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“Morning, princess!”
It’s a voice she maybe knows, but maybe doesn’t. Shelby groans and screws her eyes shut and burrows herself deeper into her bed. “You’re not supposed to come in here without permission.”
“Didn’t know they’d put restrictions on where I was allowed to go in my own faction,” says the voice, and with that word it all comes flashing back.
The yacht - the storm - the wreck. Floating to shore, gripping the only suitcase that hadn’t sunk under the weight of her entire wardrobe. Waking up next to Shep and Sniff - lying about being a pirate from a pirate family so they wouldn’t take the last of her money from her. Real pirates, a whole crew of them, pulling up and strong-arming her out of her weapon. Lies from the captain about backrubs and showers of gold; handing over all her newly-borrowed treasure to pay the price of admission.
And then, once she was halfway back to the Faction Isles, this asshole letting her know that all that had been a crock of shit, and she was locked into living with the Kestrels for the foreseeable future until she had the chance to save up for a boat big enough to last the trip to Mexico, where she was supposed to be tanning on the beach right now.
The worst part, though, is that it looks like Allison’s the only other woman in the building.
“So are you getting up or what?” Martyn asks, and when she (reluctantly) opens her eyes to the light of the room, she sees that Shep’s already gone from his side of the room. Probably getting a headstart on questing. The guy really took to the Faction Isles lifestyle from the second he arrived, letting Captain Sausage and Olivaire take him off arm in arm to learn the ropes of sailing out into the nearby uninhabited land and looking for buried treasure.
Shelby, then, is his polar opposite - she had shaken the sewer-water from her brand new boots, headed back upstairs to their (shared, which she’s never had to do before) bedroom, and gone straight to sleep at the end of what had been a horribly eventful day. “Why, do I have to do more induction?”
“Nah - you’re all clear on that front. I think Kyle did your jacket overnight - if that’s your jacket that was on the bannister downstairs.”
She did leave her coat on the post at the bottom of the staircase, that’s true. “Did what to my jacket?”
“Did your stitching!” When she looks, Martyn’s shifting a gold-lined collar between finger and thumb so it catches the morning sunlight from the window. “You’re a Kestrel now. Better look the part.”
“Is that real gold thread?”
“Obviously. D’you think Kyle Foster would have anything less?”
“Well, I don’t know him yet.”
“He’ll be in later, I’m sure. Sausage wouldn’t let him go long without meeting the new recruits. He’s been in the faction almost as long as the captain has, y’know. They both grew up around here. So did Allison - so did Guqqie, before she went off on her quest. They’re the old guard.”
Shelby huffs. “Is this gonna be on the test?”
“What, you not interested in the life and times of your factionmates?”
“Well, nobody’s asked me where I came from so far.”
“That’s because you don’t shut up about it! Heard you the first time - I’m supposed to be drinking margaritas on the beach in Cabo Verde right now, but instead I’m stuck here with you idiots.”
“I was going to Cancún,” Shelby mutters.
“Potato, potahto, you’re in the Faction Isles now.”
“I’ll get outta here,” she insists. “Soon as I’ve got the ship for it.”
“See, Oli said that too. Said he’d be right out and back home to his wife as soon as he’d got a new boat and got his funds back up. And it’s been what, now, four months? And he’s still here, palling about with us lot. You realise pretty quick: it’s a good life.”
Shelby swings around to get out of bed; elects to leave her nightgown on instead of chasing Martyn out of the room so she can change. It’s cute; it’ll work as a day dress too. (Thank god this was one of the things inside the lucky suitcase that made it.) “Yeah, well, that’s him. Maybe his wife sucks anyway.”
“You wouldn’t think that, from the way he keeps bringing her up! It’s all well she is beautiful and she’s got beautiful bulging muscles, quite like yours, Marty, if I do say so myself. Bit more subtle than a brick.”
“Why’d he leave, anyway?” She starts picking through what little remains of her wardrobe - there’s a couple pairs of socks, thank god, although all her other pairs of shoes went down with the ship. No better way to break them in than being forced to wear them all day, at least?
“Well, apparently he crashed his boat when he was out tuna-fishing, washed up round the back of the island, Sausage found him with a crab hanging off his crotch and nursed him back to health, by which point they’d bonded, and he decided to join the faction until further notice. I’m pretty sure he just sailed off while his wife wasn’t looking, personally.”
“Huh. And what about you?”
Martyn blinks. “Me?”
“Yeah. Those guys all grew up here, Oli washed up a couple months back - you know how me and Shep got here. What was your origin story?”
Now, Shelby’s only known Martyn for maybe 24 hours. The sun had been well overhead by the time they’d made their landing on the island where the shipwreck victims had been sheltered; yesterday was a long few hours of introductions, inductions, and unsuccessful flirting, and there wasn’t much time for them to bond. Even so, she can see the way he presses his back up against the wall as he processes what she’s saying. He’s trying to poker face his way through it, but Shelby’s an empath.
“Touchy subject, huh?”
“Er - yeah. Y’know, I… try not to talk about it. That’s the good thing about the Faction Isles, honestly - everyone’s in such a habit of skirting the law, they don’t tend to ask many questions about where you came from. That and all the dead parents.”
That’s fair; Sausage made no secret of the fact that it’s practically a requirement around here to have at least one dead family member before you’re considered “a real pirate”. She’d blustered some response about not having talked to her grandpa in a little while, trying to get past the bar of acceptance, but there are definitely people in this faction with a lot of death in their histories. Scar, apparently, had left four crewmates to drown and run off with their collective fortunes; Sausage had run both her and Shep through the tragic tale of how he became an orphan at fifteen and was taken in by his uncle instead on their way around the island; hell, they keep talking about their missing factionmate, Guqqie, who’s presumed dead by at least a couple of the Nightingales.
(Martyn was pretty insistent that she be considered just missing ‘til they see a body, or at least a body part.)
“Well, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t wanna.”
“Yeah,” he says, and now he’s much more obviously starting to get choked up, “yeah, that’s probably for the best. You don’t wanna know what I’ve been through.”
… Okay, yeah, she probably doesn’t wanna have this conversation, anyway. There’s a good chance that, once it was all told, Martyn would flip the script on her and ask her about her so-called pirate parents, and she’d have to hide the fact that her real childhood wasn’t anything like what she’s been suggesting to everybody else. The Kestrels prize ambition and resourcefulness, not unfailing candor, but she still isn’t sure if a lie this big would get her booted out of the club. Then she’d have nowhere else to turn - no other way to achieve what she’s looking for, to get where she’s trying to go.
“Suffice it to say,” says Martyn, “the sooner I can find that One Piece of treasure that I’m lookin’ for, the better. And in the meantime - well, in’t too bad here, is it? You got food, you got a faction…”
“No mall,” she points out.
“There is that, yeah. No Starbucks, either, I remember you were pissy about that last night.”
“I’m still mad about the Starbucks. If you guys don’t have a Starbucks then I might just have to build one by myself.”
“Ooh, she’s an architect, is she?”
“While you’re busy writing the newspaper.”
“The Noisy Parrot’s an integral part of Faction Isles society, I’ll have you know!”
“Sure, whatever you wanna tell yourself.”
She pushes past him, and heads downstairs, and grabs her boots from by the fire to see if they’ve recovered from yesterday. All dry, it seems, and last night’s coals are cold and dusty in the grate. They’ll probably never look as shiny-new expensive as they did when she took them out of the box on Tuesday, but they’ll work, and Shelby’s standards have dropped considerably since that fateful storm first blew her vacation way off course.
“Hang on, hang on, where are you going?”
“I dunno. Exploring? Questing, probably. I gotta get my funds back up if I wanna invest in building materials.”
“Not without me you’re not,” he says, and he pulls his own boots on, sitting on the bottom step. “Get a move on, then, or all the good ones’ll go.”
She sighs, and goes to take her coat from off the bannister, letting it swipe Martyn across the face as she goes.
Gold thread in the sunlight pulls her gaze. He was right, then - Kyle has threaded stitches of gold, swirls and squiggles, all across her collar.
Martyn locks the door behind them and they walk, with Kestrel colors gleaming side by side on their lapels, into the path of whatever’s coming next.
(Shelby, inexplicably, wants to tell the world to bring it on.)