Brownie Sundae Challenge 4! [Horizon Tales]
AUTHOR: Shrimp
CHALLENGE: Mango 10: at your service; Butter Rum 3: swab the deck ; Brownie
WORD COUNT: 5,047
RATING: PG-13
NOTES: Nothing really happens in this piece. It's just them being on the pirate ship. But it's a necessary transition piece. They'll be ghost pirates soon! I promise!
When she awoke hours later her body still aching and her eyes burning from the much needed sleep her mind took a moment to reel in the clarity of what was happening. She had gone to bed a smuggler and woken up a pirate. Her stomach felt light and uneasy and Vala set a hand on it as if it might sooth away her misgivings. Beside her Ekvy shifted and soon they were laying shoulder to shoulder. He said nothing. There was comfortable silence between them as they took in the sounds of the ship. The wood creaked and groaned with pressure and weight. Somewhere above them she could hear the wind and the men’s voices lost in it.
“What’s the difference between a smuggler and a pirate?” She asked. She had thought The Merchant’s Mirage was a pirate ship when she first stepped on board. But that was all of a year ago and she was younger and stupider then. They were smugglers, not pirates, and the distinction had been important to the Captain and the crew. Even when Vala hadn’t truly understood it she felt the importance of it. Now she wondered if she had ever stopped and defined the words, ever really given voice to the subtle ways in which their business worked.
“I don’t know. What?” Ekvy replied. Vala turned her head to look at him. His eyes were barely open, his chest still rising lazily and falling deeply. He seemed relaxed and at ease, far more than she was used to seeing him and far more than she felt.
“It’s not a joke.” He turned to look at her now, opening his black eyes. She searched his face for any of the misgivings she felt and saw none. Only sleepiness and the dull content of a body well rested.
“Oh. Well,” he shrugged a little, an awkward movement as he laid on his back, “they steal the goods and we sell them. You knew that though.” He lifted himself up and sat with his hands on his knees. She stayed where she was and simply angled her head better to look at him.
“I knew that,” she repeated. His eyes searched her and she felt all the tiny clues on her face that he might read to understand. Her brows were too quick to furrow or quirk. Her mouth was too expressive. The sea green of her eyes more transparent than the waters on which they sailed. When he had found what he was looking for he tossed her a smile and began to pull on his boots.
“The differences aren’t anything that’s going to concern us. We’re the lowest of the low remember. Swabbing decks looks about the same no matter what the kind of ship you’re on is.” She envied him this easiness, this uncanny ability to go with the flow and let the black and white of the world roll off his back into an amalgamated gray. Her childhood had been filled with lessons on right and wrong and the proper ways to live a life. Heroes’ tales and stories where the villains wore black and scowled through pallid faces and bad teeth. Ekvy’s had been one of desperation and movement. Hiding in shadows and doing whatever was necessary to get a bed, a meal, a chance for tomorrow. There had been no good guys for him and only the pirates and smugglers and fiends have ever even glanced at him twice.
“The ship’s probably just going to head straight to a port to drop us off, right?” She reasoned. She pulled herself up as well and began tugging on her own boots. Next to her Ekvy gave an encouraging nod.
“Yeah, they can’t really sneak up and take over a ship while tugging along The Merchant’s Mirage.” She felt a little lightened now that they had talked it out. Vala didn’t want to see the faces of the people whose things they were stealing. She didn’t want to be a participant in the violence to acquire those things. She was content with the nameless items and the empty history behind them. They were only selling the stolen goods, after all. They weren’t actively hurting anybody. She didn’t think the same could be said for the sailors on board The Moldy Peach. “Come on. Let’s get some grub and then see what they want us to do.” He stood and offered her his hand to lift her from her seated position. She didn’t need the help but she took his hand anyway, pulling against his weight to heft herself onto her feet. It was an apologetic gesture more than anything else. Meant to clear the air between them from before their nap without actually having to acknowledge anything that might have been said. She patted his shoulder when she released his hand. She never knew a person could say so much with no few words and such simple motions.
Outside it was night. The wind gusted strongly around them, whipping their ears as soon as they ascended onto the main deck. Vala held a hand up to shield her eyes for a moment, getting her bearings on the new ship. The night was alive with the crackling energy of the pirate men. She could hear laughter and shouting, curses and idle talk, the sound of dice clattering and always the steady thump of boots on planks. It was both familiar and new and the combination set her nerves on edge. The crew on The Moldy Peach was bigger, louder than that aboard The Merchant’s Mirage. There were few gaps on the deck where a body wasn’t busy toiling or lounging. On the smuggling ship it had always been simple enough to tuck away and find a moment of silence and solitude. Here there was only people, the warmth of their bodies and their emotions. It reminded Vala of whiskey, the heat as it went down and pillowed in your guts but how too much of it made you sick and burned you something fierce on its way back up.
“Let’s find Black Petunia,” Ekvy muttered, clearly as disturbed by the revelry as Vala was and thoughts of food falling to the wayside. She wondered if what was so foreboding about it was the knowledge that they would not be wholly welcomed into it. They were outsides now more than ever. She wondered if Ekvy clung as dearly to their friendship as she felt herself doing, gripping it tight in her chest to ward off the chill of loneliness and the sense of not belonging.
They walked along the edges of the ship, the ocean cutting a dark blue swath to their side while the glow of lamps and a low hanging moon illuminated their other. She peered into the darkness and saw the slow gliding silhouette of the smuggling ship as it was pulled along. She thought of the men sleeping and stinking, fading way as the magic blanketed their minds. For a fleeting moment she thought of what it would be like to still be asleep there, her head tucked into her bucket and her lungs filled with soup suds and water. Would Ekvy have found her before it was too late? Would he even have looked? She felt tightness in her chest, her imagination providing the sensation of drowning even as she stood in open air and breathed it deep. She had never truly experienced loss and now if she looked there was an entire ship full of the potential for it trailing behind. A true ghost ship. She turned her gaze away.
“Stop thinking about it,” Ekvy instructed.
“I can’t.” She hooked her thumbs into her belt and shrugged her shoulders inward slightly, bowling them over as if pressed on by her own stubbornness.
“What happens to us if they die?” She voiced her refusal to stop thinking about it, the question that had hounded her since the first dawn after the pirates had cast their spell. Even when they had been alone and drifting it had persisted in her mind but now it was a thunderous resonance in her heartbeat and her blood. The seas were vast and she and Ekvy were small. People looked at them like detritus, something that had washed up and was without function or value. She had seen it in Nalsot and Suttil and in the countless small port cities whose names she had never learned. The sailors in the taverns gave them berth and blank stares. Who would take them in if the Captain didn’t wake up? Who would even notice that they hadn’t died with the rest of the crew?
“We move on,” he stated simply but she heard a rough cut to his voice. He didn’t want to talk about that. She supposed he was avoiding thinking about it like she was unable to do. She couldn’t tell if he feared the wideness of the world that might swallow them up without the Captain to anchor them. He had been through it before though, the being alone and adrift, and maybe he dreaded it but at least he would know how to handle it. He had found the kind Captain and place that was less cruel than it could have been. He could do it again. But it was Ekvy who had found her because she had no notion of finding. She would be lost without him, as much before as she would be now. “Black Petunia would probably take you on,” he said with a shrug. “She likes you though I think she wouldn’t bat an eye if I just fell off the side.”
“We stay together,” she said, pulling him to a stop so that she could look at him and make him understand that it was not negotiable for her. There was a pause, a blankness, and then a grin.
“I like the sound of that.” For the first time since meeting him Vala thought she could read the thoughts behind his words and generally inscrutable features. She saw something light behind his eyes, a genuine openness and a vulnerable relief. Ekvy knew how to be alone but he did not wish to be again. They would have each other always, their bond of friendship something more pure than the obligation of being bound by blood. The realization of it, this sudden truth of their promise to one another, made the world and all its prejudices seem much smaller and less intimidating.
They stepped tentatively into Black Petunia’s office. There were lamps lit now that the sun had set. Vala could see the room better now than she had during the day. It was cramped and crowded with various odds and ends, things that she supposed had been stolen and never offered up for sale. A hodgepodge of the places and times of the pirate captain’s life and career. Black Petunia herself was back in her chair. She was doubled over with her head between her legs as if ill. Beside her a plainly clad man pressed his hands to her back. He didn’t rub or soothe or comfort. He just stood there and pressed. In the lamplight Vala could see his hands. They were mottled in various shades of red. The skin was knotted and rough, corded as though muscle peaked through his flesh. Scattered across his ruined hands were pinpoints of shining scar tissue. It looked painful and bizarre, as if someone had burned his hands and only half let them heal before doing it again. He looked over sharply when the door closed behind them and Vala recognized the large pupils and clouded gaze from her brief stint in Suttil the winter before. This was the healer Black Petunia had spoken of earlier. Magic addicted and torn apart.
“Absai didn’t teach you manners on that ship?” Black Petunia hissed as she righted her posture, the man’s hands falling lax to his sides. “Don’t you know how to knock on a closed door?”
“We did but you didn’t answer,” Ekvy lied swiftly. He didn’t even blink and Vala found that she didn’t either. She had grown used to this from him. “We wanted to get our tasks.”
“Well, at least I know you aren’t lazy. Can’t say the same for some of that crew out there.” She leaned heavily in the chair. Vala wondered if magic dulled the recipient as much as the user. She seemed tired and worn around the edges. It could have been the magic. More than likely it was just whatever disease was rotting her from the inside out. “Decks haven’t been swabbed in more time than I’d like to say. You can get started on that.”
“Have you been on the ship?” Vala asked. Black Petunia was terrifying but she was knowledgeable about the world and more things than Vala might ever be. She wanted her opinion, her assessment. She wanted to know what this older, wiser woman thought about what had happened to the crew.
“Aye,” she answered slowly. Vala went rigid as she waited to hear more. Black Petunia swung her hand lazily at the man by her side. “Sent him to check them over as well.” The healer was looking at them without looking at them. His eyes, bloodshot and yellowed, were set in their direction as if his body knew there was a conversation he should be paying attention to. But they were dull and glazed, turned inward on the intoxicating caress of his own magic. Vala watched him from the corner of her eyes. She didn’t trust magic or those that wielded it. The condition of his hands, the gauntness of his cheeks, the floating quality of his stare. It all combined into everything that made magic so questionable and distasteful.
“Forbidden magic, that stuff,” he mumbled through lips that hardly moved. The sound of his voice was like something scraped from the bottom of barrel. Vala couldn’t wipe the grimace from her face. “Ran my hands over them. Not much to do. Can’t heal away an empty stomach.” His lips curved in some sad attempt at a grin as his sentences trailed away. He closed his eyes languidly and may as well have been asleep on his feet for all Vala could tell.
“Isn’t there anything that can be done?” Ekvy asked. Vala was grateful. She had so many questions but they were all being drowned out by her fear and anger. She didn’t want to talk to the healer. People with magic played games. They were tricky. Her body was covered in goosebumps just to be in the same room with this man. She would rather inhale the sick sweet tang of Black Petunia’s illness than the air that held his magic.
“I went to the Academy in Suttil. I learned my magic there.” He opened his lifeless eyes again and blinked stickily. For a moment a brush of focus touched them. “I wasn’t good enough.” Then it was gone and he was back to viewing them from behind a fog. “They don’t teach old, forbidden magic at the Academy.”
“We’re done here. Get out,” Black Petunia said with a wave of her hand at the man. He nodded and stumbled towards the door, swaying on his feet. Vala sidestepped to let him pass, her body tight with the desire to avoid being touched by him. Briefly it occurred to her that her distaste of him solely for his ability to use magic was just as narrow-minded as other people’s distaste of her for being a woman or Ekvy for being a Mer. “Their minds get weak from it,” the captain offered almost as an apology for the healer. “He’s got his uses though. Keeps me together.” She managed a laugh though she didn’t seem all together amused. Vala didn’t know how long the older woman had been sick. Long enough that she had earned the nickname based around those lesions on her flesh.
“Can anything be done?” Vala ventured. Black Petunia looked at her, pain laced in her eyes. She shook her head. Vala dropped her eyes to the floor, heat prickling behind them. She felt Ekvy’s knuckles brush hers in brief contact.
“Better get yourself some food and then get to working,” Black Petunia said at length. Vala and Ekvy nodded and turned to leave, dulled by the confirmation of what they had already feared. “No-Wives, wait.” Ekvy glanced at her and then at the pirate captain. He frowned and left. Vala turned around. “When we make port you don’t have to leave. You can stay on.”
“What about Ekvy?” Vala asked. Black Petunia raised a lip in disagreement with Vala’s question.
“Don’t need two new hands. Barely need the one. The position’s for you, No-Wives.” Vala shook her head.
“It’s the two of us or neither.” Black Petunia shook her head now. She ran a tongue along her yellowed teeth and black, receding gums.
“You should look out for yourself. That Mer would trade you in if he thought it’d get him a steady job and someone’s good favor.” Black Petunia settled a look on Vala that made her feel naked, exposed. It was as if the older woman was peering through all the layers of Vala into the heart of her. She saw the girl who had cried until she nearly threw up when she heard her father planning to marry her off. She saw the girl who had tried harder than half the men she had ever known and still been relegated second. She saw the girl who just wanted to be seen. “You’re just a woman to him, No-Wives. When it comes down to it that’s all he sees, all any of them see.”
“Not Ekvy,” she argued. Black Petunia nodded slowly, knowingly.
“Aye, even him. It’s a hard lesson. Best learn it quick.” With that she waved Vala off and went back to reclining in her overstuffed chair. There were too many words caught in Vala’s throat and none came out. The woman wouldn’t believe her even if she insisted until she was blue in the face. That was their friendship, the foundation of it all. They saw each other as more than gender, more than blood, more than history. Black Petunia would never be able to understand.
Vala left, the words still caught in her throat.
They ate hard biscuits and scrubbed the ship until they went to sleep again. The days passed in this simple monotony. It was as Ekvy had predicted. Their tasks aboard The Moldy Peach were not so different than those aboard The Merchant’s Mirage. The bottom looked mostly the same no matter where you were and who was in charge. Whether a smuggler or a pirate a cabin boy still scrubbed and fetched and took the brunt of the ill will from the rest of the crew. There were really only two main differences. One was that aboard the smuggling vessel Ekvy had often been the one to tend the Captain’s small whims. To get called from simple tasks to run an errand or some other menial thing that was beneath the Captain and the other mates. Here Black Petunia called for Vala. The other difference was the men. The smugglers had no real venom in them, no true violence. She supposed that was what had allotted them into smuggling over this. What little foul temperament there was the Captain always kept well in check. Black Petunia did no such thing with her pirates.
Vala kept her sword on her now and she and Ekvy took to changing the places they slept each night. They avoided the crowds of men and always stuck by each other’s side if they could. Vala didn’t like the feel of their eyes on her. They looked at Ekvy with hate but they looked at her with something more. It made her think of how her mother had always said that a lady should never be alone with a man unless they were betrothed. Vala had always taken it as a lesson in decorum but now she wondered if it hadn’t been her mother’s way of threading life advice under the guise of propriety. Danger wafted in the air of solitude and Vala didn’t want to find out what fangs those men might sink into her if given the chance.
“I’ve gotten used to having you around,” Black Petunia mused one evening when Vala had been summoned to her quarters. She was swaying a hammock, her head tilted towards the small window that provided a view of the horizon. Vala began the series of tasks that had become her routine when she found Black Petunia like this. She had just gone through a bout of healing and liked to take a drink after such, so Vala went to her cabinet and took out the most frequented bottle. She pulled out the cork and handed it to the woman. As Black Petunia wrapped her lips around the mouth of the bottle Vala spread a blanket over her. Then she busied herself with cleaning and organizing the office. “What will I do when you’re gone?”
“Pick up a street urchin to take my place,” Vala suggested. She had been on the pirate ship for about a week. The constant proximity to Black Petunia had softened some of the fear. Now she felt fine responding quickly as she found most comfortable.
“You’re no street urchin though,” she responded. Vala looked up from where she was wiping up a splatter of ink that had managed to get on the floor. “Your friend was,” she added wistfully. “Absai told me he was living under the docks in Venrig when he found him and brought him on. His mother had cast him out when he started looking too much like the Mer father.” Vala’s ears pulsed with every word. She stared across the dim room at Black Petunia with wide, attentive eyes. She knew some, maybe most of the things that had happened to Ekvy in his life. He put little detail into the bad and allowed his tales to focus on the amusing, the outlandish, the entertaining that he could spin into extravagant stories. Did Black Petunia know more of the darkness that Ekvy refused to allow Vala to share in? “He does look very Mer,” she concluded before taking another long drag on the bottle.
“Ekvy was the one that found me and convinced the Captain to take me on.” Vala stood up and leaned against the desk. “He’d watched me fight this man called Daron Five-Wives and figured I’d be able to hold my own on the ship.” She lowered her face a little. “That’s really why they call me No-Wives,” she confessed. Black Petunia fixed a stare on her.
“That’s no small feat. He was big bastard.” She rose a brow. “You the reason he turned up with that mangled hand?” Slowly Vala nodded. She felt embarrassed though she didn’t understand why exactly. Beating Daron Five-Wives had been a great accomplishment for her. It had been a bolster to her confidence. She thought now, as she sometimes did, of Daron’s five wives and what they might have been like or what they were like now. Black Petunia barked a laugh. She swung her legs out of the hammock and took a stumbled step before regaining herself. She leaned a hand on the desk beside Vala. “And you still won’t join up with me?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“I could use a protégée with guts like yours.” She made a choking noise and coughed phlegm into the bottle she was drinking from. “I could use guts like yours in general. Mine are all rotted through.” She grinned and tossed her head back, drinking down the last of the alcohol and even the mucus she had just deposited. Vala wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“I don’t want to be a pirate,” she said by way of explanation. Black Petunia let the empty bottle fall from her hand. She held Vala’s shoulder now instead.
“You’d get respect being a pirate. You won’t get it as anything else. You gotta show them, No-Wives. You gotta show them just how strong you are, just how far you’re willing to go.” She gave Vala’s shoulder a sharp, snapping shake. “Stronger than the men. Farther than them.” Her breath wheezed noisily between them from the dead remains of her nose. It was hot and rank and filled with whatever rotting disease had burrowed into her and was working slowly through her.
“Maybe I don’t want respect,” Vala said as she pulled away and put the desk between them. She pretended to be interested in organizing the drawers.
“I think you do,” Black Petunia pressed. Vala shook her head though she wasn’t entirely certain. Respect. What did it really mean? There was plenty that she wanted. She wanted freedom, opportunity. She wanted to be left alone to do what she would without having questions and expectations piled upon her. She wanted what men had and took for granted, what they begrudged women for no real reason she could see.
“I don’t care if I’m respected or liked or known. I just want to be.” She looked up from the drawer that she had pulled open. It was filled with buttons of various sizes and types. There were lots of things like that aboard The Moldy Peach. Vala never quite knew what she was going to find when she turned a corner or opened a storage container. Black Petunia looked at her with sad, remote eyes. She pulled herself upright and went back over to her hammock.
“I’m dying, No-Wives,” she said on a huff of breath as she climbed back into the swaying rope bed. “I just want to know that everything I’ve gone through wasn’t for nothing. I want to know that another girl won’t have to make it as hard as I did because she can learn from the things I didn’t.” She laid back and Vala could only stare at her. There was an air of desolation in the cabin now. She wanted the things that Black Petunia knew and could offer. But she wanted them without price. She wanted to take them and leave and not give a second of her life more to this ship and these people. She was selfish then but so was Black Petunia for not just telling her the things she knew. She supposed that maybe women in their positions had to be selfish or they wouldn’t get anything at all. “That’s enough for now. You’ve got other things to do.” The captain put her arm over her eyes and Vala knew the conversation was over. She shut the drawer quietly and let herself out.
She wondered what it was that Black Petunia had learned and if she would ever know it herself.
It was only a few days after that when they finally reached a port. Black Petunia didn’t bring up their conversation and Vala certainly didn’t either. She didn’t even tell Ekvy about it or about the insight into his life that the other woman had given her. She didn’t tell him that she had been asked to stay on either. He had predicted it and since she had turned down the offer it seemed a moot point. She didn’t want him to worry that he was holding her back from a new, steady position. One that in the long term would earn her a higher position then she might ever had achieved on The Merchant’s Mirage.
The goodbyes from the pirates were terse. Many of the crew didn’t actually acknowledge that Vala and Ekvy were leaving. Black Petunia gave them both a slap on the back and word of good luck but little else. Vala was relieved she didn’t bring up her offer again and simply let them leave. The Merchant’s Mirage was docked successfully thanks the Black Petunia’s men and the pirates decided they didn’t need to stop over in the port for any longer than to drop off their passengers. They watched the ship pull off until the sun blinded them of their view of it.
“Should we check on the ship?” Vala asked. From where they stood on the dock it was hard to tell that there was anything truly wrong on board. The only indication was the lack of life, but there were plenty of quiet ships in harbor whose crew were all occupied with the pleasures of dry land.
“Let’s see about getting ourselves some real food and a bed for the night first. Find out where we even are,” Ekvy said. He patted his pocket and at the low jangle Vala raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been holding our money since after the ghost pirates.”
“Didn’t trust the sleeping sailors not to steal it from us?” She joked. It seemed a strange thing to joke about but she was grateful that she could. Ekvy shrugged. They shared a small laugh. “I’m glad to be off that ship,” she said when they started walking in the direction of the inns and taverns set up by the docks.
“Didn’t like your stint as a blood thirsty pirate? Seems just your kind of job, honestly.” Vala gave him a halfhearted swat on the arm. “From noble to pirate,” he continued apparently egged on by her disapproval. “Now there’s a fall from grace. You’d be very popular. They’d have tavern songs about you.”
“No they wouldn’t. Quit it.”
“Look, if they have tavern songs about Black Petunia they’d have to have songs about you.” Vala stopped and gave him a dumbstruck look. “Black Petunia was a common lass, she used to wash the clothes,” Ekvy recited in a swift monotone to jog her memory. “And when she caught a terrible ill she lost half her nose.” His eyebrows disappeared beneath the fringe of hair that hung sloppily over his forehead when she merely shook her head. “You didn’t know?”
“When would I have heard it?”
“It’s not very good. Maybe we’ll ask someone to play it while we’re eating dinner.” They started walking again with renewed eagerness in their gait.
CHALLENGE: Mango 10: at your service; Butter Rum 3: swab the deck ; Brownie
WORD COUNT: 5,047
RATING: PG-13
NOTES: Nothing really happens in this piece. It's just them being on the pirate ship. But it's a necessary transition piece. They'll be ghost pirates soon! I promise!
When she awoke hours later her body still aching and her eyes burning from the much needed sleep her mind took a moment to reel in the clarity of what was happening. She had gone to bed a smuggler and woken up a pirate. Her stomach felt light and uneasy and Vala set a hand on it as if it might sooth away her misgivings. Beside her Ekvy shifted and soon they were laying shoulder to shoulder. He said nothing. There was comfortable silence between them as they took in the sounds of the ship. The wood creaked and groaned with pressure and weight. Somewhere above them she could hear the wind and the men’s voices lost in it.
“What’s the difference between a smuggler and a pirate?” She asked. She had thought The Merchant’s Mirage was a pirate ship when she first stepped on board. But that was all of a year ago and she was younger and stupider then. They were smugglers, not pirates, and the distinction had been important to the Captain and the crew. Even when Vala hadn’t truly understood it she felt the importance of it. Now she wondered if she had ever stopped and defined the words, ever really given voice to the subtle ways in which their business worked.
“I don’t know. What?” Ekvy replied. Vala turned her head to look at him. His eyes were barely open, his chest still rising lazily and falling deeply. He seemed relaxed and at ease, far more than she was used to seeing him and far more than she felt.
“It’s not a joke.” He turned to look at her now, opening his black eyes. She searched his face for any of the misgivings she felt and saw none. Only sleepiness and the dull content of a body well rested.
“Oh. Well,” he shrugged a little, an awkward movement as he laid on his back, “they steal the goods and we sell them. You knew that though.” He lifted himself up and sat with his hands on his knees. She stayed where she was and simply angled her head better to look at him.
“I knew that,” she repeated. His eyes searched her and she felt all the tiny clues on her face that he might read to understand. Her brows were too quick to furrow or quirk. Her mouth was too expressive. The sea green of her eyes more transparent than the waters on which they sailed. When he had found what he was looking for he tossed her a smile and began to pull on his boots.
“The differences aren’t anything that’s going to concern us. We’re the lowest of the low remember. Swabbing decks looks about the same no matter what the kind of ship you’re on is.” She envied him this easiness, this uncanny ability to go with the flow and let the black and white of the world roll off his back into an amalgamated gray. Her childhood had been filled with lessons on right and wrong and the proper ways to live a life. Heroes’ tales and stories where the villains wore black and scowled through pallid faces and bad teeth. Ekvy’s had been one of desperation and movement. Hiding in shadows and doing whatever was necessary to get a bed, a meal, a chance for tomorrow. There had been no good guys for him and only the pirates and smugglers and fiends have ever even glanced at him twice.
“The ship’s probably just going to head straight to a port to drop us off, right?” She reasoned. She pulled herself up as well and began tugging on her own boots. Next to her Ekvy gave an encouraging nod.
“Yeah, they can’t really sneak up and take over a ship while tugging along The Merchant’s Mirage.” She felt a little lightened now that they had talked it out. Vala didn’t want to see the faces of the people whose things they were stealing. She didn’t want to be a participant in the violence to acquire those things. She was content with the nameless items and the empty history behind them. They were only selling the stolen goods, after all. They weren’t actively hurting anybody. She didn’t think the same could be said for the sailors on board The Moldy Peach. “Come on. Let’s get some grub and then see what they want us to do.” He stood and offered her his hand to lift her from her seated position. She didn’t need the help but she took his hand anyway, pulling against his weight to heft herself onto her feet. It was an apologetic gesture more than anything else. Meant to clear the air between them from before their nap without actually having to acknowledge anything that might have been said. She patted his shoulder when she released his hand. She never knew a person could say so much with no few words and such simple motions.
Outside it was night. The wind gusted strongly around them, whipping their ears as soon as they ascended onto the main deck. Vala held a hand up to shield her eyes for a moment, getting her bearings on the new ship. The night was alive with the crackling energy of the pirate men. She could hear laughter and shouting, curses and idle talk, the sound of dice clattering and always the steady thump of boots on planks. It was both familiar and new and the combination set her nerves on edge. The crew on The Moldy Peach was bigger, louder than that aboard The Merchant’s Mirage. There were few gaps on the deck where a body wasn’t busy toiling or lounging. On the smuggling ship it had always been simple enough to tuck away and find a moment of silence and solitude. Here there was only people, the warmth of their bodies and their emotions. It reminded Vala of whiskey, the heat as it went down and pillowed in your guts but how too much of it made you sick and burned you something fierce on its way back up.
“Let’s find Black Petunia,” Ekvy muttered, clearly as disturbed by the revelry as Vala was and thoughts of food falling to the wayside. She wondered if what was so foreboding about it was the knowledge that they would not be wholly welcomed into it. They were outsides now more than ever. She wondered if Ekvy clung as dearly to their friendship as she felt herself doing, gripping it tight in her chest to ward off the chill of loneliness and the sense of not belonging.
They walked along the edges of the ship, the ocean cutting a dark blue swath to their side while the glow of lamps and a low hanging moon illuminated their other. She peered into the darkness and saw the slow gliding silhouette of the smuggling ship as it was pulled along. She thought of the men sleeping and stinking, fading way as the magic blanketed their minds. For a fleeting moment she thought of what it would be like to still be asleep there, her head tucked into her bucket and her lungs filled with soup suds and water. Would Ekvy have found her before it was too late? Would he even have looked? She felt tightness in her chest, her imagination providing the sensation of drowning even as she stood in open air and breathed it deep. She had never truly experienced loss and now if she looked there was an entire ship full of the potential for it trailing behind. A true ghost ship. She turned her gaze away.
“Stop thinking about it,” Ekvy instructed.
“I can’t.” She hooked her thumbs into her belt and shrugged her shoulders inward slightly, bowling them over as if pressed on by her own stubbornness.
“What happens to us if they die?” She voiced her refusal to stop thinking about it, the question that had hounded her since the first dawn after the pirates had cast their spell. Even when they had been alone and drifting it had persisted in her mind but now it was a thunderous resonance in her heartbeat and her blood. The seas were vast and she and Ekvy were small. People looked at them like detritus, something that had washed up and was without function or value. She had seen it in Nalsot and Suttil and in the countless small port cities whose names she had never learned. The sailors in the taverns gave them berth and blank stares. Who would take them in if the Captain didn’t wake up? Who would even notice that they hadn’t died with the rest of the crew?
“We move on,” he stated simply but she heard a rough cut to his voice. He didn’t want to talk about that. She supposed he was avoiding thinking about it like she was unable to do. She couldn’t tell if he feared the wideness of the world that might swallow them up without the Captain to anchor them. He had been through it before though, the being alone and adrift, and maybe he dreaded it but at least he would know how to handle it. He had found the kind Captain and place that was less cruel than it could have been. He could do it again. But it was Ekvy who had found her because she had no notion of finding. She would be lost without him, as much before as she would be now. “Black Petunia would probably take you on,” he said with a shrug. “She likes you though I think she wouldn’t bat an eye if I just fell off the side.”
“We stay together,” she said, pulling him to a stop so that she could look at him and make him understand that it was not negotiable for her. There was a pause, a blankness, and then a grin.
“I like the sound of that.” For the first time since meeting him Vala thought she could read the thoughts behind his words and generally inscrutable features. She saw something light behind his eyes, a genuine openness and a vulnerable relief. Ekvy knew how to be alone but he did not wish to be again. They would have each other always, their bond of friendship something more pure than the obligation of being bound by blood. The realization of it, this sudden truth of their promise to one another, made the world and all its prejudices seem much smaller and less intimidating.
They stepped tentatively into Black Petunia’s office. There were lamps lit now that the sun had set. Vala could see the room better now than she had during the day. It was cramped and crowded with various odds and ends, things that she supposed had been stolen and never offered up for sale. A hodgepodge of the places and times of the pirate captain’s life and career. Black Petunia herself was back in her chair. She was doubled over with her head between her legs as if ill. Beside her a plainly clad man pressed his hands to her back. He didn’t rub or soothe or comfort. He just stood there and pressed. In the lamplight Vala could see his hands. They were mottled in various shades of red. The skin was knotted and rough, corded as though muscle peaked through his flesh. Scattered across his ruined hands were pinpoints of shining scar tissue. It looked painful and bizarre, as if someone had burned his hands and only half let them heal before doing it again. He looked over sharply when the door closed behind them and Vala recognized the large pupils and clouded gaze from her brief stint in Suttil the winter before. This was the healer Black Petunia had spoken of earlier. Magic addicted and torn apart.
“Absai didn’t teach you manners on that ship?” Black Petunia hissed as she righted her posture, the man’s hands falling lax to his sides. “Don’t you know how to knock on a closed door?”
“We did but you didn’t answer,” Ekvy lied swiftly. He didn’t even blink and Vala found that she didn’t either. She had grown used to this from him. “We wanted to get our tasks.”
“Well, at least I know you aren’t lazy. Can’t say the same for some of that crew out there.” She leaned heavily in the chair. Vala wondered if magic dulled the recipient as much as the user. She seemed tired and worn around the edges. It could have been the magic. More than likely it was just whatever disease was rotting her from the inside out. “Decks haven’t been swabbed in more time than I’d like to say. You can get started on that.”
“Have you been on the ship?” Vala asked. Black Petunia was terrifying but she was knowledgeable about the world and more things than Vala might ever be. She wanted her opinion, her assessment. She wanted to know what this older, wiser woman thought about what had happened to the crew.
“Aye,” she answered slowly. Vala went rigid as she waited to hear more. Black Petunia swung her hand lazily at the man by her side. “Sent him to check them over as well.” The healer was looking at them without looking at them. His eyes, bloodshot and yellowed, were set in their direction as if his body knew there was a conversation he should be paying attention to. But they were dull and glazed, turned inward on the intoxicating caress of his own magic. Vala watched him from the corner of her eyes. She didn’t trust magic or those that wielded it. The condition of his hands, the gauntness of his cheeks, the floating quality of his stare. It all combined into everything that made magic so questionable and distasteful.
“Forbidden magic, that stuff,” he mumbled through lips that hardly moved. The sound of his voice was like something scraped from the bottom of barrel. Vala couldn’t wipe the grimace from her face. “Ran my hands over them. Not much to do. Can’t heal away an empty stomach.” His lips curved in some sad attempt at a grin as his sentences trailed away. He closed his eyes languidly and may as well have been asleep on his feet for all Vala could tell.
“Isn’t there anything that can be done?” Ekvy asked. Vala was grateful. She had so many questions but they were all being drowned out by her fear and anger. She didn’t want to talk to the healer. People with magic played games. They were tricky. Her body was covered in goosebumps just to be in the same room with this man. She would rather inhale the sick sweet tang of Black Petunia’s illness than the air that held his magic.
“I went to the Academy in Suttil. I learned my magic there.” He opened his lifeless eyes again and blinked stickily. For a moment a brush of focus touched them. “I wasn’t good enough.” Then it was gone and he was back to viewing them from behind a fog. “They don’t teach old, forbidden magic at the Academy.”
“We’re done here. Get out,” Black Petunia said with a wave of her hand at the man. He nodded and stumbled towards the door, swaying on his feet. Vala sidestepped to let him pass, her body tight with the desire to avoid being touched by him. Briefly it occurred to her that her distaste of him solely for his ability to use magic was just as narrow-minded as other people’s distaste of her for being a woman or Ekvy for being a Mer. “Their minds get weak from it,” the captain offered almost as an apology for the healer. “He’s got his uses though. Keeps me together.” She managed a laugh though she didn’t seem all together amused. Vala didn’t know how long the older woman had been sick. Long enough that she had earned the nickname based around those lesions on her flesh.
“Can anything be done?” Vala ventured. Black Petunia looked at her, pain laced in her eyes. She shook her head. Vala dropped her eyes to the floor, heat prickling behind them. She felt Ekvy’s knuckles brush hers in brief contact.
“Better get yourself some food and then get to working,” Black Petunia said at length. Vala and Ekvy nodded and turned to leave, dulled by the confirmation of what they had already feared. “No-Wives, wait.” Ekvy glanced at her and then at the pirate captain. He frowned and left. Vala turned around. “When we make port you don’t have to leave. You can stay on.”
“What about Ekvy?” Vala asked. Black Petunia raised a lip in disagreement with Vala’s question.
“Don’t need two new hands. Barely need the one. The position’s for you, No-Wives.” Vala shook her head.
“It’s the two of us or neither.” Black Petunia shook her head now. She ran a tongue along her yellowed teeth and black, receding gums.
“You should look out for yourself. That Mer would trade you in if he thought it’d get him a steady job and someone’s good favor.” Black Petunia settled a look on Vala that made her feel naked, exposed. It was as if the older woman was peering through all the layers of Vala into the heart of her. She saw the girl who had cried until she nearly threw up when she heard her father planning to marry her off. She saw the girl who had tried harder than half the men she had ever known and still been relegated second. She saw the girl who just wanted to be seen. “You’re just a woman to him, No-Wives. When it comes down to it that’s all he sees, all any of them see.”
“Not Ekvy,” she argued. Black Petunia nodded slowly, knowingly.
“Aye, even him. It’s a hard lesson. Best learn it quick.” With that she waved Vala off and went back to reclining in her overstuffed chair. There were too many words caught in Vala’s throat and none came out. The woman wouldn’t believe her even if she insisted until she was blue in the face. That was their friendship, the foundation of it all. They saw each other as more than gender, more than blood, more than history. Black Petunia would never be able to understand.
Vala left, the words still caught in her throat.
They ate hard biscuits and scrubbed the ship until they went to sleep again. The days passed in this simple monotony. It was as Ekvy had predicted. Their tasks aboard The Moldy Peach were not so different than those aboard The Merchant’s Mirage. The bottom looked mostly the same no matter where you were and who was in charge. Whether a smuggler or a pirate a cabin boy still scrubbed and fetched and took the brunt of the ill will from the rest of the crew. There were really only two main differences. One was that aboard the smuggling vessel Ekvy had often been the one to tend the Captain’s small whims. To get called from simple tasks to run an errand or some other menial thing that was beneath the Captain and the other mates. Here Black Petunia called for Vala. The other difference was the men. The smugglers had no real venom in them, no true violence. She supposed that was what had allotted them into smuggling over this. What little foul temperament there was the Captain always kept well in check. Black Petunia did no such thing with her pirates.
Vala kept her sword on her now and she and Ekvy took to changing the places they slept each night. They avoided the crowds of men and always stuck by each other’s side if they could. Vala didn’t like the feel of their eyes on her. They looked at Ekvy with hate but they looked at her with something more. It made her think of how her mother had always said that a lady should never be alone with a man unless they were betrothed. Vala had always taken it as a lesson in decorum but now she wondered if it hadn’t been her mother’s way of threading life advice under the guise of propriety. Danger wafted in the air of solitude and Vala didn’t want to find out what fangs those men might sink into her if given the chance.
“I’ve gotten used to having you around,” Black Petunia mused one evening when Vala had been summoned to her quarters. She was swaying a hammock, her head tilted towards the small window that provided a view of the horizon. Vala began the series of tasks that had become her routine when she found Black Petunia like this. She had just gone through a bout of healing and liked to take a drink after such, so Vala went to her cabinet and took out the most frequented bottle. She pulled out the cork and handed it to the woman. As Black Petunia wrapped her lips around the mouth of the bottle Vala spread a blanket over her. Then she busied herself with cleaning and organizing the office. “What will I do when you’re gone?”
“Pick up a street urchin to take my place,” Vala suggested. She had been on the pirate ship for about a week. The constant proximity to Black Petunia had softened some of the fear. Now she felt fine responding quickly as she found most comfortable.
“You’re no street urchin though,” she responded. Vala looked up from where she was wiping up a splatter of ink that had managed to get on the floor. “Your friend was,” she added wistfully. “Absai told me he was living under the docks in Venrig when he found him and brought him on. His mother had cast him out when he started looking too much like the Mer father.” Vala’s ears pulsed with every word. She stared across the dim room at Black Petunia with wide, attentive eyes. She knew some, maybe most of the things that had happened to Ekvy in his life. He put little detail into the bad and allowed his tales to focus on the amusing, the outlandish, the entertaining that he could spin into extravagant stories. Did Black Petunia know more of the darkness that Ekvy refused to allow Vala to share in? “He does look very Mer,” she concluded before taking another long drag on the bottle.
“Ekvy was the one that found me and convinced the Captain to take me on.” Vala stood up and leaned against the desk. “He’d watched me fight this man called Daron Five-Wives and figured I’d be able to hold my own on the ship.” She lowered her face a little. “That’s really why they call me No-Wives,” she confessed. Black Petunia fixed a stare on her.
“That’s no small feat. He was big bastard.” She rose a brow. “You the reason he turned up with that mangled hand?” Slowly Vala nodded. She felt embarrassed though she didn’t understand why exactly. Beating Daron Five-Wives had been a great accomplishment for her. It had been a bolster to her confidence. She thought now, as she sometimes did, of Daron’s five wives and what they might have been like or what they were like now. Black Petunia barked a laugh. She swung her legs out of the hammock and took a stumbled step before regaining herself. She leaned a hand on the desk beside Vala. “And you still won’t join up with me?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“I could use a protégée with guts like yours.” She made a choking noise and coughed phlegm into the bottle she was drinking from. “I could use guts like yours in general. Mine are all rotted through.” She grinned and tossed her head back, drinking down the last of the alcohol and even the mucus she had just deposited. Vala wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“I don’t want to be a pirate,” she said by way of explanation. Black Petunia let the empty bottle fall from her hand. She held Vala’s shoulder now instead.
“You’d get respect being a pirate. You won’t get it as anything else. You gotta show them, No-Wives. You gotta show them just how strong you are, just how far you’re willing to go.” She gave Vala’s shoulder a sharp, snapping shake. “Stronger than the men. Farther than them.” Her breath wheezed noisily between them from the dead remains of her nose. It was hot and rank and filled with whatever rotting disease had burrowed into her and was working slowly through her.
“Maybe I don’t want respect,” Vala said as she pulled away and put the desk between them. She pretended to be interested in organizing the drawers.
“I think you do,” Black Petunia pressed. Vala shook her head though she wasn’t entirely certain. Respect. What did it really mean? There was plenty that she wanted. She wanted freedom, opportunity. She wanted to be left alone to do what she would without having questions and expectations piled upon her. She wanted what men had and took for granted, what they begrudged women for no real reason she could see.
“I don’t care if I’m respected or liked or known. I just want to be.” She looked up from the drawer that she had pulled open. It was filled with buttons of various sizes and types. There were lots of things like that aboard The Moldy Peach. Vala never quite knew what she was going to find when she turned a corner or opened a storage container. Black Petunia looked at her with sad, remote eyes. She pulled herself upright and went back over to her hammock.
“I’m dying, No-Wives,” she said on a huff of breath as she climbed back into the swaying rope bed. “I just want to know that everything I’ve gone through wasn’t for nothing. I want to know that another girl won’t have to make it as hard as I did because she can learn from the things I didn’t.” She laid back and Vala could only stare at her. There was an air of desolation in the cabin now. She wanted the things that Black Petunia knew and could offer. But she wanted them without price. She wanted to take them and leave and not give a second of her life more to this ship and these people. She was selfish then but so was Black Petunia for not just telling her the things she knew. She supposed that maybe women in their positions had to be selfish or they wouldn’t get anything at all. “That’s enough for now. You’ve got other things to do.” The captain put her arm over her eyes and Vala knew the conversation was over. She shut the drawer quietly and let herself out.
She wondered what it was that Black Petunia had learned and if she would ever know it herself.
It was only a few days after that when they finally reached a port. Black Petunia didn’t bring up their conversation and Vala certainly didn’t either. She didn’t even tell Ekvy about it or about the insight into his life that the other woman had given her. She didn’t tell him that she had been asked to stay on either. He had predicted it and since she had turned down the offer it seemed a moot point. She didn’t want him to worry that he was holding her back from a new, steady position. One that in the long term would earn her a higher position then she might ever had achieved on The Merchant’s Mirage.
The goodbyes from the pirates were terse. Many of the crew didn’t actually acknowledge that Vala and Ekvy were leaving. Black Petunia gave them both a slap on the back and word of good luck but little else. Vala was relieved she didn’t bring up her offer again and simply let them leave. The Merchant’s Mirage was docked successfully thanks the Black Petunia’s men and the pirates decided they didn’t need to stop over in the port for any longer than to drop off their passengers. They watched the ship pull off until the sun blinded them of their view of it.
“Should we check on the ship?” Vala asked. From where they stood on the dock it was hard to tell that there was anything truly wrong on board. The only indication was the lack of life, but there were plenty of quiet ships in harbor whose crew were all occupied with the pleasures of dry land.
“Let’s see about getting ourselves some real food and a bed for the night first. Find out where we even are,” Ekvy said. He patted his pocket and at the low jangle Vala raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been holding our money since after the ghost pirates.”
“Didn’t trust the sleeping sailors not to steal it from us?” She joked. It seemed a strange thing to joke about but she was grateful that she could. Ekvy shrugged. They shared a small laugh. “I’m glad to be off that ship,” she said when they started walking in the direction of the inns and taverns set up by the docks.
“Didn’t like your stint as a blood thirsty pirate? Seems just your kind of job, honestly.” Vala gave him a halfhearted swat on the arm. “From noble to pirate,” he continued apparently egged on by her disapproval. “Now there’s a fall from grace. You’d be very popular. They’d have tavern songs about you.”
“No they wouldn’t. Quit it.”
“Look, if they have tavern songs about Black Petunia they’d have to have songs about you.” Vala stopped and gave him a dumbstruck look. “Black Petunia was a common lass, she used to wash the clothes,” Ekvy recited in a swift monotone to jog her memory. “And when she caught a terrible ill she lost half her nose.” His eyebrows disappeared beneath the fringe of hair that hung sloppily over his forehead when she merely shook her head. “You didn’t know?”
“When would I have heard it?”
“It’s not very good. Maybe we’ll ask someone to play it while we’re eating dinner.” They started walking again with renewed eagerness in their gait.