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Jay touched down lightly on the ship, quickly handing an unconscious Gryffon off to Marshall John and briefly conversing before the latter lumbered off downstairs with a promise to look after him.
Gillion was enthusiastically talking to Caspian just off to the side, gesticulating excitedly despite looking a little on the edge of charred. Caspian had a fond smile on his face as he talked with Gill. And just metres from them, Chip was clasping Lizzie by the hand and shaking it, grinning.
“You guys could not have had better timing,” he commended. “I mean, we were doing pretty well without you, but thanks for the help.”
Lizzie rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to respond, but Chip caught sight of Jay approaching and spoke first. “Gryffon alright?”
Jay nodded shortly, looking past him and locking eyes with Lizzie. “He’ll be fine. We need to talk.”
Unlike the others, she hadn’t put her weapons away yet. Her eye contact didn’t waver as she reloaded her pistol. Mentally, she was taking stock of her injuries. She was definitely worse for wear than Lizzie, but there was nothing debilitating. Nothing that would majorly hinder her either. She still had both her pistols, and her bow was slung over her shoulder. Her knife was still strapped to her leg.
“Woah.” Chip stepped forward, a hand raised. The conversation between Gillion and Caspian came to a stop. “What’s going on, Jay?”
Jay didn’t point the gun at Lizzie, not yet, but she didn’t put it away either. “That night on Joaldo,” she said, staring into Lizzie’s eye. “You recognised me. Before we’d ever met. You can’t forget the face of a Ferin. That’s what you said. Funny enough, I’ve never been told I look a lot like my father. Or any of my relatives. I’ve only ever been compared to one.”
There was another memory, trying to struggle its way to the surface. Itching the back of her mind, buried deep beneath a haze of drunkenness. Lizzie’s voice, muffled. You just look so much like your sister. But it couldn’t fight its way to the surface.
“Jay-” Lizzie started.
“What the fuck did my father mean when he said I was fighting with the pirates that killed Ava?”
Lizzie flinched at the name. The confirmation sent a spike of ice through Jay’s chest. She cocked her gun.
Chip jerked towards her, almost instinctively, at the movement, but stopped short. Unsure. He hadn’t known. She was certain.
“Jay…” Chip trailed off, indecision clear on his face. He hadn’t heard her father’s words. But it was okay. Jay was thinking clearly. She’d been thinking clearly this whole time. She was a Ferin, after all. Ferins kept a cool head in these situations.
If Lizzie is truly the one who killed Ava, then I’ll take care of her myself, Jay had told her father, less than an hour ago.
Ferins also kept their word.
“Gill,” Jay said. “Zone of truth, please.”
Gillion cast the spell without another word, and Jay felt it wash over her. Concern was plain in his eyes, but Jay didn’t linger on it. There was no time for it. Instead, her eyes trailed briefly over Caspian next to him, who had drawn his sword and was stepping forward.
“Stand down, Caspian,” Lizzie said quietly. The first thing she’d said since Jay brought up Ava.
“My lady-”
“That’s an order, Caspian.”
Caspian sheathed his sword and stepped back. He did not meet Jay’s eyes. Gillion took a measured step away from him, eyes wary and hand on the hilt of his own sword.
“You have ten seconds to start talking,” Jay said. “Before I shoot you.”
Lizzie scowled. “Your father doesn’t know what the hell he’s-”
“Look me in the eyes, and tell me you didn’t kill Ava,” Jay said quietly. “Tell me, under Gill’s truth spell, that you didn’t take my sister from me.”
Lizzie opened her mouth. And closed it. She didn’t speak.
Jay exhaled slowly. “Draw your weapon.”
“Jay-”
“Draw your goddamn weapon.”
Lizzie didn’t listen. “Jay, you need to-”
Jay’s finger twitched toward the trigger, and in the blink of an eye, there was a chain whip wrapping around the pistol and jerking it out of her hands. And Lizzie was scowling at her, still cautious, whip in hand.
Jay allowed herself the moment of grim satisfaction, holstering her second pistol, before drawing her bow.
Nowadays she preferred the weight of a gun in her hand. But Ava had taught her how to shoot with a bow, behind their tutor’s back. She’d used her bow back in The B.L.O.C.K when she’d shot Gillion, under her father’s orders. It felt fitting for the occasion.
Lizzie turned her glare on Chip, who she’d been conversing with only minutes ago, as if demanding him to intervene. And Chip, who had grown up with Lizzie on the Black Rose, and had been overjoyed to see her alive, crossed his arms. And took a step back.
Jay didn’t wait any longer, loosing her first, second and third arrows in rapid succession. Lizzie knocked the first two from the air with a single snap of the whip and dodged out of the way of the last one.
Lizzie didn’t hesitate to retaliate, a scowl on her face as she snapped the whip toward Jay again, and Jay narrowly ducked under a blow, arrow nocked and already heading for Lizzie before she’d even stood up again.
In battle, with their crew, Gillion and Chip often formed outlandish plans together to take down their foe, which were successful just as often as they weren’t. They tried to redirect all the canons on an enemy ship towards their adversary or they attempted to set a sea monster on fire from the inside. And when those ideas failed, Jay was the one that kept them alive.
The Navy hadn’t taught Jay the same creativity. They’d trained her in efficiency. Precision. She knew how to look for an enemy’s weaknesses and target them. She knew how to take apart a foe piece by methodical piece no matter their size.
Jay cast vortex warp, disappearing and reappearing behind Lizzie, who turned just in time for Jay to crack her bow against Lizzie’s face. Lizzie shouted in pain, stumbling a few steps back and lashing out. They were too close for Lizzie to build much momentum, but Jay gritted her teeth all the same as the chain whip connected with her side.
“Fucking hell, listen! You don’t have the full story-”
“I don’t care.”
Lizzie’s nose was flowing with blood and she was still off her balance when she next attacked, allowing Jay to once again close the gap between them. This time it was her first, not her bow, colliding with Lizzie’s jaw. Before Lizzie could stagger too far away this time, Jay deliberately stepped on the trailing end of her chain whip and stomped on the part connecting it to Lizzie’s hand, forcing her to drop it.
Lizzie went for a knife at her hip. Jay didn’t hesitate. She cast heat metal on it and Lizzie cursed loudly as she dropped the now red-hot blade. Jay lunged forward, swinging low with her longbow and sweeping Lizzie’s feet out from underneath her and putting her on her back in seconds.
Looking down at Lizzie, Jay nocked another arrow. Her hands were steady.
“She was defecting!” Lizzie shouted.
Jay went still.
“Ava was defecting from the Navy!” Lizzie held, propping herself up on one arm. She spat out blood to the side before meeting Jay’s eyes with a glare. “Under your stupid triton’s truth spell. She wrote to me. She needed out and she’d heard of me, so she contacted me.”
Quietly. “Did you kill her or not.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s really fucking simple actually.”
“Jay…” Chip, standing at her side, but not between her and Lizzie. Brow furrowed. “Maybe… we hear her out first. Then whatever you want to do, it’s still up to you.”
With one twitch of the foot, Jay sent the knife at her feet skittering across the deck, away from Lizzie. But she relaxed the string on her bow, slowly pointing it toward the ground. She didn’t put the arrow away.
“Talk.”
Lizzie swiped at her nose, which was bleeding slower. “I got a letter one day. Anonymous. Someone claiming to be a Navy soldier. Said they’d discovered something the Navy was planning and was planning on defecting. Said they’d heard of my acts against the Navy and might have some information I wanted. We planned to meet.”
Lizzie scoffed. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when a Ferin turned up. Thought I’d walked my whole crew straight into a trap.”
Lizzie jerked her head toward Gillion. “That one’s sister. The artificial leviathan she mentioned. That wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it. Ava mentioned it too. Said she’d overheard a meeting about it. It was the reason she wanted to defect.
“Real honourable, she was. I believed her by the end of our meeting. Offered her a place on my ship. She refused, for the moment. Said she knew exactly where they were keeping all the plans for the artificial leviathan and she wanted to destroy them first. That was why she’d contacted me.
“Long story short, my crew launched an attack on a Navy base two weeks later. She’d helped rig the explosives inside the base, and we had a set time for them to go off. We were supposed to meet up before then, but she was late. My crew was getting their asses handed to them by Navy soldiers. So I detonated them. And I never saw Ava make it out.”
Lizzie faltered, for the first time since she’d started telling the story. “We- we didn’t know for sure. We’d been hoping she’d made it out somehow and was laying low somewhere. It wasn’t until we saw the newspaper the next day…”
The same one that Jay had gotten, all the way back on Featherbrook Island.
PIRATE SEIGE ON BLACKDUFF RAFT BASE. DOZENS KILLED
Ava’s name, just one in a long list. That was her legacy. Those two words printed in black, in that newspaper. That was all she would get to leave in this world.
“We were friends, Jay, I promise,” Lizzie said, as she hesitantly pushed herself to her feet.
Jay still felt like there was ice running through her veins. “You should’ve told me. You owed me that.”
“Yeah. I should’ve.”
(She was gone. She was gone and she was never coming back.)
“Lizzie.”
“Yeah?”
“Get the fuck off my ship.”
Lizzie obeyed without another word, Caspian trailing after her. She paused at the edge of their deck.
“For what it’s worth, Jay. I really am sorry.”
It’s worth nothing, Jay thought. It wouldn’t bring her back.
Lizzie vaulted over the edge, Caspian following with only one glance back toward Gillion.
“Jay…” Gill started hesitantly.
Jay shook her head. And she walked away too.