The Lady Darren of the House of Torasan (Pirate Queen)
I THINK THERE must have been something strange in the water on Bero, where Lynn and Ariadne grew up, because I swear, those two thought twice as fast and moved twice as fast as anyone else. Lynn hit the ground unconscious before I even had time to say, “Wait a minute.”
Ariadne loosened the scarf, straightened up, and shot a glare at me that felt like a punch between the eyes. “Lynn takes the last spot in the boat. Any objections?”
Objections or no objections, there was no point in discussing it. Lynn’s eyelids were already fluttering—she wouldn’t be unconscious for long—but she’d wake up woozy and dazed. She wouldn’t be able to walk in that state, and piggybacking a girl through enemy lines isn’t as easy as you might imagine.
But Latoya surged to her feet, making the boat roll dangerously. “No!”
Ariadne didn’t respond, just turned that piercing stare of hers towards Regon and me. “Get her in.”
No time for second thoughts or long goodbyes. I grabbed Lynn’s shoulders, Regon took her ankles; we heaved her up and swung her twice and tossed her into the lifeboat. She landed with a plop and rolled into the bilges.
Latoya was trying to claw her way back to dry land, but she ran into trouble. The Torasan children—who had, apparently, decided that Latoya was the one thing in the world they could depend on—clung to her. They formed clumps, grabbing at her legs, her boots, her hands. She could have brushed them off like so many breadcrumbs, but instead she teetered in place, afraid of breaking tiny fingers if she ripped herself loose.
Meanwhile, Ariadne had reached the boat’s painter. She clawed at the knotted rope, undoing the cleat hitch that fastened the boat to the dock. There was a soft splash as the rope’s free end hit the water.
The boat drifted from the dock. Latoya, still weighed down by clumps of children, stood atop a thwart, face a mask of horror. “Why? Why?”
“Get them out!” Ariadne shrieked at her. There were tears in her eyes, but they didn’t fall. “Get my sister away from here! Get the children away from here! You’re the only one who can do it—don’t you dare disappoint me!”
That reached Latoya. She staggered back, dropped onto the bench, and, after one last look at Ariadne, took hold of the oars. Her first pull barely moved the boat at all, just stirred the waters. On her next stroke, she thrust the oars deep, and then strained until it seemed like either her arms or the oars had to break. Wood planks bowed and creaked, and Latoya gasped, but slowly, painfully, the oars broke the water, and the boat bobbed towards the open ocean. Latoya whipped the oars around and pulled again. Again. Again. The longboat was moving—sluggishly at first, then with greater momentum, faster, faster, and, finally, fast enough to churn up foam around the bow.
Latoya was dragging that massive weight through the sea with sheer brawn and willpower. Ariadne was right—no one else could have done it.
That didn’t make Ariadne’s stunt any less suicidal or rash, but give credit where it’s due. She had just, very possibly, saved the lives of the two people she loved most on the planet. That was a pretty good night’s work, considering that she was unarmed and hungover.
Regon cleared his throat. “Not to spoil the moment, but does anyone else hear pounding?”
ONE MAN, ONE pirate queen, one princess. A bare dock, a pebbled shore. Death behind us, and killing cold in front. And a distant drumming from the stairway, as someone rammed something heavy against the barred nursery door.
Ariadne wiped her eyes. “What now?”
“Now you and I get to pay for our drinks,” I said.
I couldn’t reassure her. On an Isle in revolt, a noblewoman was in much more danger than a runaway servant, just as Lynn had said. Still . . . still . . . I couldn’t help but think that Ariadne had made the right choice when she forced Lynn to take her place in the longboat. Our class, Ariadne’s and mine, had sowed the seeds of this revolt and it was only fair that the two of us should stay to reap the harvest. All noble houses are trading houses, and the first rule of trading is this: At the end of the day, the books have to balance.
Above us, at the top of the stone stairway, the pounding went on. The tempo of the blows had slowed, but it was more deliberate, now, more steady, the rebels finding their rhythm as they smashed away at the iron-bound door.
“Could we climb the cliffs, maybe?” Regon asked.
“I doubt it.” Most things on the Isle seemed smaller to me now than they did when I was a child, but not the sheer granite slabs that framed the cove. “Fletcher tried, when he was about thirteen. He fell from halfway up and hit his head on a rock.”
“Huh.” Regon glanced at me, curious in spite of everything. “Is that how he went wrong?”
“We think so. Unless he was just born wrong, which, with my family, isn’t an outlandish theory.”
“When you say wrong . . .” Ariadne let the sentence trail away.
It wasn’t something we were supposed to talk about, but who cared anymore? “I mean that he developed a habit of cutting things up.”
“What kind of things?”
“Mainly animals. Sometimes women. Anyone have an idea other than the cliffs?”
Regon hefted the torch high and we all looked around us: sheer rocks and dark water. Pebbles, sand, beach grass.
“Should we try to swim?” Ariadne asked, voice thin and high. “It wouldn’t give us much of a chance, I know, but not much is better than none.”
Regon shook his head. “You’ve got it backwards. A cold sea will kill you surer than a blade, every time.”
“What about a blade with a crazy person swinging it? What about a hundred blades with crazy people swinging all of them?”
“Regon’s right,” I said. “You can’t fight the sea—or outrun it, or surrender to it. Given a choice, I’d always take the hundred maniacs. Douse the torch, Regon. Let’s not make this too easy for them.”
Light arced overhead, then vanished with a splash and a hiss as the torch hit the water and sank. Blinking away orange sparks and haloes, I ripped my cutlass loose from its sheath.
“I’ll see what I can do to keep them busy,” I said. “You two stay close to the cliffs, in the shadows, and as soon as you’ve got a clear path to the stairs, run like bunnies. Try to blend in with the rebels somehow—maybe wave some torches and curse my name. Get back to Lynn, if you can. Tell her that I . . . uh . . . you know what? Never mind. It’s fine. She’ll know. Also, she’ll be pissed. Try to stay out of garrotte range while you’re telling her.”
Regon breathed slowly, but didn’t speak. I was talking nonsense—they’d never reach the stairs—and I knew it and so did he. But what else could I say? Right, well, I guess that’s it; how about a rousing pirate song while we wait?
From the top of the stairs: a dull crack, then a dry splintering, and muffled shouts. The oaken planks and iron braces of the door had begun to split.
Ariadne squared her shoulders. “Someone give me a knife.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? Why wouldn’t I want to pull a weapon on these child-murdering shits?”
“Because you might hurt them.”
“Which would kind of be the point, you stupid pirate!”
“Three minutes, Ariadne. That’s all you’ve got. In three minutes, or maybe less, those child-murdering shits will be able to do whatever they like to you. Do you really want to spend that time making them angrier?”
“So drop your cutlass! Hell, let’s tie each other up before they get here. Let’s greet the bloodthirsty rebels bound and kneeling. Would that be a winning strategy, in your books?”
“There is no winning strategy here. If you haven’t dealt with that yet, do it fast.” I yanked a spare dagger from my boot and slapped the hilt into Ariadne’s hand. “Eyes, throat, or groin. Don’t bother trying for the heart. Stab until your knuckles meet skin, then twist.”
More splintering cracks from above. Pale yellow light spilled through the broken door onto the surrounding stone. As soon as the light appeared, it fragmented. Dark shapes piled on each other, boiling and seething as they surged through the gap. The rebels flooded down the steps, their shadows thrown huge and stark against the cliff. The forms of them blurred together until the mass of men was a great shadowy beast running the whole length of the stairway. Spines of pitchforks and pikes; horns of fire.
Fuck, shit, bugger and balls, this was going to be ugly and could we just not? I was terribly sleepy and, more than anything, I wanted to go back to bed.
The tide of men reached the bottom of the stairway, pooled there, then rushed forwards.
I licked my lips and tried to think of something to say that wasn’t too terribly inane. The only thing that popped into mind was “Here we go,” which didn’t seem like quite the thing.
I swore a few times instead. You can almost always find a cuss word appropriate to your situation. Here, I went with that good reliable standby, “Crap.”
Then I charged.
I crashed into the front line of rebels. It broke and spilled around me, a wave on a rock, but bodies pressed close, trapping me, gripping me, before I could swing my cutlass even once. I stumbled, and the packed crowd blotted out the sky. And then they had me.
THEY WEREN’T GENTLE.
The people in the crowd all fought to touch me, which might have been agreeable under other circumstances and which, under these circumstances, was not. At all.
Hard hands tore at my clothing, stripping away my coat and boots, belt and scabbard, purse and dagger and silver ear-cuff. A grinning man with no teeth ripped out a hank of my hair and thrust it up for all to see, howling in delight. One of them—fat-fingered, stone-faced—got a hand up my shirt and grabbed a fistful of what he found there. Others just spat on me.
I guess you’d expect me to fight at a time like that. Struggle, thrash, roar, bite, punch heads. But I went limp as a rag doll in their hands, and I didn’t make a noise. There were too many of them, milling around me in a swarming mound, maggots on a corpse. There were so many of them, and they were so fucking strong. Worse even than the touching was the sheer hatred rippling out of them, the venom in their taunts and their blows and their gropes and their spit. It’s exhausting, you know, to be hated with such total intensity, and it left me shaky and numb.
Once, just once, I caught sight of Ariadne through the throng. Two men had her by the wrists, two more by the throat, a host more by shreds and rags of her tattered night-dress. Her face looked nothing like you would expect. Not teary or frightened or even angry. She had a look of fixed, furrow-browed concentration, as if she was very close to solving a riddle that she’d been puzzling over for years.
And the butcher swings, and the hatchet hacks,
And the blood drools out like red red wax,
And the earth is pink with the dying sun,
As the chickens follow him one by one . . .
KONRAD HAD SAID, You can’t spend your whole life hiding. But I’d had a pretty good run, hadn’t I? Somehow I’d managed to convince everyone that I was a captain, a warrior, a leader—hell, a hero. The most pathetic part was, I’d managed to fool myself too.
No more. As they dragged me back through the empty nursery, I was brought back to myself, for what seemed like the first time in years. This was who I was, this shambling, clumsy woman, with shaggy hair and jutting elbows, eyes stupid with panic, tripping over her own feet. This was who I had always been, and I never should have forgotten.
They kicked me down a stairway and then another. I tried to shield my head with my hands as bits of me bounced off hard surfaces, but my torso hit the sharp edge of a stair with a dull meaty crunch. All the breath left my lungs in a violent huh and I fought for air. Twenty hands dragged me to my feet again.
The doors to the Great Hall swung open in front of us, the room cruelly bright with a hundred torches. I saw what was inside not as one single picture, but as a series of jagged flashes, reflections in the shards of a broken bottle. There was the high table, overturned, surrounded by smashed goblets and trenchers. The floor, its flagstones smeared with blood and crushed fruit. Hordes of rebels eating, gorging themselves on platters of meat and white bread, swilling cherry wine so fast that it ran down their necks.
And then the bodies. A woman’s corpse, sprawled across a chair, clothing in shreds, loose threads hanging where someone had ripped away the expensive lace trim. A heap of young men in a corner, stacked up like cordwood, with one white arm hanging free of the pile. I recognized the rings of pink jade that Konrad’s oldest son Karel had been wearing at dinner.
And then there were two large, dark-haired men—they’d both been stabbed in the back, so they must have tried to run, but they hadn’t made it anywhere near the door. I was too numb to feel much, even when I saw the dead men’s faces. Gunnar was on the left, Talon was on the right. Four blue-grey eyes, open and staring at mine.
Ariadne and Regon were behind me, yanked and kicked along in my wake. The rebels dragged all three of us past my brothers’ bodies, past leering men with mouthfuls of rotten teeth, all the way to the dais where the throne sat. That’s when I saw what was left of Konrad.
“Oh, hell,” Ariadne sobbed from behind me, and retched.
I only recognized Konrad by the gold buttons on his shirt-cuffs. The rest of him—face, neck, torso, limbs—was a black, ruined, half-liquid mess. They had doused his whole body in boiling pitch. Spikes driven through his wrists and ankles had held him to the throne during his murder, and, judging from the hideous wounds caused by his efforts to wrench himself loose, he hadn’t died quick.
Scattered across the blackened body was a mass of white chicken feathers, some of them half-buried in tar, some drifting free.
“His eyes,” Ariadne choked out. “Did you see his eyes?”
“Don’t look, lady,” Regon said. He leaned forward against the arms that held him to block her view. “Just don’t look.”
The hall doors swung open. There were two more rebels, both with drawn swords, and in between them . . .
“Jada!”
My little sister stood two heads shorter than the man on her right. Both men together could have picked her up and pitched her over a barn roof. In spite of my panic and pain, the sight of her sent a jolt of lightning through me. I bucked mightily, flailing in my captors’ hands, kicking and biting at anything I could reach until I ripped my way clear.
“Jada, run! Go, get moving, I’ll hold them off—”
I lurched towards her, dodging between benches and corpses, all the while groping blindly for some kind of weapon. A dagger, a brick, a salad fork—anything. “Jada! Move! Don’t just stand there—get a grip! The balls, Jada! Kick them in the balls!”
A blow from someone’s burly fist sent me down to my knees. Then there was cold steel kissing my throat and someone’s hot breath in my ear, hissing, “This is how it ends for you, bitch, here and now—”
His forearm muscles bunched and the blade began to slide, but a voice cut the air, screaming, “No!”
The knife moved away. I blinked upwards to find Jada in front of me, staring down. No wounds on her yet. I tried again. “Jada, run.”
A smile flickered across her face.
Then came the kick.
It clipped me on the cheekbone, and my vision burst into burning points of light. When the first blaze of agony dimmed, Jada was crouching beside me, face inches from mine. “You don’t talk to me, dog. Not ever.”
Laughing hoots came from the rebels as Jada rose to her feet. I stared at her, unbelieving—her eyes narrowed and she kicked at me again. Her aim was off that time, and I managed to catch the blow on my uninjured shoulder. But the truth of the thing was sinking home.
So. On the plus side, Jada was in no immediate danger of being burned to death by an angry mob. On the minus side, what the fuckety fuck fuck fuck?
While I reeled, someone grabbed my arms and lashed my wrists together in front of me. I didn’t fight it, couldn’t fight it. My chest was shrieking with pain, no matter how shallow I tried to keep my breaths. Two broken ribs, I thought. No, three.
Another rebel hovered close. He was grizzled, his lean face daubed with charcoal, chicken feathers threaded through holes in his jacket.
“I’ll keep her from talking,” he said. His voice was scraped and raspy, as if he’d spent the whole night screaming. He probably had. “I’ll open up a thousand mouths all over her, and none of them’ll say a word.”
Everybody in the room seemed to feel pretty good about this idea, judging from all the shouts of approval, so it was a surprise when Jada snapped, “Not yet.”
Chicken-feather-jacket man bared his teeth. “We swore we’d purge the Isle clean of the Torasan scum! Smoke out the vermin, rip off their stinking hides!”
Howls of agreement met this, but Jada raised her voice over them. “Milo wants this one! You heard him! This one’s his! Once he’s finished with her, you can have her hide. I’ll tie her down for you and make the first cuts. But until then, hands off!”
Jada’s deep tone was identical to the one I used when I was trying to get people to take me seriously. In spite of everything, I almost laughed. She are boss.
“Excuse me,” Ariadne cut in. She’d regained her composure, somehow, even though a man with no teeth was holding her in an iron grip, a billhook quivering near her throat. “You all do know that Jada is a Lady of Torasan herself, right? One of those wicked little chickens you’re so cranky about? I just thought I’d mention it. Since nobody else was bringing it up.”
Jada wheeled on Ariadne. “Quiet, dog.”
“‘Quiet, dog’,” Ariadne repeated, thoughtfully. “Oh, that was really witty. That was just inspired. Do you come up with these clever remarks yourself, or does someone else write your material?”
Jada advanced on her, the skin under her right eye twitching. Just like when I’d met her back in the nursery the previous morning, her whole body was tight and tense. I’d thought then that she was scared. I knew better now. Every line of her was rigid with fury and hate.
“Do you know how many people here would jump at the chance to kill you with their bare hands?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same question. How did you convince these charmers to let you join their club? Did you promise that you would make yourself useful? If so—do you really think they’ll keep you around once your usefulness ends?”
Jada snatched a long knife from her belt. It wasn’t the blunt silver dagger of a Torasan captain, but a fisherman’s fillet knife, wicked sharp and hook-pointed.
Ariadne managed a rusty laugh. “Oh, sweetheart. It’s so easy to get under your skin. You should work on that, if you plan to stay in politics. It’s not all wacky hijinks like betraying your family and getting them murdered. It’s hard work.”
Jada inhaled. “When the time comes, bitch, I will gut you myself.”
“All by yourself? My, my, what a big girl you’re getting to be.”
Regon hissed a warning, but too late. Jada, face flaming, nodded at the man who held Ariadne; he grinned and shoved her hard. She stumbled forwards, straight into Jada’s path, and Jada’s dagger-pommel smashed into her face. Ariadne cried out—she had nerve, but she’d never had a chance to learn how to deal with pain. Jada dealt out more blows, now with an open hand, smacking Ariadne’s face from side to side, until she finally sputtered, “All right, stop it, all right!”
Jada halted and inspected her handiwork. Ariadne’s jaw was already swelling, her bottom lip split open and bloody. With her knife point, Jada caught a stray strand of Ariadne’s hair and flicked it out of the way, then drew the blade lightly down Ariadne’s face, past the corner of her eye and the side of her nose. Ariadne flinched—almost cringed—at the touch, and my stomach turned inside out.
“Jada, stop,” I said—my voice wobbled, I couldn’t help that. “Stop it. Please. You don’t have to go any further. She gets it. She’ll be quiet.”
“Maybe I don’t want her to be quiet yet.” Slowly, Jada traced a line across Ariadne’s throat with the tip of her knife. “Maybe I want her to spend some time begging for the chance to be quiet. Or maybe I want her to make some interesting noises.”
The tension stretched agonizingly, then slackened when Jada thrust her knife back into its sheath. With a deliberate swipe, she wiped her sweaty, bloody hand on the front of Ariadne’s nightdress. “We’ll finish this later. Don’t go anywhere.”
THEY DRAGGED THE three of us—Ariadne, Regon, and me—into a line facing Konrad’s blackened corpse. One by one, they kicked us to our knees.
“You have to stop it,” I whispered at Ariadne, not trying to hide the desperation. “Don’t piss them off. Please don’t piss them off. What in hell am I going to tell your sister if you get yourself killed?”
Ariadne kept her eyes fixed on the flagstones in front of her, where the blood and spit dripping from her swollen lips were pooling into a murky puddle. “Don’t worry about that, captain. I’m pretty sure you won’t have to tell Gwyneth anything.”
A wave of excitement licked through the crowd. Shouts became cheers; hands pounded together in wild applause, and the cheering became a chant: “MI-LO! MI-LO! MI-LO!”
And there he was: Milo, captain of the guard, a tall, muscular figure, loping towards the throne with an easy, unhurried stride. He walked like a man heading home at the end of a tiring day, in spite of the bloody crust that covered each of his arms past the elbow.
Milo mounted the dais, then turned. He said nothing, ordered nothing, but the sweep of his gaze calmed the room. The crowd fell silent.
Once he had everyone’s full attention, he nudged the foot of the throne with his boot. “Someone get rid of this trash.”
It was no surprise that they jumped to obey him. If I hadn’t been on my knees with a soldier at my back, I might have jumped to obey him. His voice wasn’t very loud, but there was a calm assurance in it that was somehow more compelling than a shout.
Rebels came forward with crowbars and pried the throne loose from its place on the dais, tossing it down the steps. Konrad’s corpse came loose from the throne as it bounced down. Something broke off of it in the fall—a burnt, blackened arm.
They brought up a simple wooden chair for Milo, placing it where the throne used to stand. Seating himself, he pulled off his helmet to expose his bare face. I sucked in a breath when I saw what the helmet had covered until that moment: hooked nose, jutting cheekbones, and a short crop of dark hair, coarse as a horse’s mane.
Well. That explained a thing or two.
His eyes scanned the crowd and rested on me. He smiled. I’d never before seen a smile that looked like a razor, like just the touch of it could cut.
“Darren, so good to see you,” he said. Leaning back, he dug into his belt pouch. “I was hoping that we’d run into each other so I could give this back. Naturally I appreciate the gesture, but I’ve decided that I’m going to buy my own drinks from now on.”
He pulled out the copper coin I’d given him only a few hours before and tossed it to me with a lazy flick of the wrist. It tink-tink-tinked across the stone floor and juddered to a stop by my knee.
“Why don’t we—?” My voice caught in my throat. I coughed and tried again. “Why don’t we cut to the chase here? I take it that you’re my brother.”
A hard rap on my head made my ears ring, and Jada’s voice hissed, “You’re nothing to him, you piece of shit.”
“Now, now,” Milo said, his voice calm and distant. “It’s only natural for her to be curious. And no, Darren, I’m not your brother. My father wasn’t Stribos, he was—”
“Uncle Saxon,” I finished for him. I could see the resemblance now. Something about the jaw. “So we’re cousins.”
“Well, that’s not quite true, is it? Bastards don’t count as real children. That’s what we were always told.”
We. My stomach gave a sharp twist, as my head flooded with pictures of my father chasing skirts, groping thighs, and pulling girls onto his lap. And Uncle Saxon hadn’t been much better, from what little I remembered. Of course I had a horde of bastard brothers and sisters and cousins that I’d never bothered to ask about and no one had bothered to mention.
“How many of you are there?” I asked. “How many bastards?”
He smiled again, distantly. “Just think for a minute. For three hundred years, the House of Torasan has raided and robbed and violated the people of the Isle. Every young lord with a prick has taken his fill from among the servant girls. For every pure line of Torasan succession, there are a thousand muddy tributaries. You probably share blood with half the people in this room. Stribos knew that, even if you didn’t. He thought it was funny. He liked to yell ‘Bastard!’ while his soldiers were drilling, to see how many of us would jump.”
“Konrad wasn’t Stribos,” I said. My bound hands were shaking—whether from pain or shock or rage, I wasn’t sure. “He wasn’t Alek, or Fletcher—he wasn’t a tyrant or a maniac or a brute. He cared about the Isle; he knew that people were hurting. He wanted to make things better, you murdering wankstain—”
“Better?” Milo said. “Oh, no doubt. I’ve known plenty of men like Konrad, men determined to be better than their fathers. Instead of throwing you a scrap of mouldy bread when you’re starving, they’ll throw you two scraps. Steal an apple, and they’ll give you five lashes with the rawhide, not ten. And they always act so hurt when you’re not grateful.”
He looked out to the crowd, eyes burning. “We decided we weren’t going to beg on bended knee for the little mercies that Konrad of Torasan was willing to show us. What do you say, Freemen of the Isle?”
The roar of agreement made the rafters quiver.
“And I wouldn’t throw around words like murder, Darren.” Darren, he said, but his attention was all on the mob. He was speechifying, working the room. “Today, those of us here avenged old Varro, hung two years ago yesterday for hiding his son from the press gangs. We avenged Tomm the wheelwright, who lost a hand for daring to strike that animal Alek in the face. We avenged a thousand men over ten generations who were worked to death on Torasan warships. What do you say, Freemen of the Isle?”
Another roar, but Jada’s voice—piercing, frenzied—rang out above them all.
And Milo leaned forwards in his chair, turning his attention towards her. “Jada.”
She came to attention like a pointer dog, trembling with eager energy.
“Jada, you were born a parasite, and they tried to make you think you’d never be anything more. But you killed two slave drivers with your own hands—the first when you gave Stribos the last cup of wine he’d ever drink, the second when you baptized your blade in Gunnar’s back. Any regrets?”
Jada lifted her chin. “No more than when I crush a cockroach underfoot.”
“That’s what I thought. And in helping us cleanse the Isle, you’ve cleansed your own soul, at last.” He crooked a finger. “Come up here to me.”
She mounted the steps to the dais, and the sight nearly made me vomit. It had been strange and painful to watch Jada playing the bully, her face lit up with cruel childish glee as she drew her knife point down Ariadne’s cheek. It was worse to watch her simpering at Milo. Her face glowed with a stupid sort of awe and wonder that bordered on worship.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding,” Ariadne muttered. Then, louder, “You think you’re in love with him? He’s using you, idiot!”
Milo’s eyes flicked up briefly. He spoke, not to Ariadne, but to Jada. “Is this the one you told me about?”
Jada cast us a look of smug triumph, like a child who’d tattled on a misbehaving sibling. I told Teacher what you said, and now you’re going to get it. “That’s the one.”
“Are you listening? You’re nothing but marriage meat to him!” Ariadne struggled upwards, and got about halfway to her feet before the rebel behind her shoved her back down to her knees. She winced, but didn’t stop. “He knows that every nobleman in a thousand miles will come down on Torasan Isle like a hammer, once they find out it’s been taken over by a bastard with ideas above his station. He knows that he has to marry a true-born if he’s going to have any vague chance of holding the throne. That’s all that matters to him, so forget whatever sweet nothings he’s whispered in your ear. He doesn’t give a shit about you, Jada!”
I tensed, ready for Jada to fly down the steps and smack Ariadne’s head clean off her shoulders. Jada didn’t move, though, just looked down at Ariadne with supreme contempt.
“You know nothing about him, filth,” she said.
Ariadne almost screamed in frustration. “Oh, for goodness’s sake—I’m trying to save your life. Don’t be a stupid brat, just because I embarrassed you at the dinner table!”
Milo ran gentle fingers along the side of Jada’s jaw, turning her face towards him. They kissed. At least, I think that’s what they were doing. Jada went at it so vigorously that she could have been mining for gold in his back molars. After a few seconds, Milo extricated himself.
“Mouthy little thing, isn’t she?” he murmured. “Could you do me a favour and take care of that?”
Jada glowed. “Anything for the Master of the Free Isle.”
She slid off of Milo’s lap—she’d ended up there, somehow, while she was plumbing his tonsils—and rose to her full height. There she stood, naked knife in one hand, staring down from on high at Ariadne, as a roomful of armed men watched in reverent silence. I watched her taste the moment, and like the taste.
“Take her outside and have her whipped,” Jada said. “Maybe that’ll teach her how much her opinion is worth.”
The rebels howled their approval and eagerness, and I wondered how many of them were personally familiar with the whipping post that stood just outside the palisade. Ariadne breathed slowly. Then, once again, she tried to rise to her feet. This time, her guards let her do it. Calmly, methodically, she smoothed out the skirt of her nightgown.
Out of pure panic and instinct, I grabbed her sleeve. I couldn’t stop this, I knew that, but how could I just let her walk away?
She pulled her arm free. “It’s fine, Darren.”
“How the hell is it fine?” I whispered. I’d seen so many servants and bondsmen sagging against the whipping post, while the rawhide carved their backs into flapping rags. My skin was tanned almost to leather by sun and salt water, but I knew I couldn’t cope with that kind of pain. Ariadne was all soft curves and smooth surfaces, and I didn’t see how she could survive.
Maybe she didn’t see either, because she tried to smile and couldn’t. “All right, it’s not fine. But I can take this. Gwyneth took worse. Don’t judge me if I make lots of stupid noises.”
“Flaming shite, of course not.” I racked my brain, trying to remember everything I’d heard about flogging, everything that could possibly help her. “Lean back after every stroke, don’t let yourself slump against the post. Don’t turn your head sideways. Um—”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Regon put in, quietly, tiredly. “You’ll want to. Don’t.”
Ariadne nodded, teeth chattering. “I’ll see you on the other side, you two.”
Somehow, she managed to stay on her feet as they led her from the hall, though she stumbled more than once. Jada followed them out, smacking her knife-hilt against her palm, and whistling the chicken song under her breath.
“So,” Milo said briskly. “While Jada takes out the trash, let’s deal with the larger issue. What am I going to do with you, Darren?”
I WENT FOR him. It was stupid, of course, but I was so very tired of listening to Milo talk. I thought that maybe if I tore his nose off and threw it out a window, he might say something that was more worth listening to—something along the lines of, Oh gods, the pain, the pain.
After he’d knocked me down a couple of times, I stopped getting back up, and just hunched on the dais steps, trying to remember how to breathe. The air was thick and tasted like iron bees.
Far away, I heard Regon’s voice, saying things like Captain Captain Captain and Get up and Breathe through it. Regon type things, comforting things—the same kind of reassurances he’d been giving me since I marched onto the Glory of the Isles in a state of blind terror at age fourteen.
“Red-Handed Darren,” Milo said. “Pirate queen, defender of the helpless. Pride of Torasan Isle, and the peasants’ white-hot hope. Isn’t it a joke, how reputations are made? You know, Darren, I once heard a shepherd say—and he was dead serious—that you understood the plight of the common man because you knew how it felt to be hungry. This because you once ran low on rations during an overland haul and had to tighten your belt for a couple of months. A couple of months of hunger in a lifetime of gorging yourself at the royal trough, and suddenly you’re the people’s champion.”
“I’m not—” I started, but the toe of his boot caught me right in the pit of the stomach. I barely recognized my own gasping sob.
“Now I don’t want you to worry,” he said, still in that calm, conversational tone. “This isn’t your last night on earth. I have some plans for you that I think you’ll find interesting. You’re going to relive your glory days. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up understanding the plight of the common man even better than you did before.”
Well, that wasn’t at all ominous. I rummaged around in my head for a menacing and impressive reply that I could deliver while curled in fetal position on the floor. Came up empty, but Regon was there in the pinch.
“If you hurt her,” he said, “if you put a single stinking hand on her, then people from here to the Bay of Accra will curse your name until the sea drains dry.”
“Do you lick the boots of every noble you come across, or just hers?” Milo asked, a nasty edge in his voice. “Just hers, right? I know your type. You’re a one woman dog.”
“You think you can shame me for following her?” Regon spat on the floor. He must have managed to work up a fair amount of spit, because it made an emphatic splat. “I don’t know how long you’ve been planning this shit. But all the time you’ve been smarming around the Isle, working up the courage to slaughter unarmed women, my captain’s been on the seas fighting the real fight.”
I balled my bound hands into fists underneath me and pushed up until I could see something other than floor. Regon’s boots. Milo’s boots. Two shadows across the flagstones.
“Fighting the real fight,” Milo said. “You mean, her own people threw her away when she turned out to be a sexual pervert, so she decided, what the hell? Might as well side with the commoners. Hell of a comfy way to fight the system, piracy. She gets all the glory of being the peasants’ champion and never has to scrub a single floor.”
That wasn’t fair. I had tried. Lynn always complained that I missed too many spots.
Regon grunted. “All right, you fetid sack of goat scrotums, go ahead and shit on her motives. She’s still saving lives, and you’re still a butcher. And don’t give me that crap about justice. You’re hardly the first bastard son of a noble to whip the peasants to a lather and send them out to cut down their liege lords. It always ends the same way. The other lords strike back with a great mailed fist, and then farmland’s salted and villages are burned, and women and children are starving in the streets. I’ve heard this song before. So go ahead. Preach yourself blue in the face, and promise your followers castles in the clouds and feasts of sugar candy. You aren’t going to get them anything but dead, and they’ll realize that sooner than you think.”
Was it just me, or did Milo not have a ready response to that? I groped in a random direction, found something steady to hold, and managed to totter up to my feet.
“You’re a loyal bitch,” Milo said to Regon at last. “Does Darren take you from behind, when she’s bored with her little slave girl?”
“Don’t you fucking talk about Lynn,” I snarled. It was a pretty good snarl, but since I was still hunched over my aching ribs, most of the effect was probably lost.
“Lynn,” he repeated. He rolled the name around his mouth, and I cursed myself for giving it to him, letting him touch it and mangle it. “That mouthy little blond called her something different—but what the hell, right? Maybe you don’t know her name. Maybe you assign her a new one every day. Muffin. Slut. Fido.”
Incandescent with rage, I opened my mouth, but Regon got there first. “You really are a pig of a man, aren’t you?”
“And you let a woman lead you around by your prick,” Milo said, his voice becoming even nastier, somehow. “Why is that? You think she can help you now?”
Regon spat again. This time, the grey gobbet landed on the toe of one of Milo’s hobnailed boots. “You’re not worth arguing with, you sad little boy, and you’re boring me. Just get on with it.”
Get on with what? My brain must have been numbed almost to crawling pace with exhaustion and pain, because even when Milo drew his sword, I didn’t understand.
Regon was saying Regon-things again, like It’s all right, captain and It was worth it, and the words buzzed fitfully around my head, connecting with nothing. I looked at the sword and I looked at Regon.
“No,” I said, brain snapping back to life. “Don’t you hurt him, leave him alone—”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” Milo said. “I’m going to put him out of his misery. When you cut his balls off, you made one hell of a clean job of it.”
“Sad little boy,” Regon said again. “Sad little boy lives in terror of meeting a woman smarter than he is. Sad little boy holds his dick with both hands when he talks to a girl, in case it starts to come loose.”
Milo’s face didn’t show that the jibe had landed, but his knuckles whitened on his sword-hilt, and he hefted his blade.
“No!” I gasped. “Milo—No! Leave him alone! Do it to me! I’m the one you’re after! Milo, me! Me, me, me, me, me!”
“Me, me, me,” Milo repeated. “That’s always the way of it with you nobles, isn’t it?”
The blade flashed out.
For a second, I thought Milo had missed. Regon still stood upright, though his head was bent at an unnatural angle. But then came the blood, streaming from the left side of Regon’s neck like a red carpet unrolling, down his shoulder and arm. Maybe the sword was dull, or maybe Milo’s sword arm wasn’t as strong as he fancied it, because the blow had only taken Regon’s head off halfway.
There was no such mistake with the second strike. Regon’s body crumpled to the flagstones. A fraction of a second later, so did his head. The grey eyes, in a suddenly ashen face, were still wide open, and staring.
Too late—far too late—I surged at my captors, howling, flailing, not even caring what Milo was going to do to me if only I could punch a few of those perfect teeth out. Hard hands grabbed me and pulled me backwards. Someone dealt a clout to my skull that took me down, and then they all closed in with fists and boots.
Very dimly, through the blows that rocked me, I could hear noise from outside the courtyard: the cracking of a whip. Ariadne didn’t last even one stroke before she started screaming.