The Captain's Cruelest Bet

The Drowned Siren did not so much open its doors at dusk as surrender them. By the time the lamps were lit, the tide had washed a fresh crop of sailors up the hill from the harbour, and they came in smelling of tar and brine and the particular desperation of men who had been too long at sea and meant to make up for it in a single night.

Emma Hartwell balanced four tankards in the crook of one arm and a tray of mutton pies in the other, and turned sideways to slide between a table of dice players and the cold stone of the hearth. A hand drifted toward her hip. She did not look down. She simply let the edge of the tray tip, and a pie slid neatly into the lap of its owner.

“Careful,” she said sweetly. “They come hot from the kitchen, and I’d hate for you to burn something you’d miss.”

The table roared. The man with the pie in his lap swore and then laughed along with them, because that was how it went in the Siren. Laugh first. Learn later. Emma was already past him, hair tied back with a strip of old blue ribbon that never managed to hold all of it, dark strands slipping loose against her neck in the heat.

Three rules. She recited them in her head the way other girls might have said their prayers, if any of those girls had been taught prayers worth keeping.

Never look a drunk pirate in the eyes. Never accept a man’s promise. And never, under any circumstances, get involved with a captain.

She had learned the first at fifteen, when a boatswain with a scar through his lip had taken her stare as an invitation. The second she had learned from a man who had sworn to return for her and had not. The third she had not needed to learn at all. She had been born knowing it, the way a hare knows the shape of a hawk’s shadow.

“Emma! Ale, lass, before I die of thirst!”

“You’ll die of something else first, Hobb, and it won’t be thirst.”

“Then bring me that too!”

She set down his tankard hard enough to slop it over his knuckles. He grinned up at her with three teeth and an enormous, harmless affection, and she felt her mouth twitch despite herself. Hobb was an old fisherman who had been calling her lass since she was twelve and had never once tried to touch her. There were a few like him. Not many. Enough that she had not yet given up on the whole sorry sex.

The Drowned Siren was built from the bones of a wrecked merchantman, or so Maren Locke claimed. The ceiling beams curved like ribs overhead, black with a century of pipe smoke, and above the bar hung the figurehead the tavern was named for: a carved woman with her mouth open in a silent scream and her wooden hair swept back as if by a gale. Sailors patted her bare feet for luck on their way in. Emma had always thought the poor thing looked less like a siren than like a woman who had just been told the price of something.

“You’re glaring at the lady again,” said Maren, sliding a fresh keg into place behind the bar with a grunt. She was a broad, weathered woman of fifty with iron-grey braids and forearms that had hauled more barrels than most men in the room. “She’ll curse you.”

“She’s already cursed. I’m just keeping her company.”

“Mm.” Maren’s eyes moved over the crowd, sharp as a gull’s. She counted heads the way other people counted coins. “Busy tonight. Too busy. Two of the Merrow’s crew in the corner, and I don’t like the look of those three by the window. Keep to the middle of the room, Em. Stay where I can see you.”

“I always do.”

“You always say you do.”

Emma smiled and kissed the air near Maren’s cheek, which earned her a swat with a bar rag, and she went back into the noise.

Someone had found a fiddle. Someone else had found a reason to fight and was being talked out of it by his friends, loudly and with affection. The air was thick enough to chew, laced with smoke and spilled rum and the sweat of forty men packed shoulder to shoulder. She moved through it like a needle through cloth, tray high, answering each comment with a sharper one. *Pretty as a painted ship, aren’t you?* Prettier, and you can’t afford me. *Come sit with us, sweetheart.* I’d rather sit with the rats, they pay their tabs. *What colour are those eyes, anyway?* The colour of the last man who asked.

That one drew a howl of laughter, and a few of the men raised their cups to her. It was the trick of it, really. You made them laugh at themselves and they forgot to be dangerous. Mostly.

She was crossing back toward the bar when the door opened, and the noise went out of the room like a candle pinched between two fingers.

It did not stop all at once. It faded in a ripple from the entrance inward, one table at a time, as each man turned to see what had silenced his neighbour. The fiddler lost his tune mid-bar. A tankard was set down very gently somewhere behind her. Even Hobb, who feared nothing but his wife, stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.

Emma did not turn around.

She knew the feeling. She had known it since she was a girl: the prickle at the nape of the neck, the cold that moved through a room when something that hunted for its living walked into it. She fixed her eyes on the nearest empty tankard and picked it up as if it were the most interesting object in the world.

“Is that him?” someone whispered, not quietly enough. “The Raven’s Wrath?”

“Blackthorne,” said another, and said it the way one might say the name of a sickness.

Boots on the boards. Slow, unhurried, each step landing with the patience of a man who had never once been made to hurry. She heard the crowd part for him. She heard the bench legs scrape as men leaned out of his way.

Emma set the tankard on her tray. Picked up another. *Don’t look. Whatever he is, he is a captain, and you do not look at captains.

But the room was so quiet, and the quiet had such a shape, that she could not help seeing him in the dark glass of the window across from her. Not clearly. Only a tall figure in a long black coat, wet at the shoulders from the sea mist, dark hair pushed back from a hard face. He wore no jewels, no sash, none of the peacock finery most captains hung on themselves to be noticed. He did not need it. Men were noticing him quite enough on their own.

He stopped at the bar. Behind him, a second man strolled in with his thumbs hooked in his belt and a grin that seemed to have been stitched on, a lean, sandy-haired fellow with a gold ring in one ear. He looked around the silent taproom and clapped his hands together.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “don’t stop on our account. We came to drink, not to be buried.”

A few men laughed, thinly. The fiddler cautiously found his tune again. Slowly the room began to breathe.

Emma breathed with it, and went on working, and did not look.

She kept to the far side of the room, and she kept her tray between herself and the bar, and when Maren called her to carry a bottle of the good rum to the captain’s table, she crossed the room with her gaze fixed on a point somewhere near his left shoulder. She set the bottle down. She did not see his face. She saw a gloved hand resting on the wood, long-fingered and perfectly still, and a faded white line of scar running from the wrist beneath the cuff.

“Anything else?” she asked the bottle.

Silence. Then a voice, low and even and without a trace of warmth. “No.”

One word. It slid down her spine like cold water.

“Then enjoy it.”

She left without looking back. It was the best performance of her life, and her hands did not begin to shake until she was safely behind the bar, where she gripped the edge of the wood and counted to ten.

“You all right?” Maren murmured.

“Fine.”

“You went white.”

“It’s the lamps.”

Maren said nothing. She did not believe it, and she did not push, which was one of the reasons Emma had stayed under her roof for eight years.

The night wore on. The fiddle played. The rum went round. Emma collected coins and dodged hands and spoke to no one who mattered. If she felt, now and then, the weight of a stare settling on her from the corner by the stair, she told herself it was the heat.

It was past midnight when the trouble found her.

She was in the narrow passage by the kitchen, carrying empty tankards back to be washed, when a shape stepped out of the shadow by the barrel stacks and blocked the way. She smelled him before she saw him: sour ale, old sweat, the sweetness of rum gone bad.

“There she is,” Garrick Slade said thickly. “The little Siren herself.”

She knew him. He was a mate off one of the merchant brigs, a big man gone soft in the middle, with a broken nose and wet, heavy-lidded eyes. He had been trying all week to get his hands on her. She had been making a game of not letting him.

“You’re in the wrong passage, Mr. Slade. The privy’s out the back.”

“Don’t be like that.” He leaned one arm against the wall beside her head. The tankards rattled in her hands. “I’ve been kind to you. Tipped you. You owe me a smile.”

“I owe you nothing, and your tip was two coppers.”

“Sharp little thing, aren’t you?” He grinned, and it was not a pleasant grin. His eyes drifted over her face and stuck there, glassy, hungry. “Sharp little thing with those pretty eyes. Come on. One drink, upstairs, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

Never look a drunk pirate in the eyes. She looked at his chin instead. “No.”

“You didn’t hear me.”

“I heard you very well. The answer is no.”

“No means yes, in a place like this.” He laughed, and his free hand came up and closed around her wrist, hard enough to bruise. “Everybody knows that.”

The tankards slipped from her fingers. One struck the floor with a clang that no one in the taproom would hear over the fiddle. She pulled, and his grip did not shift. She tried to step back, and found the wall. She opened her mouth to call for Maren, and his other hand slapped flat against the stones beside her face, caging her in.

Fear was a small cold thing. She had known it so long that she could almost have called it an old acquaintance. It sat behind her ribs and said, quite calmly: *This is what they mean when they say a woman’s silence is weakness. Don’t be silent.

“Let go of me,” she said, and her voice rang clear down the passage. “Now.”

“Or what?” Slade leaned in. His breath scalded her cheek. “Who’s going to stop me, girl? Maren? That old crow?”

“I am.”

The voice came from behind him, and it was not loud. It did not need to be. It was low and level and utterly without heat, the voice of a man reading out a sentence he had already decided upon.

“Take your hand off her.”

Slade went still. Emma felt the tremor run through his fingers, felt the grip loosen by a fraction, and then tighten again out of pure stupid pride.

“Mind your own business,” he muttered without turning.

“You are making it mine.”

Over Slade’s shoulder, in the dim amber light from the taproom, Emma saw a tall figure in a black coat standing at the mouth of the passage. His face was all planes and shadow. His eyes were the colour of winter sea, and they were fixed on the hand around her wrist with an expression of quiet, terrible attention.

She had spent the whole night not looking at him. Now she looked, and could not seem to stop.

“I will say it once more,” said Captain Corvyn Blackthorne. “Let her go.”