Salveran Tides Ch. 01

Leona looked out to sea and saw the outline of a small human vessel in the distance, bow pointed towards the shore. Her heart sank. So much for her need to get away. Maybe she could make something happen as Scarlet attempted to use her as a bargaining chip. She could speak the human tongue now. What were the odds that the newcomers would be as malicious as Scarlet was?

The ship drew close slowly. It was a small vessel, a light single-masted craft. Leona dimly recalled seeing silhouettes like the boat’s from underneath, sometimes swimming in their wake and getting a thrill out of being just out of sight of the humans above. The vessel nosed into the shallows, running up on the slope of sand concealed underneath the swell of the tide. Scarlet put her hands on her hips and threw back her head. “Thank the stars you lads are here!”

Five human males disembarked from the craft, kicking up plumes of water as their boots splashed in the shallows. They were large specimens, easily a head taller than Leona if she drew herself up to her full height and stood on tip-fin. The biggest of the lot was obviously their leader, a broad bald man with a beard down to his chest. “An’ what be someone like you doin’ here?” he called to Scarlet. His eyes slid over to Leona bound against the tree, and they went wide. “By the Flame!”

Scarlet folded her hands across her chest. “Merely a maiden, cast aside on this spit of land by the whims of fate, and those who bore me ill-will.” She jabbed a thumb at Leona. “This fine filet says her name is Leona.”

“Hey!” Leona protested.

“She speaks!” another of the men said. A third man made a strange gesture with his arm.

Muscles tensed in Scarlet’s face before she smoothed them out with effort. “Aye, she does. Quite the intelligent specimen she is. Certainly worth something to a naturalist or a biologist. I hear some sciency types are looking for new merfolk specimens to dissect.” Scarlet made a vague gesture with her hand. “Mayhaps we could reach an accord.”

The men ventured further onto the beach. Three stood closed to Scarlet. Another two came over and examined Leona. She drew her legs up, protecting her vulnerable underbelly and groin, and hissed at them. “Yikes, look at those teeth,” one of the smugglers said, elbowing the other. “Betcha we could wager money on who’s man enough to stick their knob between her chompers, eh?”

“Please, she’ll just bite the thing off.” The other’s lecherous eyes flicked down. “Wonder if she’s got teeth down belowdecks too.”

Light flashed between them, and Scarlet’s knife was suddenly blade-down in the sand, an inch from the man’s boot. “Oy,” she said. “Hands off the merchandise.”

Leona’s hope of playing to the kindness of the men seemed to be dead in the water. She kicked at her bonds, hoping some divine intervention would grace her and she’d free herself. But as the two smugglers joined the rest of their group by Scarlet, nothing happened. Leona set her jaw. She would not weep. Not in front of these humans. It was beneath her.

“So what is it you want, eh?” the smuggler captain said. “We take the mermaid and take you to wherever you want?”

“I’ve got nothing else to offer, mate,” Scarlet said. “What you do with her is your business. Alls I need is transport to Garsborough. Know of it?”

“Aye, ‘tis close. What’s there for you?”

“A friend who can help me take revenge on those who wronged me, savvy?” Scarlet’s good humor seemed to be wearing thin. “It’s a simple proposition. I bet you’ve got nothing to lose by a little detour. Come on lads, help a lady out.”

The captain shared a look with his mates. Then he chuckled. “You think I’m a fool, Scarlet Rydell?”

Scarlet didn’t blink. “Not yet, but we’ll see how this conversation goes.”

The captain drew a small object from his belt made of metal and wood with a hole in one end. He raised his arm and leveled the end with the hole at Scarlet’s head. Leona’s mind sifted through the information she’d absorbed from Scarlet earlier and came back with a several words: gun, pistol, powder, shot, bullet.

“You really don’t want to be doing that, mate,” Scarlet said in a level tone.

“Oh, I think I do,” the captain said. “See, scuttlebutt in the last port we made berth said you’d been marooned. Some think you was done for, but I had a sneaking suspicion you’d handle yourself just fine. After all, you’re Scarlet fucking Rydell. The Firestarter, the sinker of the Lovathoth, scourge of the Salveran Main.” His eyes flicked down to Scarlet’s wrist. “Traitor to the Flame. The only person ever to bear the Mark and survive for longer than a few months.”

“We can sit here listing off my accolades all day, do you have a point?” Scarlet shifted her weight just so. To a casual observer it might be mistaken for simple nerves. But Leona knew better, picking up on minute body signals. Scarlet was getting herself ready to pounce. To fight. To kill.

“My point is,” the captain continued, “that I could pull out a map of the Main, close my eyes and point to a spot, and I’m almost guaranteed to land on a governorship or territory that has a substantial reward for turning you in.” The smugglers nodded, chuckling to themselves like they were all in on some inside joke.

“I’m telling you, the money you’d get from a science boffin to examine the mermaid is substantially more than what you’d get for my head.” Scarlet raised her hands. “Plus I’d owe you a favor, and a favor from me is something to not be taken lightly.”

“How could you repay it, eh?” The captain laughed. “You just gonna magic up a new ship for yourself? Find a new beefcake to replace that fuck-off big first mate of yours? Please.” He jabbed Scarlet between the eyes with the pistol barrel. “You’re nothing now, Scarlet Rydell.”

Scarlet’s face was calm, not even flinching as the barrel rapped her between the eyes several more times. “You got a family, mate?”

It was a casual, innocuous question. “Aye, I do,” the captain said, smugness emanating from every pore. “A wife and daughter. And they’re gonna eat like queens with the money both you and that fish net me and-”

Scarlet struck like the wind.

Her hands snapped up around the pistol barrel. She wrenched it free of the smuggler captain’s hand with a sharp twist. She fired, hitting him square in the chest, the sudden roar of noise making Leona flinch. She lunged forward, spinning the pistol around her finger via the trigger guard. The hard wooden pommel smashed right into one of the other smuggler’s jaws, the crunch of bone audible over the sharp shouts of alarm from the crew. Scarlet took hold of the sword thrust through the man’s belt and yanked it free. She spun and slashed upward, slicing open the neck of a third smuggler. Red blood fountained out and he staggered backward, clutching at the gash across his throat.

Scarlet ran the saber through the midriff of the man she’d clubbed, using the sword as leverage to spin him around. The fourth and fifth smugglers had drawn pistols and taken aim. Their shots struck the back of their skewered comrade, and if he wasn’t dead before, he most certainly was now. Scarlet planted her boot on the impaled man and pushed, sending his dead weight careening into the fifth man. As the fourth smuggler fumbled for his sword, she cut him down with two quick horizontal slashes, one to his belly and one to the throat. He fell, and she moved to the last one. Just as he threw off the dead man she’d shoved at him, Scarlet’s stolen sword pierced his throat with a noise like someone biting into a ripe fruit. He stared at her for a long time, gurgling quietly before sagging. She let him fall, dropping the sword as he did.

Leona stared in awe at the violent display. The whole thing had taken all of fifteen seconds. She had been certain that Scarlet would be in the same situation as her. She was surrounded by weapons while unarmed, outnumbered five to one. Now the five were dead, and Scarlet stood tall, the blood of the slain dotting her white shirt like spots on coral. How in all the seas could someone that lethal exist?

Scarlet looked around at her handiwork, then nodded to herself a few times. A faint wheezing noise drew both her and Leona’s attention. The smuggler captain was trying to rise from the ground. Despite the bullet hole in his chest, he was trying to get up, making awful noises as he did.

Scarlet reached down and yanked the pistol out of the belt of one of the dead men. She bent it in her hands, snapping open the hinge to check the load inside. A quick motion snapped it back into place, and she moved to stand by the captain. “In answer to your question,” she murmured, her voice almost tender as she pushed the captain back down to the ground with the sole of her boot. “Yes, mate, I do think you’re a fool. Because now your wife’s gonna be a widow and your little girl’s going to grow up without her daddy. Crying shame, that.”

The captain started to raise a hand. “Wait-”

Scarlet pointed the gun at his head and fired.

Silence settled over the beach. Leona realized that the guns firing had scared a myriad of birds out of the trees. They circled above, calling out to each other as if in reassurance. They were above all of this, safe from the violence below. Panic settled in Leona’s chest. Was she next?

Scarlet dropped the gun by the dead smugglers and walked over to her. It took Leona a moment to realize that Scarlet’s knife was still blade-down in the sand by her feet. “Idiots,” Scarlet muttered as she retrieved the weapon and cleaned it off on the hem of her shirt.

“You killed them,” Leona managed to say, still in shock at what she’d witnessed.

“Aye, because they thought they’d be clever and try to fuck me.” Scarlet looked down at Leona. With the sun behind her, she looked downright terrifying, her entire body outlined in a corona of orange light. “Nobody. Fucks. Scarlet Rydell.” She paused, then added, “Unless I damn well want them to.”

Leona swallowed. She was suddenly very, very afraid of Scarlet. “What about me?”

“Oh don’t worry, you’re still useful to me.” Scarlet spun the knife around so she held it by the blade. “But I’ll need you to take a nap for me, alright?”

Leona didn’t get a chance to argue before the pommel of the knife thwacked her between the eyes and knocked her out yet again.

She came to as cold water splashed all over her body. For a moment, her addled mind thought she was underwater, and she tried to swim. But once again her body flexed against tight bonds, and she groaned and opened her eyes. Still trapped.

She was aboard the small smuggler ship. Well, the ship that had belonged to the smugglers before Scarlet killed them all. Leona was tied to the mast, just a few short yards from the open ocean skimming by beneath them. Above her stood Scarlet, holding a bucket from which a few drops of water dripped out.

“Hand on heart, I promise I’ll try to keep the whole ‘knocking you out’ thing to a minimum from now on,” Scarlet said, dropping the bucket to the deck with a thud. “Don’t want your brain getting damaged. That bit of you’s valuable.”

A myriad of questions filtered through Leona’s mind, but for some reason the one she landed on first was, “Why are you nude?”

Scarlet was naked from the waist up. Her skin was bronze across the whole of her body, likely from years spent under the sun. Without the shirt on, Leona could see a gauntness to her figure, the outlines of several ribs visible against her torso. Their breasts were similar in size, though Scarlet’s didn’t shimmer with scales like Leona’s did. The tattoo that was previously unreadable was clear now, and Leona blinked several times to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

The words were written in the Altaean language. By no man’s blade will I be slain, until my life is purged in flame.

Scarlet pointed upward and Leona craned her head back as best she could, tearing her eyes away from the tattoo. Scarlet’s white shirt was tied to the single sails’ yardarm, flapping in the breeze. “Had to give it a soak to try to get the blood out,” she said. “We’ll see how well it works in a little while.”

Leona looked around them. “Where are we going?”

“Well, my pretty little fish, that all depends on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, see, I might’ve kept a little something to myself.” Scarlet reached into the back pocket of her pants and pulled out two objects, both familiar to Leona. The first was a piece of glowing crystal tied to a cord made of tightly threaded deepsea seaweed, the kind that was almost impossible to snap. The second was a plain length of obsidian metal - her collapsible staff. “You had these effects on you when I found you on the island.”

“Give me those!” Leona lunged forward as much as she could.

“Do you not understand how this works by now?” Scarlet looped the necklace over her head. It hung on her similar to how it did on Leona, the crystal pendant resting just above the valley between her breasts. She tapped the collapsed staff against her thigh. “I hold the power here, Princess, not you.”

Leona blanched. “How do you know that?”

Scarlet blinked, then smiled. “I didn’t before, that was just a slightly mocking nickname I like to use. But thank you for volunteering that nugget of information.”

Dammit! Leona wanted to scream. “What do you want?” she ground out.

“I want a great many things, Princess,” Scarlet said, and she said the word ‘Princess’ in a way that Leona knew it was going to be the only way the human would ever address her. “Some of them immediate, some of them long-term. In the now, I want a hot meal, a tankard of good ale, and either a cock between my legs or a cunt upon my face. Preferably both, if I could manage it.”

Leona closed her eyes. “Must you be so vulgar?”

“But generally, in order to obtain said meal, ale, cock, or cunt, I need several things I am now quite short of.” Scarlet ticked off on her fingers. “I need my weapons. I need my first mate. I need my ship. And I need money. All of these things, mind you, are in service to what I need. And what I need is revenge upon the Flame-forsaken gits who dumped me on that island in the first place. Now, I have a few ideas as to how I can get those things. I could do it all on my own for sure, but I think it’d be much easier if I have someone as...aquatically inclined as yourself.”

“Why would I ever help you?” Leona spat.

“Because I have these.” Scarlet fingered the necklace and waved the staff back and forth. “And they’re obviously very important to you. But if you’d rather just skip this whole part and let me take you to the Bismark Institute and sell you to the science boffs for a few hundred golds, just tell me, and we’ll have no need to talk about anything else.”

Where I will be experimented upon and dissected, Leona finished in her head. I shall pass. “And the alternative?”

“Well, that’s rather obvious innit?” Scarlet spun the collapsed staff deftly between her fingers, handling the thing like she’d had it for...well, as long as Leona had. “You’re infinitely more useful to me here than in some tank with some coots who are gonna be dead in five years staring at you through rheumatic eyes and muttering to themselves while deftly trying not to stare at your tits. Which, by the way, are quite the sight.”

Leona’s people didn’t wear clothing. It interfered with their swimming abilities. Casual nudity was the way things were, and Altaeans didn’t regard it as anything out of the ordinary. But Leona knew humans did, with the ways they covered their bodies to protect it from the sun, or to accentuate the bodies hidden underneath the fabric. Being naked was completely divorced from being vulnerable. But Scarlet’s remark made Leona desperately wish she could fold her arms across her chest. At the very least she could push her legs together to hide her sex. “Useful in what way?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re good for many things.” Scarlet gestured to her. “You’re decently strong, armed, a bit slow on the upkeep, but we can work on that. I’m sure you’ve got many more hidden talents tucked away in your noggin that I can find a use for. Much better in there than having your brain laid out on a slab getting sliced open, eh?”

Leona gagged, fighting down the bile that rose in her throat. “Please, stop.”

“So what’ll it be?”

Leona’s shoulders slumped. “Doesn’t seem like I really have a choice.”

Scarlet dipped her head and stood up. “Now you’re getting it.”

“So I help you with whatever quest it is you’re on, and you set me free? Is that it?”

“Pretty much. I’m a woman of my word. Unless you try to screw me over. Then, well, you saw what happened to those lads on the beach.”

The sight of blood fountaining out of a man’s cut throat while Scarlet looked on dispassionately is one that Leona wouldn’t forget anytime soon. “You were going to kill them all along, weren’t you?”

Scarlet looked offended. “I was perfectly prepared to barter you for passage. They were the ones who had to change things. If I’d let them hogtie me, that would have been it. My story would end with a hangman’s noose and a shallow, unmarked grave.” She shook her head. “That’s not how my life will end, Princess. Count on it.”

Leona looked up at her. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

Scarlet shrugged. “Doesn’t have to. That’s just how it is. So, do we have an accord?”

As if she had a choice. Whether Leona liked it or not, she was stuck. Scarlet had her staff, and more importantly, her pendant. Though the human couldn’t possibly know the value of either. Leona’s eyes lingered on the strange phrase inked on the human’s chest. The more she looked at it, the more she took on the rough edges, the puckering around the edges of the characters. It was then she realized that it wasn’t a tattoo, it was a brand. Who and what could have done something like that? What was this pirate doing with Altaean script seared into her skin?

A long-ago conversation with her father came back to her. One day, my little fin, your curiosity shall land you in a heap of trouble, he’d said, rubbing her hair with fondness. But I have faith that you can make it good trouble. Just trust yourself, and you will make it through anything.

Leona’s father was dead now. All that remained of him was the crystal necklace she wore in his honor, after finding that her mother kept it shut in a box in her chambers. Leona’s curiosity had already landed her on the ship, in this predicament. She figured that since she was here, she might as well push forward. If push came to shove, she could outwit Scarlet. She was sure of it. In for a copper, in for a gold, the part of her mind still sifting through the human language offered.

“It seems we do,” Leona said, looking Scarlet in the face. “Does that mean you’ll untie me from the mast?”

Scarlet laughed, the sound echoing over the water around them. She didn’t say anything, just kept laughing as she retreated into the cabin at the aft of the ship. Leona sighed. A part of her was certain she’d come to regret what she’d just agreed to.