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Marian Hawke was sixteen when she met the pirate.
A girl in britches two years too short, ankles ringed with flea-bites where her stockings ended, her long flowing hair swept into a bag and kept in a drawer somewhere after she had her little brother saw it all off one night when she was angry with her mother. She was barely sixteen and less beautiful than she was a year ago, and she was meaner. Her hands could grow so very very cold, and she hoped that when she touched people with them they worried that they would catch their death.
The pirate was nineteen and had been a pirate for exactly two weeks.
What she loved was balancing on the bowsprit when the sun burned low over the salt sea and screaming into the wind at the top of her lungs, and she never wanted to love anything else.
The pirate was a murderer, and Marian was not yet.
Marian loved to go places more dangerous than her dreams. She loved to make her father hunt her down through the docks and down the roads that led away from Amaranthine, and she loved to make her mother cry. She loved the night and touching her shoulderblades to the outside walls of taverns and daring anyone who walked in or out to meet her eyes; she loved the scar on her wrist where she’d blocked the knife of a boy whose rib she broke after he tried to steal her coinpurse, and she loved the smell of the sea on the air because it reminded her of Highever.
She called it love but in truth, she wasn’t sure she could feel love when she was sixteen. Like many children who grow up transient, she had difficulty getting attached. Outside the home, wherever that was, she had never been held long to one identity, one reputation, one name or face.
In two weeks she would travel to Lothering on the back of a secondhand fishcart and stay there for the next seven years, but she didn’t know it then. Bethany had only started awake screaming for the first time the night before.
(When it happened to Marian she was thirteen and silent. When she opened her eyes she thought she had died trapped in her corpse like a revenant: her arms were stiff, her chest creaked, her pulse threaded like the needlework she did with her mother, and her lungs, her eyes, her hands were so very very cold. When she raised them above her they were blue and frost had crusted over them like cobwebs on a tomb; a needle pain stabbed at her thighs and she found shards of ice melting into her bedsheets. Malcolm was away, but even after he came back it was three months before he found out. She said nothing.)
Marian Hawke did not meet the pirate in a tavern, or outside one. Marian was prowling the docks with her hood drawn over her head, like the murderer she wasn’t yet.
Isabela was being thrown off her own ship. Two hands grasping each ankle, two hands struggling to keep hold of each arm and elbow, a swing, a cheer, a swing, cap’n’s in the drink! She made a splash, but she sliced up the men who tossed her o’erboard enough that she was sure they were splashing, too: red, and all over the deck.
She could’ve held command, she told herself, if she’d let them sail to nearby Llomerryn like they wanted. But she wanted the sea, and there just wasn’t enough of it between Antiva City and Llomerryn. Spitting foul dock water, she pretended not to remember the wine she’d spat out the night before because it tasted like turpentine.
Her first mate leaned his fat gut over the rail. His mournful cry: “My Isabela!” He waved his great feathered hat and shook his head. She spat and held up her finger.
Marian Hawke did not hear the splash. She was counting her father’s rings on her fingers and twirling her mother’s knife, standing under a sinewy tree near the shore. She was listening to the birds.
The day was not clear: the morning light was ash-white sun and lanterns in fog. The dimness brought out the wet in the greenery, which seemed to glow with its own life. It brought out the dark in the wood, the ships and sidewalk and shacks, and in the trees. The birds were loud: they liked the drizzle.
Her father gave her a peasant’s knife for her thirteenth birthday—rough wooden handle, a blade that slipped in and out as loosely as wet sand through her fingers—but she preferred the knife her mother gave her, which her own father had once given her: small and slim like the props players drive into their breasts on creaky festival stages, but sharp as the taste of blood. The handle was ivory, and her mother’s crest was in crimson enamel at the base. Thinking of what her mother lost could ignite her anger, sometimes, when it was feeling stale; she relied on that to keep warm.
She was listening to the birds and hardly noticed the squeltch. A gull landed on a branch above her and his loud cry broke the air like an alarm, just as the pirate said, “Well, you look like you know how things get done around here.”
Marian started, but the pirate was too busy pacing to notice.
“Maybe you can give me some directions, hmm?” Her boots squeltched with every agitated step; her striped trousers hung off her like punctured sacks of wine, draped over her boots, and she wrestled, clawing with broken nails, her royal blue overcoat which clung to each arm like a leach, then tossed it over one shoulder. If she was concerned about the way her tunic stuck to her chest, she didn’t show it. She held her chin high and cast a glance at her surroundings. Dock, rocky shore, beggar by the fishwife’s shack, cobblestone road to the market. “You see,” she said, and jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That big, beautiful schooner with the gold stripe down her mainsail? She was stolen from me, like that chick in the Tevene poem. The ship that sailed a thousand faces, or whatever. She was stolen from me by bloody pirates.”
Marian Hawke’s hands were like granite, five fingers against the enamel crest, one pressed to the tip of the blade. The hunted have always known one trick, failsafe, in times of uncertainty: freeze, and watch. Marian was uncommonly good at it.
She had never met a pirate before, she did not know whether she hated them or not. She was deciding.
“Tell the harbormaster.”
The woman threw her head back and laughed. Saltwater dripped off her chin. “What a sparkling idea, why didn’t I think of it? Why don’t I run find the city guard while I’m at it! Except—“ She turned to Marian (Marian held her breath against the sun glare of her eyes) and set her fingertip at exactly the place on her chin which would one day be studded with gold. “—I can’t. Because I’m a pirate, too.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Marian raised one eyebrow. This was the right choice: the pirate smiled.
“But I’m guessing you guessed that, didn’t you? Shadowy lady?”
In a flash like lightning in the grey sky, Marian saw what the pirate saw: a dark red cloak, an ivory-handled knife, not the lingering baby fat or the flea bites—
Marian snapped alive like the thunder crack of lightning on granite. Shoulders snapped back, she slid her knife through a belt loop; unconsciously, her chin adopted the same haughty tilt as Isabela’s. “You can call me Hawke,” she said, and jabbed her cold hand out like a dagger.
“You can call me Isabela.” She said this with a playful accent, like she was imitating someone who was a stranger to Marian. Marian hated to be left out of jokes; in all these years, she had not realized that the sharing of small secrets was like leaving of a trail of breadcrumbs to greater intimacies and friendship, maybe, if she’d follow.
Isabela took her hand and smiled at the chill.
Isabela did not suspect that she was dealing with a sixteen-year-old layabout. She’d been watching Hawke hold her station in the spidery shadow of the dead tree, flashing that knife about and daring any man or woman who passed to meet her glare—the honest glare of an honestly dangerous person, Isabela thought, and a knife, twirled on her finger, that even from a hundred yards told stories. Or silenced them.
Isabela had watched her for some minutes, wringing her hair out on the pier. She’d been a stranger in a strange land once before, but that had been her wedding day, and the circumstances were too different to make comparison useful. She’d hopped towns in Rivain with Madame Hari, oh yes, but she knew the tricks of that game. This was more like gambling in a game you’d never heard of, which is really betting on yourself.
One thing she learned from her mother: being a stranger is always to your advantage if you can make them see the stranger you want them to see. Isabela needed Hawke to see a Queen of the Eastern Seas.
(That is exactly what Hawke saw.)
She’d been playing with the idea of giving up her old name anyway; the one her first mate gave her sounded much grander than Naishe. (She kept starting awake in a cold sweat, thinking of Luis cold and gape-mouthed in bed.)
“It’s funny you need help with pirates, Isa-bela,” Hawke said. She shifted her weight to her forward leg; Isabela could detect a lick of wickedness she’d never heard in that name before. “Because a pirate hunter is what I am.”
“Oh, did I say I was a pirate? My mistake, must be all the green Orlesian booze making me crazy, must be off now—“
“I never said I was an honorable pirate hunter.” She tapped her nose, which was scabbed over the bridge. “I can hunt one pirate and not the other, if she makes it worth my while.”
“Can you, now?”
She could be lying, Isabela thought. If not about what she is, then about what she intends. Very, very easily.
Isabela could hear her former first mate’s voice climbing to a shout, Farewell and adieu, Antivan ladies! As her cargo, her money, slid down the gangplank.
“I have an idea.” She drew Zevran’s knife from her belt, then his other knife (Six and Lucky Seven, she heard him say in his warm way that always sounded warm like a busted lip or a festering wound, and she was stabbed by the feeling of missing him—quickly and privately like a shiv between the ribs—missing him, that utterly fucked up boy who shook her hand and hugged her after killing her husband in his bed. Incidentally, he was only a year older than the girl in front of her now, but he was more a murderer than either of them would be for many years) and Isabela said, “I duel you. Womano e womano, knife-to-knife, and if I draw first blood you get me my ship back—“
—Because Isabela could not pay a pirate hunter—
“—You get me a new crew, and—“ Isabela bit her tongue.
“And?”
“And you do it fast,” Isabela finished. She needed a real bloody captain, not just a nineteen-year-old liar, and she knew this—But Hawke didn’t need to know that. Not yet, anyway. Not until Isabela won the duel.
“Why not a fight to the death?” Hawke said, and this was the first time she’d scare Isabela.
Isabela laughed it off, closed-mouthed, wrinkle-nosed. “You’re no use to me dead, sweet thing.”
A rare thing: Hawke smiled.
Given a few years, that smile would become a murderer in its own right.
At that moment, it was only as much as Marian Hawke was herself: a dangerous bluff.
Hawke took out her mother’s knife. Her father was a healer so she didn’t fear blood; all she felt was the thrum over her skin, the aimless rush of a lie made flesh.
(If you can’t change the flesh, change the truth it inhabits.)
Isabela let Lucky Seven spin in the air and fall back to her hand like a coin. She laughed, and Hawke smiled, and Isabela lunged.
The beggar by the fishwife’s shack swore and scrammed.
Marian sidestepped the blade by a hair and ice poured down over her shoulders, over her heart. She bared her teeth. She ducked Isabela’s second attack and lunged for the pirate’s ankles—her knife a breath away from biting into her heel like a dog; instead, it snagged wet leather and nearly tripped the pirate as she leapt back.
Marian had never used her knife in a fight.
Neither had Isabela.
Neither of them knew this.
Isabela had no idea what the fuck Hawke was doing, and this had her panicking. Marian had no idea what she was doing, and this made her fearless.
And she was fearsome for the seconds she lasted before Lucky Seven kissed her forearm and Isabela’s wet boot swept her feet out from under her.
Hawke fell to the ground, not crying out but hugging her arm—blood dripped between her fingers to make round drops in the dust—and her hood fell back.
And Isabela’s eyes nearly popped.
The girl’s face was round, her hair must’ve been chopped with kitchen shears, and Isabela had dueled a child.
Well, maybe not a child—damn close enough. Definitely too young to be a privateer, or a crime lord, or any of the things Isabela needed her to be. Definitely too young for Isabela to feel good about cutting her, Carver’s handiwork on her head like a halo of especial patheticness.
Isabela groaned and sheathed her knives; the girl snatched hers and scrabbled to her feet.
“Girly, go home.”
“I can show you where to find a crew.”
Isabela massaged her temples, too much in pain to be snarky. The girl snatched her hand and pulled her forward; Isabela said, “Oh, why not?”
Marian loved dangerous places, so that was where she took Isabela: by the hand, hers so cold and Isabela’s still damp. The pirate trailed behind her as she lead, shoulder-first, through the narrow cobblestone street until they reached a doorway, sticky with ale and other things, buzzing with flies, a sign painted with a foaming mug stuck overhead.
“You’ll find your sailors here,” Marian said, and she banged her shoulder into the door.
The tavern was dark, Marian noticed first. Though she loved to stand outside it, the idea of venturing in had always made her stomach churn. Most every barkeep this side of Amaranthine had been paid a visit by Malcolm Hawke, and every time his daughter had wandered in, in her red cape, they’d caught her with remarkable speed. She took after her mother in her face and build, but everyone she’d met who knew her father had told her that they shared just the same bearing, just the same meticulously sharpened gaze.
(She also always, always wore that red cape.)
The tavern was so smoked-out Marian’s nose felt like tinder catching, and she sneezed seven times in the doorway, hunched over on herself like a bomb shaking before it explodes. Laughter bombarded her from a near table of men, raucous and alarming like the sound of bottles hitting the wall, and when she was done sneezing the pirate leaned close and asked, a hiss, “What’s your plan now, sweet thing?”
Suddenly, she knew she didn’t have one.
The pirate sighed and rolled her eyes, which were the kind of warm that liquor was, and disappeared into the smoke and crowd. A shot of panic hit Marian then, a child lost in the street again, until her eyes found the bar, and searching the line of it found the shoulder draped with the dripping blue overcoat, a gold earring glinting in the candlelight and an elbow leaned on the wood: the pirate demanding something.
Marian stood and waited, wrapped in her cloak and sneering against the laughs and murmurs in voices so deep, accents so thick she could hardly guess at the words, and minutes later the pirate was back. Two mugs in one hand, she used the other to wrap around the girl and lead her to the back like a spooked pony.
“I need a drink,” the pirate said. “I’m having a drink.”
The table was small enough that when Marian slammed her elbows down on it to mirror the pirate, the hairs on her arms pricked at the cold of the mugs, and her wrist for a moment touched the pirate’s. A shiver ran through her guts at the touch of Isabela’s skin.
Isabela smiled and raised her mug before throwing it back.
Marian’s gaze lingered on her own—pale with oily circles down the sides and over the surface—and felt the shudder through her innards again. She touched her hand to the glass.
“What’s this?”
Isabela’s pulled-on grin narrowed her eyes. “It’s apple cider. The soft kind.”
Marian sneered and drew her hand back.
Isabela filled her cheeks with another gulp and swallowed. “What’re you doing, lying to strangers and getting into fights, girl? Don’t you have a family? A dog, at least? If the family doesn’t care about you, the dog has to.”
“Not everyone in Ferelden has a dog.”
“You do, though.”
Her name was Threnodies. Marian would admit nothing.
“My name’s Hawke, not ‘girl.’”
Isabela held her smile while she held her stare on the girl. Marian could see the gooseflesh on her collarbone, under the drying gold of her necklace, and the beads of water still dripping off the emerald. Eventually, the pirate shook her head.
“No, you’re not much like a hawk, are you? Big swooping predator—No, no way.” She sat back; her shoulders settled against the short back of the wooden chair in a comfortable, belonging way Marian’s couldn’t, and her chin dipped toward the wet metal on her neck. “You’re a little bird, a little black bird. Jackdaw is a better name for you.” Her fingers skipped over the tabletop. “Hop on home, little Jackdaw.”
Marian anchored her elbows into the tabletop; the wood scraped her skin like it might splinter. Fortunately, the pirate was being rhetorical.
She took another swig, planted the near-empty mug on the table again. “How old’re you, then?” An appraising look. “Fourteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“Ooh, sixteen. What a big girl, indeed. You got a trade yet, then?”
“No.”
Isabela made a face. “You don’t have a trade? No apprenticeship, no family business? You can’t have a title, can you? Land?”
Marian smirked and shook her head. Her lips whitened over her teeth.
Isabela considered her. “They’re marrying you off?”
She snorted. Isabela laughed, not unkindly.
“It’s worth asking. I’ve known a few young brides who hoped the engagement would only last as long as their hair did.”
“Never stayed in a place long enough. For any of that.”
The pirate hummed, her eyes wandered away.
“I can play the harpsichord,” Marian said, suddenly, like a chick hatching from her mouth and falling out.
Her mother wove brilliant rugs and tapestries when she could, and she sewed when she had to. Twice a week she took the three children down to the Chantry to bow their heads solemnly and listen, then raise their heads and sing: the lines on their faces were so severe it was as if the rock of the granite icons had cracked open and cried out. Afterward, Leandra would play the Sisters’ harpsichord.
The mother and children performed devotion, so the father was permitted his dissidence. He’d done his time, years and years of Andraste’s smooth hewn eyes glaring down on him in the apprentice’s dormitories, the halls, the library, the chapel. He had earned his private heresy.
Marian hadn’t, and that was why they did not get along.
Isabela smiled idly and sat back in her chair. Her eyes were still wandering.
“I can sew.”
Hmm…
“I can steal.”
And Isabela’s eyes were pinned back on her. “Steal? For a living? What, you’re going to be a cat burglar? Pickpocket?”
“Think bigger,” Marian said, heart racing to keep up with her mind, mind racing to keep up with her mouth. “I can steal chests of gold. Kegs of rum. Crate after crate of silk, ink, spices. I can steal ships.”
“Have to fight to steal something like a ship.” Isabela took a carefully disinterested swig.
“I can fight.”
Isabela snorted. “You can slash.”
“I can fight other ways.”
Isabela looked down and saw that the cut on the girl’s arm was gone.
This was when Isabela realized she was drinking with a witch.
Oh, she thought. She really could’ve hurt me in that duel, couldn’t she have?
“Oh,” she said, and Marian’s face turned suddenly severe.
“So you’re a…?”
“Orlesian,” the witch said firmly.
(She had, in Amaranthine, often played at street gambling—the three-shell game, worm races, dice—children’s games, but she had never bet the shirt on her back and she had never bet her life. She had not meant to bet her life then. She felt seasick.)
“Yes,” Isabela said. “And that’s… bad here, like it is in Antiva. But where I’m from—“ She leaned closer, over her elbows, and gave a crooked smile, and this was a gentleness that Marian could recognize. “—Rivain, could you tell? We believe that mages give very good advice.”
“Orlesians.”
“Yes, Orlesians.”
“As an Orlesian, I advise you to take me with you.”
The pirate bit her lip instead of laughing. Loud noises, she knew, often scared rare birds away. “They say mages are bad luck at sea.”
“Bad luck for your enemies. Once I healed a man whose arm had come clean off—I had him swinging an ax the next day. Once I stirred a tempest so mean it tore the sod off half the houses in the village. Once I bent the force of the wind to send a wyvern flying off its course.” She was speaking of Malcolm, of course. She often pretended to be him when she was scared.
“Is that so?” Isabela said, believing not a word.
Hawke nodded.
Isabela took Hawke’s hand and turned it over so that she could see her palm. Madame Hari had taught her how to play a fortune-telling game with the lines on a person’s palm, but Isabela could hardly be expected to remember the rules. She was pretty sure the curve near her thumb meant she had an excess of yellow bile. “That’s bad luck indeed, Jackdaw,” she said, and let the hand go. “But I can’t very well take you to sea when I don’t have a bloody boat, can I? We’re both just two dumb girls down on their luck here, sweet thing. I’m not here to sweep you away today.”
Desperation felt like frustration, gripping in her chest like a heart attack or a man she would meet someday. Marian stood and knocked over her chair; with shaking hands she righted it and stepped up onto it.
She shouted: it sounded savage like the sailors laughing, and just as wordless. She shouted again, and the sailors shouted back. She threw her arm out, and her red cape flourished like a flag: the sailors yelled, and Hawke said, “Who of you scurvy drunks is out of work?”
Isabela swore. The sailors swore, louder.
Hawke said, “Who of you scurvy drunks hates your work?”
Wild screaming. Mugs crashing together in the air; someone threw their sweat-soaked kerchief at Hawke; she swatted it away.
“Well, why the bloody void aren’t you sailing with Captain Isabela, then?”
Disjointed cries of Captain who? Captain what? You’re out of your mind, girl! More beer!
Hawke roared. She grabbed her mug of cider and flung it against the wall. She reached out to Isabela, who was staring up from her seat with her thumb between her teeth, and Isabela said shit and took her hand.
Her boots clapped down on the table with a splatter, and Hawke stepped up beside her. “Captain me, you ugly bastards! I’m the fucking Queen of the Eastern Seas!”
But Isabela had that rainwater-down-the-gutter feeling in her stomach, her cold empty wet stomach that only last night was wrung inside-out, vomiting rat poison. It was time to change course.
“Sorry for you lot, but I’m not looking for a crew! In fact, I’m putting my captain’s cap away and sailing with a pirate so fearsome, so cunning, so fucking good she makes a queen look like a chambermaid! The waters bend to her fucking will, on my life!”
Well, who the fuck is it? A lone drunk shouted.
Isabela scoffed. “Who is it?” She laughed. She seized Marian’s wrist and hoisted it into the air. “Captain fucking Jackdaw!”
And three dozen grizzled, flushed, hacked and scarred scowling faces were turned toward Marian: turned in their chairs, tankards held mid-air, and the air was thick with their gazes for an infinite second before Marian yelled, “Well, who’re you starin’ at?”
And in perfect (barely unsure, a second’s hesitation that only Marian in her close proximity heard) imitation of Hawke, Isabela roared, “Captain fuckin’ Jackdaw!”
And the tavern roared, “Captain fuckin’ Jackdaw!”
This was how Marian Hawke discovered that screaming can get you what you want.
“Meet us at The Siren’s Call at sunrise if you want to sail!”
The table shook when Isabela leapt to the floor, and the floor shook when Marian leapt down after her, the pirate’s hand firmly gripped around hers and leading her out.
Outside, rain was pattering in fat drops, and Marian hooked her arm around the pirate’s. “Come on, we’ll hit up the pub across the way and tomorrow we’ll have our choice of scum for a crew.”
“Look, sweet thing, the Captain Jackdaw schtick was fun, but you’re not a real captain. And—truth be told—neither am I.”
Marian tossed her hair back, a muscle memory from the days when she had some. The pirate’s mouth was twisted, uneasy, and Marian was distracted with wondering about it. “Doesn’t matter. They think we’re legends, did you see that?”
“Lies don’t sail ships, Jackdaw. Easy though that might make things. And my ship is still in the mutinous little paws of a fat Antivan son-of-a-whore for the very reason of him being more than a liar, unlike our pathetic asses.”
And this left a taste in Isabela’s mouth, because it sounded so damn much like what Madame Hari said to her after she started seeing that oxman: Lies can’t get you anything real, Naishe.
Isabela let out a deep breath that fogged the air, and Marian watched it dissipate over her frown as they walked, brisk in the brisk air, down the cobblestone road.
Marian steered them toward another tavern anyway, because she was like her dog in that once she had something between her teeth she was loathe to give it up. This place was smaller, sleepier, and Isabela dug into her boot for a coin and said, “Look, Jackdaw, I’m going to buy you a real drink—to say thanks, because you’ve been a real mate—but then, it’s time for you and I to part ways. I have to seek my fortune, and you have to get on home.”
“I don’t have a home,” Marian said, and Isabela set a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t lie to a liar, baby doll.”
Marian didn’t think she was lying, but she didn’t realize that Isabela wasn’t talking about a place.
Marian wrapped her cloak around herself, and wrapped her hands around the mug Isabela gave her. The cloak could not warm her and the frost on the glass could not make her colder.
Isabela’s eyes were already tripping over each downturned head in the place; the only thing she could really feel was the tiny flicker of hope in her chest—she could cup her hands around it like a candle flame—the hope, the memory of the day she met Zevran: she didn’t need a rescue, she just needed a hand—a friend—a mark, one more time, just one more time and she’d be sailing. Free.
Marian wanted to be him so bad she could burn.
A man entered the tavern.
His back was straight, his cheekbones were tall and severe, and there was a dark stain on his sharp jaw where he did not allow a beard to grow.
This is how Isabela met Malcolm Hawke: he was hunting down his daughter like Ser Maurevar Carver once hunted for him in the dark rooms of Viscount’s Keep and the parlors of charmed Hightown noblewomen—racing against the hunters who would punish her more severely. He came armed with a net, and they had arrows.
He was angry like his daughter was, but after she was born he learned to tamp his anger down deep inside himself and only release it like a canon: at precise moments, at precise targets, and when his family was miles away. He often forgot that he’d had more time than she had to learn this skill.
When Isabela saw him his thick hair was pulled back smooth and clean and his coat was as neatly buttoned and cuffed as a naval officer’s, and his eyes burned like whiskey—she did not immediately understand that Marian was his daughter, but on instinct she fastened an arm around Marian’s shoulders and steered her out of his path in just the same way her mutinous first mate had shown her to steer The Siren’s Call from the path of cannon fire. She recognized a dangerous man, but she did not recognize that the danger was not Marian’s.
Isabela was already saying, “Hey, mate, you got a problem?” when Malcolm Hawke seized his daughter’s arm; Isabela tightened her grip, but Malcolm Hawke wasn’t concerned with her.
Marian looked like she’d been hit by a cannonball.
“Father—“
Isabela swore and let go.
“We’re going home.” His arm around Marian’s shoulders like a net, he turned his gaze on the pirate.
Isabela heard what girls have heard from other girls’ fathers for centuries: “You stay away from her.”
This was the first of two times Malcolm Hawke would see Isabela. This is what Malcolm Hawke saw: eyes that looked too much like his own when he led Leandra Amell onto the ship that took her away from Kirkwall—a little too hot on the skin, much too reckless. This is what Malcolm Hawke saw: a new fear.
Isabela did not know that she was looking at her second chance.
Marian twisted her neck to look at the pirate one last time, as she was torn away: to Marian, she looked as mythical and lost, already, to memory as Highever had from the back of the caravan that took her away from it. The sky changes before a blizzard, and Marian felt that again within her.
She let this build as her Father walked her down the street. A familiar roaring in her ears; he heard it in his own and the rain fell.
(She could not help but count everything he had taken her away from. She counted while she twirled her mother’s knife.)
“Father. I want something.”
“We all want something. Come on.”
“Father, I want something,” and she didn’t say Like you wanted Mother, but that is what they both heard, and both of them were surprised.
“She needs a Captain for her ship. The Siren’s Call.”
Malcolm said nothing and Marian would remember this, but his mind turned with every strike of his heel on the rainy ground.
(When his heel hit the ground, steam rose.)
(Isabela did not go outside for a last look. She stood in the tavern, abuzz around her, holding two drinks and thinking of a broad black back and a small red one disappearing toward the sun over the breaking clouds, a smirk reflected in the ale that she couldn’t explain. She closed her eyes and consoled herself with the thought of the sea air which wrapped around her when she balanced on the bowsprit of the ship she took from the man who took her. It would come back to her. She would find her way into her arms again, the only thing—she swore—she’d love in her life.)
“The first time never counts,” Zevran had told her when he cut her just below the shoulder, after he’d handed her his knives and she said, “I swear, I’ll never lose.”
Marian climbed out her window at night; her foot slid on the awning and her shin bled from knee to toe, after she crashed heels-first to the ground, but she ran—ran.
She looked for the beautiful schooner with the gold stripe down her mainsail, the beautiful schooner she would never see again after tomorrow morning, the schooner that would kill five hundred men over the next ten years, then crash into the far cliffs of Kirkwall. She slipped again when she saw it, her foot sliding on the wet wood of the pier, red cloak muddied in the fall and breath knocked away. I could fall in love with you, Marian thought—she thought her sails shone bright as a third moon.
The pirate Marian sought was setting one bare foot in front of the other, her arms held straight over the water, finding the end of the bowsprit. She was gulping cold sea air and she wasn’t sure why she couldn’t catch her breath. She wasn’t sure what had just happened to her—Her captain was on the other end of the ship, in the shadow of the night. He wore a great feathered hat and watched his first mate tip-toe over the water toward the heavy white moon; shaking his head he murmured, Oh, my Isabela.
The man who had made this happen was walking home, his black boots striking the cobblestone in quick, measured beats. He’d asked around and found the Antivan captain in one of the dockside taverns where his name was known. The Antivan did not know his name, but his crewman, who had served with the Crimson Oars as well, did.
“Malcolm Hawke,” he said. “The man who healed a man whose arm had come clean off and had him swinging an ax the next day. The man who stirred a tempest so mean it tore the sod off every house in the village. The man who once bent the force of the wind to send a wyvern flying off its course, then took its pelt to market and bought children’s shoes with the coin. That Malcolm Hawke?”
“Keep it to yourself,” Malcolm Hawke said.
“If such a man thinks my poor Isabela is worth the hell she’ll surely give me, I certainly must reconsider tossing her overboard.” The Antivan hung his head and sighed, a smirk reflected in his ale that he could certainly explain, but certainly didn’t want to. Malcolm Hawke was only telling him what he’d already known about his Isabela, and he was only pushing him toward bet he’d already wanted to make. “My crew will surely toss her overboard again.”
“Get rid of them.”
“Oh, I know, I know. But where will I find new brutes at such short notice?”
“My understanding is that the Pig’s Potion crowd will be flocking to your ship come sunrise.”
The Antivan raised his wiry grey eyebrows. “It seems to be in the very stars.”
“We’ll say it was the stars.”
Malcolm Hawke’s boots struck the ground, and he did not smile at the night, because he’d done something for his daughter but he knew it would bring no smile to her face.
Marian Hawke, muddy and bleeding, scrabbled to her feet and ran up the gangplank. The Antivan had been told to expect her red cloak, and only remained in the shadows, shaking his head. The Rivaini was surprised by the sound of feet hitting the deck and wobbled, and almost crashed once again into the bay.
Marian yanked her boots off and, hopping, almost fell again. Isabela was crouching to find balance, hands on the bowsprit, and that was how Marian came after her—crawling, shuffling hands and feet, ridiculous to look at and laughing giddy. The water rushed at the ship’s hull; the wind rushed to her sails.
Isabela looked over her shoulder and laughed, and she didn’t need to ask. Tears were staining her face which looked like seaspray to Marian, and she told Marian to stop, silly bird, before you make a splash. Isabela stood, and one foot behind the other Isabela turned around, and to Marian she looked—haloed by bright Satina as she was, arms spread like wings as they were, beautiful and terrible as she was that night—like a holy woman risen from ashes. Marian Hawke could only grin her rare, murderous grin up at her and take her hand when she sent it down: this was how Hawke ascended over the water.
She undid the clasp of her red cloak and it flew behind her, in the wind, and spilled onto the deck that would see spills so much redder.
“You got your ship back.”
“You got my ship back, didn’t you? You sneaky bird.” Her captain found her where Hawke had left her: A little birdie told me you’d be here.
And Marian didn’t, she really didn’t, but she didn’t tell Isabela she was wrong.
Her hands were on Isabela’s shoulders, and she was so unsteady her legs shook, her stomach churned, and her cheeks hurt from grinning. Isabela was asking, How’d you do it? How’d you convince him, pretty bird? Marian shook her head.
She was being given what Gamlen Amell had given Malcolm, but in that moment she thought she had what she’d always wanted: she thought the bowsprit beneath her was her destiny slipping out from under her feet. She thought she was sailing away.
She tested her balance, leaned in, and pressed her lips to the pirate’s.
The pirate wheeled her arms to keep from falling, and Hawke kissed her again: both sets of lips cold in the sea spray, but something about Isabela’s made Marian feel like she’d never be cold again.
“Jack—Hawke—That fucking water is cold as—“
Isabela screamed as she and Hawke toppled into the water, and it was, truly, cold as death.
Marian gasped when she found surface, ice poured over her closed eyelids, and when she reached out she found Isabela again and planted another kiss somewhere around her chin. Isabela spat water in her face; Marian roared and splashed.
Isabela ducked underwater to escape her—Isabela would never forget how Marian Hawke looked that night, so at home in the deadly salt water, and she would never forget how she felt. She was not in first love like Marian was, nor anything near. She was scared the way she was when she saw The Siren’s Call for the first time, two weeks ago: scared in the presence of something great which she did not yet understand.
Somewhere above, and Antivan accent asked if he was going to have to send a net down for them.
Malcolm Hawke was standing at his kitchen window; he let the curtain hang over his back to block the wind that would chill the house, and he watched the moonlight on the street. He would give her tonight.
The first man to walk up the gangplank onto The Siren’s Call when the sun first bloodied the clouds the next morning was Malcolm Hawke. He said to Isabela, “She does not step onboard this ship.” Her captain had been told, but he knew he needed to tell this to the girl himself, as well. Looking down at her, that morning, he could feel the ghost of Aristide Amell at his shoulders.
And Isabela could only nod at him, and he turned and left.
The funny thing was, Isabela wouldn’t have let Marian onto her ship anyway.
It took Marian hours to get away the next morning.
She ran until she tasted blood; she slipped on the pier and cut her shins again. She didn’t care.
The Siren’s Call had launched: in the distance, a sea away, a girl in a great big hat was standing at the stern. She waved at the girl on the pier.
She knew what it was to run from destiny, because she’d been doing it since Luis choked on a poison dagger two weeks ago, since she first stepped onboard that ship—But she couldn’t take Hawke away from hers. To Isabela’s eyes, Marian Hawke’s destiny did not look like one you flee. It looked like one you snuggle up to—one that cared, at least.
“Isabela!” Hawke screamed, her throat shredding. “You bitch!” A sob broke through. “Come back for me!”
“Come find me!”
And Isabela would tell the story of how she lost her crew and dueled Captain Jackdaw, how she was never sure if he let her win and how he got her on her feet when she had nothing, how maybe she even fell in love, in dozens of taverns in dozens of ports in a dozen countries, every time hoping that some chick in a red cloak would stand on her chair and cry out that Captain Jackdaw wasn’t a “he” at all.
The pirate waved her great plumed hat in the air, red like a scarf billowing to the dust before a bull. “So long, Marian!”
One day Marian Hawke will be a murderer, she will have decided that no place she can creep to is more dangerous than her mind, and she will meet a pirate in a tavern. The pirate will knock three men to the floor and drop her elbows back on the bar—she won’t see Hawke right away. After ordering another drink she’ll ask the bartender if he’s heard the tale of Captain Jackdaw.