“You can.”
She stepped over one of the fallen men, grabbed the back of my neck, and kissed me. Full on, with tongue. A lesser man might’ve burned to death on the spot. When she broke it, she said, “Anything?”
“Not really,” I said honestly, which surprised me as much as it did her.
“Now I know I can trust you.” She laughed.
It wasn’t like the kiss diminished her sexiness; instead it was like I saw past it, to the integrity of the person behind it. I might have been her lover for years without seeing this, but once I had, I knew we’d never be physically intimate. In one kiss, we’d jumped over all that and become… well, whatever we were. Friends didn’t quite capture it. Neither did siblings, or comrades-in-arms. It was all of those, mixed and applied as the situation demanded.
And this situation demanded all of them.
I’d taken a job at which I knew I’d fail. I’d never find this other Edward, the sailor and pirate, not after twenty years. But I would look as hard as I could. Because I knew that Angelina, what ever she might say for others to hear, would do the same for me.
Over dinner that night, I told my girlfriend, Liz Dumont, about the new job.
We sat in our small second-floor room in Mrs. Talbot’s boardinghouse. The rain had stopped, and the lamp burned as the overcast sky dimmed to darkness. Horses whinnied in the street, and someone yelled something in a language I didn’t recognize. In the distance, I made out the distinctive clang of sword against sword and men’s voices drunkenly raised in song. It was all part of Neceda’s rustic river-port charm.
Liz was trim, with short red hair and freckles. She was also smart, brave, and tough, which she had to be since she ran a courier business that took her all over. She knew how the world worked, and how to navigate it.
She said, “You don’t really think you’re going to find him after all this time, do you?”
“It’s unlikely.”
“Then you’re just taking Angie’s money.”
“I’m taking her money to look. And I will, as hard as I can, and as long as I think there’s any point. She knows there aren’t any guarantees.”
Liz looked at me from beneath unruly bangs. It was a look that tended to make me agree with anything. “Is it a good idea to work for a friend?”
“I thought about that. I think it’ll be okay. I also think,” I added as casually as possible, “that I’m going to bring Jane Argo in on this.”
Liz sat up, tossed her bangs from her face, and set her jaw. I knew that look, too. “Really,” she said flatly.
“Yeah. She was a pirate hunter before she turned sword jockey, you know.”
“And she was a pirate before that.”
“Well, I’m looking for a pirate. It’s her area of expertise, not mine.”
“Is she still married to that worthless little weasel?”
“Miles? As far as I know.”
“Didn’t you have to go pull him out of one of Gordon Marantz’s gambling houses last year?”
“Yep. Didn’t change a thing.”
“Amazing how some people can have such huge blind spots.” I didn’t say anything. Jane Argo knew exactly what her husband was; she just didn’t care. She loved him. It couldn’t be explained rationally. Not by Jane, certainly not by me.
Liz continued, “I can trust you on a long trip alone with her, then. Right?”
“She’s a colleague, that’s all.”
“But suppose your ship sinks and you get washed up on some desert island, just the two of you…” she teased.
“Do you want to come along?”
“Kinky. But I can’t. I have to take a bunch of scrolls to the Society of Scribes archive in Algoma.”
“Then you’ll just have to trust me.”
She grinned. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
We both laughed. We drank some more wine. Then we abandoned our dinner for more intimate activities.
Sometime before dawn, I got up and walked out onto the landing. The stairs leading up to our apartment went down the side of the building, and I saw a lamp burning in old Mrs. Talbot’s rooms on the ground floor. Neceda’s riverside location gave her the perfect means to receive and dispose of stolen property, and it was no secret that she did so. Still, she was discreet, and I had no interest in knowing her business. She gave me the same consideration.
The clouds were beginning to break at last. I caught glimpses of stars behind the irregular blobs. Neceda was asleep; even the whore houses and taverns were silent. Liz snored lightly, femininely, in the room behind me.
“Hey, what you doing up there?”
I looked down. Mrs. Talbot stood at the foot of the steps in a shapeless, too-short nightgown. At her age, I assumed it was for comfort against the heat and humidity. At least I hoped it was. I said, “Just thinking.”
She took the pipe from her teeth and said, “About what?”
“Pirates,” I answered honestly.
She laughed. “They’re bad luck, you know.”
“How so?”
“My second husband was a pirate.”
“No. Really?”
“Sure as the moon in the night sky. Not a very good one, though. He lost a foot during a boarding, but he still got his share of the loot. Name a navy that would do that for him.”
“What finally happened to him?”
“Got his peg leg stuck in the mud making a run for it ashore. A soldier cut him down and trampled him. That wooden leg was the only way I could tell it was him.”
Chuckling, she went back inside. I heard male voices muttering before the door closed.
I looked up at the stars. Finding one pirate after twenty years was a lot like picking one star out of this sky. Just when you thought you had it, a cloud slid by and you had to start all over when it passed.
My star was Edward Tew. And my cloud was the two decades that separated us.
Chapter Two
Jane Argo looked at me down the length of her sword. Her arm was fully extended and her feet spread wide for balance. From my perspective, I saw her face reflected upside down in the blade, distorted a bit by the accumulated nicks and dings. Sunlight sparkled from the numerous rings on her fingers. A strand of hair drifted into her eyes, but she didn’t blink. Neither did I-the sword’s tip was right at my throat.
I was hyperconscious of everything around me: the wind in the trees, the splash of a fish in the lake, a woodpecker’s persistent knocking. Sweat trickled down my forehead. Not many men survived seeing Jane Argo from this angle. Offhand, I’d put the count at “none.”
With a flick of her wrist, Jane knocked the bee from my collar and slapped it to the ground. She crushed it beneath the sole of one knee-high leather boot. “There.”
My voice sounded reasonably normal when I said, “Thanks, but I could’ve just slapped it away myself, you know.”
“Ah, where’s the fun in that?” She looked at her sword longingly. “Was a time I could’ve sliced it in half before it hit the dirt.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I said, wiping the sweat from my eye.
She laughed. If you spent any significant time with her, you realized she laughed a lot, and her voice was incongruously high-pitched and girlish for someone her size. She was my height, busty and wide-hipped but with a wasp-narrow waist. Her broad shoulders were as muscular as a galley slave’s, and she wore a large ring on every finger. Her hair fell past her shoulders, and only the faint streaks of gray in it and slightly deeper smile lines indicated that she was older than she sounded. “Yeah, you’re right, but it’s nice to pretend we once had a mythical prime, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. I tried not to pretend about anything, but that didn’t mean Jane couldn’t.
She turned to the young man tied to a nearby tree. He was scruffy, unshaven, and his clothes were often-patched rags. “So what did you think of my little trick?”