The Fox (2 page)

A command snapped from the gangway forced Inda’s awareness outward: he’d been dumped into the waist of the pirate ship.

Fox’s breath was warm on his ear. “Remember. No Marlovan or even Iascan. Just Dock Talk. And stupid.”

Hands hauled him to his feet. Worms of white-hot agony shot through his arms and his bad wrist; his hands were bound behind his back.

He was pushed toward a ladder and up, the thrusting hand steadying him on the climb.

He shuffled onto the captain’s deck. Sunlight struck Inda’s eyes like heated needles. He closed his eyes. Mistake. He stumbled over a coiled rope. Guffaws were the first sign of trouble, a sign that the interview with the captain was meant to be entertainment.

“Well now!” Gaffer Walic’s voice was a clear tenor, almost as melodic as Tau’s. Had Tau survived?

The pirate captain addressed someone in an undertone. Then in Melaeri-accented Sartoran, employing the drawling accents of an aristocrat, he added, “My first mate insists we’ve uncovered the mastermind behind our late adversaries. ”

Laughter.

A woman answered in far less refined Sartoran, “No wonder we gutted ’em. Watch! He’s gonna trip over the bucket!”

Inda glanced down, realized he wasn’t supposed to understand, and so he forced himself to trip over the bucket. Only those long lessons in falling kept him from breaking an arm, but even so the strain when he was yanked to his feet made him bleat in pain.

The captain switched back to Dock Talk. “Well, Fox. You fetched him. What do you say?”

“Stupid as a post, but fights well. Useful as a hand.”

Another voice, lower, angry, cut in. “That’s the one I saw commanding the action. I know it.”

Inda stood with his eyes closed; his stomach lurched.

Fox spoke again, in harsh Dock Talk but with a Marlovan precision to his consonants that chilled Inda’s nerves. “He was
relayin’
orders. You was seein’ him doin’ it, Varodif, through yer glass. But we was seein’ the tall, yellow-haired turd speakin’ ’em, before he was cut down.”

“Yellow-haired turd?” the captain drawled. “Might that be the Marlovan prince we made this entirely too expensive journey to find? Who cut
him
down?” His voice was light, almost sweet, which did not account for the sudden silence, so complete a silence that Inda was for the first time aware of the song of wind through sails, the whine of rope and wood, the
wash-lap-lap
of the sea against the hull.

Yellow-haired turd—the memories flitted like angry bats. Kodl, their leader (though not their commander, hard as he tried), falling. Dun the Carpenter, who had always fought shield arm position at Inda’s left trying to protect Inda even with a sword stuck through his chest. Both of them had been yellow-haired.

Dizzy with pain, with guilt and sorrow, Inda opened his eyes again.

The pirates stood in a circle facing the captain, who lounged in an armchair on his deck. The sun shone behind him, a glaring halo outlining the silhouette of a short, burly man.

“I’ll find out who, my children,” the captain said. “We missed quite a price for him. It comes out of your share if you had a reason, and out of your skin if you were clumsy.”

Again the silence, so the captain said, “Stupid will do for us, even if he don’t command ships full of warriors. Put him over there with the new recruits. Let’s have the next.”

Inda was guided to one side, the bindings on his wrists loosened so his numb hands fell useless to his sides. Without having said a word of agreement, Inda became a pirate.

At first it seemed easy.

That changed fast.

From the forward hatchway Rig, one of the marine defense band, was brought up. His hair was matted and sticky with blood, dull red in the bright sun, his face bruised. Two fingers bent in a way that made Inda’s guts heave yet again.

“We like,” the captain drawled, “the young ones who can be trained, who take orders. Join or die.”

Inda tensed. He could not say,
Join! There’s a secret plan—
So what could he say?

“Quiet.” Fox whispered. “Do. Not. Give. Us. Away.”

Inda groaned, his body trembling. A finger-press at his elbow sent white lightning through him, and when he could see again, it was to meet Rig’s bleak gaze, a look he would interpret and reinterpret for the rest of his life.

Rig spat on the deck. “You shit-stinking soul-eaters killed my brother—”

That was as far as he got. A pirate ripped a blade across his neck. Inda closed his eyes, but was not spared the sickening sound or the thud when Rig fell to the deck.

Walic sighed. “Why, Nizhac? He would’ve added splendidly to the meager number reserved for my evening’s entertainment. ”

The pirate pointed at the wad of spit on the deck, and the captain
tsked
. “Too reckless, my friend. Silent, and I like that, but far too reckless. We would have begun by making him lick it up.” Inda could see the captain’s profile now. The man seemed about forty, fleshy face, hair cut close to his head, a style that looked peculiar to Inda, but was the current aristocratic fashion in Colend. He wore a long brocaded coat embroidered with gold thread that gleamed in the sun, and he sported a huge gold hoop at one ear. “Next.”

Inda finally comprehended that he was not the first to join. A few steps away one of his newest recruits trembled, huge shoulders hunched, black hair hanging tangled over a face drawn in misery and shame. He’d joined to save his own life.

Pirates shoved forward three more of Inda’s marine defenders. The first two did not look his way but the last stared at him, a white-lipped, narrow-eyed glare of contempt that was all the stronger because it was provoked by fear.

“Well?” the captain asked. “We have much to do. I need crew, and I need entertainment after a night of exertion. Which are you to be?”

They didn’t answer. Some of the crew shifted stances, looking seaward or avoiding others’ eyes; though Inda thought he was alone in shameful guilt, there were in fact other reluctant pirates who had joined just to stay alive.

“Any others?” Gaffer Walic asked.

“Four,” someone called.

Gaffer sighed, waving a hand to and fro. “Bring ’em.”

Guiding Thog, Uslar, and Dasta, and half carrying Mutt—who’d suffered a broken ankle in his fall off a mast—was a thin young man whose facial contours released another squealing bat of memory. That sharp chin, the defined cheekbones below a wide flat forehead, the mouth like the upper angle of a triangle revealing prominent front teeth—that rat face had to belong to a Cassad— the former ruling family of Iasca Leror! There couldn’t be anyone so like them wandering the world. Inda remembered this face hovering just past Fox’s shoulder just before Fox brained him.

The Cassad did not look Inda’s way as he led the last of Inda’s band behind the three who had refused to join the pirates.

The three the captain had been considering. All tall, muscular, and few as they were, this band of the dead Marlovans had taken far too many of his own crew. He glanced up at the fire damage, the many arrows bristling over his ship. Yes, they were good indeed. “You know you can change your mind,” the captain addressed the three.

“I hate pirates,” the third said, as he had when first hired by Inda and Kodl. “Fight them, yes. Join them, be damned first.”

“Not before we get a night’s fun out of hearing you change your mind, over and over,” the captain retorted, thinking,
So much for mercy.
He twitched his gaze to small, frail-looking Thog. “Well? Join or die. I hear you’re wonderful with a bow. I can use such talent.”

The Chwahir girl hated pirates, that much Inda knew about her. He held his breath, waiting for the inevitable, as her black, enigmatic eyes flicked Inda’s way. He saw in that glance both accusation and question, a question Inda could not answer: even if it was habit for his band to turn to him for commands, he could no longer command.

But he could beg. “Please.” He shaped the word with his puffy lips, not sure if she understood, remembering that cry of hers as Tau pulled her from the wreckage of the mast,
Let me die!
He shaped the word again,
Please
, though he expected her to turn away in scorn.

All she saw was the movement of his bruised lips and the agonized squint of his eyes. Was there meaning in the way he stared at her?

Memory wheeled through her mind, distant as seabirds against the vast sky. Her heartbeat thrummed in her temples. Pirates, loathed pirates, but not the Brotherhood— and not
them
, the ones she hated even worse than the Brotherhood. She longed to have Jeje there, to hear her sensible voice, and then she remembered Jeje saying one night,
How strange it is that we can’t get our own hearts and brains to agree, so why should others agree with us? This wants Tau
(smacking her chest)
but this
(smacking her forehead)
chooses Inda.

Thog glanced down, straight into Uslar’s frightened black eyes. She knew that he, and maybe Mutt, waited for her to choose for them. They were too young, too bewildered, and Mutt too hurt, to do anything but follow her lead. She did not have the right to choose death for them.

She said to Uslar and Mutt, “For now.”

“What’s that?” the captain drawled. “Speak up.”

Thog faced him, squaring her bony shoulders. “I won’t shoot at anyone from home.”

The captain gave one mirthless guffaw. “The Chwahir runt is the only one with the guts to demand conditions. I don’t intend any raids on Chwahirsland anyway, platterface—that’s Brotherhood cruising ground these days.” He looked up at Dasta. “And you?”

Dasta had understood Inda’s single word. If Inda went, there had to be a reason, and even if there weren’t, it was better to be with friends. Nothing else in the world made sense anymore. Maybe with friends, life with pirates would be bearable. “I’m in,” he said.

“So let’s get ready for the fun,” the captain said, gesturing toward those who had refused, and every one of the new pirates braced against the anguish of conscience.

But then respite appeared, a sight so unexpected, so astonishing, the newcomers stared. It was a small, round, fair-haired woman wearing what looked like a formal court gown—loops and loops of lace, ribbons, on fabulous brocade—something you never expected to see on a pirate ship. None of them knew the gown was three years out of Colendi fashion, and even in fashion would never have been worn by its dead owner outside, during the day. The jewels around the low-cut neck glittered with painful brightness.

“Coco has a new toy,” she said, laughing as she swept aft through hastily deferring pirates. “Pretty-boy says Coco can have him
if
there’s no torture of his mates.” She pouted, then crooned, “Coco wants her pretty boy.”

And there was Tau, following in her wake, clean and dressed in a new shirt and trousers, a bandage around his forehead like a headband, over which his freshly washed golden hair fell loosely, a gleaming hip-length cape fluttering gently in the breeze. The expression on his extraordinarily handsome face was tight with self-mockery.

The captain slapped his knee. “What? Traders carry their own bawdy-boys? Never knew them for merry wights. Well, then, a promise is a promise, my sweet.”

A casual flick of his fingers, and three pirates turned on the three who had refused and slit their throats.

Pirates got rid of the bodies, fetched buckets, and sloshed the deck free of blood. And so, without any words of memorial, Inda’s mates were gone.

“Clean these up and feed them,” Captain Walic said with a weary wave of his hand at his new crew. “Put them in watches. Any extra can go over to the
Sea-King.
They need a top-hand or two. Come, Coco, let’s see what your new toy can do for us.” He got to his feet and strode down the deck, his crew and the newcomers all motionless around him.

Walic, the startling female, and Tau vanished into the cabin and shut the door.

The pirates turned wearily to repairing damage and restowing the taken cargo.

Inda was still gripped by Fox Montredavan-An, who stared at the captain’s door, his mouth tight with distaste.

“Tau was trained in his mother’s pleasure house, but he’s been with us for years,” Inda croaked.

Fox’s eyes were a rare shade of green—not the usual hazel mixture of gray and brown and bits of spring green, but an aggressive summer green, glinting with pinpoints of light reflected off the sun-splashed water running alongside the ship. “He’s a bawdy-house boy, like Coco was a bawdy-house girl,” Fox retorted softly, in Iascan. “He moves like one, he sounds like one, that means he thinks like one. They sell themselves; they’ll sell anything.”

Inda was too exhausted, hungry, and pain-hazed to argue. Tau was alive, Tcholan, Thog, Dasta, and the two scrubs—Mutt and Uslar—were alive.

Right now that was all that mattered.

Fox’s sarcastic expression changed to a narrow-eyed assessment. “Come along. Can’t have you dying on your feet.”

Inda obeyed, glad to be following someone from home, someone he could trust. His wounds and bruises hurt too much for him to want to talk. Peripherally he noticed things. Outside of the damage that he and his band had done, the ship was clean. Many of the pirates moving about were stiff; others had bandage-wrapped arms, legs, and heads.

Inda was pushed down onto a pile of winter sail that had been brought up to the weather deck so the hold could be restowed. He tried to listen while the pirate with the tinkling chimes braided in his hair barked words at him. But the slamming pain radiating from the lump behind his ear where Fox had struck him had increased to deafening effect.

Larboard watch . . . mizzenmast sails and cut-boom crew . . . rope repair when not tending sail or working the boom . . . front of the fighting when they fought . . . “You listenin’, stupid?”

Inda made an effort to concentrate. “Yes.”