The Pirate King Ch. 21

"Good." He paused. "Was it not enough?"

I looked up at him, confused by his question. He had never asked this before.

"Because I'm not sure I'm willing to go any farther."

That worried me. "Was it too far for you?"

"No." His answer was so sure, so quick, that my worry was dispersed immediately. "Definitely not. I just think this is kind of where I sit, where all of this is concerned." He looked up at me. "And I want to know if I'm not going to be enough for you."

"Enough," I told him. "Always enough. I love it because it's you."

I wasn't sure it was the right thing to say, and I knew it was not the most eloquent way to put it, but this Captain had pulled so many words already from my soul and so I simply said what was left.

"Good." He pressed his face back into my hair. "Good."

"I'm not sure I like that you come to me for this. How you came to me for this today. I don't want..." He took a moment to gather his thoughts. "I don't want to become somewhere you come only when you feel bad."

I shook my head. "Never." I pulled him close and kissed him. "You make me better. No matter how I was before. You make me even better." I paused before adding; "However, I don't think I would know what to do without you."

"Don't worry," the Captain said. "I'm not going anywhere anytime soon."

I nestled into his chest and allowed his beating heart and the solidity of his promise to lull me to sleep.

***

Wicky did not see us coming.

The sea was calm that morning, had been calm since the night before when the Captain had pushed me to become a calmer thing. All that was left was to bring in a warmer air and then we had a fog, a cover that we took advantage of to the fullest. We were but 30 yards from Wicky's side when his lookout sent out a panicked call.

It was too late. They did not even have time to send off a cannonside against us before we pulled up and boarded them.

My body was quiet. My hands were easy, my movements sure. I made my way across the decks like the force I was meant to be, scattering bodies before me like rain. If the man gave up I walked away. If he fought I killed him. I could see the Captain across the ship, had time in my movements to watch him and make sure he was doing the same.

A man attacked him from behind and I nearly leapt across the whole of the deck but the Captain, my Captain threw him and there was a flash of blades and then he was no longer a threat nor even a man and I laughed, laughed to see something so beautiful and he looked up to see me laughing and waved before heading right back into it.

It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was everything I had dreamed and if it went perfectly, why should it not? Was I not in control? Was I not with the man who completed me? A perfect day should have been expected. A perfect day was deserved.

I should have seen it coming.

I should have felt it on the wind. In the way the water grew cold and black, how the souls slipped too easily through my fingers. But what of it if a man I killed died? Why should that be a surprise to me? And if the sea beneath us was unusually calm, should I have been shocked? Had I not calmed it myself? Was I not the sea itself, eternal, immeasurable? I killed men who would have killed my love and did not think to ask, in what others ways do beings have control. Where else do threats lie.

And so I missed his arrival.

Of course he would be there. It was his domain, just as it was mine. And any time that you killed a sailor, and that day I killed many and my crew killed many more, there he would be. Ready to accept the offering.

I had thought him sated. I had thought myself safe.

I had been a fool.

Foolish. Foolish, idiotic, lazy, blind, I can call myself whatever names I choose and in the end it does not matter because I did not see him. Not when he approached my ship, crawling through the water. Not when he hoisted himself over the rail into the battle. Not when he began making his way across the deck, his shadow long and winding and all that he had bothered to send for such an irrelevant errand. A collection of debt as he saw fit.

He came against the sea, and all he sent was his shadow.

"Sailor!" the Captain called. Screamed. And I looked up across the battlefield, my body glorious, my motions right, to see the Captain holding up his hand and pointing to the corner of the ship where an enemy sailor dropped dead and fell over the ship. Strange, I thought. I did not do that.

And then I saw him. Dark. Black. Smelled that sick oxygen-lacking stench he drug up with him, that he folded into matter and turned into blackness and watched as he touched another sailor and they dropped dead and that's when I realized, that's when I understood that we were all going to die.

I dropped my knife. I dropped the man that I held. He was dead, we were all dead if he had come to us in this way he could kill whole ships, entire oceans but the Captain, the Captain I could not allow the Captain to die, not in this way, I could not, would not, and so I raced across the deck as I called to the sea.

I called to the sea and I called to the sky and I called to anyone who might listen, I promised things I should not have promised and begged from beings who should not be shown weakness and in the end none of it mattered, none of it made a difference because when I reached the Captain the shadow had him in his grip and was trying to pull him over the side and I spat words that Minnie had taught me, words so ingrained within me they sat in my mouth like broken teeth and they tasted like blood and it still wasn't enough, Dave held him tighter and I screamed the sea at him then, poured the raw anger of a still flat expanse, of a summer storm keeping you from port, the endlessness of my anger and the promise of my eternity and he shrunk from me then, shrunk away everywhere but also moved away and over the edge of my ship, of myCaptain's ship and it left behind the Captain, it left behind my Captain but it was too late, it was too late because he had touched him, leeched his soul from his body, his life, Dave could have claimed him with just the slightest touch and he had wrapped himself around my love like he deserved his touch and so, and then.

The Captain was dead.

I touched him once. Felt the way his skin was cold, his soul already in the courts so far beneath the sea even I did not dare stop foot. My fingertips traced down his face to close his eyes.

And then I turned, opened my soul, and I fell into the sea.

***

There was nothing but bile coming up anymore. I stared down into the ocean where it had splashed and wished I could become the same. Nothing but thin water and foam.

"Lad," Cookie said softly behind me.

I did not look at him. I stared into the ocean instead, into the waves carrying bits of flotsam and the remnants of men that had thought they could resist me and then further, deeper down. The black pits that Dave called home that now contained the Captain's soul.

I threw up again.

Wicky ship was no more. I had destroyed his ship, and then another ship, and then another, and I do not know who they were or what they were doing but they had been pirates and they had been in the North and they flew my flag like it was their own and so I had run to them, spread myself across the waters and brought our ship to their sides and destroyed them one after another and it had done nothing, nothing to take away from the truth that the Captain is dead and my body tried to throw up again but I had nothing left, nothing, nothing left to give.

"Lad." Cookie was more insistent this time. I knew he stood with the whole of the crew in the center of the ship, corralling and containing the terrified men. I knew Ichor had stood at the bow of the ship, had listened to my instructions, I knew the Russian had climbed in my storms to trim sails I did not have the time to order trimmed and Sneg had climbed with him. That Natch had as well. That Finn had not. That Thron had screamed at me, had tried to throw the body of the Captain overboard to join the other five who had been killed just like he and the Captain was dead, there were holes in my stomach were he had been before, there were rips in the fabric of my world, there was a pouring out of my soul, there was a tearing within me that -

I turned over to the rail and vomited, my body trying to empty itself of whatever I had become.

It couldn't. It never, ever would, for I was already empty in the most violent ways imaginable.

For a long time the only sound was my retching. Finally, my body could take no more, and I merely leaned on the railing.

"Trilon." It was the name of an ocean; it was not my name. But Cookie had no other way to call me. I put my head in my hands and felt the sea, the way it was everywhere, how the currents pushed and pulled and never went anywhere.

I was so lost.

"You can't leave him like this."

I had killed the other three men that had tried to throw the Captain overboard with Thron. Thron was lucky the Russian had been close by and was not afraid to put hands on me, to direct attention to himself, that we shared enough blood to make harming him more difficult than I wanted; Thron was lucky.

And the Captain was dead.

"There's nothing to be done, lad. 'Tis fate."

Fate, I thought as I felt my hands on my face. Fate and destiny and the immovable forces of the world and it happened and so it was meant to be but this could not be, this could not be what my fate was, I could not be meant to feel this pain and the Captain, the Captain.

The Captain did not believe in fate. I held onto that thought wildly, hoping, wishing. But it did not serve to make him any less cold, me any less empty.

The wind whipped around me. The ship stood silent. Waiting.

But. I suddenly straightened. But.

My eyes tracked North. Not the north that held the ship I hated, the brother that killed me. But true, absolute North. Where I had once sailed and thought I would never sail again.

Fate, I thought slowly. Oceans spinning with a velocity all their own and I made no attempt to calm them. Destiny. Family.

There was only one island there. One volcano. One witch capable of opening a gate so strong a man could walk through and come back to find it still there.

I turned my head to find Cookie waiting on me. The men around him backed away at my gaze but he simply looked back, arms crossed.

Or, I thought as I looked Alan over. A full ship.

If the sea had taken him, perhaps I would have been more willing to accept it. If he had fallen in battle, had died as part of the life we lead. Perhaps then I would give him over, would walk away.

But this was not a part of anything. It was randomness. It was chance. I stared down in the inky darkness and thought about fate, and desire, and a being with many rows of teeth who had become too comfortable with claiming the living before he had any fucking right.

New deal. I want him. slithered sharp and sandpaper over my skin. Meant to be, I tried. It didn't sit well in my stomach. Stolen, I tried again.

My oceans quivered in recognition as I slowly stood, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. The men behind me scattered the deck. I paid them no attention.

"Ghost," Natch called. I ignored him, walking directly up to Cookie.

"The preservation from the island," I asked Cookie. The Captain lay at his feet, curled and broken and empty, empty, still so beautiful and it cut across my stomach and caused me to drop to my knees beside him.

Cookie took in a sharp breath. "He needs buried."

I gathered him onto my lap, moving curls back from his face again and again. Dave has his soul, I thought. But you need a body to finish a deal. My heart was racing but my mind was suddenly so very still. "Recreate it."

Cookie was shaking his head, his eyes wide. "Lad, even if I could." He glanced around. "He came for him. The men saw. He's going to try again, he's gonna come back for -"

"And then point the men North."

Cookie's words left his body. I felt them leave, knew they traveled to the place I was leading these men to with the speed and accuracy of incredulity. When they rushed back they were breathless, weighted by the knowledge he held from his mental travels. "You can't be doing this."

"You know the way." He felt so cold in my arms. I pulled him closer and did my best to ignore the way his arms hung so loose, so empty. "You've done this before."

"They just lost their Captain," Cookie hissed. "They can't lose you too. We can't afford to lose you."

I ignored him. "Natch." The boy was at my side in an instant. "Do whatever Cookie says."

He shot a quick glance at the cook, to the expression of anger and fear and frustration mixing on Alan's face, simmering. "Ghost..."

"Salt," I said more to myself. "A full circle to protect him."

"Whatever you need," Natch told me. Sometime in the storms I had become his voice had taken on an air of reverence, of fear, of awe and I hated it but to hear him say those words made some part of me calm and at peace. I knew he would do as I asked, and I knew he would do it well. Some part of me mourned the loss of him as a friend; most of me accepted his obedience as the natural progression. As the simple order of things.

He was a sailor, and a child of the sea. He would do as I asked.

"Dave will kill you," Alan told me. "If he doesn't, she will."

Dave. I thought of the moment just after - I thought of the moment I had fallen apart, when I had called to everything and allowed myself to become the thing I was meant to be. I thought of the way Dave had shrunk before me. How his shadow had fled.

He hadn't even come himself. He thought me so lowly he could send ashadow to kill for him. Anger slowly began to grow, filling in the empty spaces the Captain had left behind. Water pressed into the smallest cracks and began to widen them, breaking them down until I was nothing but shifting heavy waves and directionality.

Dave, I thought. Dave had made a mistake.

"Lad." Alan crouched down before me. "It's too late. He's gone."

I let my eyes drift over the Captain's body. Lifeless. Empty. Felt the way that emptiness could be filled with swells so large they would empty continents. Did not feel the need to reign in the storms that began to gather in the space his soul had left.

When I looked up at Alan he blinked. Natch, standing beside him, sucked in his breath and pulled back.

"Perhaps," I told them calmly. "But I'm going to get him back."