Текст книги "The Pirate's Wish"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

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And then I whirled around and punched her square in the face, right at that point where her eyes met her nose.

Pain erupted through my hand like I’d punched bone, but then my fist slid straight on through her head, and she dissolved into smoke, disappearing completely

For a long moment I stood there, my anger consumed by astonishment, and waited for her to return. But there was just the waves crashing up against the bottom part of the island, the wind rattling the pine trees. Nothing.

After a while, I set off down the beach, although I did pull out my knife. Just in case.

I walked for a good hour, working off the soreness in my legs and the ache in my head. I’d split open my hand when I punched Echo, but after a while the sting of that disappeared too.

“Girl-human!”

I stopped. The blaze of anger made a sudden, violent appearance. The damn manticore. She’d started this all, hadn’t she? All for a meal.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted.

The manticore trotted out of the woods, flicking up little sprays of sand with her paws.

“The Jadorr’a sent me,” she said. “He said you were in danger.”

“Not anymore.” If I needed any more evidence that I repulsed him enough to undo the protective magic, it was right there: he hadn’t come for me himself.

“This is all your fault,” I said.

The manticore fell into step beside me.

“I know.”

I glanced at her. Her face looked strange. It took me a moment to realize that it was cause she looked guilty.

“He hurt you,” she said. “Soul-hurt.”

I kicked at the sand.

“As opposed to body-hurt.”

“Yeah, I got it. I ain’t stupid.”

The manticore stopped and nuzzled my shoulder like she was an overgrown cat. “I thought he returned your affection. Humans seem to care about happiness. I wished to gift some to you. In exchange for combing my mane.”

I scowled. “You had me do it so you could eat him.”

“Well, yes, that too.”

I didn’t say nothing.

“One does not negate the other,” she added.

“Well, you just made things worse.” Not exactly the wounding insult I’d hoped for, but I was too tired from everything to be clever.

“I know,” she said.

And then she knelt down in the sand. “If you would like, I’ll allow you to ride me.”

I stared at her. “Is this a trick?”

She peered up at me through the frame of her fur. “No trick, girl-human. It is a great honor to ride a manticore.”

“Are you gonna stab me with your tail once I get up there?”

“If I wished to poison you, I would shoot the spine into your heart from here.”

That was probably true.

“Come along, girl-human. We are far from your rock-nest, and I will not kneel like this all day.”

I looked at her, considering. My body ached and I was sick of walking. And it would be something to say I got to ride a manticore.

Besides, she still looked kinda guilty, and I realized I actually believed her: that she thought she had been helping – at least up until we cured the rest of the curse and she got to snack on him.

“Alright,” I said.

I swung my leg over her shoulder and settled myself between her leathery wings. She straightened up, tall as a pony. I wrapped my arms around her neck, leaning into her soft mane-fur, which smelled clean, like the woods after a rainfall.

“Do not fall off,” she said.

“Ain’t planning on it.”

And then she took off in a gallop, moving like liquid over the sand. A cold wind blew off the sea and pushed my hair back from my face. She let out this great trumpeting laugh that echoed through the woods, stirring up the birds, and after a minute I started laughing with her. The anger washed out of me, and the sadness and the fear and the humiliation. The wind coursed around us like we were flying, and it stripped Naji right out of my mind.

The manticore got me that gift of happiness after all.

Course, it didn’t last. We had to arrive back at the cave eventually, and as the manticore slowed to a trot, I could see Naji pacing back and forth across the beach. He was wrapped up in his black Jadorr’a robe and he looked like a smear of ink against the impossibly wide sky.

“You must disembark,” the manticore said, kneeling. I climbed off her and gave her a pat on the shoulder.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“It was my gift to you.”

Naji had stopped pacing and he stared at me, his hair and cloak blowing off to the side. I trudged across the beach toward him, sand stinging me in the eyes.

“Why did you undo the protective spell?” The wind caught my voice and my question rose and fell like it belonged to a ghost. “The one that’s supposed to keep me safe from the Mists?”

“Have you gone mad?” Naji stared at me. “Why would you think I’d do that?”

“Because Echo showed up. That’s why I was in danger.”

Naji’s face went pale beneath his scars.

“I didn’t hand you over,” I said. “Obviously. But it was a pretty crap thing for you to just – expose me like that.”

“I told you, I didn’t undo the spell.”

“Then why did Echo find me?” I shouted, the wind ripping my question to shreds.

A peculiar expression crossed over Naji’s face. It almost looked like pain, like guilt or sorrow or even worry, but I knew better. “I would never do something to put you in danger.”

“Yeah, just to save your own skin. I imagine you were willing to put up with a headache if it meant getting back at me.”

“I had more than a headache.” Naji’s voice was low. “I would have come myself, but I didn’t think you wanted my help. I would gladly offer–”

“You’re right,” I snapped. “I didn’t want your help. I can take care of myself. You’re the one with the problem here.”

“I don’t want you to think I put you in danger,” Naji said. “It was… The magic must have weakened more than I thought– “

His words wounded me. “So you did weaken it, then.”

“No.” He shook his head. There was that peculiar expression again. “No, absolutely not. It was an… ah, emotional weakening.” He took a deep breath. “Intense emotional reactions can sometimes interfere with magic. It will sort itself out, I swear to you. But to have you so upset with me, my magic wasn’t as powerful…” His voice trailed off.

I focused my gaze on him, sharpening it. Anger built up in my chest again. “Upset with you?”

“Yes, when I, um, didn’t reciprocate–”

“Kaol, stop talking!” My hands curled into fists and I thought about pulling my knife out and stabbing him in the thigh, the way I had the night I met him. “Guess I just ruin everything, don’t I? Not like I fulfilled one of the tasks for you or anything.”

“I told you I was grateful for that,” Naji said quietly, but he didn’t look at me.

I whirled away from him. I couldn’t look at him another damn second. My whole body was shaking. This was why I hadn’t kissed him for so long. Because I knew this would happen. My kiss was so repellant that it shut down all his damn spells.

“Maybe I’ll just leave,” I said, speaking to the sea, my back still turned to him. “Maybe that’ll make things easier.”

“Ananna–”

I didn’t let him finish. I walked away from him, past the manticore and into the woods. He didn’t follow.

I slept outside that night, in a nest of pine needles and fallen tree branches that the manticore had stacked up deep in a clearing in the woods, not far from the shack. I could smell the smoke from the hearth. Naji’d been tending the fire the last few days, making sure it smoked proper and didn’t go out. I didn’t know if he tended it tonight. I didn’t care, neither.

I fell asleep early, after eating some berries and caribou, and curled up along the manticore’s massive shaggy side. Her heart beat against the walls of her chest, slower and heavier than a human’s heart. There was something comforting about it, like a drum beat setting time to a story.

I woke up in the middle of the night.

The manticore was still sleeping and the forest was quiet as death, which set my nerves on end. Forests ain’t never quiet, not even in the middle of the night.

I peeled myself away from the manticore and scanned the darkness. I was still wearing Naji’s charm even though I’d wanted to take it off – but the thing had kept Echo from touching me enough times that I figured that was the kind of stupid Mama would’ve slapped me for. And as I crouched there in the shadows, I was more grateful for it than I cared to admit.

“It really doesn’t seem fair, don’t you think?”

Echo.

My blood froze in my veins, and I leapt to my feet, all the muscles in my back and my arms tensing up. Her voice was coming from all over the place, like she’d melted in with the forest.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said, “that you can strike me in the face, and I can’t even touch you.”

“Seems plenty fair to me,” I called out, managing to choke back the quiver in my words. Echo laughed. The trees rustled a response. I beat my hands up against the manticore’s side, but she didn’t move.

“I’m afraid that won’t work, Ananna. We hold sway over the beasts of your world.”

“The manticore ain’t no beast.”

More laughter. I shoved up against the manticore and kicked at her haunches. But she just slept on.

“This is growing tiresome,” Echo said.

“I know,” I told her. “Suggests you ought to just move on, don’t it?”

Something flashed behind my eyes, and next thing I knew I was standing on the beach, in the cold open wind, next to the bonfire.

This was the closest I’d been to it since the day Naji set it to burning. It was bigger now, the figures writhing in its flames more defined. I could make out the features of their faces. Those faces weren’t something I wanted to see.

“This is much better, don’t you think?” Echo stepped into the hazy golden light. It shone straight through her so she glowed like a magic-cast lantern. “Easier to see each other.”

I kept my eyes on her, even though the fire flickering off to the side made me want to turn my head. Both times we’d gotten rid of her involved hitting her unawares: Naji with his sword, me with my fist. So I did the first thing that came to my head. I lunged at her.

She glided out of the way, and I landed face-first in the sand behind her. I didn’t waste no time feeling sorry for myself – a sucker punch don’t work more than once that often – and twisted around so I could see her again. She floated there beside the fire, her arms crossed over her chest.

“What do you want?” I said. “You know I ain’t gonna hand over Naji.”

She sighed. “I really wish you would stop saying that.”

She kept on sizing me up, and I knew there wasn’t nothing she could do or else she would’ve done it already.

“We just gonna stand here till the sun comes up?” I asked. “You wanna place bets on what side of the island it’ll be? I bet it’s over that way.” I tilted my head off to the left. “Ain’t seen it rise over that half of the island in a while. Figure we’re due.”

“That wasn’t my intention, no,” Echo said. And she gave me this hard cruel smile that I didn’t like one bit and gestured at the fire. “This is lovely. The assassin’s handiwork, yes? I’ve seen this sort of magic before. It’s rather unstable.”

She glanced over at the fire. “You don’t spend much time here, I’ve noticed, watching the flames. They’re quite remarkable. I’m sure my lord could teach you to do this sort of thing, if you were so inclined. Our world is the world of magic, did you know? It’s the place all your magic is born.”

“I already know one way to build fires,” I said. “I don’t need another.”

“This isn’t a fire,” she said. “It’s far more dangerous.”

That was when I looked. I tore my eyes away from her and looked at the fire. It’d been tickling there at the edges of my sight all that time, like an itch I wanted to scratch, and I finally turned my head and looked.

It swallowed me whole, all that golden light. Sparks and a warmth like the bright sun at home. The pale northern sun didn’t even compare. And here: Naji’d brought a piece of that familiar sun here, he’d set it to burning on the sand.

The bodies in the flames swirled and danced and called me over.

Echo was up close to me, whispering in my ear, and the fire burned away the coldness of her breath. “You can create that yourself. He’ll never teach you. But we can. I can. You can carry that light with you everywhere you go.”

I stared at the fire, my hands tingling. I tried to tell her I couldn’t do magic. But maybe I could, if I was part of the Mists.

“Who wants to be a pirate when you can be a witch? The most powerful witch the world has ever known. You won’t just control the seas, you’ll control the pulse of life. That pulse is what makes these flames burn. It is what gives power to that silly trinket around your neck-”

That brought me out of myself. She wasn’t offering power, she wasn’t even offering magic. She was after Naji. Always had been.

And the fire, for all its beauty, for all its magic, was still fire. It would only burn me if I got too close. Just as it had done Naji.

I dipped forward and yanked a stick out from under the fire. It was hot, but I didn’t drop it; no, I spun around and flung the stick and the lick of flame at Echo, and her eyes went wide with surprise and then with anger, and then the stick sliced straight through her and she turned to mist and disappeared.

I collapsed on the sand. My hand stung. In the golden light I saw the place where the stick had touched my skin, saw the red line it left there.

The beach stayed empty. The wind howled and the waves crashed down below. I forced myself to stand up, legs wobbling, and began to pick my way across the beach. I didn’t realize I was heading for the cave till I got there and found myself swaying outside its entrance, the dim, flickering light from the campfire casting long uneven shadows.

Inside the cave, Naji groaned.

“Naji?” I stepped in, leaning up against the damp stones for support. Naji was curled up in front of the fire, his hands pressing up against his forehead. He stirred when I said his name.

I shuffled forward and knelt beside him. Prodded him in the shoulder. He lifted his head.

“What did they do to you?” he rasped.

“Nothing.” I leaned back, didn’t look at him. I was too tired to be embarrassed. “Tried to get me to hand you over. I didn’t, course, even though–” I decided not to finish that thought.

Naji stared at me. “What?” He pushed himself up. He was pale and ashen, his scars dark against his skin. His hair hung in sweaty clumps into his eyes. “Wait, you mean the Otherworld…” He collapsed back down on his back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Of course I mean the Otherworld. Who else would be chasing after me?”

“The flames,” he said. “I felt them. The heat…”

I kept real quiet. My hand started stinging again, and I had to look at it. A thick red line cutting diagonal across my palm.

“We were by the fire,” I said. “Echo took me there.”

“Echo?” Naji sat up again. He didn’t look so pale no more. “You know her name?”

“It ain’t her name. It’s what she told me to call her.”

“Oh, of course.” Naji closed his eyes. “She can’t hurt you, you know.”

“I know. The charm.”

Naji looked at me, looked at the charm resting against my chest.

“So why in all the darkest of nights did you touch the flames?”

“What?” I slipped my hand behind my back. “The hell are you talking about?”

“The flames, Ananna. The fire. I know you touched it. It struck me down so hard I couldn’t even come save you.”

“I don’t need you to save me.” I stood up. “And it’s not like you want to save me anyway.” Naji didn’t move, his eyes following me across the cave as I scooped up the cooking pot we’d filched out of the Wizard Eirnin’s house. I set water to boiling on the fire.

“You still touched the flames.”

“Do I look like I touched any flames?”

Naji got real quiet, and his eyes darkened, and he tilted his head so his hair fell over his scar. I felt suddenly sheepish.

“I didn’t touch no flames,” I said. “But I yanked out one of the sticks to send Echo back to the Mists.”

Naji glared at me.

“Had to use something,” I said. “Didn’t have your sword.” The water was boiling. I poured it into one of Eirnin’s tin cups and dropped in the flat green leaves Naji used to make tea. Some herb that only grew in the north. I didn’t know its name.

“That was very stupid,” he said.

“It was just a stick!”

“It burned you.”

He said this more gently than I expected, but I still shoved the tea at him, sloshing a little across his chest. He glanced down at it like he’d never seen a cup of tea before, but after a few seconds he wrapped his hand around the cup and drank.

“Not bad,” I said.

“What?”

“It didn’t burn me bad.” And I showed him my hand.

“Would a stick pulled from any other fire have burned you at all?” he asked.

I scowled at him. “You only care cause the burn hurt you. But it ain’t hurting no more, right? So could we just drop it?”

“It’s not about the burn hurting me–”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Ananna–”

“Shut up!” I was regretting coming back to the cave now. I should have just trudged back to the manticore. The damn beast probably slept through the whole thing, but at least she wouldn’t nag me about getting burned by magical fires or look at me like I was this big disappointment cause I was the one in love with him and not some pretty little river witch.

CHAPTER FOUR

I woke up the next morning to the manticore licking my face.

“Stop it!” I shouted, rolling away from her. “Feels like you’re skinning me alive.”

“Girl-human,” she said. “The Jadorr’a asked me to fetch you.”

“Again?” I twisted my head around and squinted up at her. Sunlight shone around her big glossy mane. “I ain’t in no danger.”

“He said it was urgent. I told him I wouldn’t do it, that I am not his personal servant, but…” Her tail curled up into a tight little coil at the base of her spine.

“Urgent?” I asked. “Is it the Mists?”

“Oh, no. He said it wasn’t a matter of danger.”

“Then what is it a matter of?”

She blinked her big golden eyes at me. “I don’t know.”

Figures. Still, I roused myself up, taking my time cause it was the worst thing I could do to Naji, making him wait. Me and the manticore strode side by side down to the beach, where the smoke from the bonfire bloomed up against the sky, dark gray on light gray.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Where the hell is he?”

“He said he would meet you here.”

I sighed and scanned over the horizon. Nothing but emptiness. Except–

There were two people standing beside the fire.

I’d gotten so accustomed to the aloneness of the island that the sight of two human figures at once startled me. One of ’em was definitely Naji, cause he stood farther back from the flames, wearing some dark cloak I didn’t recognize, one that wasn’t tattered beyond repair. And the other–

I leaned forward, squinted.

“Marjani!” I shrieked

“What is that?” asked the manticore.

“Remember how I said a friend was coming to pick us up from the island? Well, she’s here!”

“We can leave?”

“I hope so.”

The manticore reared up on her hind legs and let out a string of trumpets and then raced toward the fire before I could stop her. I pounded along in the sun, the wind cold and biting, my breath coming out in puffs. Marjani stared at us. She was wearing a bright red fur-lined cloak that I gotta admit I wanted. It looked warmer than anything I’d nicked from the Wizard Eirnin’s house.

“What the hell?” she said.

The manticore skittered to a stop a few feet away from her. I snuck a look at Naji – he had his arms crossed over his chest, his face dark with intensity. “Don’t get too close to the flames,” he said.

“I won’t,” I said. The sight of him twisted my stomach up into knots for a few seconds before I shoved it all away.

Marjani’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Is that a–”

“Oh! This is the manticore,” I said, like I was making introductions.

The manticore lowered her head, all deferential and polite like she was meeting a lady. She must’ve wanted off the island more than I realized.

“My name is Ongraygeeomryn, and I am most grateful for your assistance.”

“You never talked that nice to me,” I said.

“You never had a water-nest.”

Marjani stayed calm, although the longer she looked at the manticore the deeper her frown became. I ran up to her and threw my arms around her shoulders and she laughed and hugged me back.

“I am so glad to see you right now,” I said. Now that I was across the beach I could just make out some big white sails way off in the distance. It was a bigger ship than the Ayel’s Revenge, probably a warship, though I couldn’t tell from that far off.

“They wouldn’t come any closer,” Marjani said.

“How’d you get on land?”

“I climbed.” She jerked her head over to the place where the beach dropped off, and there was a hook wedged into the sand.

“That held?” I said.

“Barely.” She smiled.

“You came back,” I said, cause part of me still thought it was hard to believe. I knew it wasn’t the easy thing to do. Hell, probably wasn’t even the most honorable, what with Naji being a murderer and a mutineer and all. At least she didn’t know about what I’d done to Tarrin of the Hariri, about how I’d had to kill him in self-defense. I didn’t like thinking about it.

“Of course I did,” she said. “I promised. Besides, I need your help. His too.”

Naji glanced at her, his eyes all suspicious. “Help with what?”

“I’ll explain once we’re on the ship. I don’t imagine the crew’s gonna be too happy about sitting out this close to the Isles of the Sky for much longer.” She turned to the manticore. “Naji told me about the, ah, arrangement you made with Ananna. I’ll allow it, but you should know I’m not taking you aboard if you intend on eating any of the men on that ship.”

“What?” The manticore bared her teeth and hissed.

“Sorry.” And Marjani pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the manticore’s heart. The manticore drew back, not quite into a cower. She kept her teeth out, though. “You’ll stay in the brig for the entire trip. I’d muzzle you if I could.”

“But you’ll let her onboard?” I asked.

Marjani sighed. “I’m not about to double-cross a deal you made with a manticore.”

I wondered if Naji’d told her about the three impossible tasks as well. Probably. But I doubted he’d tell her about the kiss. Hoped he wouldn’t.

“Get your things,” she said. She threw me a second pistol and a pouch of powder and shot. “And keep that damn manticore in line.”

The manticore hissed, crouching low to the ground.

It didn’t take long for me and Naji to gather up our clothes and Naji’s weapons. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t even look at him, but as I walked out of the cave he put his hand on my arm and said, “We should take the caribou.”

“Don’t touch me.”

Naji didn’t say nothing for a few moments. Then: “It hasn’t quite finished drying out yet, but perhaps we can find a place on the ship. Payment for bringing a manticore on board.”

He was right and I knew it, even though the thought of spending another minute alone with him, remembering everything about what happened the last few nights, the good parts and the horrible parts both, made me want to throw up.

“Fine,” I said, dumping my clothes on the ground.

We wrapped the meat in his old assassin’s robe. There was so much we only took half the strips, leaving the other half there to rot or feed the noisy creatures of the island.

I hated every minute of it. I kept waiting for him to say something about the fire or even about the kiss, but he never did.

Marjani was waiting for us by the fire once we finished, sitting on a piece of driftwood with her pistol pointed at the manticore. The manticore was curled up on the sand, eyes full of hate.

“I didn’t look at it once,” Marjani said as Naji and me walked up. “But you’re insane if you think I’m going to forsake a fire in all this coldness.”

Naji scowled and didn’t say nothing.

“I do not like this friend-girl-human,” the manticore said.

“Well, she’s the one with the boat.” I stopped in front of Marjani. “We got dried caribou to give to the crew.”

“They’ll like that. Half of them are from the ice-islands.”

I carried my stuff up to the beach’s edge, next to the place where Marjani had thrown her rope. Something about the edge of the island made me dizzy, like it was the place where the world cut off.

I peered down. A rowboat bobbed in the water. I tied me and Naji’s clothes up together and tossed them down, then tossed down the caribou meat too. Both landed right in the middle of the boat. A useful trick, Papa’d told me when he taught me. Never know when you’ll need to toss something.

“Are we gonna climb down?” I asked.

“I can’t climb,” the manticore said.

“I’ll take you.” Naji cut across the beach. “All of you,” he added, when the manticore opened her mouth.

I remembered the day we arrived on the island, how close he pressed me into his chest. And it was weird, cause the last thing I wanted in the world was for him to hold me – but at the same time, it was the only thing.

Instead, he asked me if my hand hurt.

“What?”

“Your hand. That you burnt last night.”

Thinking about it made my skin tingle, but it didn’t hurt none at all. “No, it doesn’t. Told you it was fine.”

Naji gave me a hard look. I stared back long as I could.

“I’ll bring the manticore and Marjani down to the boat one at a time,” he said. “Don’t start rowing out to the ship yet.”

“I know that.”

Another dark look and then:

“Don’t leave me on the island, either. You know what would happen if I stepped out of the shadows on that ship. The crew won’t trust that sort of magic. I’d be tossed overboard.”

“I ain’t gonna leave you!” It took every ounce of willpower not to smack him hard across the face. “I ain’t cruel, Naji. I ain’t you.”

He glowered at me. I glowered right back.

“Good,” he said, and then he grabbed me by my uninjured hand and the darkness came in.

Marjani’s ship was a big Qilari warship called Goldlife, and it didn’t belong to Marjani but to a skinny, mean-looking captain named Chijal who had a jagged white scar dividing his face clean in half. Nobody so much as glanced at Naji’s face when they hauled the rowboat up on deck – and though she didn’t say nothing I had a feeling Chijal was the reason Marjani had bartered her way onto this particular ship.

The crew was rowdy and loud, drunker as a group than the crew on the Revenge, and even more lewd. The first day I had to hold my knife to some guy’s throat to keep him from grabbing at me.

When night fell, and we’d cleared out of sight of the Isles of the Sky, Marjani took me and Naji down to the brig. Nobody was down there on account of the manticore, though she seemed more preoccupied with trying to lick every spot of brig-sludge off her coat.

“Girl-human!” she bellowed when I dropped off the ladder. “I demand my release at once!”

I pressed my hands against the bars. I felt sorry for her, I really did, but even I wasn’t about to let her free on a ship full of men.

“If I let you out, you’ll eat half the crew,” I said. “And a ship this size, we need ’em to get you back to the Island of the Sun.”

She pouted.

“Yes,” said Marjani. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

I turned to look at her. Somebody’d strung up a trio of magic-cast lanterns that swayed with the rhythm of the boat, casting liquid shadows across Marjani and Naji.

“We’re not going to the Island of the Sun,” I said.

The manticore hissed. So did Naji.

“You realize that manticore wishes to eat me, correct?” he said, sounding like snakes.

“No, we definitely are dropping off the manticore,” said Marjani.

The manticore hissed again, and I turned and shushed her.

“We’re just not doing it with this boat.”

Me and Naji both stared at Marjani, and she gave us this wry little smile.

“This is about that favor you want from us, isn’t it?” Naji asked.

“It won’t be difficult,” she said. “Certainly not for you…” she looked at me when she said that bit. “The Goldlife crew are gonna help us steal a merchant ship, and then we’re gonna sail her into Bone Island and get her a crew.”

“And then you’ll take me home?” the manticore asked. “Will you cure the Jadorr’a’s curse first?”

Nobody answered her.

“Who’s gonna captain?” I asked. “One of Chijal’s men?” The thought of it turned my stomach. The officers were just as loutish as the crewmen.

“Oh, absolutely not,” said Marjani. “We’ll captain her. Me and you together.”

Naji looked relieved, but I just stared at her.

“That’ll never work,” I said. “Ain’t no man’ll sail under a woman–”

Marjani held up one hand. “That’s why I needed both of you.”

“No,” said Naji. “Absolutely not.”

I looked from him to Marjani and back again, and in those sliding soft shadows I saw her plan taking shape: put Naji in some rotted old Empire nobility cloaks and he’d look the part of captain sure enough. A mean one, too, what with the scar.

“You won’t actually captain anything,” I said. “Right? We’ll use him to book a crew.”

“Exactly,” said Marjani. “Captain Namir yi Nadir. I started spinning tales about him while I was looking for a ship to bring me out here.”

“What!” Naji asked. “Why?”

“So men’ll want to sail with you,” I told him. “What kinda captain is he?” I grinned. “Brutal and unforgiving, always quick to settle a dispute with the sharp end of a blade? Knows how to whisper the sea into a fury anytime a man disobeys him? A real monster of a captain, right?”

Naji was glaring at me, his eyes full of fire. Seeing him angry like that soothed the hurt inside me. Not a whole lot, mind, but enough that some of the sting disappeared.

“Of course not,” Marjani said. “I want men to sail with us, not fear us.” She turned to Naji. “I put out stories about you sacking the Emperor’s City with a single cannon and a pair of pistols and another one about you seducing a siren before she could sing you to your death.”

The anger washed out of Naji’s face. “And people believed that?”

“People’ll believe anything, the story’s good enough. I also put out word that you pay your men fair, you offer cuts of the bounty even to the injured, and you’ll sail with women.”

“I do all that?” Naji frowned. “I’m not even a pirate.”

“No, you’re an assassin,” I said.

The anger came back again, just a flash across his eyes, but it was enough.

Marjani gave me a look that told me to cut it out.

“All of this is moot until we get a ship,” she went on. “So Ananna, I’d like to see you arm yourself with more than a pistol and a knife. Naji…” She gave him a half smile. “Well, your Jadorr’a skills may be required.”