When he pinched her nipples through her gown, she cried out into the silence of the hold.

“God’s wounds, you undo me,” he muttered against her neck, the words short bursts of heat. His hands left her breasts, slapped hers away from his cock, and Toinette could feel him struggling with the laces of his hose.

As she reached for her skirts, the boat swayed. A creak from above heralded a shower of sawdust, as well as a larger chunk of wood that hit Erik between the eyes.

“Mannaggia!” Toinette swore in the Italian of her birthplace. Erik kept his silence, but he pulled back, rubbing at his forehead.

However the wood might have wounded him, it had punctured their embrace like a dagger in a wineskin, and lust drained rapidly. “We can’t,” Erik said, panting. “We’ll no’ be safe staying here so long.”

Toinette thought about asking him how long he thought it would take, but restrained herself. His eyes were still glazed, and warmth lingered between her legs. Teasing was asking for trouble. “There’s that. And if the ceiling does fall on us, best we look respectable when the men come to our rescue.”

“Aye.” He turned away to take hold of the crate. Toinette made no immediate move to follow him, though she did let her eyes linger on his tented hose. Her nipples ached for his touch, and her sex felt nigh as damp as the waves that lapped against the hull.

When she did move, she grabbed the other end of the crate and was glad of the strain on her muscles. Hard work was the cure for lust. So she’d always heard, and so she prayed would be the case.