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one.
“A round on us, for every pair of hands sober enough to hold it!”
Hook’s lip twitched against the rim of his tumbler, fingers flexed against mosaiced glass as he registered that boisterous shout. A decidedly familiar voice, and not a welcome one in his favourite tavern, especially when he’d already condemned himself to a night spent licking his wounds alone.
He’d left Smee and crew on the Jolly, with barked instructions to scrub the deck raw and make any necessary repairs for an early morning voyage. They could see to their own needs, so long as he was left to his devices for the evening.
They had shared uncertain glances behind his turned back, Hook knew, but he was in no fit mood for company. Not after a day like that.
Across the room, amidst cheers and hollers from the unruly crowd of drunken slovens who bore witness, Leroy slammed a deep pouch, thick with coin no doubt, onto the grime-soaked bar. A flustered barkeep loosened the strings, his eyes shiny and bulging like ripe fruit on the vine. He waved one hand to a young barmaid at his side, who shrank from sight into the cellar behind in search of fresh kegs.
“A gift,” Leroy crowed, as his shipmates filed in through the open doorway, faces alight with pride. And the last of them, with a hand raised to adjust her black tricorn hat, long blonde hair drifting around her shoulders as a strong ocean breeze followed suit, was her. “From the benevolent Captain Swan!”
The Truest Believer and its crew were building quite the reputation these days, due in no small part to this sort of occurrence. Its second mate was a man of small stature and big mouth, but bigger still was the generosity of the ship’s captain.
Emma Swan. A woman of mystery, a pirate who refused to kill, and a captain who left a trail of gold and good will at every shore she tended. The smallfolk loved her; they called her Saviour, and told grand tales of her adventures. And there were many to be heard.
Perhaps the next of these tales would be the one from that very day, when she’d stolen Hook’s treasure out from under him, and he’d watched the deep red sails of her ship bleed from sight in the middle-distance.
Blinking that cruel image from his focus, Hook swallowed the last dregs of his rum, eyes tracking this new arrival with interest. Of all the taverns in Misthaven.
She hadn’t spotted him yet, watching her from a dark corner of the tavern as he was. He’d foregone his usual black trench coat in favour of a loose shirt and vest combo, but in truth he could never fully blend in with his namesake appendage glinting so companionably in the firelight. Not that it bothered him much, at the best of times; he liked the attention, the disquiet he could cause people in presence alone. If they feared him, they were less likely to fuck with him.
“Leroy.” Swan’s voice drifted as the raucous noise gave way to chatter and drinking. “When I gave you that pouch, I didn’t think we’d be using it to water down the locals.”
“It’s good business, Cap’n.”
Another crewmate turned to face her where she was stood, leaning back against the bar with both elbows perched on its surface. One boot crossed over the other, a sheathed blade dangling from her belt, and if Hook craned his neck just a little to take in the view between the heads of two swaying gentlemen at the next table over, well…
She was the competition, after all.
“He’s right, as it happens,” the crewmate said, and Hook recognised her as Red, or by her more colourful moniker, The Wolf on the Water. A she-devil in battle, or so he’d heard from many a pirate. He’d always been too distracted in their bouts with the Believer crew to notice. After swigging from a heavy tankard, she continued in an even tone. “Make some friends here, and they might loosen up and sing a few bars, if you know what I mean.”
Hook was quite interested to know what she meant.
“Not sure how well they’ll be singing with their heads cracked open,” Swan said dryly. A few tables away, a heated argument over dice was rapidly growing into a brawl. “Tiny, could you take care of that?”
“I got it,” the burly man said, ducking under ceiling brackets to cross the tavern in a few strides. His shadow fell over the table, and within minutes any dispute had been quelled. Only one man lay unconscious on the straw-covered floor tiles; a remarkably smooth end to a fight around these parts.
When Hook looked back over to the bar, Swan was staring at him.
That emerald-eyed gaze of hers, the confident arch of her eyebrows as she watched him, caused an unwarranted smirk to pull at his lips. He watched her in return, tipping his empty glass to her in mock greeting. Busted.
Swan held his gaze for a moment, mouth parting in surprise, before she turned her back on him and leaned over the bar. A momentary truce, perhaps, from her point of view; see no evil, impale no evil with the sharp end of her broadsword. As if Hook could truly go on with his night knowing she was a scant ten yards away.
But there she was, facing him again with a glass in each hand and walking his way determinedly. Relief washed through him – he’d have her stab him before paying him no mind altogether.
“To the benevolent Captain Swan,” he teased, and she rolled her eyes as twin pints of amber gold hit the table between them.
“Where’s your usual cohort? It’s not like you to drink alone.” Swan dropped onto the bench opposite him, swinging both legs over to face him in that dark corner. She looked different like this, without the wind whipping strands of hair across her face, and without her sword locked with his on the quarterdeck of her ship. This felt… intimate.
“Perhaps I was looking for more elegant company,” Hook said, running a finger along the rim of his new glass.
“You really think you’re in the best place for that?” Swan cast a look to the next table, where an almost skeletal old man was digging for gold in one wrinkled nostril. Opposite him, a mop of tombstone-grey hair quivered on the table as the head beneath it snored in violent, wheezing bursts.
“Well, love, the tides have seen fit to sweep you into my harbour, so a man can’t really complain.”
“Awfully chipper considering the way things went down today,” Swan drawled, taking a slow pull of ale. Not a fleck of remorse in her tone, nor surprise, because that was their game.
Some days, Hook would have her cornered, chest to chest with her back angled over the railing, his sword biting into hers at the hilt. Her teeth would be gritted angrily as he bore her down, ocean spray dripping from her chin. And he’d be smiling at her, baiting her with low words meant only for her ears.
And some days, rather more than he’d like, Swan would leave him chained to an empty chest, stranded alone on some beach or cove with the water lapping at his ankles.
The smallfolk who told her tales in their thatch-roof houses would call him villainous; a beast to be thwarted by their bright-eyed Saviour, and oh, thwart him she did at every turn of the wheel. But they were like to miss the finer details of Captain Swan’s dealings with the blaggard Captain Hook.
Like how her eyes, even in their fury, would drift to his mouth as her sword shook under the weight of his strength. Like how she’d distract him long enough to get that handcuff around his wrist in the first place.
“What’s past is past,” Hook said cheerfully, sipping from his own drink with confidence that she was too morally decent to poison him. “What brings you to this fine establishment? Last I saw, you were headed South with my loot in tow.”
“I knew you were still sore about that.” Swan jabbed an index finger at him, but he merely grinned, shrugging one shoulder dismissively. “We got there first, Hook. It was a fair steal.”
“A contradiction if I ever heard one,” he countered. “But we can argue the semantics of good form another day. You’ve avoided my question.”
Swan averted her gaze from his, rotating her glass between both palms in a half-circle. “To celebrate, or to settle in for the night. To pillage and plunder. Your best guess is your own, I don’t owe you my reasoning.”
“Then I’d prefer to think you followed me at length. I’ve been known to have that effect on women. Like the pipes of Hamelin, don’t you think?” Hook adorned this with a wink, and zeroed in on the minute tick at the corner of her lips.
“Maybe the drowned rats aboard the Jolly Roger have your answer.”
“Mr. Smee will be wounded to hear it. He’s quite fond of you, Swan.”
Point of fact, Smee was terrified of her and made no secret of it. She’d once speared his breeches very close to home when he’d tried creeping up on her mid-duel with Hook, and he’d received no sympathy from his captain in the aftermath.
Interrupting them at a time like that was the very epitome of bad form.
Swan hid a growing smile behind her glass as she drank, but he was far too familiar with that dimple in her rosy cheek. He pressed his luck, just to test the waters. “We sail for Arendelle at first light. I assure you I’m no threat to whatever nefarious scheme you’re cooking up here in Misthaven.”
Her gaze pierced him like needlepoints, slipping under skin and muscle. This, another idiosyncrasy of hers he’d grown familiar with over the course of their acquaintance, was by far the most bothersome. Swan plucked lies from a man’s mouth like fine hairs, as quickly as they formed on the tongue. And for pirates, who primarily traded in bluster and bullshit, she was not a dealer to be trifled with.
Knowing that, however, meant Hook could talk himself around a point.
Yes, he did intend to sail for Arendelle. No, he didn’t care to intercede on any plans made in Misthaven. But he had an inkling she’d dropped anchor here for a reason, and like the weather at sea, Hook’s whims could change on a dime – with the right motivation.
“Arendelle, huh?” Swan murmured, eventually removing him from the scope of her gaze. “That’s quite a trip.”
“Fear not, I’ll return for you at journey’s end,” he said, voice pitched low to match hers.
“I don’t doubt it,” she agreed, and her fingers spread along the pint glass, lacing together not so far from where his own hand was furled in on itself, his thumb running along each fingertip idly. Hook imagined how they must look to an observing eye, sat in council like this, and he wondered at the easy company they kept when they were four feet on stable ground.
When her tongue darted out to wet the pink seal of her lips, he took a deep pull of ale and shifted minutely in his seat.
“Do you—” Swan started abruptly, before pausing to inhale and start over. “I’m looking for… someone.”
Hook tamped down on his bubbling glee and the better part of his interest. Instead, looking thoughtfully to one side, he tapped a slow beat into the table with his hook. “Aye?”
“A man, or maybe not,” Swan said, and he could see the knot coming loose, just so, as she confided, “I was told he might have the answers I’m looking for. And this port is his last known location.”
“That’s quite a mystery you have there.”
Jaw flexing, Swan drank until her flushed cheeks grew visible through the misted glass, and its contents reduced to a thin sliver of gold. He watched the line of her pale neck ripple between the lapels of her coat, tongue pressed to teeth, and waited her out.
“You,” she said eventually, planting the glass down and wiping a sleeve over her mouth, “have no idea.”
“Please, I crave enlightenment.” Hook brought his hand up, leveraging his bristled chin between thumb and forefinger in playful thought. And then, with an airy wave for her to continue, “This man of mystery?”
“Lives up to the name.”
It was like squeezing blood out of flagstone at times with this woman, but he did so love a challenge. “Perhaps another name. One I might recognise.”
“Aren’t we feeling helpful today?” Swan regarded him suspiciously, and Hook lay thick the smoulder he’d mastered for such occasions; eyebrow arched, thumb languorous at the corner of his mouth.
“With no stake in your search, I’m at your service. Consider it my debt paid for the drink.”
That seemed to mollify her, if only enough to brush his probing questions off as a poor attempt at flirting. Swan’s attention was elsewhere today, adrift with the flotsam of her nameless quarry and any myriad gems of information he carried with him. There had to be some importance to this.
She muttered a single word that seemed to catch in her teeth, reluctant as she was to part with it.
“Beg’ pardon,” Hook wheedled.
“Cricket.”
“Then you’re in luck! I know just where to find such a beast.”
His joke landed flat, if the pressed line of her mouth was anything to go by. “Really missed your calling as the Queen’s royal jester, Hook,” Swan said. A morbid thought, given Her Majesty’s penchant for rending hearts she stood no chance of winning with that lovely temperament. “It’s the only name I have to go on.”
“Hardly a strong start, if you don’t mind me saying, love.”
“Oh, I’m well aware.” Swan nodded, running a hand down her brow and pressing irritably at closed eyelids. “So you’ve got nothing on this Cricket guy?”
“I’ve a word of advice; you want the Marauding Man, a tad further inland if you follow the market road. Upscale clientele, and a fount of knowledge once you wet the right beak.”
Swan’s features perked up, eyes shining like Hook had dropped a heavy key into her lap and waved her on to the palace coffers. And perhaps she would find a thread to follow in that nest of spiders; he’d not bet against her, even with a handful of loaded dice.
For now, Hook was content to preen under the warming flicker of her gratitude and empty the vestiges of a drink he’d paid for in sawdust.
“Thank you,” Swan said quite seriously as he swallowed his bitter victory, drained in full to the last drop. He set the glass down and pushed back from the table to stand.
“Best I start making tracks,” he said. “Can’t have your crew thinking we’re aught but two rival ships passing in the night.”
She smiled tightly at that, as if in agreement but not altogether pleased to hear it. And when Hook reached to fold his hand under hers, raising it from the table as he pressed a faint kiss to the backs of her fingers, Swan let him linger.
“Until next we meet,” he murmured, lips pursed against her knuckles and holding, one breath into three, until she removed her hand from his grasp. “Captain.”
-
His ship was quiet as the grave when Hook boarded shortly thereafter, feeling brighter in spirits than he had in a long while. Two of his crew sat on barrels under the Jolly Roger’s grand main mast, one armed with a blade wider than a man’s fist and a whetstone for sharpening, while the other slumped in a fitful doze.
“As you were, boys,” he crooned, strolling by and down into the hold at a leisurely pace.
Someone had lit the oil lamp fixtures in his absence, giving the room a sickly yellow hue dappled by pinpricks of moonlight that penetrated through the upper decking. Though Hook himself knew every polished surface, every creak and cranny of this ship in his sleep, it certainly made things easier to locate the right compartment amongst the many.
Whistling, he flicked the latch open with one hand and heaved the lid up into place, head tilted indifferently at the panicked stare that greeted him.
The man below, bound in thick cargo ropes that fastened both arms to the hold, almost choked on his gag when Hook fisted a hand in his ragged tunic and pulled him up into the light.
“Tell, me, Cricket.” Hook smiled, toothy and without sympathy, namesake catching in the bundled fabric where it stretched taut around the man’s jawline. With a yank, it tore free from his mouth and hung limp around his quivering throat. “What do you know of our mutual friend, Emma Swan?”
-
two.
Regina’s favourite mirror was cracked.
To be precise, there appeared to be a chip slightly left of centre, where a shard had separated from its proper place, leaving a cavity wide enough to fit the scarlet tip of her fingernail. Had she done this, she wondered, in a flash rage, hands flinging well-loved accessories from the surface of her vanity?
What a waste, to throw out something so beautiful now. But there was surely no place for a broken thing in the Queen’s bedchamber.
“You’ll lose hair a good deal faster if you keep grazing at it like the flank of a horse.”
Teeth gnawing at the inside of her lip, Regina set down the silver-handled brush and glared at the interloper in her mirror.
“And with it, my patience, if you keep flitting in here to antagonise me,” she hissed.
Tinkerbell gave a put-upon sigh from her seat on the chaise lounge, cross-legged and comfortable with a ruby-red apple clasped in one hand. Her pretty, white teeth dug into its skin, crunching loudly in the otherwise quiet room, and Regina’s hands twitched on her dresser.
“Just trying to help, Your Majesty,” Tinkerbell said, all the while churning fruit around her mouth like heavy cylinders in a mill.
Regina turned to deliver a searing glower over one shoulder, hoping it might curtail the sudden urge to light her own furniture on fire. “I’ve never once asked for your help.”
And, unsaid, it had never once done her service to expect it.
The Green Fairy, for all the glitter that seemed to trail her every move in a sweeping footprint, lacked the quiet dignity that one would expect from the fair folk; be that a tactful mastery of the common language, or even basic table manners.
She had no place in that gaudy flower garden with her own kind, just as she had no place here.
“But you’re perfectly happy accepting it from rogues in leather,” Tinkerbell drawled.
“Help for a fee is work, dear, of which you know nothing.” Regina’s dress swept noisily around her feet when she stood from the vanity. “And I don’t appreciate you eavesdropping on my private business.”
“On his ship. I think you’d call that his business, personally.”
Tinkerbell bit into the apple again and chewed slowly, tossing it up into the air to be caught once in her own hand, and then to disappear on the second upswing. She frowned and closed her fist around the empty space. “I was eating that.”
“What’s your interest in the pirate?” Regina asked, nose wrinkling. The apple dropped into her open palm, a crescent ridge left by Tinkerbell’s teeth raking at her fingertips through the silk glove.
“Secondary. Much like yours, though I’m not looking to traffic innocent men through Poseidon’s Boneyard.”
Regina twitched once, and the apple blackened in a spit of fire. The stink of burning fruit hung heavy even after she’d pelted it over the balcony. Fuming, she lifted the hem of her dress and strode from the room, hardly surprised when Tinkerbell’s light step dogged at her heels.
“There’s nothing innocent about what that man could do, chirping his stories to the wrong people.”
Armed guards lined the deep corridor in pairs every twenty feet, watchful eyes under black helms that tracked them both without a turn of the head. They didn’t dare move in a way she might construe as insolent, even on the fairy whose bright green shift cast an offensive glimmer in their eyeline.
Tinkerbell sighed, and Regina bolstered her pace to escape that defeated exhale of breath.
“Fear is a strong motivator, true, but not the only one in your wheelhouse, Regina.” Her voice was soft, but not yet forgiving. “Haven’t I at least shown you that much?”
“Don’t you have other lives to interfere in?” Regina snapped, pivoting towards a flight of stairs that spiralled down and down into the bleak antechamber below.
The darkness didn’t linger once Tinkerbell joined her at the bottom. Fairy magic was, after all, about the glamour, the puerile glitter-smoke and frosted-mirrors routine to fool the eyes of any unfortunate souls who called on them; whatever it was that made their light magic so literal in its presentation also imbued their very skin.
Tinkerbell’s light, a pale but vibrant green, cast an even darker shadow from the looming stone pillars that awaited them, twin columns bracing the ceiling above the entrance into Regina’s private vault.
There was hardly the need for the torches, she mused, but to say it out loud would be too much like a misfired compliment.
“You’re spending a lot of time down here,” Tinkerbell said from the rear, as Regina pushed two thick wooden doors open into the gloom beyond. “In the dark, by yourself.”
Judging by her tone, she had some thoughts on the subject, none of which Regina cared to unspool today; tracking the inner workings of Tinkerbell’s mind could be slippery at the best of times, like corralling wild animals into a burlap sack. Her motives in visiting so frequently were a mystery still.
“Now that my biggest threat is in a box, I find myself with a lot more time on my hands.”
“And which threat would that be?” Tinkerbell wondered, eyes on the two sealed glass cases at the centre of the room as they stepped inside. “The bug in transit, or one of these poor souls?”
Regina strolled to the left side of the display, her gloved hand trailing along its surface in comfortable ownership. She stopped to peer through the glass window, and her eyes shined with greedy satisfaction at the pale figure lying prone along the hard wooden panel inside. Beautiful and trapped, like a pinned butterfly under the watchful gaze of its collector.
Tinkerbell stayed by the vault entrance, radiating soft light in total darkness, and watched the glass fog over where Regina’s breath touched whisp-like fingers. She kept her arms crossed, ostensibly a silent protest, though more to hide the uncontrolled shake that ran a gentle current from her wrist down to her fingertips. Regina saw it anyway, and she smiled dangerously.
“You’re free to leave at any time, dear.” The words were honest, if not exactly sincere. They both knew she wouldn’t take notice.
“I wonder what they’re dreaming about,” Tinkerbell said quietly, as if watching them take a sweet doze in the meadow, summer breeze and daffodils, and not surrendered to the cloying depths of a sleeping curse.
“It doesn’t matter, as long as they never wake up.”
“Then why not just kill them and be done with it?” Tinkerbell asked in that same probing tone, an insect looking for a crack to wriggle through. “That could hardly be worse.”
Regina turned on her heel then, crossing the room in three long strides and catching Tinkerbell’s jaw in the cage of her clenched fingers. Green eyes half-narrowed in expectation, a wing-span away from understanding.
“What do you dream about, Regina?” Tinkerbell asked quietly, taking in light breaths of apple-scent burnt to cinders. Regina’s thumbnail dug into her cheek unkindly.
“I don’t dream at all,” she said, and sealed the lie in a vault of their own making.
-
three.
The Marauding Man, though not grandiose in size, proved easy enough to find along the bustling market road.
A long sign hanging from thick chains along a wooden post showed the outline of a man in a green top hat, stick-thin and leaning on the letter “M” in green, followed by a jagged knife-scrawl that might have passed for a “Z”. It looked like someone had scratched that in more recently.
“Mizz,” Leroy read, dragging the second letter out slowly. Three of them stood, necks tilted up to watch the sign swing back with a rattle, wind buffeting it in a gentle slap. “What’s with the hat?”
“Marauding Man. Two ems,” Red clarified.
“This must be the place.” Emma stepped forward from the group of three, having sent the rest of their crew on a trawl elsewhere for supplies (read: booze). Nothing worse than showing up all guns blazing at a joint that was, as she’d recounted to them earlier, “upscale”. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Red had seen her captain sitting cosy with the one-hand wonder from across the room. And the rest — well, they didn’t call her the Wolf for nothing; she could sniff out a storm coming, and this one had blue eyes and a liar’s smile.
Still, she followed Emma, just like always, one hand on her pommel as they all tracked into the tavern. Captain in front, followed by Leroy, with Red bringing up the rear across the threshold.
This place was cleaner than the last, she’d give them that much; floors that must get a sweeping on occasion, no straw, no sticky mantle from spilled ale and bloody spit. Every man in there fitted with shirt and shoes, and tables boasting a full four legs. Classy.
Red used to tend bar in a place like this, play the coy wench for any sleaze with an open tab, until Granny’s trigger-finger got them both in the shitter with the Black Knights. She wondered how that old bag was doing back home. If she was still alive, even. The thought made Red’s mouth turn down at the corners.
“Stay sharp,” Emma said, throwing Red a concerned look over her shoulder. Red nodded once, hand drawn back from that smoking fire pit so she could search the room for anyone paying a little too much attention. “We don’t know what to expect here.”
“Not to question your judgement, Captain, but how do we know this isn’t some kind of trap?” asked Leroy, who hadn’t the pleasure of watching Emma’s brief liaison with Hook at their first stop. Nobody wanted that news passed from mouth to mouth around The Truest Believer; there were already whispers after the incident at Mermaid’s Cove.
Emma certainly took her time coming out of that cavern.
“Oh, you can count on it,” Red murmured to herself, but Emma’s shoulders tensed in acknowledgement.
“Look, it’s not like we have any other kind of lead here. And between the three of us, I think we can protect ourselves if the net drops overhead.”
“I’d feel a lot better if Tiny’s head was also under it, sister,” Leroy sniped, but he threw his hands up placatingly under Emma’s icy stare. “I mean, Captain.”
“Let’s just see what happens.”
Which was pretty much their whole game plan as a crew, actually. Hunted by the Royal Guard on land, so why not steal a boat and call yourself pirates? Well, the actual sailing part took some getting used to, but it was amazing what you could learn when the circumstances were literally sink or swim.
Emma went over to the bar, elbow-checking more than a few grunts who thankfully seemed far too blitzed to pick a fight with the blonde who was forcing her way through. One guy though, thick neck, bristled red hair that spiked up like a lion’s mane, turned his eyes on the captain, and Red stepped forward, her sword grinding slick against its sheathe as she pressed her thumb under the guard.
That caught his attention, and the inhuman glow that seeped into her irises helped him find his good manners. Emma, meanwhile, slapped the counter with a handful of silver and got a word in with the old woman keeping bar.
“You think we’re going to find a damn thing here that makes it worth the coin she’s throwing around?” Leroy leaned in to ask, arms crossed defensively over his chest.
That was the thing about Leroy, and probably what got him his position in the crew to begin with; he didn’t pull punches, even though he wasn’t all that good at throwing them. Emma valued honesty, and Leroy had that in spades.
“I think,” Red said, looking around at the sallow faces hunkered down over tables, talking in low tones you’d have to move in close to hear, “that I trust Emma’s instincts. And I’m ready for another drink.”
“Now that’s an idea I can get behind,” Leroy said, perking up. He followed Emma’s trail to the bar, leaving Red a few feet away to watch the room.
From under the hum of quiet conversations, a sharp yip started up in the distance. It hammered up in volume – yip yip yip – as the noise grew closer until it scrambled, four furry legs and a wet button nose, face first through the door they’d left ajar.
Red knew dogs – knew this dog in particular, as a matter of fact – and what that intent little twitch of the ears meant, the way he crouched and stared, eyes glittering, at Red before letting loose an unholy furore of barking.
Yep, she knew what that meant, and it was bad, bad news.
“Captain,” Red called, voice pitching a little high as she stepped back. Her hand grabbed indelicately at the back of Emma’s duster, catching a handful of leather and a confused grunt elicited from its owner. “We got trouble arriving pronto, can we get a move on here?”
“Trouble? From that overgrown rat?” Leroy gestured to the dog that was now bouncing side to side across the doorway, still barking at them. Red ducked her head, pulling her hood up jerkily with one hand and shaking Emma like a maniac with the other.
“Not the dog, Leroy,” Red hissed. She tugged the hood down aggressively over the top of her head.
Emma finally turned towards the commotion and brushed Red’s hand away. “He’s all worked up over something.”
Too late. The door slammed once against the sole of a hard boot, and then violently into the wall as it ricocheted. Red groaned at her poor luck, face hidden in the folds of her hood like it might swallow her from sight and burp her out at the next port. Instead, a figure clad in blue hurtled into the tavern, arms raised to hold the single limb of her crossbow level with Red’s chest, and almost immediately Emma’s arm was bracing her protectively.
Grating steel replaced the murmur of any surrounding conversations, as at least a dozen other weapons drew up under every table in the room; all eyes on the new arrival, who didn’t seem to notice anyone except the pirate in her crosshairs.
Red dropped the hood reluctantly, flashing a wry smile that boasted more confidence than she was feeling. “Hi, Kansas. Long time, no see.”
“You know this lunatic?” Leroy barked, one hand on the pistol strapped to his thigh.
“Your friend here ought to watch his mouth before it catches a bolt.” Dorothy’s voice was steady and cold, much like her gaze as it pierced Red’s own. Emma, meanwhile, was trying her best to edge in between them with her sword already in hand.
“I don’t know what your problem is, lady, but I bet we can talk it out like rational people,” Emma said, elbow jabbing into Leroy’s gut when he muttered something indignant about rational people.
Dorothy glanced at her but made no move to lower the crossbow. “Not interested in talking. I’m just here to collect.”
“Collect what, a bounty?” Leroy asked, and Red could see his fingers twitching at his belt. He was a fast shot, but Red didn’t like his chances against Dorothy when she was already fingering the trigger. In truth, Red didn’t like the thought of either party shooting first.
Worse, she could almost hear the swish of a dozen ears pricking up in tandem at the mention of a bounty. Those were rare enough in Misthaven, and if any crook in here with a debt to his name got a sniff of what their captain was worth to the Queen – Evil Queen, her brain corrected – they were in for a long night.
“Right,” Dorothy said with a scoff, and then, with a pointed look in Red’s direction that she could read a mile off, “Like I have nothing better to do than chase some pirate around.”
“I left a note.” The words blurted out of Red’s mouth like they’d just crawled up her throat in a linked chain and jumped to an untimely death.
The silence this time was almost suffocating.
Emma’s stare held the weight of a sinking anchor. “You left a note?”
“No wonder she wants to kill you,” Leroy said incredulously.
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t really know what to think,” Emma said, scratching at her neck, eyes averted like someone thinking Red had stolen Dorothy’s virtue and disappeared into the night.
Red’s mouth opened in her own defence, but the words died on her tongue when a bolt whipped past her nose, rustling the fabric of her hood and shattering a bottle on the shelf behind them. Glass spewed noisily to the floor in a wet clatter.
“You’re paying for that, Dorothy,” the old woman behind the bar snapped.
Dorothy rolled her eyes, nose scrunched up in a way Red had always found adorable. Even now, as she re-loaded the crossbow with nimble hands and hefted it up to eye-level.
“If we’re all done saying pointless things,” Dorothy started. “I want to know where you took him.”
“Him?” Red looked at Emma, who shrugged one shoulder uncertainly.
“Your dog’s right there,” Leroy said. He pointed at Toto, who was giving more attention to an itch behind his ear than any stand-off going on in his honour.
“Archie.”
Red shuffled back through the index of her relatively short memory, looking for any mention of that name. She’d met a lot of people, none of which had ever been prisoner on board The Truest Believer. They weren’t much for hostage-taking; what good was an extra mouth to feed?
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said decisively.
Dorothy seemed to falter, taken in by the very real confusion showing on all their faces, but she soon doubled down. Her glare was reaching acidic levels and Red could only frown back, feeling slightly wounded by her distrust, after everything. “Someone from the guild saw pirates take him. Soon as the sun went down, his door got busted open.”
“We got into port just a couple of hours ago,” Red told her.
“How convenient is that?”
“We’re not the only pirates in the area, you know,” Emma said with some annoyance. And then, her sword arm drooping noticeably as the wheel spokes turned in her head just as they did in Red’s, “Oh, that motherf—"
-
and then.
Down in the cargo hold of The Truest Believer, the ship’s youngest crewmember slid both hands under the ridge of a wide lidded chest. He struggled briefly, skinny arms twisting to leverage the weight of it up and over the rusted hinges until it swung back with a thud.
They had come close to losing this one, thanks to the Jolly Roger’s crew. Henry had been shoved down into the crew quarters when the cannon fire started (ugh, as always), so he’d missed out on all the excitement, but he’d listened, ear pressed to the door, as wood splintered violently outside and Leroy shouted himself sick across the deck. Hoist this and fire that! Turn, turn, turn!
One of these days, they’d have to let him help out in battle; Emma had been training him with a cutlass, so Henry was pretty sure he could give Captain Hook a run for his money. Or at least the short guy in the hat.
Maybe if he won a real fight, they’d let him come ashore during the night hours, rather than leaving him on “lookout” duty with Sleepy – not great company – and Marco, who was too busy making repairs to keep a real eye on him. Which left Henry on his own to poke around the new acquisition.
It was – well, not that impressive.
“What’s so special about this thing?” Henry muttered to himself, or maybe to the busy trail of ants that skittered by, but they didn’t have an answer for him either. Frowning, he reached down to lift the thick book out of its chest by the spine and held it up under the dim overhead lamp.
“Once upon a time,” he read from the cursive lettering on the cover. Like the old stories he’d read, back when Belle was first teaching him the common language at the town library.
Pirates didn’t care all that much for books, though; in fact, most of them couldn’t read very well, which was part of what made him so valuable to the crew. It was why Emma had let him stay, when she’d first found him as a grubby ten-year-old stowed away in her cargo hold, instead of throwing him head-first into the ocean.
(That’s what she said, anyway, but Henry knew better. Emma was a hero, through and through. Even if she’d have everyone else believe otherwise.)
Henry knelt down against the wooden slats at his feet, setting the book down flat so he could flick through it page by page. Mostly, he just looked at the pictures; they were a little blurry but colourful, like real people painted through a fractured spyglass. Like a window into some other world.
And some of those people looked kind of familiar.