Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

~1712~

Long Island crawled with pirates. 

Most respectable local children learned this early, because their parents either warned them staunchly against such villains, or else were involved in the trade. Or, as in the case of the Nolans of King’s County, both. 

The Earl and Countess Rivers (so they styled themselves) had a most impressive fortune that was, as all their neighbors’ were in those days, made so impressive through a charitable willingness to overlook the niceties of British trade law. However, once that fortune was secure, they turned on the industry: retreating into what society New York colony could provide, and into the all-engrossing task of educating their two children into ornaments to said society. The children, similarly engrossed in receiving this education, ignored their parents’ sermons against associating with pirates as ably as they ignored the backroom deals that funded their regiment of tutors, governesses, and fencing masters. 

At the time these young people became interesting to us, they were just leaving that stage of childhood in which one ornaments society merely by smiling prettily when one is told how very like one’s mother or father one is becoming. In this new and concerning stage of nigh-adulthood, one must Make Use of oneself to be properly ornamental.

John Nolan was nearly twenty, and had made no use of himself in all that time. He was a plain, pale, thin-limbed thing, with an angular face occasionally rendered handsome by a look of petty disdain he was wont to put up as if it were a shield. The young man had little interest in business, politics, or war. Whether he had talent in any of these, it was impossible to tell. For John, to do a thing against his will and to do it poorly were the same. 

He remained, nonetheless, a social favorite for his habit at parties of speaking to no one—a charming trait, for he could never then give anyone offense!—and occupying himself at the pianoforte till the carriages were called, playing beautiful pieces of his own composition and saving his hosts a small fortune in hired musicians. A careful observer might also catch the rare, true smile that broke over his face, like the sun through clouds. In those moments, he was truly handsome. But it is the function of such musicians that they are not observed carefully.

Whatever favor John won with his hosts, his parents were less charmed. After all, it is acceptable to have a reclusive composer for a second or third son, but in an eldest, these quirks may only be tolerated insofar as they are tempered with more productive habits. Despairing of the boy, Lord Rivers suggested John take a living in the church, where his music might at least edify the body of Christ. This episode was comically disastrous. John returned before the year was out with a completed symphony and a cheerful atheism, and the matter was never spoken of again.

John’s sister Mehitabel was a magnetic girl of nearly eighteen who was, in her own estimation, entirely overqualified for marriage. (Lady Rivers said a lady could never be any such thing. In light of the bachelors this good woman was eyeing for her daughter, we may amend Mehitabel’s calculation thus: she was entirely overqualified for all her prospective grooms.) Mehitabel’s features were very like her brother’s—except perhaps a comelier mouth and larger, more luminous eyes—but her manner was infinitely more inviting. Since John was unlikely to prove useful as an heir, she was much petted by her parents. In her seventeen years, she had learned and enjoyed (though, perhaps, not mastered) all arts, music, and languages customarily studied by ladies, as well as equestrian affairs, the styling of wigs, gymnastics, fencing, Greek and Latin, complex mathematics, astronomy, and cartography. 

These last had combined neatly into a special interest in navigation, to which she attached herself with unparalleled devotion.  It was in service of this study that she accosted her mother one day at tea.

“Maman,” she said sweetly, “you have been so good to me, and I have never wanted for anything in pursuit of the muses of learning.” John, hunched over a mahogany writing-desk, scoffed to himself, knowing whatever favor Mehitabel was about to ask would be exorbitant indeed. Lady Rivers, however, was appropriately mollified—until her only daughter declared a desire to go to sea.

One hand pressed to her heart, she leaned back in her chair as if she might call one of the upper maids to bring smelling salts. “My dear girl, whatever for? No, no, my girl, I shall have a nervous attack if I even consider it. What would possess you to go to sea? We just had a lovely holiday to Southampton last summer.”

“It would not be a holiday, Maman, but for educational purposes. I believe—and Master Hale agrees—that I’ve learned all I can about navigation while trapped on dry land. Gaining practical knowledge is a most necessary next step in becoming a well-rounded young woman.”

Lady Rivers, though a fervent champion of education, protested that young women could be marvelously well-rounded with only a theoretical knowledge of deep-sea navigation. She also privately resolved to replace Master Hale with a less indulgent tutor. However, during his daughter’s impassioned plea, Lord Rivers had come in from his morning inspection of the stables, and as he removed his gloves, throwing them to the tea table with a loud smack , he said, “Let the girl go to sea, Mary.”

“Oh, Father! ” Mehitabel exclaimed in delight as John looked up sharply and said, “Really?” and Lady Rivers gasped, “My lord, whatever for?”

He stretched out in the larger of the parlor chairs. “We’ve always said our children’s education should spare no expense. I see no reason to quibble over sea versus land. Yes, my girl, get thee to the sign of the three-eyed wench; join a crew; sign their articles; begone.”

Here, Mehitabel faltered. The Inn at the Three-Eyed Wench was a by-word between the Rivers for calumny, piracy, whoring, and all other evils. She could not be sure, but it seemed she recalled her father once saying he would feed his children to lions before he would have them known at such a place. “I beg your pardon, sir—I thought you might arrange something with one of your partners’ ships.”

“Impossible,” he said coolly, buttering a slightly burnt muffin. “Their voyages are far too long for your constitution, and I don’t believe in exploiting my old friendships so. No. You find yourself a kindly fishing vessel or some such and go up the coast for a few days. Then we may discuss deep sea voyages.” 

If he was joking, it was in a new style; there was not that heat in his voice his children were accustomed to. If he was not joking, perhaps he had forgotten what all these words meant. Mehitabel resolved to exploit the miscommunication until he corrected his error (which, she hoped, would not be till she was several leagues out to sea). “Thank you, Father.” She stood and straightened her skirts to a strangled, distressed noise from her mother.

“Oh, Belle?” Lord Rivers gestured toward the writing-desk. “Take John with you.”

“I can’t possibly—” John protested, but his father stood and silenced him.

Lord Rivers was sharp at all points like a lancet, and his glare was just as cutting, the full force of which he now turned on John. “ You can’t possibly, my young Mozart?” John flinched. “No: an inapt metaphor. Mozart was twice world-renowned by your age. And you are—what? Get your coat and mind your sister as I told you.”

John, perhaps wisely, bit his tongue, only nodded stiffly and brushed past his sister to leave the room. Mehitabel threw their mother a reproachful look as she followed, which Lady Rivers cast likewise on her husband, though for her own reasons. 

“How could you think of letting Mehitabel go to sea?”

“She won’t get past the dock,” he replied. “I’m shocked she even agreed to try, but the minute she sets foot in that inn, she’ll be mocked out of the room by every captain worth his salt—the ones who don’t try to molest her first.” His wife shrilled in protest, but he only smiled meanly. “John will dirty his soft hands defending her, Mehitabel will lose this ridiculous sailing notion, and they will both receive an education in the real world—a subject their tutors have clearly been scanting.”

~

The Inn at the Sign of the Three-Eyed Wench lurked exactly where one might expect such an inn to lurk: far down the harbor’s end, nearly underneath the docks. A constant chorus of beggars and prostitutes traded in its alleys, and (though, in truth, this must be said of every shop so near the water) it was overpowered by the smell of rotting fish. 

For all that cheerful environment, it was still frequented by the middle class of captain, perhaps because they could lord it over the place as they could not at the higher class of inn. So John and Mehitabel did not stand out quite as much as one might expect. This is not to say that they did not stand out. Of course they did. They had dressed down as best they could for the occasion, Mehitabel in a silver-grey mantua and John’s coat also of grey, though even if they had mimicked the sailors’ getup perfectly, their wide eyes and turned-up noses would have marked them out as a novelty in that rarified air. But when they pushed open the heavy, creaking door beneath the heavy, creaking sign, the various crews hunched around their tables merely glanced up, assessed the newcomers, and assumed they were lost rather than any kind of mark to be bullied. 

John, who had been braced for the latter, was left on his back foot when no one came barrelling up to him, demanding his business and his purse. 

“How shall we go about this?” he inquired.

“Let us split up,” said Mehitabel confidently. “We can canvas the inn more quickly that way.” 

John was not entirely convinced his parents would count this arrangement as “looking after” his sister. But after three conversations, he was convinced of something else: they would never get to sea. The first men he approached, on being asked if he might speak to their captain, told John he could have the next chat after the captain finished with his lady upstairs, though they hoped John didn’t charge as much. The second gestured with a laugh to a pile of coats in a corner that gave of bubbling, rum-scented snores at irregular intervals. The third simply said, “Fuck off, princeling.” 

He could only imagine the indignities his sister was facing. Just as he turned to rescue her from them, she called, “John!” in a tone that implied little need for rescuing.

“John,” she repeated, rushing to his side and tugging him toward the back corner of the dining-room whence she had come. “There’s a gentleman I would like you to meet. This is Captain Edward Reyes . ” 

“Captain Reyes,” said John, shaking the man’s hand.

“Mr. Nolan,” replied the captain. 

The correction was on the tip of John’s tongue, but he bit it back, realizing she gave the man their least assuming name on purpose.

Captain Edward Reyes was a barrel-chested man just as tall as John’s shoulder, dressed very rustically. John knew that a captain’s clothes did not always match his wealth; he had spied on enough exchanges between his father and the captains who traded for the Rivers family that he knew a man simply dressed might be frugal—or stingy—and a man swaggering around with much gold on was likely wearing all he owned. Even still, the plainness of Captain Reyes’ dress, as well as that of the young men around his table (and young they were—John was not sure how many were even his age), suggested that perhaps his ship did not operate at the caliber of their father’s aboveboard partners. 

Still, he found in the captain a perfectly amiable conversationalist, as able to hold sway at a table as any middling-wealth baronet, and several charming acquaintances among the crew. Captain Reyes particularly commended his gunner, a tall boy with prominent ears and a goofy smile called Mark O’Connell, and the ship’s cook and surgeon, a friendly little man who shook John’s hand vigorously with a “Shaun Cooper, sir, at your service!” Compared to his previous conversation partners, John thought he could chat with this crew for some time.

The captain leaned back in his chair, which was brave, considering their quality. “This young lady says you’re looking for berth.” 

“I’m looking for employment,” corrected Mehitabel.

“You’re hired already.” 

“Is she?” asked John in some amazement. 

Captain Reyes shrugged. “I’m able enough at navigation, but I’ll never say no to an extra hand at the helm. Some might say there’s no place for book learning at sea. They say it leads men astray in a crisis. It fouls up the chain of command. It…” Captain Reyes’ list of reasons that book learning had no place at sea went on so long Mehitabel grew half afraid he would convince himself by the recitation. But he smiled thinly and concluded, “But I say fuck ‘em.” 

Mark O’Connell thought that sentiment good enough to drink to. 

The captain addressed himself to Mehitabel in a stage whisper. “Does he want to work too, or is he just pleasure cruising?” 

“Oh, I’ve never wanted to work,” John said before he could stop himself. 

Captain Reyes burst out laughing pahahaha! and the rest of his crew joined in. “Neither have we, sir,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Neither have we. Isn’t that the rub? But we poor men have to make do for ourselves.”

John, unsure whether we poor men included or excluded him, chuckled along awkwardly. He shot Mehitabel a look that said if he was about to get press-ganged into swabbing poop decks or whatever it was that talentless men did at sea, he was going to throw something of hers overboard at the next opportunity. 

“My brother is a very able-bodied musician,” Mehitabel said proudly. Best of sisters! He wouldn’t dream of throwing anything of hers anywhere. 

Captain Reyes went on to explain that their ship—a pretty little sloop by the name of Summer Stars—was bound next day for the Dutch West Indies trading cloth goods, and if the Nolans had no troubles about it, they could draw up articles right there. 

“Oh, articles,” breathed Mehitabel, so quietly only John could hear. She was not asked to sign many things in her day-to-day life, other than letters to elderly relatives and the Eisley sisters. 

Perhaps the Nolans ought to have shown a more modest hesitation. Perhaps they ought to have treated Captain Reyes’ offer with the sort of diffidence that young ladies are taught to use to make suitors jealous. But John was never taught such things, so he was not practiced in weaponizing the awkward diffidence he naturally possessed. And Mehitabel, who had been taught such things, assumed that was only for proposals of marriage, and that proposals of sea ventures could be entered into whenever one’s fancy was struck. 

So two of the Summer Stars’ crew pulled up additional chairs for John and Mehitabel—dumping their occupants onto the dusty floor to squawk indignantly—and poured them ale (which neither of them really enjoyed). Meanwhile, Captain Reyes busied himself with ink and paper until, breezily reassuring them that everything was perfectly standard, he slid the final document across the table. It read thus: 

ARTICLES ON BOARD THE SUMMER STARS

• That every Man shall obey civil Command; the Captain shall have one full Share and a half in all Prizes; the Master, Carpenter, Boatswain, & Gunner shall have one Share and a quarter.
• That every Man shall maintain his Arms clean and fit for an Engagement, or else suffer such punishment as the Captain and Company shall think fit. 

Herein followed several articles about general upkeep aboard ship, forbidding the crew to carry lighted candles in the powder magazine, and other such wise prohibitions. While the punishments listed seemed harsh to the Nolans’ young eyes, they assumed this was standard practice at sea and read on.

• That if any Man shall steal any Thing in the Company, to the value of a Piece of Eight, he shall be maroon’d or shot. 

Mehitabel’s lips moved silently over the word marooned. John glanced at her. Surely this was not standard. Marooned was a word from novels. And not novels about the respectable adventures of the British navy. 

• That in the capturing of Prizes (here her fingers began to tap anxiously against John’s leg under the table), the Boarding Party to be chosen by Volunteer, that every Man might have his fair turn. Furthermore, that those in the party are allow’d a Shift of Clothes and a Pistol from the taking, over and above their Share.
• That no Prisoner shall be killed or maimed without the will of the Captain or a Majority Vote.

Mehitabel smiled the winning smile she usually used to disguise when she was about to cheat at whist and begged a moment alone with her brother. This granted, she and John hurried out of earshot of the crew. 

“John, don’t be cross, I did not—” 

“—realize they were pirates?”

“No!” she said in an agonized whisper. 

“I’m not cross,” said John truthfully. “I think it’s just our luck.” 

She glanced over her shoulder at the pirate crew with whom they had just been drinking most convivially. “They are the only ship that will have me. And I would not be doing acts of piracy.” 

“Just navigating toward them.” 

“Don’t tease, John!” 

An itching somewhere deep behind John’s ribs told him he could do little worse than go home to his father’s withering, greying remarks and his mother’s nothing-reassurances. “If I don’t tease, we’ll have nothing to talk about on this long voyage.” 

She looked up sharply. For all that she prayed John might come along, and that he had seemed to get on with Captain Reyes, it was another thing to hear in his own words that he was going, and she exclaimed so with such delight that John’s conscience was pricked at his reluctance. “All right. So we’ll risk it. If it’s very dreadful, we can mutiny!” And with that, she returned to the table. “I have a concern here,” she said, pointing to an article: “That no Woman shall be allow’d in Disguise. The punishment 30 lashes for her and any Man found to have carried her aboard.” 

“You wouldn’t be disguised,” pointed out Captain Reyes reasonably. “You would be hired. It’s the sneaking we take issue with, see.” 

“But could I disguise myself to others, supposing you knew it was me?” 

This the captain granted as a useful artifice. And with that matter settled, nothing else remained but for John and Mehitabel to sign on the lines provided and join the pirate crew. John noted with interest that Mehitabel signed her name Michel Nolan , but there was no opportunity to comment on it, for hand must be shaken all round and farewells-for-now said. Captain Reyes told them to be ready to sail at first light. Thus they parted.

The walk back to the carriage began in silence, as if they were waiting for the pirates to get out of earshot. Finally, John tested something aloud. 

“Michel Nolan.”

“Do you like it?”

“He sounds like a devout French peasant.” 

“You’re teasing again,” protested Michel (for, as the young lady took great pleasure in the name, and it was the one her new companions would know her by, we shall grant her the choice and call her so too). 

John protested in return that Michel Nolan would make a very fine pirate, once the good man gave up going on pilgrimages or whatever. Reassured, his sister looped her arm through his. Over the course of the walk, her shyness slipped away and by the time they alighted at home, John had to hush her lest her chattering about how excited she was to set sail alert one of the less secret-keeping servants. 

Perhaps it needed not be such a great secret, since their father had told her to do precisely what she had done. Still, when they parted on the stairs, it was with a whispered intent to meet again in the morning with whatever they might pack discreetly. Michel, however, had precious little that would serve, especially when it came to practical shoes, so she ended up in John’s room as well, filling her smallest trunk with the smallest of his clothes, retiring to her own at last for a few hours’ sleep. 

She tossed fitfully, hair splayed against her several pillows, until she was convinced the clock was refusing to strike midnight out of particular spite. Perhaps God was keeping her awake because she was not fully prepared for the morning. She rose, dressed herself in an old riding outfit of John’s, and returned to bed, boots and all. It did no good. She resigned herself to hours of counting the sounds of the town-house settling, the breeze rustling the leaves outside her window—and John’s door opening down the corridor. A terrible and unfounded fright struck her, and she rushed to intercept him. 

Meanwhile, John paced fretfully until he also assumed the clock was spiting him. When he could bear it no more, throwing his bags over his shoulder, he descended, having struck upon the notion of going—he knew not where. 

“John?” Michel’s whisper above arrested him. She leaned over the banister.

“I—I thought I’d go out. For a walk, or something.”

“Oh, good.” She hesitated before admitting, “I thought you might be going without me.”

John smiled. “I hardly want to go with you!” he said, which was a moving reassurance.

Michel shifted from one foot to the other at the top of the stairs. “Can I—”

“Come on.”

So the young Nolans left the home of their youth. They left a pair of letters for their parents to discover in the morning: 

My dearest Mother and Father,

I have booked passage on a lovely ship known as the Summer Stars. The captain and crew are perfect gentlemen, and the captain is most encouraging about the opportunities I will have to improve myself at navigation. When I return, I expect I shall be the most accomplished young lady of the season! I imagine none of the Eisley sisters have been to sea, and you may tell Mrs. Eisley so. Though the girls are my dear companions, I feel their mother has never shown you the deference you are due, and it is unkind of her. 

(Michel continued in this vein for the whole front of the page and most of the back, before signing off with many effusions. She considered whether the drop of a tear on the signature might make her goodbye seem more earnest, but John pointed out that since she was not sad in the least, it would, in fact, be less earnest to do so.)

My lord. 

According to your wishes, I accompany my sister abroad. You will hear from us some time in the fall.

Your obedient son,

John. 

At first, John thought they might only walk in the unwholesome night air, but they veered toward the stables, and without discussing the matter, saddled their horses. 

When they were children, their governesses used to take them to an untouched stretch of coastline not far away to splash in the waves, identify wildlife, and stop troubling their mother, who always took ill in the summer. John led them there; a steady remembrance of the paths, even in the dark.

The tide was out, and they walked such a distance to reach it. If you, dear reader, have ever been so bold as to walk the coast at night, then you remember, as they do, the constant trudging through sand that makes one lose all sense of where the land ends, far behind in the darkness. John could only tell Michel was still beside him by the crunch of sand beneath her too-large boots. At last, they reached the black water, and without discussion—as with everything since they shut their grand front doors—they sat in the sand and helped one another pull off their boots.

It used to be a game. They would stand, hand in hand, four and two, or five and three, and jump the tiny waves that rolled in one after the other, John taking a great four-year-old pride in how much deeper he could go before a really huge wave knocked him over (the same depth that now only lapped at the cuffs of his pants) or until Michel cried because her clothes were too wet. They stood there in the tide, John’s arms crossed, Michel’s hands clasped in front of her. She repressed the impulse now to give a little hop as each wave brushed against her ankles. 

The full moon sent streaks of white fluttering across the surface of the water, but it only made the rest of the expanse deeper and more inscrutable. The West Indies were somewhere before them, so they had been taught, where the water did not bite with spring chill, as it did here. Michel thought of diving in. John thought of lying down and letting the foam cover him. They simply stood, staring out. 

They crossed the ocean once, so they had been told, not long before they began wave-jumping at this very shore. Presumably, they could do so again. After all, they were so much older. So much more capable.

A bird squalled behind them, startled by a snake moving in the grass, or whatever startles birds. The bird, however, startled the humans, reminding them how dark and lonely this beach really was. John shuddered; Michel shook her hands like shaking off cobwebs; their gazes finally broke, and they hurried to their horses, leaving the sea behind with the unspoken promise that it would have them back soon enough.

There were hours yet till sunrise, but they could not go home after such a solemn leave-taking. So they went early to the Three-Eyed Wench, braving the stares of the scattered drunks who also frequented such a place at such an hour. When the crew of the Summer Stars found them come morning, it was at a dark corner table, fast asleep, curled into each other like puppies. Captain Reyes smiled and shook John’s shoulder. “To arms, messmates. We’ve got a long way to sail.” 

Chapter Text

~1722~

John Nolan sat, frowning, at a dark corner table in a public house in Port Royal. His long, calloused fingers traced the glass of whiskey he had not drunk from since it was brought to him. Out the streaked, grimy window, he had a fine vantage of Gallows Point, where, two years earlier, Calico Jack Rackham had met a well-deserved end. John, if he had not achieved Captain Rackham’s success or notoriety, thought that at least he was also unlikely to achieve his end. He was nearly thirty, and ten years’ wear had sharpened away almost all the soft edges that still belonged to him at twenty. But to those who had not known him so long, it seemed he must have climbed out of the sea like this—wiry and sharp-eyed. 

The foppish young man sitting across the table had not known him long, and so thought him exactly that. So when John said witheringly, “I told you, we’re not hiring,” he actually withered a bit.

“If I could just speak to the captain, I’m sure he’d—”

“Listen,” said John through a tight smile. “You seem like a nice boy who wants a real job. So you should go join the navy. The town is crawling with them. We’re about to go on one last miserable voyage, try to hunt a prize worth the price of provisions to get her, get ourselves killed horribly, and then throw in our hand.” The prospective sailor shifted uncomfortably in his seat, feeling that he must have interrupted some deeper private reflections. “You deserve better. Go make His Majesty proud.” 

Just then, a shadow fell between the lamp and their table. John did not look up, but his discomfited tablemate did, and found himself gazing upon possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. 

While the woman’s silhouette was imposing at first glance, it was all stage magic. The once-fine greatcoat and a cocked hat of grey felt that fell low over round, dark-lashed eyes filled out her figure. Beneath their bulk, she was wraith-wiry and rather too pale for their climate, her fashionably-shaped face somehow all the prettier for how little care she had taken for it. She looked very like John, except perhaps for a comelier mouth. 

“Mr. Cooper tells me to tell you that we are ready to sail,” said this vision.

“Thank you, captain,” said John, his eyes still on the young man. 

Said young man did a poor job masking his surprise, considering how openly he was being watched. “Captain Destry?” he stammered out. “Of the Terror?” 

“The same,” she said with a bow. 

John smirked. “He wants a job.”

Michel laughed, high and musical. “Go join the navy!” 

~

After this rejection, the hapless aspiring sailor slunk out of the public house, neglecting to pay for the drink he had called over for John at the commencement of their brief acquaintance. Once he was well out, Michel sank into his chair, pushing her hat back off her forehead. Something of the fine lady still hung about her posture, even all these years later. 

“Are we really ready to sail, or was that an excuse to get rid of him?” asked John.

“We are.” Apparently in no rush anyway, Michel reached for John’s whiskey, which he passed her. 

“We don’t have to go out,” he said as she, with polite but inexorable sips, drained the glass. “Someone will surely buy the ship off us, which could get us to Havana, and from there…” He left this out, as neither of them knew where they would find themselves in this fantasied retirement. 

She bit her lip. “We promised the men one last take. Enough to pay them out, anyway.” The thought felt like a whimper: a sad concession made all the sadder by how hopefully their enterprise had begun. The Terror had been her child and her opus; she had made it and it had made her. Abandoning it now was like tearing up a trousseau—after years of work and so much hope sewn into the seams, did leaving it behind not declare the whole thing meaningless? Perhaps an ill-chosen metaphor. She had left her own trousseau behind when she turned pirate, and found much joy in the leaving. Certainly she could do so again—if allowed a while to be deeply miserable first. 

John wished he could find it in him to fight longer, for her if no longer for himself. A younger John’s spite would have driven him to keep hold of it. He had not felt young in years. “One last hurrah.” 

“One more.” 

They shook hands on the promise, which made Michel smile, then left the public house without paying for the drink that the disappointed sailor had ordered for John. 

Port Royal had been a handsome city until very recently—indeed was still a handsome city in large portions, if one allowed that those portions were the ones preserved underwater since the earthquake. Their path back to the harbor took them along the edge of one such area. In an attempt to speak of anything other than their upcoming retirement (or demise—though he was mostly sure that had been hyperbole to discourage new recruits), John commented on the view where the road fell away into the sea, the waterlogged buildings far below and their gardens now swimming with new kinds of livestock. Michel remarked that land down there could probably be got very cheap, and if all else failed—but that sounded morbid, so she stopped. Their careers were not going so badly as all that. 

They met their surgeon at the harbor looking rather rushed, as if he was hoping not to be spotted. 

“Where do you come from in such a hurry, Mr. Cooper?” asked Michel smilingly. “You would have beat us aboard anyway.” 

Mr. Shaun Cooper started, then swept his hat off his head. “Your pardon, Captain. I had to, ah, to post a letter.”

“To your lady love?” she teased. 

“No! Nothing of the kind. To my—mother.” 

John and Michel knew perfectly well that Shaun had the most amiable relationship with his parents of anyone on the ship, so the consternation on his ruddy, pleasant face at the word “mother” meant either that he was lying or she was ill. The former was quite unthinkable. 

“I hope she is not too ill!” Michel abandoned John to take Mr. Cooper’s offered arm. Mr. Cooper explained haltingly that last he heard, all was generally well, but that it would be good to see her again soon. 

For the first time, John, who was bringing up the rear, had an ominous thought. In all their end-of-career planning, they had never outright asked Shaun what he intended to do once they parted—asked if he might consider staying with them. But why would they ask? They hardly knew what they would do with themselves, and had nothing to offer a good man like Shaun. John frowned and blinked rapidly. 

“Now that would be a prize to take,” Michel laughed over her shoulder, and John looked for what ship she could be referencing at this distance from the dock. “We could really retire in style.” She gestured to a large proclamation hung outside the jail. John’s blood chilled, and Shaun fell uncomfortably silent. 

PROCLAMATION

For Apprehending various and sundry Pirates. 

(A long introduction of the king preceded any of the relevant message. Gentle readers interested in such things may appeal to other proclamations of the period for examples.) 

For as much as we are informed that several Persons, having possession of a Ship of about Forty Guns called the Timberwolf, have, contrary to the Laws of Nations and of this Kingdom in particular, and in despite of their Letters of Marque, recidivated to the Heinous and Notorious Acts of Piracy for which we had once most graciously Pardoned them;

We being Resolved that the utmost Diligence should be used against such Open and Villainous Transgressors, do Require and Command any of Our Good Subjects to Seize and Apprehend any of the Men of the said Timberwolf, as Ed. Reyes, Mark O’Connell, Fred. Mascherino, Mathw. Rubano, Mathw. Fazzi, [here the list of names went on for some time], and we Assure the Payment of the Sum of Fifty Pounds Sterling for every Man so Captured. 

Furthermore, One Hundred Pounds is offered for the Capture of one Adam Lazzara, of the same Ship. 

When they reached their own ship, the prospective retirees shook off their land-bound lethargy. The Terror, she was called, a two-masted schooner that could outrun half the navy if they asked her nicely. Her decks, worn but clean, shone honey-golden in the warm afternoon sun, and her sails snapped smartly in the breeze. The tide was fresh and fair. They were pirates a while yet! There were prizes to take and bounty to distribute. Fears of the future could be tucked away belowdecks until then. 

William, their helmsman, met them on deck. “Word says storms are brewing near Havana. Shall I change our course?” Michel went with him to see to the charts, while John and Shaun remained on deck, watching the rest of the small crew busy themselves about setting sail. 

“Will you miss this?” asked Shaun. 

John stood in thought so long that Shaun thought perhaps he had not heard him. “I’ll miss the good people I’ve met,” he said slowly, which was perhaps the nearest he could get to wishing aloud for his old friend. “But I was never meant for the sea.”

Chapter Text

~1712~

After the Summer Stars set sail from Long Island, a week passed in relative peace. Michel helped navigate when there was no danger of hitting anything, and so indeed they hit nothing, and her confidence increased by leaps and bounds. Several exuberant letters were drafted to Master Hale and put aside till they might be sent. Several more were addressed to their mother, but John, leaning over her shoulder while she wrote in the little closet the crew had converted into a ladies’ bunk, counseled her to let those stay in her trunk, if not be consigned to the sea. 

“I don’t want her to worry about us!” 

“Considering where we are and who we’re with, no news is good news, don’t you think?” 

John did very little aboard ship, but he earned his keep by his pleasant hand with a guitar, and even more so by being good company to drink with, full of those spiteful observances about polite society that are so agreeable to impolite society. The first day he laid hands on a rope, helping one of the hands catch a broken line when no one better could be had, he returned to his bunk with broken blisters on both palms. Rather than take his wounds to Mr. Cooper’s galley and admit he had never been rope-burnt, he dressed the wounds himself by the wavering light of a tallow candle. He was, after all, plain John Nolan here, as long as the charade lasted. 

It was not to last long. The next morning, he tripped climbing the companionway to the deck, and as O’Connell caught him and hauled him up the last step, he said, most obsequiously, “Up you go, my lord.” 

John started as if he’d been burnt. 

O’Connell bowed nearly in half, though he interrupted his own gallantry with laughing at John’s face. “Come on, we’re all Long Island bred, you think we didn’t know the Nolans the minute you walked in and said your own name?”

“Ey, everyone has a first time running away from home,” Captain Reyes said. 

O’Connell pointed out that since they had an earl aboard, they ought to get better rations. Mr. Cooper counterpointed that John was not an earl, merely a poor earl’s son—unless his father had kicked the bucket in the last week, in which case he offered his condolences. “What are you, m’lord—a viscount, aren’t you?”

John nodded, not sure why his face flushed. There was no distaste in the way Mr. Cooper said the word, only the pleasure of getting a fact right on an exam. Viscount Savage, he offered.

“Oh,” said O’Connell, duly impressed. “That’s a good pirate name, actually. You can keep that.” 

“Thank you?” 

Michel smiled. “Have you been much acquainted with the peerage, Mr. Cooper?” she asked politely.

He smiled back, and his smile made him look even younger. “I study it a bit for fun. The whole system has no place in my personal beliefs, but I think it’s all fascinating, how you’re called and all. Like, uh, classifying fish—or whatever men of science do with them.”

“Eat them,” said O’Connell firmly. John hoped the metaphor did not extend that far between viscounts and fish, or else he hoped they would never be shipwrecked without food. 

These ruminations were interrupted by the lookout hailing Captain Reyes from above. “Sail ho!”

“Where away?”

“Spanish colors off the starboard bow!” 

The officers went afore for a better vantage. It could not be told at this distance what ship she was, but whatever her name, she was an older merchantman, slow and hard to handle and, by her weight in the water, insufficiently armed. It was just the sort of prize they had been hoping for. The resolution passed at once to take her, and a volunteer boarding-party was made up, of which O’Connell was the first and loudest. The crew fell to merrily, loading the long-guns, taking in some sail so that they might catch the ship without betraying their intention to do so too early or too obviously, and fetching an impressive array of weapons. 

“Civilians below,” the captain said with a pointed look at the Nolans. 

“I am not a civilian!” said Michel indignantly. “I’ve signed articles!” John tried to hiss that the captain was not slighting them; he was doing them a favor. But his intrepid sister had already tied up her hair and stolen a cap from one of the hands to tuck it under. “Give me something,” she said to anyone who would listen. Someone handed her a pistol. “Well, I don’t know how to use that. Don’t any pirates fight with swords?” They did, and a sturdy little saber was procured for her.

John and Captain Reyes watched her test the weight of her new weapon. “You’re not trying very hard to enforce your command,” John remarked. 

“You try running a ship some time. Fortune sends you this enthusiastic a volunteer, you thank Fortune.” The captain cocked an eyebrow at John. “How about you, sailor? Headed below with the civilians?” 

John heaved an enormous sigh. “Obviously not.” He started off in the direction of whoever was handing out swords. “This is not enthusiastic volunteering!” he called back over his shoulder. 

“Don’t worry, I didn’t think so!” laughed Captain Reyes. 

A part of piracy the novels do not prepare one for is the inexorable period of waiting that comes between spotting the ship, readying to fire, and sailing into range. John and Michel stood at the railing in this period, swords sheathed at their sides, watching the Spanish ship grow larger. The tiny figures moving about on its deck grew more distinct by the minute. John wondered idly if one of those dark specks would be the thing that killed him. 

“I’ve never been in a battle,” said Michel, just to make conversation, though that was the one thing she could say that everyone on the ship knew.

“It’s practically epee. There’s no right-of-way, and you score anywhere on the body.” John made this comparison with great confidence, as though he had put thought into it (which he had not).

“Maestro says epee is for big dumb brutes,” Michel remarked. John scowled.

“What on God’s green ocean are you fucking talking about?” said O’Connell. 

Then their British colors were struck, and the black was raised, and the cannonade began.

~

In the aftermath of the battle, the young Nolans sat back to back against the foremast, or at least it was deduced to be them, because once the rest of the crew, alive and dead, were accounted for, the two unrecognizably bloodsoaked figures at the Sisyphean work of cleaning their weapons could not be anyone else. 

“Are you quite well?” Mr. Cooper offered Michel a hand with some concern.

“Oh, yes, thank you!” she said, wiping off his now further-besmirched hand. “I think very little of this is mine!” Once she was on her feet properly, she helped John up in turn. “That,” she said, “was nothing like epee.” 

“Speak for yourself! I’m writing Maestro a thank-you note as soon as I get all this washed off.” Which important task John marched off to do forthwith, grumbling about how much he hated the whole experience till he disappeared belowdecks, Michel and the others watching him go . 

“I thought you said he was a musician,” Mr. Cooper said, tallying John’s kills. Then, having done more math: “For what it’s worth, I thought you said you were a navigator!” 

Michel shrugged. “We had very classical educations.”

Chapter Text

~1714~

Bath crawled with pirates.

In particular, we refer to the port of Bath in the newly formed North Carolina colony, only just split off from Carolina proper. Which is not to say that Bath, England did not crawl with pirates, though we must leave their ravagings to the excitable imagination of an Austen heroine and stay focused on the other side of the ocean. We may even point out that Bath had not seen its height of piracy in this sunny spring of the year of our Lord 1714, for Blackbeard would not make landfall for some years. But long before his illustrious if brief reign of terror, the port was always occupied by some villain or other, trading more or less ill-gotten goods. 

The Lazzaras, of Lazzara Shipyards, had nothing to do with piracy. They maintained their up-and-coming family shipyard in a narrow harbor a small distance up the river, and they minded their business, and business was good, and they never had adventures. 

Which is not to say that no adventuring spirit could be found among them. Several of the elder cousins had expressed a desire to travel west with some expedition. Aunt Bernadette was said to be a siren, or have married a siren, or perhaps to have met a siren once. And Adam, the eldest son of the chief branch of the family, he had a faraway spark in his eyes that his father said would lead to trouble. But there was simply no time. The caliber at which they worked required daily dedication that allowed no lollygagging nor daydreaming, and certainly no yearning. 

On a particularly balmy morning, adventure found its way to the Lazzaras, and piracy to boot. It came with a ship of the fleet anchored in Bath port, and Aunt Katherine running with her skirts flying to announce that a delegation of stern-faced, blue-coated officers in cocked hats was trooping up the path from town. Mr. Lazzara stumbled out of the shed, where he was helping his one-armed brother shave, to greet the Navy men. 

“Lord Commodore John Cornelius O’Callaghan the Fourth, Her Majesty’s Ship Victory,” said that estimable gentleman, extending his hand graciously to Mr. Lazzara, whose own hand had been halfway to a salute (he corrected course in the nick of time, with a quick aside to wipe the last of the lather off his palm). 

“Honor to have you in our shipyard, my lord.” Though hardly a small man, Mr. Lazzara found himself trotting to keep up as the commodore strode the dock with great purpose, examining the half-built yachts and schooners in their moorings. He halted where Adam sat, one foot trailing in the water, his freckled nose turned up to the sky.

“Yours, I imagine?” said the commodore.

“My oldest, sir. Adam.”

“A fitting name for the firstborn, as our father Adam was indeed the firstborn of creation. Stand up, Adam, when you’re spoken to.” 

Adam stood, but not in any hurry. This commodore whoever-he-was kept darting his eyes around like he had to count everything in reach. They weren’t due for inspection, especially not from commodores. He was judging whether to buy. Adam had seen this sort of customer before; they always wanted a little exhibition from the boys, because if a man could not raise a quality son, his boats might leak. In defense of the Lazzara crafts’ seaworthiness, then, he could exhibit a little. 

“Honor to have you in our shipyard, m’lord,” he parroted. 

“Yes, yes,” said the commodore absently, frowning at Adam as if he were the thing for sale. “Handsome boy you have.” He kept speaking over Mr. Lazzara’s gratitude. “Strapping young man, aren’t you? The sort Her Majesty’s Royal Navy is always looking for. How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Sir.” 

“Nineteen. If you were my son, you would long since have enlisted. You see my son there, John Cornelius.” He gestured behind him, where a pale young man in naval attire poked listlessly at an array of sextants. “Joined up, doing his duty. Gets to sail under his father.” 

John Cornelius O’Callaghan the Fifth looked very much like his father; incredibly tall and thin, as if his face had been made slightly too long and whoever formed him stretched the rest of him out to match. But while the commodore wore this figure like a wrought-iron gate or a fire-poker, hammered out into rigidity, John Cornelius looked more like a greyhound dog in an unfamiliar house. One rather wanted to reach up and pat his long, handsome face reassuringly. 

Adam did not care to pat John Cornelius’ face; he only wanted to know if the boy were actually taller than he, as he looked vexingly like he might be. He startled back to attention as the commodore addressed him again. 

“Well, young man? What keeps you ashore?”

It didn’t do to answer honestly with half the family standing around expectantly, but it also didn’t do (so he’d been told) to tell nosy Royal Navy officers to fuck off. So Adam arranged his face into that artless, lopsided smile that kept him in free drinks and good company wherever he found himself. “If all us strapping young men went to sea, your lordship, who’d you have building the ships we go on? Our grandmothers?”

The commodore laughed like he meant his voice to carry in a high wind; Adam’s father (once he was sure his son was not to be whipped for impudence) joined in nervously. Wiping his eyes, though there was not a tear in them, the commodore clapped Adam on the shoulder. “Well spoken. You serve your country in your own way.”

At Adam’s quip, John Cornelius finally looked up from his hands. His sunken eyes met Adam’s over the commodore’s shoulder, and they exchanged a very small nod. 

~

Lord Commodore John Cornelius O’Callaghan the Fourth, apparently finding Adam’s little show acceptable, announced that he did indeed intend to commission a vessel for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. He always spoke the title so, each word of the four given equal emphasis, like troops lined up for inspection. With much bowing and wringing of hands, Mr. Lazzara invited His Lordship indoors to discuss the finer points of the commission. Mrs. Lazzara invited the other officers—and the rail-thin John Cornelius—indoors for tea and bread and jam. And the rest of the family, though there would certainly not be enough bread and jam if it was requisitioned for company, went indoors to see how they took it. Adam offered to come along, but his uncle laughed rather callously. “You’ll talk His Lordship to death.” So Adam was left as he had been found, alone on the dock in the sunshine. 

He wondered idly if he ought to catch the officers as they left, bow and scrape to the Lord Commodore and so on, and drop a word discreetly that he wouldn’t mind enlisting after all. The Victory had come from Barbados, one of the shipmen said, and was returning to England soon. It would be something to cross the sea, to feel the deck move under his feet with no sight of land in any direction. 

While he was lost in this reverie, gazing out toward the horizon, or at least toward where the river curved and cut off the horizon, the second customers of the day arrived. This crew, it must be said, did not dress as neatly as the officers of the Royal Navy. However, in their defense, it must also be said that they arrived on a limping wrack of a sloop, which was taking on water fearfully as it lurched into port. 

“Hey! Hey!” Adam leapt to his feet and, with many ungraceful gestures of his long arms, directed the helmsman to a safe anchor. As the landing party piled into the boat and pulled up to the dock, the ship slumped like a drunkard finally falling asleep. It remained mostly afloat, the gaily painted name Summer Stars clearly visible above the green water, but Adam thought privately that they would not get her out of the harbor again. “I’m glad you got here when you did!” he said, offering his hands to the newcomers. “What happened to you?” 

No straight answer was forthcoming. Adam chalked this up to the recent shock of their ship nearly sinking, and the good gentlemen of the Summer Stars, whom we have already met, were grateful that he did, for it spared them the trouble of inventing a story other than the truth, which was that they had come off rather badly in a fight with the British navy and were escaping up-river to lick their wounds and regroup. 

“Now, my good lad,” said Captain Reyes, and if the paternal tone fit uncomfortably in his mouth, Adam did not trouble himself about it, “it seems to me there are a lot of fine ships in this here harbor. Could you tell me what they’re all for?” 

“For sailing, mostly,” said Adam guilelessly, which the crew found very funny. 

“And so they are,” the captain replied. “But are they for sale, by chance?”

A dark-haired young man just behind the captain remarked, “For sail and for sale,” with a smirk. Unlike Adam’s quip, this was received with much groaning and a smack to the back of his head that nearly sent his glasses into the harbor with the frogs and crayfish. 

Adam was informed that these gentlemen—for gentlemen they declared themselves, though, as one might deduce from their ragged and rakish style of dress, temporarily financially embarrassed—were in search of a new ship, and had heard wonderful things spoken of the fine establishment known as (a comma was inserted into the dialogue as the captain looked for signage) Lazzara Shipyards. And, since here was clearly a fine young man of the house, might he be so kind as to direct them to someone with whom they could do business? 

Adam was caught in a dreadful pickle. On the one hand, he was under strict orders to direct all potential customers to his mother or father. On the other hand, his mother and father and all other authority figures were currently negotiating the sale of the year with a lord commodore , who would not appreciate having his business deals interrupted by a crew of temporarily financially embarrassed gentlemen. His solution was to lead said gentlemen to the door and beg them to wait there while he crept into the front parlor and picked off whichever aunt was furthest from the bargaining table. 

As they strolled the long path up the hill to the house, Adam met all the young men whose acquaintances readers have already made, and John. This was not quite John as readers met him two years earlier in King’s County, nor yet John as he would become, once he was fully grown into his new nature, but a sort of John in flux. Adam was not sure what to make of this boy, at home among the sailors but something more gentle about him.

Perhaps he was some kind of accountant, Adam concluded. 

The aunt he managed to catch by the elbow turned out to be Aunt Helen. He introduced her most graciously to Captain Reyes, briefly explaining his plight and begging her assistance. At first, Aunt Helen was offended to be demoted from the Royal Navy negotiations to this raggedy business. Then Adam pointed out that she had not been participating in the naval business, which nearly sunk the whole enterprise. However, Captain Reyes interjected to pay her several attentive compliments and, thus mollified, she took him and his little entourage to the second parlor, which is what they called the unfinished sitting-room off the kitchens. 

Adam followed them to the parlor door, but as he was about to slip in and make a beeline for his broken-in chair, the housekeeper found him.

“There you are, boy,” she said, one hand clamped on his ear to enhance listening. “Haven’t I had a jaunt looking for you! Your mother wants you.”

Protest though he may, he was dragged away and sent on a quest for some foodstuff so wildly unimportant that he forgot it as soon as he delivered it. And tragedy of tragedies! By the time he returned, not only had the navy men gone back to their ship, but the crew of the Summer Stars was nowhere to be seen. Adam marched back down to the docks and threw rocks in the water in a miserable temper. At the rate he was going, he might live and die on sailing ships and be buried wrapped in a sail, all without ever leaving the Pamlico River.

Chapter Text

~1722~

Lady Fortune had, in some ways, been kind to Adam Lazzara, even as she had led him down paths he could not have foreseen. The ocean that wrinkled and battered most men had refined him; the gangly, freckled boy of nineteen was tanned and broad-shouldered as he reached the end of his twenties, brown hair flowing down his back in salt-sprayed waves. He surveyed the rolling deck of the Timberwolf with keen brown eyes, risking a smile as his quartermaster broke into a fevered argument with one of the hands over a game of checkers. The weather was fine, the wind at their back, and their stores full for the voyage ahead. 

Master Mark O’Connell, fed up with checkers, tossed a black one to bounce off his opponent’s nose and jogged up to where Adam stood on the quarterdeck. “Tell you what, captain, I’m ‘bout to pitch Nate overboard.” 

“Don’t even think about it,” Adam laughed; “we’re short-handed enough as it is.” 

He was referring, of course, to the ways in which Fortune had been—not that Adam would ever speak ill of a lady—frankly a cold-hearted damsel! They had run into a string of misfortunes of late: another attempted mutiny, the resultant maroonings and firings, which had left them down a surgeon, a gunner once Mark was elected to fill the quartermaster’s position, and several other able-bodied seamen. In the most severe blow, Ed Reyes had suffered a shoulder injury in the tumult and, after heavy consultation with his children and a preacher they were holding for ransom, decided it was no good gaining mortal wealth if you died too soon to spend it. So, as he put it, he quit while he was ahead: retired to a country house on Long Island, from which he wrote them a letter about his blessed state of relaxation that was kindly meant but sounded like gloating to the men still very much being hunted by the British government. 

Which was to say, as Adam did succinctly, they were short-handed. 

It did not inspire confidence in the security of his newfound captaincy. Yes, he had been elected by his brothers in a fair majority, but what a dwindled majority it was! The only member of his old friends he had left after all this time was Mark, and even Mark was acting strangely, dashing off to send letters when he thought no one was looking and returning with a faraway, fond expression. If he had found a sweetheart ashore and wanted to retire, Adam didn’t know what he would do. Carry on, he supposed. 

Nathan Cogan-Post, who did not realize he had a pink spot on the bridge of his nose from the checker, interrupted Adam’s anxious reverie. “Captain, it looks like a storm.” 

Adam blinked and fixed his eyes on the horizon, which had gone yellow-grey and sickly. 

“There’s a schooner caught in it already,” Nathan went on, pointing off the port bow.  “Shall we try to rescue them?” 

“And put ourselves in the middle of it?” Mark said incredulously. “Fat chance.” 

“Ah—” Adam cast him a shaming look. “But he’s right. Hard a’starboard, Mr. Post. We may outrun her yet!” 

The wind, which had snapped smartly at their backs, began to jab at them from all angles, like a spoilt child tugging at its pet bird to see if it can get the feathers off. Adam’s hair blew into his face, and he cursed himself for not tying it back. There was no rain yet, but it would be upon them in minutes. All told, it gave a hell of a perspective on the future. He could worry about what his dwindled crew thought of him once he had saved their lives. 

Many a ship could only wish to be so lucky as to have Adam Lazzara as its captain in an emergency. Barking orders with indomitable energy, he took the length of the deck in his long strides, his men falling into order around him like the musicians in an orchestra, each playing his part. That spoilt wind caught his voice and flung it far from the ship; the sounds that echoed back were wholly inhuman. Mark believed spirits walked between the waves. Adam only believed it on nights like this. He pulled his coat tighter around him and shouted all the louder. 

The rain met them not a moment too soon, yet still much sooner than they wanted it. It came all in a sheet; one moment they were dry, and the next, the sky had upended itself onto them, every groan of the ship answered by the thundering of rain against its boards. Adam swore and repented of swearing and swore again. He had made it through many a storm in the years since he turned pirate. This one was unlike any he had weathered yet. It was uncanny. Maybe spirits were at sea tonight after all. Maybe the fates had a reckoning coming for wicked men. But if he were to face fate tonight, Adam had no intention of facing it quietly. Everywhere he was wanted, there he was, lending hands and cheering his men by his assurances. The Timberwolf sailed on, making slow but dogged progress through the storm.

The schooner, their fellow in the tempest, was not so fortunate. She had lost her mizzenmast early, and yawed wildly. Sheets of white foam shot up over her bow, now faint glowing through the storm, now brightened by cracks of lightning. Sometimes she plunged into a trough between the waves so deep she was lost from sight entirely. But all of this the Timberwolf only saw in glimpses; for every moment the lightning opened the sky and revealed them to each other, the driving rain and the louring darkness hid them from sight longer and longer. 

In one of these dark periods, the horrible sound came. A great crack, but not of thunder: as of a giant tearing apart a huge old tree. The very beams of the schooner were breaking in two! Adam did not pray much anymore, but he found himself casting a hope to heaven for the poor bastards. 

With much shouting and cursing, Mark made him to understand that there were men in the water. And with much shouting and cursing back, he made Mark to understand that of course those men were to be rescued, and as quick as they could—without, of course, letting anything happen to their own ship, because a storm was a storm and a ship was a heavy thing not to have control of. 

So ropes were let down over the sides, and, once a few waterlogged sailors had been hauled aboard, let down again. At first, Adam paid them little heed, taking on some of the sailing burdens of the men occupied with the rescue. But the shout Mark let out, half disbelief and half—was it joy?—was unmistakable over the wailing wind. 

“Shaun Cooper!” 

Adam started as if burnt. It was, it was Shaun Cooper in the flesh, seven years older, balding and muscular now where he had once been a skinny little fellow—as they all had been—but still that same bright smile as Mark pulled him over the railing and clapped him in an embrace. Adam hardly had time to feel the sudden ache, to stumble forward in an aborted attempt at a greeting, to wonder how long since Shaun had parted ways with—

But the man next to him gave another tug on the rope he was hauling in, and because he was the only one near enough, Adam reached out to grab the half-drowned figure at the end of it, and so it was that he found himself hand to hand with John Nolan. 

“J-John.” Mercifully, as he froze up, he jerked backward instead of forward, pulling John onto the deck instead of dropping him back into the sea. 

John shook his hair out of his eyes, water streaming down his face. John’s hair curled now. Wet shirt clinging to his skin, he shivered violently, staring at Adam as if he didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Although his mouth moved, either he made no sound or the wind again stole words from between them. Then he broke away from Adam without having really seen him at all, shouting, now audibly, for Shaun, for the rest of his crew, anyone to answer. “Where is she? Where is she?” 

As John hung so far over the railing that Adam felt an old impulse to haul him back by his shirt, the Timberwolf’s crew congregated on what must be the last survivor of the ship—John’s ship. Many hands reached down to help the poor wretch aboard. 

Perhaps, with the way the day had unfolded, Adam should have been more prepared for what he saw. But as the wind gave a last wrenching howl and lulled back to sleep, the rain coming gentler, they pulled Michel Nolan onboard. 

“Holy shit.” Mark, too, was caught halfway between a disbelieving laugh and a fearful, and he cast Adam a helpless look, only to see the same one on his captain’s face. “Ma’am,” he said, helping Michel to her feet. 

Michel rubbed the salt water out of her eyes and pushed her dark curls back, looking around the ship as you do when, in dreams, you find yourself back in your childhood home, long since moved away from in waking life. “Mark?” she breathed through wet coughs. “Where—” 

“Michel,” said John. 

“Jeff?” She clung to John’s arm as she asked, and the look in her eyes wrenched Adam’s heart inexpressibly. 

“I don’t know,” said John. “I don’t know. It’s us, and Shaun, and…” 

As John raised his handsome head to take stock of whom among his crew had survived the storm, he finally registered all the other figures, and indeed the familiar shape of the deck, one they had not stood on in seven years. 

Then John saw Adam, actually saw him, followed by Michel. Under their shared gaze, Adam felt very young and frightened. At once, they went from refugees on an angel ship to soldiers lost behind enemy lines, outnumbered but bristling in case of a fight. 

In situations like these (though God, in what lifetime had he ever expected to be in this situation?), the only thing to do but retreat behind his captaincy. “You’ll have to forgive me not welcoming you more warmly,” Adam said, praying his voice would not shake. “But last we parted, you did say you’d cut my throat if we ever met again.” 

“I did,” said John, his face as measured a blank as Adam’s. 

What did one say—what could one say? He wanted to ask, “Will you still?” followed by a hundred more questions: hows, whens. Have you thought of me as often as I’ve thought of you? 

“We’re sailing as far as New Orleans. You’re welcome aboard—if you promise to put off killing me till then.” He tried to smile. 

“Fine,” said John.

Michel caught her brother’s other arm. “John,” she said, not yet so quiet that Adam could not hear her over the last of the rain. “We can’t go. I saw Jeff get picked up by a ship. I know I saw it. And if it’s not this one, then it’s out there somewhere. We need them to let us off in Havana, get another ship…” 

“Lady,” said Nathan respectfully, “if another ship was out in this storm, it didn’t survive. It’s a miracle we did, and you saw what happened to yours.” 

“That’s not possible—I saw—” Michel cast her gaze around her, as if expecting to find this third ship sailing just over her shoulder, but the sea, now calming, was empty but for their own ship and the few chunks of flotsam that were the last remainders of the Terror. Still she swore there was another, calling to mind golden sails and a flag’s device of a pyramid torn apart by a sea serpent, and calling on anyone else to admit they saw it too. No one could. Pity and discomfort mingling as the lady grew ever more insistent, the crew slipped away one by one to tend to the storm’s damage. 

Meanwhile, Mark cast Adam a meaningful glance and mouthed something, but when his captain could not read his lips, he pulled him aside. “We need more hands.” This, unlike Michel’s, was low enough to be private. 

“Don’t pull my leg.”

“They got no ship,” he pointed out. “The Helena’s letter sounded urgent. We ain’t got time to hire a crew, at least not one we trust. It’s good money.”

Adam crossed his arms, like that would stop the frightful pounding in his chest. “They’ll never.” 

“Shaun will.” Mark swallowed hard. “Adam, I don’t ask you for shit.” 

“I know it.” 

“It’s our fault, so it’s our fixing.”

“Christ, I know.” 

“Just ask.”

Adam looked across the deck, where the survivors shared their own confidences. Mark had suffered the worst under quartermasters before him, and borne it heroically. It was too tame to say the Timberwolf would not be sailing; no, its crew would be hanging in gibbets and their eyes pecked out by crows if it were not for Mark O’Connell. So although the thought of sharing a voyage with John—with Michel—made Adam’s hands go cold, he could not refuse him anything when he asked so earnestly. 

So the offer was made. Doing his best to sound assured of this plan’s good fortune, Adam offered the survivors of the Terror a place on the Timberwolf for their next voyage, not as castaways, but as crew, sharing in the profits of the enterprise, which were sure to be many, for their contact had never yet steered them false. 

Shaun Cooper, as Mark predicted, looked meaningfully at the Nolans before pledging his services. The other straggling survivors, who had no notion of the history between their captains, followed with no hesitation, till only John and Michel were left. John glanced to his sister. Adam knew that if she demanded it, John would hear nothing but to have them put ashore in Havana, and he knew just as well that he would obey. 

“It would not be a charity,” Adam said honestly. “I could do no better than the two of you, if I had a month to hire and all the Spanish Main asking to sign articles.”

Michel hesitated, still thinking of the vanished golden ship and those who might be on it, but at last, she said, “Oh, well. Yes. Fine.” 

John looked again between his sister and Adam, and nodded slowly. 

“The honor is all ours. Welcome aboard. And of course,” Adam said, taking his hat in his hand, “my cabin is at your disposal, Miss Nolan.” 

“It’s Mrs. DaRosa,” she said stiffly. “Actually, it’s Captain.” And leaving those names in Adam’s ears, she retreated belowdecks. John, reaching fruitlessly about himself for a smoke, paced the deck to the bow and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the sea fall away beneath them. Adam watched them go, then disappeared somewhere himself, leaving the deck half-deserted. 

Shaun sauntered over to where Mark now stood alone. “You look…incredibly healthy,” he said, planting his hands on his hips and trying not to think about all the rainwater filtering into his shoes. Of course he knew, intellectually, that Mark must have changed over the years, but he had never quite managed to attach whatever changes he imagined to the voice in his letters, so it felt like the change happened this morning, like his friend had only just turned into the broad-chested, sun-burnt man who fished him out of the storm. 

“Oh, thank you. I worked at it.” Mark’s smile was still uneasy, but God, it was a sight of clear sky. “So do you, though, Jesus Christ!” 

Shaun looked down again, half in surprise, as if Mark seeing him made him forget his own body and all that had happened to him since they parted. “I took up the martial arts while I was away. Couldn’t…make you fight my battles for me anymore, so I had to, you know, shape up. I wrote to you about it?” Mark’s brow furrowed without recognition; he added, a bit sadly, “That one must have got lost.” 

“Sorry,” he said, as if it were his fault. 

Shaun shook his head against the apology. Such things happened. Both of them wondered briefly how many of their letters had not made it to the other, but both found that to be an unhelpful thought, and put it aside. 

Mark pointed. “All your hair moved from the top of your head to the bottom.”

Shaun broke into a grin. “It did do that! And against my orders!” 

Their shared laughter echoed across the silent deck of the ship.

Chapter Text

~1714~

As always happened, no one told Adam anything, and Aunt Helen went to bed early, so he had to run circles around the shipyards that afternoon asking someone who had heard from someone who had spoken to another person who had actually met the pirates. Because pirates they apparently were, if his uncle’s report were to be trusted. “No respectable men dress so raggedy,” he averred, ignoring the way his own breeches sagged in the rear. 

“No honorable sailors offer to pay in doubloons,” said his mother.

“But money is money, isn’t it?” said Adam. “Did we sell them anything?”

“There was nothing to sell,” said his father. “We told that Captain Reyes and his people, we were very sorry, but everything we have in the docks just now is spoken for, and if they’d like to place an order, we ask only a very reasonable down payment…” 

Adam sighed enormously. With his luck, his father’s business spiel would have killed the pirates with boredom, if not sent them straight back to their ship, never to return.

“...and they said they’d have to think on it tonight and asked for a lodging-house of any sort in town.”

Adam’s ears perked up. “And which one did you send them to?” 

“No good recommending a rattle-trap like the North Star, and I would past have sent them by Mrs. Chamberlain’s, but her hogs trampled your mother’s peascods last spring and she flat refused to pay us back for them…” 

“So Forkner’s…” Adam coaxed. 

“And that boy tried to leave a message with me as they left, and I told him I, I am not your postman.” 

“What boy?” 

“Him with the glasses, I don’t know if you saw. Poor lad, to need them at that age, he must really be seeing wrong, and to get them at that age, maybe they had more money than  I thought…”

“Father, what did he say?” Adam knew perfectly well that he could be just as bad when it came to telling a tale the long way round, but there was no time for forbearance in light of a message from John—for that interesting John it must have been, and what could he have wanted that was not to do with business?

Mr. Lazzara cast his eyes to the heavens. “He said that if any of the young men of the house were free this evening, they ought to come drinking at Forkner’s Inn. Which is a forward invitation for your cousins, but then, what do you expect from pirates?” 

Adam nodded and smiled until he could escape the conversation. Then, with the utmost degree of nonchalance he could muster, he put on his coat and hat, announced to no one in particular that he was going out, and sauntered, hands in his pockets, down the high road to town. 

~

“You made it!” said John, pleased. “Thought you might not be able to get away.” 

Adam shed his hat and coat, leaving them lying somewhere he was sure to forget at least one of them, and slid onto the bench opposite John. “No chance. And miss talkin’ with real pirates?” 

“Don’t get too star-struck; it’s only John,” O’Connell said, ruffling his hair. “Are you buying or what?” 

Adam was not buying, as he admitted breezily enough and Captain Reyes kindly confirmed. On the contrary, he was treated as something of a novelty among the crew; they plied him with ale and demanded all the good stories of life ashore he had, however dull he protested they were. 

The Lazzaras as a whole, while they were good, solid people who built good, solid ships, were not particularly handsome. They put handsomeness in the smoothness of their hulls, in the luster of their decks, and in their great towering masts that made one think of Jacob’s Ladder, especially when the ship was in full sail on a blue-clouded sky. So one spoke of the Lazzaras’ craft with the kind of awe usually reserved for fine people, but upon meeting them, the best that could be said was often, “Well, they have friendly smiles, and they make one feel welcome.”

Adam was not only good and solid, nor merely friendly in his smiles. Adam was gorgeous. He carried himself with the easy, loping grace of a lost prince raised by kindhearted peasants, and when the sun caught his brown eyes on a winter day, it felt like summer to everyone near him. 

And it was this perfect creature who sat languidly across from the officers of the Summer Stars at Forkner’s Inn, one scuffed boot propped against the table, chatting amiably about the weather in these parts of Carolina at this time of year and of the various funny-looking birds he had seen recently. Adam’s speech was at times difficult to follow, rambling into odd corners and down rabbit holes, but it wove a captivating little spell, much as a spider’s web may be crookedy and catch flies all the same. We must forgive the crew forgetting their business while they listened, as the author suspects few in their place would have kept better focus.

But however enchanting one’s conversation partner, the sun must set eventually, and set it did, sending deep orange beams through the bottle-glass front windows. Captain Reyes, through various stretches and yawns, complained gruffly that it was past an old man’s bed-time. Adam, who had been assuming—correctly—that the captain was not more than thirty, was very confused, but he wished him good-night all the same, with a touch more deference due to his apparently reverend age. “Will I see you all tomorrow?” he said hopefully. “This town hasn’t had talk this lively in months!” 

“I’m afraid not,” said the captain. “We, ah, we sail before first light tomorrow. There’s a long voyage ahead before we’re home.” 

“Right, right. Well, think of me when you’re out at sea, will you?”

“I will,” John promised.

Well-wishes were sent round for Adam to carry back to his family, and with a series of significant looks, the crew of the Summer Stars, one by one, left their tankards on the bar and trudged upstairs to the thinly-blanketed beds that awaited them. Captain Reyes settled up with the proprietor, and for the second time that day, Adam was left alone. He sat and sighed at the low fire in the great hearth, but it would not sigh back, which was rude. He would have liked a little sympathy. 

The inn was dark around him; he had no more excuse for sighs and knew he ought to return home. At just that point, a noise from the stairs startled him. “Don’t bite; it’s just me.” John had left his jacket and hat in his room, it seemed, and came down looking rather less impressive and more everyday. “I know I ought to sleep, but there’s no chance of it this early.” 

“Do you get nervous,” Adam said, “before a voyage?” 

“Not anymore. Not really. May I?”

“Oh, please.” Adam gestured politely, and John retook the seat across from him that he had vacated minutes prior. 

“No,” John said wryly, “I used to get nervous before we sailed, but it turns out once you’ve been in a few battles, your threshold for frightening events gets a lot higher and, well, pulling out of the dock just doesn’t thrill me anymore.” 

Adam bit his tongue, because he would not let himself be the wide-eyed landlubber who never shut up about how terribly he longed to go to sea and how much it would thrill him and so on and so on.

“Why aren’t you on a ship somewhere?” asked John. 

“I’m not out of my apprenticeship for another two years—”

“So run away. It’s horrendously easy. I had no fucking intention to go, and here I am.”

It was true that, of the two young men conversing at the low, heavy table, Adam was the natural charmer. But John’s honesty, plain to the point of impertinence, caught Adam utterly off guard and drew him out as much as Adam’s smiles and long stories drew John in the first place. 

So he told him why. And it was not the arch retort he had given the Lord Commodore, nor the thousand airy excuses he floated to friends and relations about finding the time and caring for his dear, aging father, but the truth, straight from the hollowest part of his gut. No one had ever heard him speak like this before, but this young pirate with the sharp green eyes let him unburden himself in all his heartfelt self-contradiction and fear. And all John said at the end of the confession was, “That does sound like shit,” and it was as good as absolution.

“I don’t want to keep you up all night listenin’ to my troubles,” Adam admitted shyly. “I’m all right, really I am, I—you’re an awfully good listener, John Nolan.” 

A little flush crept up John’s pale neck. “Hey, we’ve got all night,” he said, as if to say it was no trouble at all. A closer observer than Adam might have noticed a hint of guilt in his tone, a bit of forced ease, and a glance back upstairs toward where his crew had gone to bed, but Adam caught none of these things. “Do you want to hear me complain? Cause I can match you and then some.” 

Adam did, especially when it turned out that many of the things John had to complain of were just more adventure stories—though with enough good complaints about crewmates and enemies that Adam felt at ease to share his own stories about working with his various cousins and uncles, including one time when…

So the night passed. Finally, John looked at the thin line of soft blue at the eastern edge of the horizon and said, “Well, that’s my signal.” 

As John stood with extreme reluctance, Adam hurried to join him on his feet. “Good night, John.” He smiled and extended his hand to shake good-bye. “Well, good morning.” As John clasped his hand familiarly, Adam’s face, just for a moment, betrayed more than he wanted it to. “If I never see you all again—” 

“Oh, I doubt that.” 

The tension slipped away from Adam’s forehead.

John clapped him on the shoulder. “Be good,” he said. Then he hurried up the stairs to bed. Adam chuckled at the quiet string of curses he could just hear; John had somehow struck every creaking step squarely on the place where it creaked the loudest. 

Stretching his long legs in front of the dying fire, Adam noticed unhappily that the room, which had erstwhile seemed so homey, was in actuality very close and dim. What a rotten place to spend any time at all! Thinking these comforting thoughts, he hunted down his long-abandoned coat and went home, where he collapsed into bed without undressing and fell into a deep, untormented sleep.

So complete and restful was his sleep, in fact, he did not stir till he was startled out of bed by the sound of his mother screeching curses in several languages (most of which she did not speak). 

Adam stumbled downstairs. Usually, if he appeared at breakfast still dressed from the night before, unwashed with his hair stuck out at all angles, the event earned him a stern lecture. He did not receive a stern lecture this morning, but he had little time to appreciate that pleasant forgetfulness. 

His parents were seated at opposite ends of the breakfast table, shouting at one another—but not at one another so much as in tandem: a counterpoint duet of offense. The aunts and uncles and cousins bustled in and out like a ruffled opera chorus. And Adam stood in the middle of it all, waiting for something sensible to be said so he could figure out how he was meant to join in the song. 

One of their ships had been stolen. Adam wondered politely how this could be. He was told to be quiet. One of their finest ships, a sturdy brig called the Timberwolf, which had been commissioned especially by a wealthy merchant in Charles Town, had been stolen in the night! Adam, still far from complete consciousness, wondered sympathetically who could have done this. He was made to understand, through a string of profanities as deftly constructed as a jeweler’s chain, that it was those mongrel goddamned marauding devils, the pirates of the Summer Stars. 

Adam was now quite awake. 

“He—they couldn’t. They would never! They couldn’t have, anyway; they were—” 

The words “asleep in the inn all night” were about to fall from his lips when he came to a dreadful realization. 

His handsome young face stiffened with resolve, and he turned and marched for the harbor. His parents’ demands where he was going fell on deaf ears.

The Lazzaras kept a small sailboat at their dock for pleasure cruising (as if any of them had the time) and upon occasion to take things out to the larger ships. This little craft Adam prepared for sail with single-minded focus. His little brother wandered out to wonder at him, but he waved the lad off with uncharacteristic brusqueness. “The boy’s lost it,” whispered his various relations among themselves at breakfast. 

The boy had not lost it—at least, not entirely. He set sail around eleven, while a cool yellow sun climbed overhead. He set his course, as far as he knew how, down-river and then up the coast, where the pirates had directed all their future talk the night before. 

Adept enough at sailing to do it without thinking too hard (after all, Adam had had this little boat since before he had a brother), he sailed some distance in his ill humor before realizing, around two or two-thirty, that he had never sailed this far in his life. 

He stilled, one hand steadying himself in the rigging, and looked over his shoulder. The coastline had curved to the north, and he could no longer see the harbor where Lazzara Shipyards lay, or even the inlets and islands where he and the young cousins used to take the boat when they were too small to be safe. His current view was still familiar enough in terms of flora and fauna—he would not leave Carolina for a day yet—but still, by landmark, as truly unknown to him as the shores of New England. Hopefully, he would not have to reach New England to catch up. 

The pirates did not have an insurmountable head start. John had only left him at daybreak, and their flight had been discovered not many hours after that, so a light little craft like Adam’s could gain a good deal of ground, especially in the shallow places near the coast, where he could navigate more freely. The first shiplike speck to appear in his sights was a disappointment—only a respectable trader flying the French flag. Adam adjusted his sails and kept his eyes on the horizon, noting somewhere in the back of his mind that it was a much wider horizon than the one he had known. 

At last, evening fell, and even by the light of the few lanterns hung around the boat, Adam despaired of seeing anything. He would have to tie up somewhere and risk letting them get away overnight, or else sail blindly into the dark and blunder right past them! He cursed himself for not listening better when the men were discussing their route the night before. Had it only been the night before that he was laughing till his sides ached across from—

But that had all been a game. They had not really been interested in him. John had only stayed up so late and let him jabber like a bird for hours to keep him away from home while his shipmates stole from Adam’s family. Adam rubbed his sleeve across his stinging eyes. What did one expect from pirates?

As his vision cleared, his heart leapt into his throat. There were lights across the water. Faint and golden they were, their reflections wavering on the tide. But he knew distinctly: they were the lanterns of a ship. 

Though he had not made much noise during the day, mumbling instructions to himself or humming a shanty here and there, now Adam sailed in leaden silence. It could be just another merchant, of course. But his heart, now returned to its rightful spot behind his ribs but beating twice as loud to make up for it, told him this was the ship he had been hunting. Tongue between his teeth, he trimmed the sails and brought himself nearer. It was; as the shape emerged from the darkness he knew it, the familiar curve of a Lazzara ship; it was the Timberwolf, now in the hands of pirates. 

The boat floated in unobserved till Adam was hidden in the shadow of its hull. The prow of his little craft nosed up against the ship, like a puppy greeting its much larger sibling. 

Then it was time to execute his brilliant plan, such as it existed. One of the lines hung trailing astern in the water; he stretched for it and gave it an experimental tug. It stayed taut in his hand. Good enough. With a firm knot, he lashed it to his boat, and, hand over hand, scaled the side of the ship, shoes slipping a little against the boards. 

So much for boarding. Once on deck, Adam had vague notions of cutting the ship adrift, or by some trickery seizing control of her steering, or else—but any plans, however vague, were dashed by the rough hands that grabbed him from the dark. 

Curse and struggle though he might, the hands—now four, now six, who knew how many—carried the boy along the quarterdeck like he weighed nothing. The strongest hands forced him to his knees in a yellow pool of lanternlight. Adam bit back a cry of pain, then another as his arms were wrenched behind him and one more hand, this less brutal than the last, took a fistful of his hair and forced his head up to meet his captors face to face. 

“Adam?”

“Who’s asking?” he said, blinking against the lantern’s glare. 

As his eyes adjusted, the silhouette bending over him, long fingers twisted in his hair sending tiny spikes of pain down his scalp, resolved into the figure of John Nolan, his dark coat pulled shut over his bedclothes against the chill night and his own hair sleep-rumpled. A curious half-smile played over his face. “How on earth did you get here?” 

Adam would have liked to be the kind of devil-may-care adventurer who could lie without a twitch to his mouth, or stoically tell the pirates where and how to kill themselves. But even starting the lie made his tongue heavy and stupid; it would not do as he bid, and he was left looking up at John, wide-eyed and stuttering.

The pirate took pity on him. “Did you come to steal your ship back?” he said, and his voice only lilted in mockery a very little. 

“It’s not ste—not st—I’m not a thief if it’s mine.” 

“That’s a fair point,” John shrugged. “But it’ll be hard to prove when we come to Williamsburg and report a stowaway. Awful lot of witnesses against you.”

Adam struggled helplessly against the arms holding him, his pride stung twice by the chilly reception; once for itself and once again for being fooled at the inn. “I wanna talk to the captain.” 

John laughed. “No, you don’t! You’re lucky this only woke me. The captain would have you drowned. I like you, so I’ll just duck you underwater a few times, till you learn your lesson.” 

“John, don’t be cruel.” The voice behind him was soft, musical. As John turned to acknowledge it, Adam caught a glimpse of the speaker past his shoulder. A girl with wide, dark eyes sat on the railing by the helm, boots kicking idly at the spindles. She had not been among the crew he met in Bath, but she was dressed in pirate’s rags like the rest of them. The captain’s sister, maybe, or a prisoner herself. 

“Please, miss,” he begged, appealing to whatever maiden generosity the books taught him to expect from such a figure on a pirate ship. 

The girl tilted her head curiously at Adam, pretty mouth smiling at his misfortune. “Shooting is good enough to repel boarders.”

“That’s so.” John shifted his weight and drew a pistol from his belt. “I don’t like any of it. Like I said. I like you. But laws are laws, and you’ve broken ours and England’s, which is pretty hard to do. What do you say, Adam? A bullet now or the gallows later?”

Adam spoke quickly, but it betrayed an idea that had been forming in the dark of his mind since the night at Forkner’s. 

“If I’m gonna hang as a pirate, can it be with you?”

John’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry?”

“Take me on. Sign me up. You own a Lazzara ship—however you got it—” he added with a last spite, “so you ought to have someone aboard who knows how to take care of her.” Adam little felt the weight of his words, but who does when they speak only to save their skin? He would live long enough to feel it later. 

Chapter Text

~1722~

The newest hands aboard the Timberwolf were at a loss to interpret the unbearably thick air that had settled aboard their ship since that untimely storm forced them to cross paths with the Terror. As far as they could see, the captain was everywhere offering his services so that he need not meet the newcomers, who likewise were haunting the far corners of the ship so that they need not meet him, as well as Master O’Connell and a few others among the longest-serving hands. What this meant, in practice, was that meal times were staggered most preposterously, but also that any sailor who did not want a turn at the watch had only to say so in earshot of Captain Lazzara, who would promptly relieve them of it. 

“With all the staring out at sea betwixt the three of them,” said one man to another on their third night since the storm, “you’d think them all was waiting for a husband to come back to shore.” 

When their paths did cross, Adam was officious to the point of obsequity, like the captain of a pleasure cruiser ensuring his honored guests had every comfort. His efforts were received, without exception, with thin smiles and brief replies that implied, if not said outright, that they would rather be anywhere but here.

But such icy tempers could not last forever. On the fifth day, land was sighted, and not long afterward, the grubby little French outpost now called New Orleans. (Nathan Cogan-Post, who had seen the real Orleans, was less than impressed.) 

Adam came to meet John and Michel where they watched the coast come into focus. “We’ll be in sight of the ship soon,” he said. “I’d like you to join the boarding party. Gerard’s an old friend—not as old as you, of course, but damn near. He’d be pleased to meet you. Besides, a trip aboard the Helena’s not to be missed. As you’ve heard.” He grinned in spite of himself. Mark had been loudly declaring all day that he was not getting on that haunted old thing again unless he were taken in chains, which added a certain color to the afternoon’s social call. And with the event so doubly recommended, John and Michel could do nothing but accept the invitation. 

So the party was made up. Adam sat in the front of the boat, with the Nolans behind him, and Mark and Shaun in the stern. Mark, for all his complaining, had never had any real intention of staying behind. If his captain were to get haunted, he needed to be there to keep an eye on things. And if no one was getting haunted, he needed to be there as well, because it might be fun. 

“What a wreck,” John commented as they sailed the little distance toward the other ship.

“Yeah,” said Adam fondly.

The Helena, at least from their distance, did not cut a prepossessing figure. Its blackened hull—blackened by paint or by charring, none could say—loomed up out of the water like a great hulking sea creature, and equally draped in seaweed. Swaths of colored fabric and kelp hung from the rigging, casting strange shadows on the deck, where not a soul moved. As they drew into its larger shadow, they could see runes and sigils carved into the black gunwales, and the figurehead, which from afar only looked like the type of fair lady who graced most ships in these waters, revealed itself to be a dual figure, with Death reaching up from beneath to grasp the maiden’s throat. 

“What a horrid piece of art,” Michel remarked, impressed. 

Adam explained that Gerard had had it done especially for their first voyage. “Hullo!” he called up. “It’s deceptive—” he added to the Nolans; “the ship looks like a dump, but I’ve seen her innards; she can sail if she needs to. I said, ahoy up there! Frankie, don’t tease a man when we’ve come all this way just to see ya!”

A man, who from the height of the ship looked very small, leaned over the railing and smirked down at them. “Took long enough.” He disappeared, and ladders were shortly thrown over the side.

When they reached the wide deck, John’s skin crawled. It was an enormous ship, truly; they were all dwarfed beneath its sails. But the dozens and dozens of crew it took to man such a beast were nowhere to be seen. A few skeletal creatures lurked about, who might be sailors or might be hangers-on from an opium den or gambling hall. Two men sat in the shade of the quarterdeck, muttering over tarot cards. The only sound was a faint, eerie music coming from somewhere below, twisting in time with the lapping waves. The whole picture was enough to make one believe in ghost ships.

“Welcome a-fuckin-board, me hearties!” 

It was a very ordinary sailor who greeted them. It was because he was so ordinary that his appearance made them all jump. 

“Frank Iero, as I live and breathe.” Adam and the man named Frank exchanged increasingly enthusiastic greetings. He was rather short—it had not been just a trick of perspective looking up from the water—with shaggy black hair and more tattoos every time one looked at him. Michel thought privately that he had a face made for painting. One could imagine him smoking cigars with baronets and smugglers. One could imagine him slitting one’s throat. 

Frank Iero kissed her hand gallantly and shook hands with the others. “Gerard’s been expecting you,” he said with a leering little grin, and he ushered them toward the aft cabins. 

The only thing that kept everyone from growing even jumpier as they descended into the still-deserted bowels of the ship was how utterly at ease Adam seemed. Indeed, he enjoyed it more the further into the dark they walked. One could practically feel the happiness radiating from him, like a dog being led to bones. And there were many bones, hanging in garlands from the bulkheads, along with dried plants and bits of wound-up writing in a strange, spidery hand. 

At last, they came to a low door at the end of the passageway, with an animal skull mounted on it and several forbidding smears of what might be blood. Frank, still altogether too pleased by their twitchiness, turned the latch and ushered them into the room. 

The cabin, like the door that led to it, had a low-beamed ceiling that Adam had to remove his hat to avoid brushing against. Along the walls were various curio cabinets and open chests, all crowded to obsession with oddities and curiosities: dusty jars stuffed with plants, mechanisms of astronomical or medical use (and some that did not seem to have any known use), old jewelry, books in all sizes, shapes, and conditions, and of course, more bones everywhere one looked. 

The crew spent so long sneaking glances at the Helena’s strange treasures that by the time they realized they were being watched, they had been well and truly observed. Against the far wall, seated in a high-backed chair with his black boots kicked up on a mahogany table, was the man who could only be the Gerard of Adam’s many stories. 

Captain Gerard Way of the Helena looked neither young nor old, but very, very pale, like a creature that only surfaces at night. His darting, deep-set eyes took them in, each in turn, and his thin, mocking mouth let them know precisely what he thought of them. “Why, Adam,” he said, “I had no idea you were in this part of the country.” He and Frank, who had slunk around the periphery of the room to hover behind Gerard’s chair, exchanged a knowing giggle. 

“Ah—that’s a good one,” said Adam. “But you, ah, you sent for me. This time, anyway.” 

“I did.” Gerard’s boots hit the floor with a pair of thunks. Michel noted that they were about forty years out of style, with the rest of his clothing a mis-match at least that old, rotting black frilled coat and stained cravats and all, till he looked for all purposes like a Jacobean dandy and a hellfire Puritan got into one of their usual scrapes outside a theater and emerged from the tussle all in one outfit. One straggly bit of lace hung off his cuff most precariously, and with this he gestured as he spoke, the way a more modern man might use a handkerchief for emphasis. “And you brought friends. Not that I mind, of course—any friend of Adam Lazzara’s is a friend of mine,” he said, eyes glinting darkly at John and Michel. “But we must do everything politely before we get down to business. It’s only decent.” 

Adam flourished grandly. “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Gerard Way, the premier trader in the world—in the world, mind you!—of magical antiquities and cursed artifacts.” 

“Well, cursed—” Gerard demurred, but he clearly considered it a compliment, and his ghostly face went pink around the ears.

 “Gerard, this is Captain Destry and her men Shaun Cooper and John Nolan, lately of the good ship Terror. They and I were—uh—what I mean to say is—” Adam’s tongue caught him up as he looked at them. “What I’m tryin’ to say is that many, many, many years ago, these notorious pirates kidnapped me—can you believe it? And they turned me as wicked as them. It’s the truth! It’s their fault I am the dashing scoundrel you see before you today.” 

“Oh, so this is who I have to thank,” said Gerard, but his eyes narrowed curiously. He circled the table so he could offer his hand to the men. To Michel he bowed with perfect poise. “Captain, this is truly an unexpected honor. You’ve come up in stories,” he said, “and not just Adam’s.” 

“Oh!” Michel said, because after all, what did one say to that?

“Well! This has been fun,” Adam interjected. “But your letter made it sound pretty urgent, whatever this business you were hoping we could help you with…” 

Gerard agreed noncommittally that yes, yes it had been rather urgent, but as he returned to his throne (for that was the only proper word for the fine chair in which he held court), the crew of the Terror thought that he looked as if he would rather like to collect them. Gerard waved with that torn lace cuff for Frank to fetch…whatever it was, which the young man saw to promptly, retrieving a small, square wooden box about the length of a man’s finger, ornately carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. 

“Normally,” Gerard said for the benefit of those who were not Adam and Mark, “we have the Timberwolf fetch things for us. They’re very good at…” He smiled, and his teeth were pointed. “At acquisitions.”

John looked askance at Adam. Whatever operation was running out of the Helena, it hadn’t been part of the Timberwolf ’s mode d’emploi while he was aboard. Adam, seeing and rightly interpreting this look, shrugged. “They pay really well!” 

“So do our clients,” said Gerard. “But now we need the reverse. Frank found something, and it is…” He paused for another meaningful sigh, but this time Frank piped up first. 

“Cursed.” 

“Cursed?” Michel repeated. “But I thought—”

“Actually cursed,” said Frank. “Not like all the rest of this junk.” 

Gerard leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “First of all, we don’t know that it is cursed, any more—or any less!—than anything else we sell. All we do with our artifacts is tell prospective buyers the stories we’ve heard about them. Whether those stories are true is not our business. But this particular find is—Frankie, I liked how you said it the other day—what was it?—it’s too hot for us to handle.” Frank grinned. Gerard put the box on the table between himself and the other pirates. “We think things would be much smoother for us if this little darling went back where it came from.” 

Adam spoke slowly, like he was trying to puzzle the situation out. “So you want us to give the box back?”

“Give, no. Put it back. Bury it, lay it to rest, whatever you like to call it. From the ground it came and to the ground it shall return.” 

Adam leaned in till his elbows were on the table too, which involved a great deal of leaning due to his advanced height. “Gerard,” he said. “This feels like a trick.” 

“If I was trying to trick you,” said Gerard, his pointed fey nose wrinkling, “I wouldn’t be so obvious about it. Be honest; how much gold do you have left in the coffers? Two mutinies put down and a retirement fund paid out. That does put a strain on the treasury.” 

A muscle tightened in Adam’s jaw. He did not like to have things put so bluntly, not around listening ears. “How much?”

Gerard held up one white-gloved finger and consulted in a leather-bound ledger. The number he named made Mark swear vehemently, and even Frank looked a little impressed. “And not a reale more.” 

Adam protested that he would never quibble over reales with an old friend such as Gerard Way of the Helena, but in the profusions that followed, John noted that he talked the price up by several pounds, and Gerard allowed it. “So,” Adam finished, “what exactly are we laying to rest, here?” 

With a smile, Gerard opened the box. “Why, this is the very finger of Captain Henry Rollins.” 

It was impossible to tell from looking at it whether the finger in the box once belonged to Captain Rollins. None of the pirates, save Mark, had met the man personally, and Mark had only paid as much attention to his hands as one needed in a bareknuckle brawl. But, indeed, a human finger rested in the velvet lining of the box, fairly well-preserved but obviously some time since removed from its body. It was an ugly finger, large, square, and calloused, with a dirty nail and a tarnished silver ring set with a cracked black stone. 

“Gerard,” said Adam through a tense, polite chuckle. “What exactly were you doing with Henry Rollins’ finger?” 

“Well, it points to Henry Rollins’ treasure,” said Gerard, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “So they say.” 

“So they say.” 

“That’s not strictly accurate,” Gerard corrected himself. “Have you ever heard of Red Kira Roessler?” They had not. “I’m not surprised. Frank told me her tale, and where he got it from, who knows? He likes them tall.” 

“The tales and the ladies,” Frank added helpfully.

“Anyway…” Gerard went on with a fond yet pointed glare. “They say she was the fiercest ever to sail under the black flag. They say she amassed an incredible store of treasure, spent the half of it, and hid the rest—still more than you or I have ever beheld—in a cave on Long Island.”

“There aren’t caves on Long Island!” John spluttered, but Adam hushed him. 

“They also say,” Gerard went on as if he had not been interrupted, picking at the stones on a garish ring of his own, “that she was a wicked witch, that all the treasure rightfully belonged to Captain Rollins and the Swinging Man, and that Roessler bewitched them out of their rightful prize.” Sighing languidly, he said, “But since that is by far the dullest explanation, I’m only inclined to believe the witch part.”

“I bet you are,” Mark muttered, for although Gerard’s cabin was fairly spacious, he was a large man, and had touched one too many organs in jars trying to stay out of people’s way. 

Frank now helpfully produced a ship’s log with a cracked spine, placing it on the table in front of his captain, whose story continued breathlessly. “What is certain, whether bewitched into it or no, is that Captain Rollins shares our admiration for Red Kira. In his last entries before the Swinging Man was—so they say—swallowed by a demon’s whirlpool, he speaks of lighting a path to her treasure for her. Of pointing the way to it himself, if need be.” He gestured meaningfully to the slightly congealed digit on its red velvet cushion. The crews of the Timberwolf and the Terror shuddered as one, all picturing the mad, fearless old captain committing some butchery on himself to create this grim relic. 

“So,” Adam said, a touch of green about his gills, “let me see if I’m getting this straight. Ol’ Rollins chopped his finger off and turned it into a maaagic compass that points to this Red Kira’s treasure horde…”

“In a cave,” said Shaun. 

“On Long Island!” said Frank. 

“Which does not exist,” said John, who was hushed again for his insights. 

“And …” It was Adam’s turn to carry on a speech through the interruptions of his shipmates, and he managed it only a little less gracefully than Gerard did. “You want us. Your good friends of the Timberwolf. To…”

“To follow where the finger points,” said Gerard. The way he said it, this was the most natural thing one could ask of a trading partner. “It’s doing us no good here, and if you put it back, it will materially benefit us both.” 

At this, Adam folded his tall personage into the chair across from Gerard, wholly invested. “How materially?” 

“We’ve been over this.”

“No, no, no. That was for burying this box in the sand, or handing it back to a nice old granny. If we’re retrieving a treasure to boot…” 

Frank rolled his eyes and fluttered his hands at the remaining visitors in a way that said this negotiation might take some time. As he ushered them back into the passageway, they caught one last glimpse of the two captains, bantering over the box like gleeful old card sharks. John felt an old impulse to stay behind, not to leave Adam alone with a stranger on a strange ship, but before he could name the feeling, the door shut between them. “I’ve heard them like this when the prize was a quarter as much,” said Frank. “We won’t hear from ‘em till well after dinner. Do you wanna see our giraffe skeleton?”

It was not every day that one was offered free viewing of a giraffe skeleton.

Negotiations did not take quite as long as Frank made them sound. In good time, Adam and Gerard emerged from the cabin arm in arm, swapping half-remembered jokes from their entangled past to which no one knew the punch lines anymore. 

Michel, whose viewing of the Helena’s curiosities had brought other issues to mind, plucked at its captain’s sleeve the first chance she got. “Captain Way,” she said. “Do you know anything about ghost ships?”

“Some would say you’re on one,” Gerard replied with a smile, for the reputation of his beloved Helena was a matter of personal pride. “Why do you ask?” 

So she told him the story of seeing at some distance the great ship sailing in the storm that destroyed the Terror , and of watching her husband be picked from the waves, and of that ship’s disappearance as soon as she stood on a solid deck again. Captain Way’s hazel eyes fixed intently on her, one eyebrow arching in wonder. When she had finished speaking, he thought briefly before admitting, “I’ve seen nothing exactly like what you describe, but many things a little like it. Which is to say that I think you must be on to something.” He glanced at her shipmates, who, from their faces alone, he must know were concerned by her fixation. The sight made him smile. “My advice to you is: Keep looking.” 

Gerard handed the dearly-bargained-for box to Adam with all due flourish and swore them all to constancy in their quest, on pain of a dreadful curse.

“An actual curse, or the kind you sell here?” said John with a crooked smile. 

The expression Gerard returned him, though a smile in the strictest sense of the word, was tinged with ice. “I guess you’ll have to stick around long enough to find out, hm?” John, feeling the slight for what it was, had no reply other than that he would indeed, and on that cooling exchange, they took their leave of the Helena, descending to the boat that would take them back to the Timberwolf and on to adventure.

Chapter Text

~1714~

In later years, Adam happily told anyone who asked that he was kidnapped by pirates in his youth, which was true if one left out the crucial details that it was he who followed them, boarded their ship, and demanded a job. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the pirates were kidnapped by Adam. But this, then, leaves out part of the truth as well, and we must be especially truthful in a story about liars. And the plain truth is that the first weeks after Adam handed himself over to a pirate crew, however voluntarily, were still a fearful time.

Most of the crew were kind to him, as a rule, or at least the crew he met at the shipyards were kind, and would not let the rest be too much otherwise. He was indentured promptly to the boatswain, an ever-frowning old man called Anton, and sent therefore on a daily loop of chores and maintenance, most of which he had done since he was very young, but none of which he had done on a ship that had taken heavy cannon shot the night before. The work was not complicated, but it never ended, and he fell into his bunk every night with a groan for his aching muscles and woke to the morning whistles almost too stiff to stand. 

Anton grumbled constantly that he would have him beaten for mistakes, for asking too many questions, and once for laughing too loudly when a fish bit Shaun Cooper on the finger. The threat was not idle, either. Captain Reyes was not a vindictive leader, but he had a man whipped, not long after they left shore, for leaving a candle uncovered in the powder magazine. So Adam became very fast at his chores, because the longer he worked next to Anton, the more opportunities the old man had to find faults. 

As time passed, and no punishments fell to him more terrible than the occasional box on the ears he was too slow to dodge, Adam began to wonder if someone was watching out for him. It could not be the captain, who seemed to look on Adam as a sort of distant household pet always vaguely underfoot, and heaven knew it was not Anton.

He began to wonder most particularly about the dark-haired pair of young gentlefolk without whom the ship, it seemed, could not run. He had not spoken to John Nolan longer than a few minutes since the night the Timberwolf was stolen, for the young man was not an accountant but the quartermaster, the crew nearly as much at his command as the captain’s, and his attentions thus always demanded by a thousand little troubles. Still, John’s searching green eyes fell on him often, even, Adam thought, sometimes when he was not looking. 

The young lady was introduced to him as Destry, and that was all. She rarely spoke to the officers, and rarer still to the fo’c’sle hands, but when she did speak, it was with a quick wit and a keen heart for the craft. Adam watched the way she whispered to John at supper, one hand on his shoulder; the way their mouths quirked in the same way when someone said something particularly stupid (especially when the someone was him). Sister, he thought. He did not comment on it, merely added it to the secrets he was collecting about this crew. Another secret of hers he uncovered quite by accident, or perhaps it would be better to say that he remembered it.

Anton set Adam to re-polishing the spindles of the aft deck railing, which eventually worked him around to sit near Michel’s feet as she steered, her having taken the helm while their unimpressive helmsman recuperated from a sprained wrist. Captain Reyes knew stories of helmsmen who stayed their post even as their entire arms were shot off by cannon fire. But apparently, that fortitude was not universal. So Michel took a turn at the helm. “It is always good for me,” she offered, “to know how it feels to steer one of my own courses!” And after all, no one else felt particularly inclined to volunteer, and the wind was not so strong that a sailor of her strength could not handle it. 

Some time passed without either of them speaking, only Michel’s soft, melodic humming—a composition of John’s—and the occasional short exhale as Adam worked the polish into the dark wood. 

Finally, “It’s a good book,” he said, without looking up.

Her head snapped down. “What is?”

“Destry. Sharpshooting, adventure. Kinda aspirational.” Adam finally met her eyes, searchingly. “Do the rest of the crew know it’s a false name?”

“The ones who should.” 

“Sorry for intruding on that number,” he said, daring and not very apologetic at all. He returned to his work, the muscles in his lean arms flexing with the studious exertion. 

Michel tucked her hair behind her ears. She oughtn’t be pleased. After all, if this untutored hayseed—meaning no offense, and of course she could be betraying her own ignorance of shipbuilders, but it was surprising to know they had more books than the family Bible—if he saw through her little disguise, she might be worse at them than aforethought. Still. It was rather pleasant to have someone catch her clever literary allusion. (Shaun had read the book after she explained the reference. Which was kind of him.)

 They had sailed in silence a moment too long for Adam. “Do you mind if I ask—”

“Yes.” She couldn’t hold her stern face long. “No, go on. Ask.” 

“I just mean, you can’t always go by Destry,” he laughed. 

She sniffed. “I can if I want.”

Adam sat back on his knees, rag in his lap, and smiled up at her. “You can do anything you want! But if you wanted otherwise?” 

“You can call me Michel.”

He felt the rebuff—how could he not? when she blurted it out as if burnt. But he took the deflection in stride as he shrugged and said, smile unbreaking, “Michel it is. I know the rules for the fair folk all right.” 

Michel tapped her fingers against the helm and wrinkled her nose up at the blinding-white sails. If he meant to play the double meaning of fair , that bright, earnest smile did not betray it. “Where would you learn about the fair folk? They haven’t got them in Carolina—only sea serpents.”

“According to Mr. Mark O’Connell,” Adam protested (who, Michel must grant, would know), “not only have we got them, but I’m under their curses and jinxes and fates already. From being annoying, I think.” 

“Oh, I see,” she said through the traitorous laugh that bubbled up in spite of her. “You ran away to sea to escape the fairy curses.”

He examined the spindle he was meant to be polishing, his smile colored now with a hint of smugness. “Sure, but it didn’t do me any good, because Mark swears we’ve got curses and jinxes and fates on this ship too. And, not to be rude,” he added, “but that must be all of your fault, because the Lazzara family never sells a curse-infested ship. That’s bad business.”

Chapter Text

~1714~

Adam went some time before joining a boarding party. He tried to volunteer the first time they spotted a prize, but Captain Reyes frowned at him. “I’m going to be blunt,” he said, “because you’re an honest boy, and I like to be honest with you. I think you want to help those nice merchant-sailors kill us all so you can get your nice parents their pretty ship back. And I like this ship. And my own hide. So, honestly? Not in a million fucking years.” And he sent Adam to be locked in the hold, where the boy shouted fruitlessly, begging to be let out, to help.

After that incident, Adam stopped asking. He was no longer locked up, but went dutifully belowdecks whenever a battle was to ensue, restless and starting at every little noise—and certainly at every large one. When it had been quiet long enough, he would emerge on deck to see who among his colleagues had survived the encounter, to help to haul loot aboard and bodies overboard, and, without fail, to mop the bloody, gunpowder-stained deck. 

But the longer he stayed, becoming less “our indentured servant who may still want to kill us” and more the favorite of the crew, the more bold he became, till one day they spotted a prize approaching, and Adam raised his hand to be allowed to board, and the captain did not say no. 

“Are you sure about this?” said John as they readied their weapons. “You’ve had a pretty comfortable situation until now.” 

Adam loaded his pistols. “I’m not afraid,” he said stubbornly.

“You’re better than the rest of us, then.” 

In the days that followed, Adam remembered very little of the fight with the Mandy. He remembered the long night with the crew, drinking the Mandy’s best rum to the health of everyone in the boarding party (and then he remembered no more). He remembered the cannon fire, because his ears rang for days. He remembered Mark grinning at him as they went over the side. But between leaping aboard the opposing ship and drinking its spoils dry, he remembered only flashes of the scene. 

Let us help along his memory with our own, who, looking on from outside, may not be so overwhelmed with the sights and sounds of a pitched naval battle. The fight on deck was nasty, as all such fights are. Brutal men who have nothing to do with their lives but are attached to them anyway quickly become experts at grim ways to separate their opponents from theirs. Adam, being no such expert, put himself on the defensive at once, sword swinging gracelessly to stay between him and anyone who might want to dismember him. We remember, though he says he does not, that more than one of these swings struck a sailor down where he stood. 

Adam felt miserably out of place in this first foray, his limbs all too long for his body, as if he were a boy underfoot in the kitchen again, but instead of the roaring fire in the hearth, it was cannon roaring and the flash of pistol shot. Though not afraid, he felt a little ill. A shot went off right behind his head, and in stumbling away from it, he stumbled against the open hatch and tumbled all the way down the causeway into the lower decks. 

In the sudden quiet, the ringing in his ears was deafening, and in the sudden dark, he may as well have been blind. But even with his senses dulled so, he went on the alert, like an animal that knows itself to be in a hunters’ haunt. He backed further into the dark, letting his eyes adjust. He ought to return to the deck. The captain would reprimand him for cowardice. The irony was not lost on him, after spending so long sent belowdecks on his own ship, to finally board another and end up belowdecks there! Still he lingered. There was a door ahead to his right; he tested it, hoping for a powder magazine or he knew not what. Locked, and so too the one beyond it. 

“Who goes there?”

Adam whipped around, back to the wall, hands raised. Two men from the Mandy were silhouetted in the light from the hatch. From what he could make out, they were not unhandsome, but cruel in their eyes and their manners. He knew at once that they could tell he was not one of theirs. 

“Before you run me through!” he began, with no idea yet where he would end. The men stopped their advance. “Sir.” He addressed himself to the shorter of the two men, who struck him as more leaderly. “I’m not—” 

“Not a bleeding pirate?” sneered this gentleman-sailor. 

“Not bleeding too much, yet, I hope!” Adam made a little show of checking himself for injuries, which made the second man smirk in spite of himself. “You really should let me live. I’d appreciate it. I’m not what you think I am. The pirates above, they stole my father’s ship, and when I tried to recover it, they captured me.” 

“Tried to recover it by yourself? Idiot.” It was not a promising remark on the face of it, but an unpromising reaction would be stabbing Adam through the heart and stopping his story there, so the investment, the attention, even in scorn, was very promising indeed. 

Adam smiled, a boyish Scheherezade. “Funny, that’s what my mother calls me too. I’ve been locked up so often while the pirates do their dirty work. And just now, when they’ve let me off my lead a little way, I’ve met you. Awfully good fortune, don’t you think?” 

“Come into the light,” the first man gestured. Adam did so, keeping his eyes fixed on something just over their two shoulders, something coming down the ladder behind them. 

With a guileless grin, he showed himself off; no hidden arms, no fancy dress, only a plain ship’s boy with a simple sword, quite at their mercy. 

“Now!” shouted John. 

The men leapt. One whirled around to meet John’s sword between his ribs. The other turned only to get Adam’s in his back. 

The boys finished them off, then stood over their corpses, twin hearts racing. 

“Running away from the fight?” teased Adam.

“Saw you go down,” said John. “Saw them go down after you.” 

Adam remembered very little of what came about after this. Somehow, the battle ended, and they found their way back to the sunlight, back to their own ship. 

Anton was dead. About this there was no doubt. His terrorized apprentice mustered up, at best, an ambivalent malaise about his demise, but this crew was not wont to mourn long or deeply, so his lack of real grief went unnoticed. The reason Adam did come under scrutiny, however, was simple. If his master was dead, what should be done with him? A vote was scrounged together. It had been three months since Adam climbed onto their ship (his ship, he persisted in calling it). He had acquitted himself honorably, done his work on time, and just now, as John proudly pointed out, joined a boarding party and killed five enemies, including the ship’s master. Was he to be set ashore, or freed and kept, or thrown overboard? It was not a difficult vote, but as good and democratic pirates, they held it nonetheless. Almost unanimously, they decided that Adam was to be let out of his indentures and raised from boatswain’s mate to boatswain himself, with the according raise in his share of all prizes, including this one. One or two people had voted for setting him ashore, but they were mainly annoyed by his liability to sing and whistle at early hours. 

“Fellows,” Adam said gratefully. “I don’t know what to say. I’m very glad to have earned my keep—I’m getting awfully fond of you all, even if you do smell—”

“Not half as bad as you do!” exclaimed Mark from the back of the crowd. 

And really, what more needed to be said? Especially when, as aforementioned, the Mandy had such an impressive store of rum that must be drunk through that very night. So the party was broken up and reassembled below in time for supper. 

“Where’s Destry?” Adam asked, sitting on the table and kicking idly at John, both already a few drinks in.

“She doesn’t really go in for all of this.” John waved his spoon at the table at large to mean carousing into the night with a large number of rough and drunken pirates. “She’ll probably wash up and go to bed early.” 

“Oh,” said Adam. He felt a twinge of disappointment that the young lady was not to make one of their party, but his merry mood did not let him think of it too long. “So,” he went on, leaning in conspiratorially, although, what with all the other conversations going on at theatrical volumes around them, it would be hard work to overhear them, even for Gates who was sitting right beside John. “Your sister uses a false name.” 

John hummed something noncommittal. 

“But you don’t.” 

John breathed out a little laugh and cleaned his glasses. “Don’t need to. There are a lot of John Nolans on the ocean. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s looking too hard for this one.” 

“Surely your parents would want to see you again?” 

“You’re more sure than I am, then.” 

Adam squinted at John. There was something in his tone that he could not parse, something in the defensive squaring-off of his bony shoulders. It bothered him, perhaps more than it should. Pirates were known to keep secrets, but even still, he did not like the idea that he could not read John—rather, that John would not let Adam read him. 

“Do you want to go home?” he asked. 

This new line of questioning made John clean his glasses again for something to do with his hands. “I don’t know.”

“That’s not a very exciting answer.” 

“Well, when I find a better one, I’ll send you a letter. I don’t know yet, I should say. I haven’t been away long enough to miss it, or to tell whether it’s a place I will ever miss or else if this feeling is all it will get from me. I was not at home there—in Long Island society, being a disappointing viscount and an unimpressive heir and all the hanging baggage of those titles, but you would think, if the sea was my home, that I would know it. Feel it, somehow.”

“Because I feel it,” Adam added helpfully. 

“Exactly! And Michel feels the same way you do. The second we lost sight of land, she became…something fuller. Realer. I am still wandering, I think. And I sometimes hate the sea altogether. So if this is home, it’s kind of shit.” 

Adam could not help a smile breaking out over his face. “You’re so queer, John. What is it like in your head?” 

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” John warned, a blush creeping up his neck. 

Adam flopped across the table in a pantomime of John’s melancholy, one hand nearly landing in Shaun’s peas. “You talk like some aimless, soulful, poetical creature, but you got yourself a job! A very responsible and—and difficult job! How on earth does a miserable viscount who doesn’t want anything to do with the sea end up quartermaster on a pirate ship? And good at it?” 

This little performance had attracted the attention of the nearby hands, whose chatter drifted away so they might watch Adam sprawl about and make fun of their superior officer. 

“Well, we needed a new one,” Mark said, “cause the last fucker, uh. Quit.” 

His delicate way of putting things suggested more to the story, which Adam requested, and Shaun obliged. “Let’s just say ol’ Thunderfoot O’Connell had to earn his name somehow!” A bit of pantomime from the crew accompanied this, including a vigorous stomping and the notion of a head exploding into bits. The praise was implicit, and Mark blushed up to the ears. “The crew were all in agreement that John should take over.” 

“All except John,” Mark added. 

“And really,” said Shaun, “that only solidified our liking him.” 

Adam found this both amusing and bemusing, and he cast a laughing glance at John, who only shrugged, directing him back to the storytellers as if to say I don’t get it either. 

“Well, it’s like this,” said Mark, propping his elbows on the table so that he could more easily talk with his hands. “You see, the man who wants the crown the least is the one that oughta be king, right?”

“Right?” Adam agreed in advance of more explanation, but Mark only nodded solemnly. 

“There you go.” 

“Is that how you pick a king?” 

“It’s how you pick a quartermaster, apparently,” said John. “And I can’t argue with it, because the bastards got me, and now I care what happens to them, so I have to do well in the role, even though it’s the most thankless crock of shit ever invented.” 

Adam shook his head. “You’re so queer,” he said again. 

“You’ll find it out yourself in about three weeks,” said John. “You came out to sea for adventure and revenge, or whatever it is you thought you were doing following us. And now you’ve taken on responsibility. God save you.”

Chapter Text

~1722~

The Timberwolf left New Orleans on a cloudless June morning, the kind that, inland, is drenched in birdsong and the smell of new-cut grass, and at sea is a perfect sphere of bright, bright blue. In addition to John Nolan, Michel DaRosa, and Shaun Cooper, who had once been a part of this ship, their mate William had been rescued from the sea and recruited to its rolls, as well as a few other good men and a tiny young lady with fire-red hair called Miss Williams (no relation to William, she made clear), whom the Terror had abducted from her ship in much the same fashion that the Timberwolf had, once upon a time, abducted a young Adam Lazzara. The survivors of the Terror filled out the ranks of the Timberwolf comfortably, and before long a stranger would be hard pressed to tell who had come from where, the crews got on so well. 

The crews, of course, meaning the fo'c'sle hands and Shaun, who could be found as often as not in some out-of-the-way corner, laughing with Mark O’Connell as John had not known him to really laugh in years. 

New Orleans lacked in the way of provisions, so they sailed east a day or so to Pensacola before embarking properly. A few men went ashore to buy what they figured they could not steal at sea, but they returned from that excursion reporting an odd encounter. 

“The shopkeeper knew our ship,” said Nathan. 

“That’s not an odd encounter,” said Adam. “We’re famous. I did that on purpose.” 

“Did you also spread around that we’re traveling with something weird?” Adam did not. “Because that’s what he knew. He said to me, ‘The Timberwolf? I hear you’ve got a’—how did he say it—‘a unique cargo aboard just now. Keep an eye on it.’ Then he looked around at the other crews in the shop as if it might be something they wanted.” Nathan crossed his arms. “What exactly is it we’re carrying?” 

“Either something very interesting or something very, very stupid,” said Adam. “Your shopkeeper friend thinks it’s the first one, which is encouraging, if you think about it! After all, if we’re about to invest a lot of time into a voyage on its behalf, I guess we’d rather have it be a—have it be a…” He was not entirely sure what to call it. 

“A target on our backs,” said John. 

As for John, and for Michel, they had not assimilated so smoothly as their fellows, but they had taken up their old roles. The Timberwolf never had good fortune in helmsmen, so when they sailed from Pensacola, Michel set William to the helm and, with the look of a martyr going to face the Coliseum, she requested a meeting with the captain and officers so she might chart their course. 

They met in the captain’s cabin, which, as Adam promised, had been put at Michel’s disposal. She laid out a series of charts across the great desk. “Do we sail to Long Island?” she began. “Where precisely is this cave meant to be? Shall we make for any coast and circle the isle till we find it?” 

“I still say we’ll find nothing,” said John, who was not, strictly speaking, an officer, but without whom no one felt right beginning the meeting. (The old role he had taken up was a very old role indeed: that of “indispensable ambiguity.”)

Adam, not without some exasperation, asked if there was anywhere else this cave might exist, which, it so happened, there was. While they had been viewing the giraffe skeleton and various other trophies of the Helena, Frank had expanded on the legends of Red Kira Roessler, who he claimed was a long-lost aunt. She had apparently spent a great deal of her growing-up in Curaçao, and for as many legends that placed her famous treasure horde on Long Island, almost as many pointed to the Caribbean location. Gerard favored the Long Island tales, partly because the Captain Kidd connection made for better legend-weaving. But, Frank had said with a shrug of his shoulders, no one would know for sure till someone went hunting!

“We know Curaçao has several very beautiful caves,” said John reasonably. “I’ll bet you money the tales got muddled, Kidd for Kira, and all of a sudden people are placing her somewhere she may never even have visited.” 

No one could argue with the beauty or, for that matter, the existence of the Hato caves. Nor was anyone particularly keen on sailing north again so soon. So they voted to head toward Curaçao, plundering a few Caribbean haunts along the way and guaranteeing their crew a tidy profit even if it turned out Captain Way had led them a merry chase. 

As Michel began plotting their southward course on the larger of her maps, most of those who had been called to the meeting drifted into side conversations, then out of the room entirely, uninterested in the march of the compass across the chart. Adam, however, rested his hands on the table and watched her work. Her gaze flickered up to him once, then she affixed it again on her calculations. 

“I, ah, hope the cabin has served you well,” he said. 

“It’s very pleasant. You have good taste.” 

“Don’t sound so surprised!” he joked. 

That made her look up with a frown. Point deducted. He began again. Did the Terror ever make it to Curaçao in its voyages, he wondered. She hummed noncommittally. No points awarded. 

“I talked some with your friend Miss Williams yesterday,” he offered. “She seems like a firecracker. I’m glad you’ve been sailing with more women; I know—I mean, you said once it wasn’t easy being the only—” 

Michel’s compass slipped from her fingers and clattered sharply on the table. “You do not have to do this.” He began to brush it off as no trouble, but she spoke again, her voice clipped and commanding. “I would rather you not.” 

Game forfeited. Chastened, Adam begged her forgiveness. “I’m troublin’ you when you’ve got important work to do. I’ll leave you to it.” 

As he moved to pass her and leave the cabin, Michel caught his arm. “John is not ruled by me,” she said icily. “You need not court my good opinion to get to him.” 

Adam looked as if he would reply to that if he could, but she held open the door and showed him out, then returned to her charts, fingers tapping anxiously at the table. With a quiet “Damn it!” she slammed shut the ship’s log and ran her fingers through her hair. If she could not keep herself composed while he made stupid small talk, the looming voyage promised to be unbearably long. But then, she supposed, she had a great deal on her mind, quite aside from anything Adam wanted to say. 

~

Shaun was alone in the galley when Michel found him, humming to himself. 

“Do you think me mad?”

He looked up mildly from the side of bacon he was preparing. “If I did, I wouldn’t have killed anyone you told me to.” 

“Now, I mean. Since the storm.” 

“Why, no more than usual.” 

From anyone else, his circuitous answers would have annoyed her, but having known him so long, she knew he did not make light of her. She perched on an apple-barrel and rested her chin on her hands. “Well, there’s one, at least.” For a moment, she fell silent, and Shaun wondered if this was all his erstwhile captain had to say. He went on slicing bacon just in case. “I had thought,” she began again, just as the silence was settling, “that it might have been the shock of the wreck. Toying with my senses, you know. Especially since no one else—but the shock has quite, quite passed, and I am still convinced of what I saw. I can see it now,” she said, closing her eyes and pointing to a place in mid-air before her, like Macbeth’s dagger, “as clear as you please, or as clear as it ever was, which is not, I admit, as clear as I please. But I have asked everyone who was on deck that day, and asked them alone, in case they were afraid to sound mad in front of their fellows.” 

“And no one else saw the ship?” 

“Not a one.” Her head sank into her hands. “Their captain has done very well, taking on a mad widow as navigator. They must think me ready to steer them into the rocks the moment I see another torturing vision.” 

“I won’t take your hand,” said Shaun, “because my hands are covered in pig fat. So please imagine me taking your hand and pressing it sort of reassuringly.” 

“I am imagining it. Thank you.” 

“Whatever is going on, and whether we find the vanishing ship or no, you are yourself.” 

Michel wiped her eyes. She had spoken the hateful word— widow —as a goad. Tell me it is not true, or confirm it and let me despair. She was frustrated and comforted by Shaun sidestepping the term altogether and being kind within their ambiguity. He had always been sensible that way. Shaun finished with the bacon, scraping the chunks into the stew-pot and setting the knife aside to wash, humming again the tune he had caught in his head.  

“Were you writing to Mark O’Connell all those years?” she asked suddenly. 

Shaun flushed. “Not only to him!”

“So you were.” This he had to acknowledge. Michel shook her head in amazement. “How many times in the last seven years did I tell you, to your face, how badly I wanted to kill him?”

“Plenty,” Shaun admitted, as he prodded the fire under the pot. “But I wouldn’t have let you.”  

They spent some time in this fashion, sweating in the light of the galley fire; the only hearth they had known in many a long year. But in good time, the supper-bell must be rung and the galley must be over-filled with starving, grumbling crew. So Michel took the early bird’s prerogative, and with the worm of firstmeats acquired, she and her stew retreated to the captain’s cabin, where she would eat alone and retire early, hoping for a long night’s sleep. 

This, she was not to have. A soft sound awoke her before the moon had fully risen, one unlike the usual chorus of noises that came with life aboard ship. She lay, fully alert, in the sturdy bed, glancing into the shadows and listening. It came again, as of something rolling and bumping up against its container, and it came, unfortunately, from the cabinet in which the finger of Captain Rollins had been stowed. She had not decided how she felt about the curses and magics of the Helena , but their eerie crew had planted supernatural thoughts in her mind, and the oppression of such thoughts was not to be borne! 

So thinking, she cast off her bedclothes and unlocked both cabinet and box. Throwing open the lid, what she saw sent a shiver all the way down her bare arms. 

The men were snug in their hammocks in the fo'c'sle, snoring to varying degrees, the whole ensemble like the gentle sawing of three dozen logs. Michel threw open the door, wrapped in her greatcoat because she could not find her robe on such short notice. She went at first to John’s bunk, expecting to find Adam in the hammock over his—but of course that was how things once were, not how they were now. Which meant she had to shine her candle in the face of nearly everyone before finding her way to the captain. “Wake up,” she said, shaking the shoulder she had access to. “Will you wake up?”

“My God, ma’am, I only just dropped off…” Adam emerged from his blankets with his hair a-tangle and his eyes barely open, like a hibernating bear. “Have we been boarded?”

“Better,” she said, and would say no more—desiring to spend no more time in the crowded, stocking-scented fo'c'sle—till he joined her on deck, John stumbling after because he wasn’t getting any sleep anyway. Thus ascended, she held out her hand, showing the gentlemen the open box therein. 

The finger was moving. It squirmed like a living thing, tapping its crusty nail insistently against the wall of the box as if it intended to inch its way back to its owner, alone if necessary. 

“Hm. I don’t enjoy that,” said John. 

“It’s disgusting,” said Michel.

“It’s…ah, it’s got a charm to it, the little fellow…” Adam tried to defend the wriggling extremity, but his heart was not in it. 

“But it is moving,” said Michel. “And it began, now I think to myself, as soon as I retired to the cabin tonight, which means it had been trying to point us further north at least since…”

“Since we set our course for Curaçao,” said John with a frown, understanding the sign’s portent.

“Captain Way asked you to follow where the finger points,” Michel turned to Adam as Captain Lazzara. “Shall I reset our course?” 

Adam shrugged openly. “Looks like old man Rollins doesn’t approve of our southerly plans, and if he’s got a better map in his…er, his head, then make sail for Long Island. If that will be acceptable to you?” he inquired.

She laughed in scorn at what she perceived to be scorn, for why would he submit the voyage, on which the whole crew’s fortune depended, to her will? “It’s no matter to us,” she said. It was true, or at least she meant it, which is often close enough. Some years after they departed from the Timberwolf, John and Michel had received word that their parents had died, one close after the other, of a smallpox that had wrought dreadful scenes on the whole county. Their children long presumed dead, the estates and titles the elder Nolans had cheated so long to amass passed to an indifferent cousin. The younger Nolans did not mourn long in the traditional ways, but a strange, oppressive cloud passed over their hearts, and they never returned to their island home. 

But all that had been some years past, the memory faded enough in its colors that they now read the picture wrong, believing their long absence was only because they had never had a compelling reason to return. Now that one was offered, in the form of a fine treasure, of course they would go!

Michel took the finger with her to the helm, setting it beside her to consult like a macabre compass. She shouted orders to the men on watch, who adjusted their sails enough for the night—they could make proper arrangements in the morning with the full company awake, but at least they would not waste time sailing in the opposite direction.

Adam and John hung back against the railing, watching her work with all the precision of one who had long been accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. They were woefully biased, of course, but even an outsider would see the Timberwolf could hardly be in safer hands. John was well accustomed to this; he had, after all, watched his sister’s progression from dilettante with a fancy for the nautical arts to a weathered sea-veteran day by day. Adam had taken time away from seeing Michel every day, so he was silent not with custom, but with some wonder. Of course, he could not go long without speaking in general, nor long without mentioning the most particular change time had wrought on the Nolan family. 

“How long has your sister been…” Adam watched her toy absently with the ring that she wore on a chain round her neck. 

“Captain?”

“Married. Or both.” 

John had to think about it. “Five years captain. Four years married.” 

“Damn.” 

“I know.”

“How’d she find a man good enough out here?”

John smiled at the memory. “We took his ship coming out of Boston. He was the only man on it who didn’t cower. She thought that was…well, attractive.” 

“It is,” said Adam. 

“It is.”

Adam shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. “What about you? Did you find anyone while you were away?” 

John shook his head tersely. “I wouldn’t ask anyone to wait ashore for me. So I always thought, well, when I finally give up this life. Then there’ll be time.” 

“But you never did.” Adam glanced aside at John, whose pale green eyes were fixed on the dark green sea. “I thought you left us and went straight to shore.” 

“I tried! I fucking tried.” John looked, with a bitter laugh, from the sea to the stars, as if they might be to blame for his failure. “Over and over again, but nothing ever…worked. We were about to retire for good; one last take, one last voyage, until—”

John was about to say “until the storm hit,” but Adam finished his sentence for him with, “Until I came back in your life!” And he was only joking, but his words made John jolt as if he had been stung.

“Don’t say it like that.” He excused himself shortly thereafter.

Adam dared not swear to it, but before he fell asleep that night, he thought he heard an old melody, a guitar played by practiced hands.

Chapter Text

~1714~

They took a ship off the Azores to re-provision themselves, a tame little exploratory vessel called Clarity that surrendered at the first sight of the black. Half the boarding party gathered the crew on deck, along with the captain’s family, who were with them. They kept hands on their swords, but the prisoners seemed suitably cowed, so they did not bother to draw. It seemed gauche. Meanwhile, the others kindly lightened the Clarity’s burden of rum, sugar, meat, and whatever else struck their fancy. 

Michel’s fancy led her to claim a dress of green silk from a chest. Adam, laden down with a barrel of molasses, raised an eyebrow teasingly and remarked that it might get in the way in a firefight. As they climbed the stairs, she moving a touch faster than he, Michel retorted that if she could get through a crowded ballroom in one, the deck of a ship in a battle could be little worse. Besides, did she not deserve a birth-day present? 

This banter carried them to the deck, where the sudden sunlight made their steps unsteady, and by the time she had recovered from the glare, Michel found herself facing the captain’s daughter whose dress she was carrying off. 

The girl had the imperiousness of youth that hasn’t seen enough sun, and her slender hands fluttered over a pale gray mantua very like the one Michel left home in years ago, though in a newer fashion. She looked on the pirates with pure loathing, and hissed, “Put that down, boy. You’ll get it dirty.” 

Michel stopped short, her hands tightening on the dress. Then she arranged her face into a sneer and apologized that she had no time to wash her hands. “But you shan’t see it again, so you won’t have to see any damage that comes to it.”

That night, as he passed the door to Michel’s cabin, slightly ajar, Adam saw flickering light as of someone passing back and forth in front of a candle. He paused, one hand raised to knock without thinking of what he would say if she answered. 

Answer she did. “Adam?” Only her head and shoulder were visible in the crack of the door, but that shoulder was clad in green silk. 

“I—I didn’t mean to bother you,” he said. “Is that Miss Sour Face’s dress from this morning? How does it look?”

“I couldn’t reach the laces on my own,” Michel confessed. “I had a maid when I dressed like this before.”

“Should I play lady-in-waiting?” 

“Adam!” she chided, but the offer was genuine, so, gingerly, she let the door fall open so he could step into the tiny cabin. She took a breath to speak, thought better of it, and turned her back to him. Their eyes met in the fine full-length mirror that had been John’s birth-day present to her. “If you put me in some ridiculous sailor’s knot that I can’t get out of…”

Adam took the ribbons gently in his rough hands. “I don’t know much, but I know better than that.” He made quick work of the lacing, as if he feared that too long contact with the fine fabrics would sully them—or feared something else entirely, head bowed to his task, half-holding his breath lest it touch the back of Michel’s sunburnt neck. 

A quick step back; his hands shoved into his pockets. “Is’t well done, my lady?” he said, affecting the prim accents of the milliner in Bath who would help the town girls buy ribbons and feathers while Adam tried not to knock things over in searching for sweetheart-presents. 

Michel blinked at herself in the mirror, her mouth forming a quiet oh. She was and was not the girl who last wore gowns like this. Now almost one-and-twenty, her figure had not become the soft and well-guided shape so fashionable on Long Island, her shoulders too strong, her elbows too sharp. But the sweeping curves of the green silk almost took one in. It shimmered softly in the low candlelight, hiding all the burns and scrapes and scars that littered her skin like landmarks on one of her charts. 

Unable to look at herself another moment, Michel’s eyes flickered up to meet Adam’s again in the mirror, which was worse. He, after all, had never seen her like this. She almost apologized for how ill she looked, until she recognized the meaning in his gaze. 

“It is very well,” she murmured. “Thank you.” She choked back a sob. “I wish—” 

“Michel!”

“It’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Michel…” he repeated softly, his brown eyes too kind. 

She put her hands on her hips to steady herself and turned her back on the mirror. “It has been so long since any of my acquaintances…looked like me. Sounded like me. My God, what I would give to be in a ballroom and be unnoticed and unremarked upon because there are far too many ladies. As always,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. 

“If I ever saw you in a ballroom, I promise I wouldn’t notice you at all. Look right past you.” The lie was worth the faint smile it won from her. He felt suddenly much too large for the little room. “Do you regret it?” he said. “Going to sea?” 

Michel wiped her stinging eyes determinedly. “No. After all, I’m sure even the very accomplished Eisley sisters have never sunk a man-of-war.”

Adam thought of the fo’c’sle quarters down the passageway, of the men swapping stupid tales in the bright light of the swinging lanterns, stealing each other’s pocketknives and throwing dirty stockings at anyone who laughed too loud while they were trying to sleep. It was terribly quiet in this lonely cabin.

Chapter Text

~1714~

It was John’s turn at the watch, which most nights meant hours of stargazing, of composing little songs and singing them to himself in his broken voice. It also meant time alone to consider what he had done with his life so far, what he was become, and where he was like to go, but that was less pleasant, hence the emphasis on little songs. Sometimes, the thoughts could not be avoided, and even the little songs became about what he had done with his life and where he was like to go. 

All of this was to say that John was relieved to hear someone clambering the rigging and have that someone be Adam, sliding into the crow’s nest with a conspiratorial smile. 

“I brought a bribe so you don’t kick me out,” he said, unveiling an orange from his jacket pocket. 

“You come to a ruthless pirate and you don’t bring at least doubloons?” said John.

“No. Now scoot on over.”

John made room for Adam to sit beside him—the boy was all knees and elbows, and the crow’s nest not very big, so they were cosy, seated at cross-angles to one another. A minute’s quiet passed, but a more companionable quiet than the one that had gone before, filled with the soft shuffling of Adam peeling the orange and passing John his share and so on and so forth. 

“You were right, you know,” said Adam, his mouth full of fruit.  

“I know. About what?” 

“Getting tricked into responsibility and liking it. She’s a mean old lady.” 

“So it’s got you too.” 

“People listen when I talk, nowadays,” was all he said, and said more by those six words than he would have if he had gone on for pages. 

John kicked out one leg and let it fall over Adam’s. “Will you live and die for the good ship Timberwolf, then?”

“Maybe. I’m proud of the old girl. She’s survived a hell of a lot more as a pirate ship than she would have under that lordly old merchant my father meant to sell her to.” John remarked that it highlighted the Lazzara family’s craftsmanship all the more, which Adam liked. “That’s what I’ll tell them next time I see them,” he said smugly. “Though God knows when that’ll be. I have to see more of the world, you know. Maybe sail all the way round it.” 

“Do you know how long that would take?”

“What, have you got other plans for the next two years?” 

“Don’t you start!” John laughed. “I can’t escape my own thoughts about the future when I’m up here, and now you come bringing me some of your own!” 

Adam smiled knowingly. “It’s the staring at the sea, on out to the horizon. I used to do it at home till I thought I’d fall in, or float away.” Silver flecks of starlight reflected in his brown eyes. “You’ve got the biggest, most obvious metaphor on Earth right there in front of you; you’d have to be a fool—or asleep—not to think about life a little. Right?”

“Maybe I was the fool for picking a career where I’m surrounded by the big, obvious metaphor day and night,” John grumbled. 

“Could always move inland; chop down some trees in far, far west Virginia.” 

“No.”  

“Thought not.” 

John almost resented how at ease Adam was. Even in their cramped accommodations, he found ways to lounge around, as if he were lying in a field somewhere to star-gaze. 

Adam winked. “You’re too pretty for hard labor, anyway.” 

It was a joke. It was a stupid joke among shipmates, another dig at his lordship the useless viscount. It should not have taken the breath from John’s lungs the way it did. “It would disagree with me,” he said, valiantly playing along. 

“Most things would, the way you talk.” Adam rolled onto his elbow to speak face to face, John’s ankle now tangled between both of his. His expression had something new in it, like he had invented a good game. “Maybe if we get you to say no to enough things, we can figure out what it is you do want.” John threw half his orange peel at Adam’s head, but he allowed the cross-examination. “Do you want to go back to the clergy?”

“I’d rather kill myself.”

“The army, then?”

“No.” 

“The law?” 

“And hang you?” 

“Well, there go all the respectable careers for a, uh, for a respectable young man. What about just being a lord? Just get gouty on an estate somewhere with hounds and pheasants and be a plague on society.” 

“Maybe I should.” 

“You’d never.” 

John picked the remaining peel apart with practiced fingers to busy his idle hands, which are, as everyone knows, the devil’s playthings. All the darts thus far had been thrown far wide. But Adam’s face became thoughtful, which made John fidget. He suspected the next throw might hit nearer the mark, and like William Tell’s boy, could only brace himself for the strike. 

“You don’t want to perform?” asked Adam, more softly.

John thought of delivering his songs to great concert halls, and shuddered. “No. That’s not what it’s for. It’s for me, and the people I love. Or anyone, really, as long as I can hand it to them casually, just because I think it will please them. I’ll play at parties when no one is asking their talented young ladies to exhibit, and if somebody walks by and thinks, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and then thinks of me no more, perfect. I don’t want them to think that I want—want praise, or compliments, or—” 

“We wouldn’t want anyone to think you want,” Adam teased, leaning in a hair’s breadth lest anyone below listen in and get the idea that John Nolan might have desires. 

“Stop it,” John said half-heartedly.

“Well, if you only write to please, good work, for it pleases me. You could be a kept boy, I guess.” For some reason, John blushed, though the night was dark enough to mask it. “I’ll bet, if you tried, you could find some, oh, some fabulously wealthy mistress who’s charmed by your songs. And if you ask her nice, she’ll give you a cottage on her grounds to write in, with a big pianoforte and a bigger bed!” As he painted this salacious little picture, he leaned in even closer, braced so that his wrist was not touching John’s thigh, but John felt his skin burning all the same, Adam’s fingers ghosting over his own. 

“I don’t want her!” John protested, his face very hot. 

“I know!” Adam’s laughter seemed loud enough to wake the whole ship. “Do you want a lover at all?” 

“Adam, would you stop talking?” The order burst from him before he could think. 

Adam flinched away. “Yes, sir.”

The lost closeness almost made John repent right there. “Don’t—it’s fine.” 

“I’m sorry—” he went on in a rush. “I didn’t understand—if I talked too much, I—”

“I said it’s fine. You said nothing.” John spoke firmly, as if declaring it could make it true. Oh, he had said nothing aloud, had said nothing yet, but they knew each other too well for him not to hear the question—the offer—that had been creeping up on them both from the moment Adam began his teasing. And once that offer was spoken! He knew he would not refuse it if once he heard it, but he dared not take it up, either, and ruin something so—

They were happy as they were, he thought, as if declaring it could make it true.

Chapter Text

~1715~

These were the golden days of the Timberwolf. Everywhere the flag with the sign of the wolf flew, their name was spoken in fear. Even granted the profligate spending pirates were accustomed to, enough riches fell into their hands that the most reckless among them had a little squirreled away or sent home to make wives proud. 

But as the infamy increased, so too did the burdens of fame. They could hardly go into a pirates’ hideaway without being recognized and challenged by some drunken fool looking for the quick riches that would surely accompany killing Captain Reyes of the Timberwolf. As to sailing into port, it was ten to one they’d be recognized there as well, which meant someone calling the harbormaster and the harbormaster calling the Navy or the militia. It became a lonely life, and for those who joined hoping to see the world, the world shrunk to a series of out-of-the-way coves and islands, or one criminals’ slum after another. 

But by God, the money, the thrill of battle, and the rolling waves underfoot as one walked the deck on a sunlit spring morning. And if the close quarters led to more petty squabbling than the crew had once known, the endless sea set it all into relief. 

It so happened one day in April that they were off the coast of North Carolina, dodging a nosy little navy cutter, when the ship suffered a bad injury to its mainsail. Adam frowned up at it.

“Can we mend it?” said John. 

“Not quickly, with the tools we’ve got aboard. And if we really wanted it done fast, I’d love to have a sail loft to lay it out…” An idea came to him. “Oh…” 

John rightly interpreted his expression as reluctance. “Do you know a sail loft nearby?”

He did. So a very small party was called for to visit Lazzara Shipyards that evening and, were the good Lord and the Lazzaras senior willing, to mend their mainsail overnight. John, noting the particular tightness of Adam’s shoulders and the way his hands could not lie still as he set forth the plan, insisted on making one of the party himself. He sat across from Adam in the stern of the boat. “Does your family…know you’re alive?” 

“Depends on whether there are wanted posters for us in Bath.” Adam watched the coastline beside them grow more and more familiar, and John watched Adam. 

“I know why I never wrote home, but why did you? I met your family. They seemed like good people.”

“They were—they are. At first, I didn’t have time. Anton kept me jumping; see if he would have let me waste half an hour composing a letter.” John’s remembering laugh was more fondness than exasperation; such is the softening effect of memory on the deceased. “And by the time I was free to spend my time how I pleased, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What would I have said? ‘Fine weather, in very good health, slit a man’s throat Thursday last. Your loving and obedient son, &c.’” He exhaled a laugh. “Besides. If my father knew, my mother would find out, and if she knew, Aunt Katherine would hear of it, and by the time Aunt Katherine has kept a secret, the whole Carolina colony may as well know.” He took a particularly vicious pull of the oars. “At least if I come to them in the flesh, maybe the excitement of my resurrection will keep the nastier questions at bay until we’re gone again.” 

The boat pulled up to the dock in the shipyard harbor just as the sun slipped all the way below the western hills. Adam leapt out to tie it up, a quick shake of his head to keep away the sudden wash of nostalgia—hadn’t he done this exact motion in this exact place more times than he could count? John and the few other hands who accompanied them followed, carrying the rolled sail between them. 

In the darkness, he was able to lead them out of sight of the main house into the barn. “Up that ladder, there, is the sail loft,” he pointed, voice low. 

“So you decided against telling your family you’re alive,” John said wryly.

“John Nolan, I’m flattered that you want to meet my father, but I’ve got an awful lot of sewing on my hands tonight.” John cast him a withering look, but he disappeared upstairs with the men while Adam took one last glance outside and pulled the barn door closed behind them. 

The hours whisked past in silence. John was fairly useless at sewing, so he stitched slowly and pricked his fingers often, watching Adam work as much as anything. We dare not say that was why he pricked his fingers so much, only that the injury occured most often around the same time as contemplations on a young man’s eyelashes. 

Hardly had they finished their work, rolling the mended sail again to take it back to the ship, when the door Adam had shut below was thrown open. All froze, and Adam dropped quietly to his stomach beside the trapdoor so that he could better hear the agitated voices that accompanied the movement. 

“It’s my father,” he mouthed as John crept up to join him. His father it was, his voice graveled with the early hour. The second man’s voice took longer to place, Adam ticking off a list of his various uncles and elder cousins before realizing with some alarm who it was. 

“—not possible at this hour, Your Lordship,” Mr. Lazzara was in the midst of saying, evidently excusing the subpar greeting.

“This is not a social call, sir,” said Lord Commodore John Cornelius O’Callaghan IV. “The Hopeless has just reported to me on the Victory that they have been tracking your son through these waters—”

“My son?” 

Adam winced; he could hear the shock in his father’s usually easygoing voice. John’s shoulder bumped silently against his as if to confirm that he heard it too. 

“Have I the honor of informing you that your son has for some time been an increasingly notorious pirate?” said the Lord Commodore, as drily as a desert. “Well, congratulations. Just what every father dreams of hearing, I’m sure.”

“You say your fellows have been tracking him? He’s here? Is he well?” 

They could practically hear the lord commodore’s eyes rolling. “The Hopeless lost sight of them before rendezvousing with the Victory . I decided, since you and I have some rapport, having done business together in the past, to visit you myself and inquire after your son’s whereabouts.” Flustered stammering ensued, followed by a more pronounced sigh from his lordship. “I will be plain, sir. Either you are a talented actor, or you have no useful knowledge. I do not believe you capable of the former, so hear me man to man. We will be at the fort tonight. If you hear from your son, send for me there. If I find out you hid him from me? Well.” The rough edge of the floorboards cut into Adam’s fingertips where he was gripping the edge of the trapdoor. 

Mr. Lazzara agreed, for what else can one do when a very tall lord commodore makes such demands? “Would your Lordship like me to light your way to town?” This was a genuine offer, but accidentally a very brave remark, for the Lord Commodore took it as a backhanded wish for him to go. 

“Fear not, sir; I shall not impose upon your nighttime generosity overmuch. Just one more question, now I bethink me,” he said slowly. “When I first visited you, in March last, there was an ugly little wrack of a sloop in your harbor as we left. It was called the Summer Stars, was it not?” 

“Your Worship has a long memory,” said Mr. Lazzara.

“And a long face,” Adam murmured. He could feel how close John had come by the exhale-laugh against his shoulder. 

“Belonging to a Captain Reyes, wasn’t it?” 

“It seems you’re better acquainted than I was; I never saw the man apart from that one day.”

“What became of that ship?”

“Why, we took it apart for scrap ourselves after those bleeding pirates gave it up.”

“Gave it up?”

“And stole one of our best in exchange, yes.” 

“Mr. Lazzara, think carefully. I have important business with the company that was once the Summer Stars. What is the name of the ship they stole from you?” 

Adam bit his tongue, and John’s fingers tensed where they brushed against his on the edge of the trapdoor, both of them prepared for the damning word as if it would hurt. A longer pause ensued, though not a silent one, as Mr. Lazzara filled the time with much hemming and humming before pronouncing the name: 

“It was the Timberwolf.” 

Now there was silence, so entire and unsettling that Adam almost risked leaning down to catch a glimpse of the lord commodore’s face so that he might interpret it rightly. 

“Well,” said his Lordship with a clap of his hands and a tone that suggested he was repressing a smile, “this has been a productive visit after all. Deliver my regards to your wife. If you hear of your son before I do, send word to the fort at once, on pain of my deepest displeasure.” And with hardly a wish good-morning, he swept out of the barn, and the befuddled Mr. Lazzara followed. 

“We have to go,” said John, already up and motioning for the other men to roll up the mainsail. “Adam?” 

Adam was sitting back on his heels, looking rather stricken. He had not planned to spend much time with his family on this visit; in fact, he dreaded the idea of facing their curiosity, or worse, their lack of it, to be scrutinized for his escape with as little interest in why he had gone or what he had done as they would have in the exploits of Mrs. Chamberlain’s hogs. 

He had not considered what was quickly becoming a worse prospect: that he could not even go home to suffer that indignity in the first place! To reveal himself, even to his father alone, would be to put the entire family in danger from the highest possible source—at his age, a Lord Commodore of the Royal Navy seemed to Adam the greatest authority on earth next to a king. 

“Adam?” John repeated, a firm hand on his shoulder. 

“Ready,” he said. As they descended, carrying the sail between the four of them, he said, “Well, I guess I’m really a pirate now, if I wasn’t before.” 

“What?” John was preoccupied with something. 

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What business did he have with the Summer Stars?” John murmured, half to himself.

Chapter Text

~1722~

The Timberwolf had no need, truly, to stop for a good while; they had provisioned thoroughly in Pensacola. But all the same, it lightened many a heart when Adam called for the ship to come to harbor in town for the night. The boats were let down, and most of the crew disembarked for a change of scene—and a change from the constant circling of one another that had marked the past days. All looked forward to a night with some of the familiar comforts of home. 

The moment they reached town, they discovered that whatever the home comforts, familiarity was in short supply. The half-light of early evening had begun to filter grey and yellow through the spindly pines that surrounded the settlement, and it cast grasping shadows across the houses, the road, the faces of one’s fellows, as if to caress their faces with long, cold fingers. In such lighting, everything felt strange and unknown, and the pirates shivered at the echoing chatters of the kingfisher and the distant heron’s rough-throated caws. Adam, having grown up in the Carolinas and having visited this town once, was not so alarmed by the wiry trees and eerie bird-calls that alarmed his northern crew, but he was unnerved still by the way all the locals on the street fixed their gaze on the visitors, as if they were trying to see through to their hearts. Adam considered his heart a very personal organ. He did not care to have it examined by old women on Floridian verandas. 

One such perceptive old dame, flyaway blonde hairs escaping from a towering turban, accosted them as they passed her door. She clutched Miss Williams’ hand in both of hers, making the girl curse abruptly. 

“Tell your fortune, dearie?”

Miss Williams extricated her hand (which was something of an ordeal, this woman’s many rings clamping round her in a kind of vise) and excused herself on the pretense of visiting a sick orphan with whom she was acquainted. 

Then a large-mustachioed man swept out of the house next door and placed his broad-chested self between the woman and the visitors. “Ignore her, she’s only an old bag-woman plying her trade.” Said bag-woman called him a few choice names in return. Before they could thank him and be on their way, he went on: “What you need is a true master of the psychic arts!” And with a flourish of his wide cuffs, he gestured them into his own abode. 

Exclamations of “Oh, no,” and “Be serious!” went up from the group, and they left the two mediums to glare and blame one another for the lost trade. 

The further they pressed into the little town, the more they became convinced that there was nothing to be had here but mediums and diviners of every persuasion. One could hardly turn down an alley-way without having one’s palm read. Many predictions were shouted at the crew as a sample of the wares to be had; they were told alternately of death stalking them, of long and peaceful old ages, of fame and fortune and destitution, and that their captain would take his quartermaster for a lover—this last so thoroughly rebuked by Master O’Connell that Adam was nearly actually insulted instead of just play-insulted.

At last, they came to the little plaza, such as it existed—a widening of the dirt road, a weather-beaten oak in the center forming a sort of roundabout, a small church, and two public houses squared off, one against another, on either side. The houses were built in the usual style, of clapboards with the ground floor and garden walls white with coquina and lime wash. Matching balconies overlooked one another, providing patrons a respite from the heat and a view of the plaza, in case anyone wanted such a thing. Indeed, the two houses could have been built at the same time. But, as twins are distinguished by their dress and the company they keep, so were these buildings. The house on the north side of the plaza was somewhat dirtier with use; every light in the building blazed with the sounds of laughter and arguments inside, and a man with no trousers sat on the balcony, drunkenly serenading an attentive osprey. The house to the south was much neater, and a much more sedate and complex music wafted from the dimly-lit interior. The former house was marked by a large sign announcing it the Dangerous Business; the latter was called simply Hotel Cassadaga. 

With one mind, the pirates turned toward the Dangerous Business. 

“Belay there,” said Adam, who was bringing up the rear. When his crew turned to look at him, he rather sheepishly said, “For a number of…secret reasons, I’m not allowed in there anymore. Let’s try our luck next door, shall we?” This was assented to with only a little grumbling, and a good deal of straightening one another’s outfits, for the Hotel Cassadaga seemed, at least from the outside, to stand on appearances more than its competitor. 

Adam knocked at the door, doing up one last button on his waistcoat before a servant answered it. The party was admitted and introduced to the innkeepers, a pair of sarcastic-looking men around John’s age. The darker-haired young man with the narrow, pensive frown informed them that they were too late for supper, and the dance was already begun, if —and here he looked over their clothes knowingly—they were interested in that sort of thing. 

Adam assured him they were not, and would take such grub as could be found lying around the kitchen at such an hour for poor travelers. On the self-description, he withdrew his purse from an inner pocket, inspecting it as if he expected to find nothing, but revealing meaningfully that it was a purse of no insignificant weight. 

The second innkeeper had been tending bar and attending to the conversation at the same time; his wide-eyed, scatter-shot intensity reminded John of his most fascinating history tutor. When this man caught sight of Adam’s gesture, he emerged from behind the bar to introduce himself as Kasher and rest an affectionate hand upon his fellow’s thin shoulder. “Con, why don’t you show our new friends upstairs?”

The frowning innkeeper arched one eyebrow and admitted that there was also a pleasant open-air seating arrangement on the first floor where poor travelers might pass an evening, and if Mesdames and Messieurs would follow him…

Mesdames and Messieurs would indeed, and so he led them past the hall where there was dancing. It must be a peculiar dance, for the music sounded as somber and bittersweet as their host, but the partygoers laughed and their footsteps tripped along the floorboards as airily as if they could not hear the mournful tunes. Up a wide staircase they went, two abreast, and were shown to the first-floor dining-room, which was nearly a balcony, its four walls open to the scent of the magnolia trees growing alongside the hotel, their heavy boughs shaking petals onto the tiled floor. Only a few guests peppered the outer tables, and they expressed no interest in the newcomers, who behaved at once as though they had the place to themselves.

The peculiar street of fortune-tellers and mystics, although it had posed no danger to the crew, took on the appearance of a gauntlet through which they had passed together and, having conquered which travail, bonded them for the night. This soldiers’ camaraderie, combined with the fine ale that flowed freely from the taps of the Hotel Cassadaga, made what could otherwise have been a tense meal into an increasingly easy one. Stories of the Timberwolf’s exploits in the intervening years were brought out and brushed off for the benefit of the late Terror’s crew, who heard them with all the appropriate ovations. Mr. Kasher brought up breads and cheeses and some fruits left over from the entertainments below. The humid summer air grew lighter as the sky grew darker around them, till the evening dissolved into a mild night. 

At some time well past supper, an argument broke out at the Dangerous Business, audible even across the street. The voices of the offended party (or perhaps the offending) grew nearer as they were ejected from the premises, considered returning to their ship, vetoed such a retreat when the night was still young, and summarily made their wishes known to the good hosts of the Hotel Cassadaga, who showed them likewise to the upper dining-room. However, all the particulars of this series of events were lost on our heroes, who were engrossed in a critical piece of the ship’s history—its unfortunate inability to keep a quartermaster. 

“They say the job has a curse on it,” said John, betraying his earlier claim that he had not kept up with the Timberwolf’s exploits while away. “That nobody can be master of this ship—or the Stars before her, for that matter—without something nasty happening to him. And yet you, Mark O’Connell, most careful avoider of curses I have ever met, took up the post!”

“Well, you see. I know exactly what happened to all those assholes.”

“And it won’t happen to you?”

“Nah,” he said. “Cause most times, I happened to ‘em.” He rehearsed the well-loved story of earning the name Thunderfoot, then stammered out an acknowledgement of John’s exit, which he granted he had played some role in. But he was not long in this regretful humor, for then there were maroonings to tell of, and a man bitten by a sea serpent—which, he granted, he had not played a role in, but he wished for it very heartily. “Because I found out that morning that he was fixing to mutiny, and I was on my way—right on my way to tell Ed, but Faz spotted a sea serpent on watch and decided he wanted to hunt it instead. Wanted its skin. Which is plotting a mutiny AND dereliction of duty. So him getting his arm bit off was pure justice. Then we fired Rubano too, after that, though my vote was for marooning. Double marooning, really, cause you give a man mercy after he mutinies once and then he pays you back by helping plot a second one?” He nodded solemnly. “Double marooning.”

“We did not maroon Rubano, double or single,” Adam said in a fair stab at a lighthearted tone. 

“No. Put him ashore ten miles out of town with no supplies nor shoes. Last I heard, he took up with a traveling magician.” 

“Is that a polite way of saying he’s dead?” asked Michel.

Mark, with several oaths, explained helpfully that he was damned if he knew and damned again if he cared. 

John frowned. “Forget the magician—you had two mutinies?” 

“Well, three, but I started one of ‘em. ‘Cause of the whole fiasco with Fred.” Mark spit derogatorily. 

This tale took longer in the telling than Fazzi’s sea serpent. Shortly after losing the future Terror crew, the Timberwolf hired a new quartermaster, an older, abler sailor than any of them, one well-acquainted with the colonial merchant navy and full of bright ideas to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the Timberwolf’s operations. For a time, Mark admitted, things went well. They were more successful even than they had been with John. “No offense,” he added. 

“None taken.” 

“But he didn’t like me. Nothing personal, he said, just I was shit at my job. Only he said it more genteel, and he didn’t say it to my face; he said it to Ed to try and get me sacked.” Exclamations of horror were had round the table. “Didn’t work, thank Christ, but he didn’t care much for Ed either, so after that he just chatted around and got himself made captain. As you do. But nothing personal! We were just behind the times, you know. Didn’t we know the real way to get ahead in piracy was to take the honorable path, to accept the pardon and turn privateer, all that king-and-country bullshit. And it fuckin’ scared me!” Mark had drunk just enough to lose his self-consciousness, so he confessed with bright-cheeked honesty. “I was twenty-one—twenty-two? Barely, and this grown man, this Respectable Sailor who’s been at sea half as long as I’ve been alive says you, you can’t do shit right, I hate you, everybody should hate you. Feels like you’re the only person on the whole fuckin’ ocean, especially because—” 

Here he held his tongue. The flush of embarrassment was replaced quickly by another look, one of guilt at letting slip something he shouldn’t. 

“Because what?” Michel asked, laying one hand on his arm. 

He was in for it now. Instead of setting him at ease, her special attention made him even more agitated. “I shouldn’t have run my mouth,” he said. “Don’t mind me. It didn’t even matter. Once I told him man-to-man, Adam was on my side all the way.”

“And why shouldn’t he have been?” said John slowly. 

Mark blew out a breath and looked at Adam, who looked briefly at the ceiling as if hoping it might drop on them. But that Providence who led the conversation in this miserable direction also protected the hotel ceiling, so Adam had to speak. “I was—I mean…” He sighed and tried again, slower. “He’d been a good mentor to me for a while there. Fred. I put my vote behind him for captain.”

“Did you?” 

The intensity of John’s gaze had a way of making Adam feel dreadfully young; he wanted to squirm away from it. “It didn’t sound so awful, the thought of making more money with less danger to our hides. You weren’t there; he had ideas—”

“Ideas like throwing Mark off the ship!” 

“I’m not proud of it—”

“That’s the spirit.” 

“John!” he protested. 

“What we haven’t talked about,” said John, pointing a finger at Adam, “is that you took the King’s pardon. That I, quite frankly, do not understand. You sold Ed out for some stranger so that you could, what, be a respectable privateer? Since when has that been your dream?”

“Now, hold on,” Shaun interjected reasonably. “So did we.”

Adam, who had been mumbling a half-hearted defense of Captain Mascherino’s vision for the ship’s future, was stung to life by this revelation. “You did?”

Much as he would have liked to, John could not lie well, not to Adam, and certainly not with Shaun beside him setting the record unpleasantly straight. So he stammered over his retraction, admitted that the Terror had accepted a letter of marque for a few years, although, he avowed childishly, they had never done nearly as well for themselves under British colors as the Timberwolf had, so somehow what they had done was still less heinous. 

“Being good at privateering is no cure-all,” Adam said. “It wasn’t a jolly old time with the governor watchin’ our every move—”

“I’m sure you spent many a night crying into your overflowing treasure chests—” 

Mark waved his hands. “All right, all right,” he said. “We all hate England more than we did before, all right? That’s not the point.” 

“Exactly,” said Michel, letting her chair fall forward from where she had been leaned back watching her brother and Adam spar. “The point is, whyever you did it and however well it turned out for you, you betrayed us, and not three years later did the same goddamned thing to Eddie.” 

“I—”

“And you have the gall now to smile and bow and welcome us aboard like you’re a changed man and everything is lovely.” 

“Listen!” Adam protested. “I meant—”

“Well?” He nodded. She scoffed. “All you’ve ever done in your life is mean well. I hope your good intentions are a great comfort when you equivocate and sell and betray your way into dying alone, right on the deck of your Timberwolf.” Her hand flew to her mouth, as if she had never meant that to be spoken aloud, but spoken it was, and so spoken that she would not take it back. Adam looked like a ghost. 

“I’m sorry to interrupt. It sounds like you were having a little family squabble.” The first thing one noticed about the sea-captain who approached them was his eyes. They were the clearest blue anyone had ever seen, eyes like the sea at the height of summer, just as bright and just as deep, eyes you could sail into and make it halfway round the world. 

“What?” John snapped, ignoring the man’s beautiful eyes. 

“Captain Green,” he said easily, “of the Great Golden out of Philadelphia.”

“Charmed.” John took the time spent shaking Captain Green’s hand to catch a slowing breath through gritted teeth.

“Did I overhear you say you were from the ship Timberwolf?”

“That is where Fortune has us just now, sir,” he answered drily.

“That’s what I thought.” At once, Captain Green gripped John’s hand vise-tight, and John caught his breath as he felt the unmistakable press of a pistol mouth in his side. Captain Green smiled, friendly-like. “You have something of mine. I must have it back.” 

Scarcely a moment passed—certainly not long enough for John to realize what Captain Green wanted nor craft a witty retort telling him he should not have it—before the sound of another pistol cocking echoed in the hushed dining-room. “Get away from him!” Michel’s hand was steady as she pointed her gun at the strange captain’s temple. 

He tilted his head toward her, a manic grin twisting his handsome features. “Do you have it then, my lady?” As he spoke, men on all sides got up from the tables nearby, drawing their weapons as they stood. Our fearless crew was utterly surrounded. 

Adam got to his feet, and the enemy hesitated as they realized he was by far the tallest man there. “Hold on. Hold everything, here. What is it exactly you’re wanting from my shipmate?” he asked, hands held wide and casual. “Because if it’s his undivided attention, he doesn’t give that to anything but music, and if it’s his hand in marriage, Shaun Cooper’s been claiming that since 1713, so we’d have to arrange a duel for him.” He turned slowly, meeting the eyes of every man in their turn. “And if it’s something that isn’t his to give—I mean, if it’s something of ours, or definitely if it’s mine—I have a lot of really good hats, and people have been admiring them lately. But. Well.” In one flourish, he was drawn, his saber glinting in the lamplight as he turned it this way and that, daring all comers at once. “You’ll have to go through me.”

“It’s the finger of Henry Rollins I want,” said Captain Green. “And I’ll have it, or blow a hole in his pretty side.” He cocked his pistol, and John’s jaw clenched at the sound. 

“Careful there,” said Adam. “Someone might do something stupid.” As he spoke, he let his eyes roam over his own crew, meeting their gazes in turn. “I mean really, colossally stupid. The sort of idea that you discuss at dinner in Newark after an adventure with loggers that gets you called off your rocker, but you know what? In desperate situations like this? A man starts to think it might not be so stupid anymore.”  

Two actions then happened at once, the hearers having read Adam’s cues impeccably. First, Mark heaved up a bench from their table and, wielding it like the battle hammer Shaun had never permitted him to get, he took one great swing and flattened four assailants, just as he had proposed doing in Newark after an adventure with loggers. 

At that moment—taking advantage of Captain Green’s split-second distraction—Michel brought the butt of her pistol down hard on his arm, forcing his gun away from John, where it fired uselessly into the floor between them. 

The gunshot above informed the patrons attending the dance on the ground floor that something exciting was happening, to which they responded by screaming and fleeing in chaos. The fight in the dining-room proceeded apace, with as much sprightly motion and changing of partners as the dance had done. The Great Golden had the advantage of numbers, but they found themselves matched with foes who were as surprised as they at the formidable defense they were putting up. It was as if a one-armed man, long accustomed to working around his loss, were suddenly reunited with his missing arm and found himself capable of much he had forgotten. Michel caught herself wondering ever so briefly, as she and Adam finished off an enemy together, why they had ever given this up. It was a foolish wondering, but it expressed how well things were going. 

Adam knocked Captain Green away from John and squared off against him in the center of the dining-room. The strange captain was vicious, especially in such close quarters, and Adam’s arms were soon stinging, laced with new cuts. But those arms still gave an advantage of strength, and he pressed the man till he was backed against the dining-room wall, their swords locked between them. 

“How did you know to look for us?” Adam demanded, his sword slipping up Captain Green’s blade another inch as he loomed over him.  

Captain Green had to look up to meet his eyes. “Ask me nicely, Adam,” he said, with a remarkably serene smile for a man with a large saber creeping ever closer to his throat. 

“No—no, I see what you’re doing,” Adam said with a shake of his head. “You overheard us talking, that’s all. You didn’t fortune-tell my name. You’re not—” 

“Not magic?” Captain Green bit his lip as he struggled to force back Adam’s blade. “It wasn’t a very good trick, I guess. No better than the frauds in the street down there. Do you want to see a better one?” 

The blue of his eyes brightened, like sunlight flashing off the waves, so much that Adam had to blink back the glare. When his sight cleared, Captain Green was fading away into mist! 

The sudden lack of resistance sent Adam stumbling into the wall, and all around him he heard collisions and exclamations of dismay as his crew found themselves likewise unopposed; the crew of the Great Golden followed their peculiar captain into the aether.

“Sound off,” Adam panted, turning to assess the damages. “Any dead—and anyone else disappearing on me?”

One of the Timberwolf’s men was dead, as well as three from the Great Golden . Adam knelt to inspect them; their still-corporeal bodies the only proof that the encounter really happened, that the Timberwolf’s crew had not gone mad and hacked each other in their frenzy. He murmured an oath and tried to stand, but a sudden faintness overcame him, and he staggered in the motion. Mark caught his arm to help him up, then exclaimed himself—Adam’s sleeves were soaked with blood. 

All were then consumed with collecting their things and their wounded and escaping the dining-room before the hosts investigated and found only one crew to charge for the damages. Their quarrel was, for a short time, forgotten. Perhaps forgotten is too magnanimous a word. It was put up, at least, till it could be dealt with again, and it watched its players like a broken doll on a high shelf.

Chapter Text

~1715~

The next days were dreadful ones, as they tried to steal out of Carolina and lose the Victory. Adam and John had gone directly to Captain Reyes upon returning from the Lazzaras’, and within minutes the whole crew knew they were being hunted not only by a cutter, but by one of the best-armed frigates in the fleet. All hands did their duty with a dread punctuality. No one sang or whistled on deck, and few got any sleep. They never saw the monstrous ship—for all they really knew, they had lost it simply by leaving the shipyards so promptly—but every superstition that allowed one to sense a ship’s presence had the men convinced that it lurked around each turn of the coast. 

The worst part of the situation, said someone, was that they had not re-provisioned their ship since arriving in Carolina. This would have been done after mending the sail, but now they dared not stop. John noted wryly that if the Victory caught up to them, the thin rations would quickly stop being the worst part of their situation. No one laughed. Angry and disagreeable stomachs lead to angry and disagreeable sailors.

On the third day of sailing, the ship was caught in a great sea fog. The warm day gave way to a bank of low-rolling mist so thick that Michel, standing at the helm, could not see the bowsprit. She called for the sails to be taken in. 

“Captain;” she met him as he left his cabin, “I don’t dare steer us anywhere in this.” It was not, she explained, a failure of nerve. At their proximity to the coast, there could be all manner of rocks and sandbars on which to strand themselves that they would feel long before seeing. He proposed sailing further out to sea to get into clear water and clearer skies. Her face looked grim, and even he admitted he did not much care for it. The Victory was heavier in the draught than they, and would be sailing further out as it was. They could run right into her path. On the other hand, they could be sitting ducks for her if they waited for the fog to clear.

“Or she could sail right past us,” said Michel. 

So they dropped anchor and waited. If the mood aboard ship was restless in motion, it was gunpowder-tense when halted. The fog drifted, heavy and cold, across the deck as the pirates paced, writhing around their legs like grey, slimy sea snakes. Mark checked and re-checked the guns lest the damp get to them. Shaun went with him on the first two rounds, then, seeing that he was even more helpless in this endeavor than Mark, climbed on deck to bring drinks to the crew still watching above. Everywhere, whispers. Whispers about magic, whispers about God’s judgment, whispers about having your throat slit in the dark. 

Day gave way to night. The fog gave way to nothing. Against the few arcs of lantern-light on deck, it stood up straight, walling them in on all sides. 

Adam, who had been lookout, climbed down the mainmast around midnight to change places with Timothy, who was taking his place for the middle watch. “Don’t fall asleep up there,” he teased. 

“I won’t,” grumbled Timothy, which was a categorical falsehood. By the time Adam’s feet hit the deck, he could hear soft snores from the crow’s nest in time with the rocking of the ship. He smiled. 

He took a turn around the deck to re-adjust to his proper altitude before going below. Even after more than a year on the high seas, a turn in the crow’s nest still made him a little dizzy. With everyone else gone to bed and Timothy snoozing above, this was the first time he had been properly alone in weeks. He swung his arms and shook them out, shaking his head like a dog to wake himself. He would have enjoyed a little song, if they were not all so deathly afraid of being heard. 

As if in answer to his unspoken wish, a low whistle came from somewhere beyond and below. 

Adam found, upon hearing it, that he did not after all enjoy having a little song just now. Still, he crept to the port railing, because to see a real siren (other than his Aunt Bernadette) before Mark would be a thing to lord over him for ever, and no amount of fear could make him pass up that opportunity.

The whistle came again: the same little tune, a signal rather than a song. Adam drew his pistol and looked. His attention was drawn first by a white handkerchief, waving softly as if it meant to sweep away some of the fog drifting past it. The handkerchief belonged to a man, and the man was sitting in a small rowboat that looked practically new. Adam chuckled to himself at the thought that one could never escape one’s upbringing; only a shipbuilder’s son would notice the quality of a boat before the person in it. 

As for the person, the young man was dressed in naval blues, so Adam kept a hand on his pistol, white flag or no. But something about the long greyhound-face and creased brow tugged at his memory. This was not just another able-bodied sailor. 

“John Cornelius?” he whisper-exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing in a boat?”

John Cornelius O’Callaghan V, for indeed it was the Lord Commodore’s rather gangly son, looked out from under his handheld flag of truce. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “I hoped it might be you. Come down here.” 

“Uh…” Adam almost laughed in his face. “No.”

John Cornelius rolled his big eyes, the spitting image of his disdainful father. “I’m not armed. That’s what this is for,” he said, waving the handkerchief for emphasis. “My father doesn’t know I came, so I’m in rather a hurry.” 

Adam looked around the deserted deck once more. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m bringing a gun.” 

John Cornelius grumbled something about typical pirates that, luckily for him, was unintelligible in the fog, but he pulled up as near the Timberwolf as he could while Adam threw a ladder over the side and descended to sit in the rowboat with the young sailor. 

“Well?” said Adam, hands in his lap. Between the two of them with their long limbs, the boat was rather crowded. 

“My father doesn’t know I’ve come to see you,” repeated John Cornelius.

“Me?” 

“Well, come to talk to any of the pirates,” he clarified, “but it is convenient having it be you who spotted me. You seem like a decent fellow. Sort of reasonable.” 

“Thank you. You’re not so bad yourself.”

“Since I’m in some hurry, I’ll cut the pleasantries. To be plain, the Victory is waiting for you just around the peninsula that you can’t see up ahead. You can’t escape north, the way you came, because you’ll run directly into the Hopeless. And. Well. My father intends to board your ship and slaughter every one of you in the morning.” 

“Oh.” 

“Well—not strictly every one of you. We’re to rescue a lady that you have prisoner, one Mehitabel Nolan.” As soon as Adam understood what he was being told, his nose wrinkled in distaste (he could see why she preferred Michel), but John Cornelius took his look as either confusion or a feigned expression of the same. “Do you have her?” 

“We don’t keep prisoners on the Timberwolf,” Adam said glibly, “and definitely none named Mehitabel. I would know.” 

John Cornelius sighed. “If you say so.”

“Why do you want her so bad? You her sweetheart or something?” 

This elicited an actual groan from the miserable John Cornelius, as if he was thinking about an upcoming work of dentistry he was to have done. “Not exactly. But I am to marry her.” 

He went on to explain that the O’Callaghans had recently become very good friends with the Nolans of King’s County, Long Island, a family that, if not pristinely reputable, was most certainly rich. Some years ago, the Nolans’ only daughter was kidnapped by pirates—a terrible tragedy—and in their distress, they appealed to their good friend Lord Commodore O’Callaghan. In advance of the navy finding their beloved child and rescuing both her and their reputation, they offered their daughter’s hand for the lord commodore’s son. “I assume there’s a shocking amount of money tied up in the bargain,” said John Cornelius, “only I couldn’t have been bothered to sit in on the negotiations.” 

“What about John?” said Adam, half indignant. “Are they not looking for him, too?” 

“Oh. So you do know them.” 

Adam’s heart sank.

John Cornelius leaned in toward his silent companion. “To be perfectly honest with you, I can’t give a damn about this whole thing. And I’ve tried. I don’t know Miss Nolan from Eve. I don’t particularly care to marry at this point in my career. And I definitely don’t care to risk my life for a bride when I could go home and find several thousand perfectly decent girls who are not pirate-brides and do not take blood sacrifices to get. But,” he sighed again, “my father and hers have other plans. So if it must be Miss Nolan, I want to put as little trouble as possible into winning her.” 

The distaste, the dismissal of one of the best women Adam knew by someone who had never even met her brought a rush of blood to his cheeks, and he was speaking again before he could stop himself. “She’s too good to get put on a shelf by a, a stuffed—fucking stuffed-shirt bastard like you. She deserves—” 

“She deserves to die in infamy on Gallows Hill, is that it? Or a slow, gory bleed-out on the deck of your ship? Like a true, free pirate.” Adam fell silent, and John Cornelius leaned in to press his advantage. “You might get your wish. I’ve heard lady pirates go into battle disguised as boys, and I’ll be honest with you, in the fight tomorrow, I won’t bother asking my opponents if they happen to be my intended in disguise. You can all die nobly and freely together. Or whatever pirates do.” 

“What are you telling me all this for? So we’ll quake in our boots all night? We won’t surrender.”

“Aren’t you listening? I don’t want a fight at all. I want your help to avoid it.” 

Adam swallowed hard, his fingers ticking anxiously over the cold metal of the pistol in his lap, and the fingers of the fog creeping inexorably over his. “How?”

~

The fog cleared away by morning; the Victory still nowhere to be seen. Michel was cheered as much by the sun’s return as by her suggestion having worked so neatly. Adam could hardly look at her for the brightness. His eyes were heavy with how ill he had slept, but no one remarked upon it, for who among them could say they slept soundly the past days?

He turned away from that pure sunshine and begged the captain to let a few of them go ashore for the day; he knew a little town nearby where they could fetch such provisions as would get them to the next major port without risking the high visibility of taking a prize. This allowed, a shopping-list was compiled and money provided from the general funds. The Timberwolf drew closer to shore, into the little cove that the morning had revealed them to be floating beside. 

“Destry,” said Adam, holding out his hand gallantly. “You have to come.” She smiled even brighter. 

It was the sort of excursion John would have enjoyed as well, but he had been detained below by Mark, who needed his advice on some indifferent matter of utmost urgency, so he did not hear their plans—indeed, did not know they had gone till the boat was already on the beach, disguised with foliage, and the young vagabonds well on their way to town. 

If the following misadventure feels unlikely, dear reader, one must remember, if one can, the heady effects of youth and sunshine on sober judgment. In addition to these enticements, our heroine was further absorbed by a sense to which readers may not relate, unless they have recently escaped almost certain death. Moreover, Michel Nolan had been facing death off and on for three years, and the fact that she had not once died, not even a little, had given her a delicious sense of invincibility. So although they had been charged most solemnly to buy their provisions and return with all haste, Michel took Adam’s offered arm and allowed their pace to dally more and more behind the other hands, till their last quarter-mile into town was taken at a gentle stroll, as if they were a pair of farmers visiting on a Sunday.

A few shopkeepers had a sideways glance to spare for the tall young man and the lady with him, dressed alike in sailors’ wide-legged trousers and linen shirts, her long curls only tied back with a ribbon. But they were so uniformly pleasant to speak to and pleased with everything they saw that no one complained of them long—especially once gold began trading hands. 

The Adam of a year past, who had cursed his lack of skill in lying—or anything like it, for this was not quite a lie, but it served the same turn—would have marveled at himself now, chatting blithely away with a tempest behind his eyes. He could hardly look at the barrels of salt pork and molasses they were meant to be buying; his eyes swam with thoughts of the Victory coming upon them, and not only thoughts, but images played out on a stage between him and the market-goods: thick black cannon-smoke stinging his eyes, falling bodies and screams of agony as grape-shot tore through masts and limbs alike. He did not even have to picture dying in grim combat on deck; a ship with the firepower of the Victory, catching them with nowhere to run, could ruin them without even boarding. 

“Where are you bound on this fine day, my pretty sailors?” asked a fisherwife, with a lilting song in her voice that told of disguises and elopements and adventures. Whoever the young people she imagined Adam and Michel to be, Adam hoped they lived happier than their doubles here. 

“Far away to Italy, mother,” said Michel warmly. 

“Are we?” said Adam. 

“I am,” she laughed. “And you may come with me if you like.” 

“If it’s to sunny Italy you are bound,” said this kind old lady, who Adam nonetheless wished he had never seen, “then you must have ribbons and pretty things for to see pretty sights.” She bent, with little oaths for her aging bones, to fetch a box of ribbons that she would not let them leave till Michel had inspected, despite the girl’s polite protestations that they really ought to move along. 

“Italy will wait,” the old woman insisted. “Is this not a fine piece, and in just your color…” 

Michel reached out to touch the green ribbon she was offered. The callouses on her fingers caught the soft fabric, and her hand leapt away as if she were afraid to tear it with the roughness of her skin. 

“It is very fine,” she agreed. “Too fine for me, I think. Thank you.” 

Adam thought again of the green silk dress, the one that ought to be admired in society ballrooms but was instead their secret, shut away in a tiny cabinet in a cramped cabin. He thought of Michel’s impassioned cry as she saw herself in it—God, what I would give! He thought of that dress soaked in blood and sinking to the sea-floor, a shroud for its owner. 

“We ought to go back soon,” she spoke lowly as she drew him away from the fisherwife. “They will miss us aboard.” 

Adam’s insides hollowed. So far his plan had gone without trouble, but as the moment drew near he feared he would not have the stomach to it. But stomach it he must, or else face all his worst imaginings. 

“I happen to know,” he said conspiratorially, “of an inn just ahead there. What do you say you and I have one last drink ashore before we’re off to—what did you say, Italy?”

Michel arched one perfect eyebrow. “Just you and I?” 

Adam laughed and rested his chin on her shoulder. “Well,” he murmured into her hair, “I haven’t told Gates and Barnett about it. Unless you want to invite them.” Michel flushed. 

The inn took shape at the end of the road. One could see its dusty windows, though whether for the dust or the distance, one could not yet see anyone inside them. Adam swallowed and fixed his feet in that direction, but they would not do what he bid them. He stopped in the middle of the street, Michel pulling up short beside him. “All right?” she said.

This lie came the most naturally, for it was not one at all. He pressed his purse into her hand and gave her a summer-warm smile to remember him by. “You go on ahead and buy the first round. I’ll send the others to the boat to load up the stores, and then I’ll come back for you.”

Michel squeezed his hand and hurried away. Adam’s face fell as she turned from him, and before she had reached the heavy inn door, before it fell closed between them, he was stumbling away in the other direction. 

The reader must give us leave to let Adam trace his lonely path back to the boat without us, for he never knew any more of what passed behind him than what his miserable imagination could torment him with. We, however, are not bound by his ignorance, and can—one might say must—follow the lady instead, as with unknowing feet she treads the trap set for her. 

The inn was much darker than the sun-drenched street, so Michel had stepped fully inside before her eyes adjusted and she realized who waited at the largest table. She had never met John Cornelius O’Callaghan V, so she did not recognize him in and of himself, sitting with his hands folded and an expectant, urgent look on his greyhound face. But she knew the look of five men in British naval uniform as well as any pirate. Before she could feign innocence and pass them by, they were approached, their broad, horrible hands closing on her arms.

Perhaps Adam had the right idea in looking away.

Chapter Text

~1722~

The colorful, various, and evocative curses echoing from the sick bay might have led one to believe Mark had taken the worst in the fight against the Great Golden, and that Shaun was reconstructing every one of his bones from scratch. 

John, however, fed up with the closed door and in need of an antiseptic other than grog, finally swept past the other waiting injured only to pause on the threshold, blinking. Although Mark was indeed the one swearing so floridly, he was also the one holding the needle. Shaun stood braced against the table as his shipmate stitched up a wide cut on his forehead. 

“Second cabinet,” said he, anticipating even with his eyes closed what the intruder was looking for. John could not suppress his smile as he left the sick bay. He had read that ships’ surgeons customarily mended themselves. The Royal Navy’s surgeons did not have such stouthearted companions. 

Once they were alone again, Shaun let out a shuddery little exhale. “Shit,” he added, wincing away a tear.

At this crack in the very brave manner he’d taken his surgery thus far, Mark’s litany instantly changed tune. “Nah, it’s fine. It’s fine. You’re fucking fine. I just gotta tie a knot in it—you’re fucking fine; we’re shit fucking dandy. Do you want a knot on your forehead? Too bad, here I go.” 

John, meanwhile, carried his supplies to the captain’s cabin, where Adam was leaning back in a chair, looking very pale. (He had refused being put to bed, even though Michel offered the room back for the night, because he only had so many bed-linens and did not care to bleed all over the best ones). One broad hand rested over his eyes. As John hurried to his side, he stirred faintly. “John, I need you to know I’m all right, really. I was just—ow.” He stopped abruptly as John tried to peel his bloodsoaked shirt away from his arm, where it had stuck to his wounds. “Ow! Avast there, surgeon.” 

“Shut up,” said John, tongue between his teeth as he picked at the ruined fabric. “All right, well, this has got to go.” 

“Oh!” said Adam, bashful. “You’ll have to, ah, to help me out here—I’ll complain a lot more if I have to get my arms over my head.” 

“Right.” John stood back to assess. Tearing his captain’s shirt off seemed excessively violent (he let it pass that in his mind he was calling Adam his captain), so he unsheathed his dagger. “Hold still.” Adam, for all his faults, took direction well. He froze as if he were sitting for a portrait, hands in his lap, while John drew in and took a handful of Adam’s shirt in his left hand, linen damp with blood and sweat. The first cut, down the center, was easy. It laid Adam’s chest bare, and John had to force himself to keep his eyes to his work. They had slept in bunks one over the other in the fo'c'sle; they had seen each other half-dressed a thousand times on a thousand and one nights. If Adam was broader, more muscular, marked by new scars and tattoos, each won in a story without him…what was that to him? He let out his breath and turned his attention to the sleeves. This step invited much less speculating about the past, because these were full red, drying against his wounds. As John cut the stained fabric away, he could feel every time Adam winced and gasped at the pain. As he peeled the second sleeve back from a painful cut on his forearm, Adam’s free hand flung out and gripped John’s arm. 

“Shit,” he moaned through gritted teeth. 

“Almost done,” John reassured, eyes fixed on the last of the fabric. “I’ve never seen wounds like this; it doesn’t make any sense.” 

“It’s showing off. He didn’t want me dead. Damned if I know why.” 

John chuckled. “Well, that was nice of him.” 

“Quite a fellow. I feel like I can—” Adam shuddered, “—still sort of feel his vanishing mist clinging to my skin. Or maybe that’s just the blood.”

At last, Adam’s shirt lay in shreds on the cabin floor, utterly butchered, while a flush crept up its erstwhile wearer’s cheeks. John, thankful for the cabin’s dim light to cover the burning on his own face, fetched cloths and a basin of water and pulled up a seat next to Adam, their legs brushing. He worked in silence, wiping the drying blood from Adam’s cuts. It ran in brown-red rivulets down his tanned arms, following the curves of his muscles like rainwater cutting streams down a mountainside. John still couldn’t quite believe, sometimes, that this was Adam Lazzara he had once been able to knock to the ground in a fair fight. He imagined the tables would be turned if they tried again. 

He hoped they would not need to try again. 

Thinking of their fighting brought to his mind the argument from the tavern. He frowned. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that today.” 

“I probably deserved it,” Adam admitted. “Have you written to Eddie lately?”

“Not since I left.” 

“We have his new address—you should write. He’d like to hear from you in his grand retirement, I’m sure,” Adam said with a laugh. “I’ve been meaning to write again, but I’ve—I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.” 

“Wizards and whatnot.” 

“Exactly.” 

“Wizards!” John repeated in wonder. “We never dealt with anything like that the first time we sailed together.” Adam agreed. “Ten years, and the ocean still finds a way to surprise you.”

“May be more surprises coming our way if we see this through,” said Adam as John set to dressing his clean wounds. 

“Like a cave on Long Island?” Adam nodded. “That’ll be the day!”

As Adam smiled, he finally relaxed. “I like that we fought a sea-witch today and are following a severed finger to a cursed treasure as we speak, and yet the cave is the most wonderful thing to you.” 

“Listen,” John said, ducking his head; “the ocean is very wide. I’m sure many things on it would test my understanding of the world, so I try not to set my foot down too firmly on anything. Long Island, however, is not very wide.” 

Their shared laughter was as warm as spices and as sweet as sunshine on the waves. John’s heart could not bear it. 

“That ought to—” he said with a last inspection of Adam’s bandages, suddenly tripping over his words like a boy, “hold you together—hold all your blood inside. Where it belongs.” 

Adam could not look away from him, tilting his head up to John as he flexed his fingers, testing how well he could move done up like this. “I appreciate you takin’ such good care of me.” 

“Yeah—well. All right.” John reached as if to clap Adam on the shoulder in a manly fashion, then thought better of it and clasped his hands behind his back instead. There was nothing that could be said without betraying himself most abominably, so he made his excuses and hurried away, which was a betrayal in itself. 

Michel was pacing the deck, glancing every few steps back at the lights of Cassadaga dancing off the water. “There you are,” she said, catching up to John as soon as he emerged on deck. “We need to go ashore.”

“We need to…what?” John repeated stupidly, unable to make sense of her words, for he had never felt less like he needed something in his life. 

“The captain at the hotel, Captain Green or whatever his name—the way he and his crew vanished…” she began intently.

“Michel…” John began to understand her drift. 

“If they can do that, their ship must be the ship I’m looking for. The ship Jeff is on. It’s incredible fortune to have come so far and still meet them again; we can’t let them get away!”

“We promised to see this quest through,” John said. 

“They can hire new hands. John, if Jeff is alive, he is on that ship, and it could be within our very grasp.”

“Or it could have vanished again,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “We don’t know where or how far they went after they left the hotel, and what’s more, we don’t have a ship of our own.” 

“I know. I know—I know,” she said, “that to marry—to love at all—in a place like this is to borrow, not buy. It is to know the wind will take him out of your hand someday, soon or late, and to be always ready for that day: to let him go when the sea comes to collect, but to say I’ll fight, I’ll cling to you till then. And I was ready—I could have been ready. But to have the wind holding him in sight, just out of my reach! This cannot be the time to let go, or if it is, it is so much crueler than I thought it would be.” 

John pulled her into an embrace. It was his turn to watch the lights of Cassadaga over her shoulder while she clutched his jacket; not crying, her breath deliberately slow. “I miss him too,” he said. “Not as much—”

“Not as much as I?” she said, somewhat muffled. “I fucking hope not.” 

“Well, he never paid me nearly as many compliments.” 

Michel sighed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “This treasure had better be worth as much as Captain Way made it sound,” she said. “I need a ship of my own again.” 

John hummed agreeably. “Do you need patching up at all?” he said.

“Not very badly. I told Shaun to attend to everyone else first.” She saw his hesitation. “I am well, I promise. Just bruised.” She touched his face, rubbed a smudge of what must be Adam’s blood from his cheekbone. “I don’t know how I would be going on, just now, without you.” 

John pulled her in once more and pressed a kiss to the side of her head. She had not asked if he would go with her. It was assumed; they went everywhere together, they always had, ever since he came back from his abysmal pastoral living in Hick’s Neck. He found himself wondering for the first time what it would take to let her go, and hating himself for entertaining the thought. It could not be. He would just have to be clever. 

“You smell of gunpowder,” said Michel, her mood mended well enough to bully her brother. “Go wash up.” He did, still in a kind of daze as he left.

Michel returned to pacing, slower now, the worst of her nervous energy dissipated by one good loss of control. In a little while, once the crew was sufficiently patched and sewn like the raggedy old coats they were, the deck would crawl with tired men, gingerly making ready to sail. Perhaps they ought to have sailed at once, lest the Great Golden make another appearance and finish them off. But, she admitted to herself, she had lingered in a state of secret hope that it might, that she could get a closer look at that crew, or get aboard the ship itself and hunt for a prisoner. Then, too, they had been in no state to leave quickly, in disarray after Adam was wounded. 

Like an actor hearing his cue, Adam appeared. He walked steadily, if slowly, for someone who had so recently lost a not insignificant amount of blood. A clean shirt draped loosely over the outlines of bandages on his strong arms, and his hair was tied up. Sauntering to the railing, he dropped to a seat and let his feet hang over the edge of the ship, sighing at the stars. He had not noticed Michel. This was just as well, since they had not seen each other since the argument at the hotel, and she had spoken much in the heat of the blood. She essayed to escape, but they were the only two creatures on deck, so it was not a long nor a successful attempt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, moving to scramble to his feet. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” 

“Please—I beg you, don’t stand on my account. You’ll keel over,” she said. He obeyed, his long legs swinging slightly against the side of the ship. He was not so near to collapsing as all that, but he appreciated the gesture all the same. “It’s your ship, anyway. You’ll be rid of me as soon as we’re through finding this treasure.” 

“Will I?” he asked softly. Fond daydreams of his old crew rebuilt around him, sailing off into the sunset, now popped like the bubbles they were. Of course she would want to leave a place with such bitter memories!

“Poor Miss Williams has been of two minds who her captain is for weeks. I don’t want to keep her in confusion much longer.” 

“That’s not confusion,” Adam protested; “it’s damned stubbornness. She likes you better than me, and she may be right, but I won’t stand for it anyway.” 

A sigh fought to escape Michel’s lips in spite of her, a wave of old fondness that she had long thought to be killed by time. “I’ve told you,” she said, “we don’t have to play this game. John—” 

“Michel,” he said. “If there was no such man, I would be your friend. I swear it. I—I was, once. Would you let me be again?”

For some reason, the asking outright stung her where the offered jesting had not. “Were you once? A funny way you have of showing it.” She began another retort, but stopped herself. She could not be so petty again. The outbursts at the hotel were children’s barbs. She was a woman, and could think before she spoke, like a woman. “You have done wrong; you have done very wrong, but you know it.” Her voice shook, but she mastered it.

“Yes,” he breathed, and if he too had been lashing out in childish self-defense, now he was the picture of the penitent. 

“He’s a good man, Adam,” she said, meaning John Cornelius. 

“I know.” 

“If he hadn’t been the one in ten thousand—”

“I know,” he said, his handsome face troubled. “Michel, I swear—I swear on a Bible, if I thought he wasn’t dec—decent folks, I would never…”

A misty silence hung between them. “That’s kind of you to say,” said Michel. Everything had been since he pulled her out of the ocean, bowed, and surrendered his cabin to her. All kindness. A night wind swept down from the rigging, ruffling the scarves and frills she had on. Michel shivered as if a ghost had dragged its long fingers along the back of her neck. “I wish that you would say something unkind, for once.” 

Adam frowned for a split second as he made sense of the request, another as he weighed how best to answer it. Then he shifted so that he sat facing her squarely, hands open and unmoving in his lap. Tilting his chin up to meet her eyes, he said in a low voice, “I hoped you would be happy with John Cornelius so that John would forget you.” 

“Oh…” she breathed out. The honesty took her to her knees; it hurt like digging a bullet out of her skin and pouring alcohol on the wound. “More.”

“I wouldn’t let anyone talk about you or John after you left. Everything you did to build up the Timberwolf, I claimed as my own work.” 

“More.” 

“I went back.” The words were half-choked, as if caught in his throat. “It doesn’t matter, I know. What was done was done. But I went back, before I left for the ship. You were already gone.” 

“I screamed for you.” 

“I didn’t hear you then. But I’ve been hearing it in my dreams ever since.”

Michel’s breathing was ragged as if they had been in a fight. “Thank you,” she said. Adam nodded. 

She thought of collapsing beside him, of laying her head on his shoulder and staring at the sky till the stars drowned her thoughts. But they were not children anymore, and these things were not done. So she simply extended one scarred hand, which Adam took with all the grace he knew. He was looking at her strangely again, and there again was the ache in her chest. It was not, as she had thought before, an ache of the old familiarity. No, a new shoot was forcing its way through the frozen ground. 

“We still missed you,” she admitted. “Even when we wanted you dead. I think if we had killed you like we wanted to, we would have gone on missing you forever.”

Chapter Text

~1715~

When Adam returned to the Timberwolf from the village, with Barnett and Gates and their stores, he had a few minutes’ respite while unloading, wherein no one was asking him questions and he could exist as an automaton without thought or soul or conscience. But the relief was not to last. John met them soon after their boarding. He trailed to a halt before coming to greet them. 

“Did my sister not go with you to town?” he asked, his dark eyebrows furrowed, eyes darting across the deck like she might have already taken her place at the helm. 

“John, I—” Adam took a slow, shuddery breath. “The navy was waiting for us there.” 

“And?” John insisted, his chest suddenly hollow. 

“She’s alive, she’s fine, I know it, I—” 

“Then we have to go get her!”

Adam caught John’s upper arm as he tried to storm away toward the captain’s cabin. “John, it’s not possible.”

“You haven’t been back that long. They can’t have gotten far. Let me go—let me go; what’s gotten into you?” he demanded, for Adam’s heels were dug in, and he could not escape him. Finally looking into Adam’s eyes, he said, even more alarmed, “You were in a fight with the Navy, and she got carried off. Is that what you said?” Adam only looked at him, wide-eyed. John’s voice lowered as he spoke deliberately. “You must have handled yourself very well. There’s not a scratch on you. Or Gates, or Barnett.” 

“They had no part in it; I—the Victory was wait, was waiting to ambush us in the morning, and it was—”

“How do you know? We were trapped in the fog all night; how do you fucking know?”

“John, don’t be angry with me. Lord Commodore O’Callaghan’s son came to the ship in the middle of the night; he wanted to warn us. He didn’t want—we didn’t all have to die for it, if we just…”

“If we just what? What exactly did your friend the lord commodore’s son want that he’d be willing to parlay with pirates?” 

“John, your parents have been looking for you,” said Adam. “Well. For Michel.” 

John’s gripped Adam’s shirt, drawing him closer till Adam could feel his hand shaking. “And you helped them find her?” 

A crowd had gathered now; it seemed all the crew was staring down on the two of them. Adam, to John’s surprise, gathered resolve from the observers. “I had to do it!” he exclaimed, and without thinking, his hand came up to close over John’s, gripping him closer. “Don’t you see? It was the only way I could keep you—my family—this crew is, is closer than family to me, honest to God.” 

John’s face was murderous. “I’m going to pretend you’re an idiot,” he said, every word laced with brimstone, “because otherwise, that is the most unthinkably selfish bullshit anyone has ever said to me. Let go of me, or I’ll break your nose.” 

The rebuff stung Adam to the quick. “You’re not that tough.”

John had never been much good at fisticuffs, but he was much, much angrier than Adam, and in these cases, anger carries a good deal of weight. He threw a punch, and if it did not break Adam’s nose, it sent him reeling, and John pressed his advantage to take them to the deck of the ship, tumbling together into the now-shouting crew. The fight was furious but quick, and before anyone could say, “Look! A fight!”, John was straddling Adam, a dagger to his throat. 

“Jesus, fuckin’, Mary an’ Joseph—!” Mark O’Connell shoved aside the dumbstruck lookers-on and pulled John bodily off Adam. “This is no fuckin’ way to behave—” 

Struggling fruitlessly in his gunner’s much stronger arms, John said, “If one more person lays a hand on me, I’ll keelhaul them.”

“All right. All right.” Mark gingerly let him go, though not, John noticed through his fever-rage, at such distance that he might not grab hold of him again if he needed. Adam had not moved from where John left him; face bloodied and collar torn, the boy lay still as if he could escape notice by it.  

“Make ready to sail at once,” said John, praying to whoever might listen that his voice would not break and betray him. “We go after the Victory today.” 

“What’s going on out here?” Captain Reyes had finally been roused from his cabin by all the commotion. 

John explained, in as politick of terms as he had near at hand, that their son of a bitch boatswain had sold his sister to the fucking Navy for thirty pieces of silver, and that if they made haste they could certainly catch them and rescue her before all was lost, and that furthermore, he recommended said son of a bitch be put in irons, or better yet, in a cage, till he could be properly tried and shot. However, though his words lost none of their fury, as he spoke, he felt their effect grow weaker and weaker. “Captain, you’re looking at me like I’m a child.” 

“John,” said Captain Reyes, resting one hand on his shoulder. “You know I’ve always been fond of you and your sister, since the first day we met.”

“But.” 

“But in no world does a ship like the Timberwolf take on a ship like the Victory and survive.” 

John understood now why Adam had spoken more boldly once the crew was watching; they all murmured in agreement with the captain’s wisdom. “So you will do nothing.” 

“There is nothing I can do that wouldn’t be suicidal.” 

“Were you part of the conspiracy, then?” He turned on the others. “Were you? Were you? Did everyone vote without me and decide it was for the best?” Most faces betrayed their ignorance; they turned away from him, but not in guilt. Mark, however. Mark could not look up from his twisting hands. “I should kill you too,” John hissed. 

“Look, it’s not like she’s not gonna be all right,” Mark protested; “she’s gonna be rich and—and probably have more friends and be happier, and also we didn’t all get butchered this morning! Which is nice. I’m not gonna pretend that’s not a nice thing to wake up to.” 

“I didn’t know,” said Captain Reyes. “John, I am sorry.” 

John set his jaw firmly. “I would like to be released from my duties as quartermaster of the Timberwolf.” 

Adam had finally sat up on his elbows, his brown eyes bright against a black eye spreading across the bridge of his nose. “John,” he begged. “Don’t.” 

John kept his eyes firmly on the captain. “I ask you to release me from my duties immediately.” And it was because, after all the fire and storm, he had become so ice-cold that the captain knew there was no keeping him unless he were put in irons. 

“And me as well, sir, if you please.” Shaun Cooper’s unmistakable voice came from the side of the crowd. John looked at him questioningly as he emerged to stand at his side. Shaun shrugged. “It’s not right, what happened. And it’s not the Timberwolf if the Nolans aren’t aboard it. I will recommend some good surgeons I know, so you won’t be left without, but you must let me go as well.” John clasped his shoulder in silent gratitude. 

Well, after that, Captain Reyes could have ordered everyone back to their posts, but they all loitered on deck as John and Shaun packed their few things and made ready one of the jolly-boats. Not a word was spoken; only the songs of the distant birds in the trees ashore broke the grave-silence. 

At the last moment before descending, Shaun pulled Mark aside. “Come with us,” he said. 

“I can’t,” said Mark, hands shoved deep in his pockets. 

“Of course you can. More than can; you ought to. You ought to make it right.” 

Mark’s ears turned pink, and he shook Shaun’s hand off him. “I didn’t do anything that needs making right. We had to make a trade to keep our shipmates safe and keep ‘em together. Be pretty stupid of me to do it and then leave those shipmates, wouldn’t it?” 

“Shaun,” said John gently. “Are you ready?” 

With a sad last look at his dearest friend, Shaun said, “Michel is our shipmate too. Write to me sometimes, will you?” 

Mark gave an abortive nod, then he left them alone to let down the boat, casting off from their home of many years. A lanky figure clinging to the rigging watched them row away till their little boat was swallowed up by the horizon.

Chapter Text

~1715~

Michel took her captivity aboard the Victory with grace and patience, which is to say that every time John Cornelius asked if she would like to take some air on deck, she charmingly told him that she would fling herself into the sea. So she spent a great deal of time, at her future father-in-law’s insistence, locked in the captain’s cabin for her own safety and well-being. No ladies’ clothes had been found for her, so she remained in the sailor’s garb from her last day on the Timberwolf, reading the ship’s logs and looking for intelligence on the lord commodore. 

She and John Cornelius were to be wed upon their arrival on Long Island, or so he informed her. “Your parents miss you a great deal.”

Michel threatened again to throw herself into the sea. 

Despite her temper, he politely visited her cabin-prison daily. “You won’t be troubled long with a husband.” he said on one of these. 

“Are you dying?” she asked, curious in spite of herself. He looked thin enough. 

“Not to my knowledge,” he said, “although in this line of work one never really knows. No, the Victory ships out directly after the wedding, and I’ll be on it. I have a family house in Queen’s County, but I imagine you’d be more comfortable with your mother and father, so there I plan to leave you for at least the next year. I know,” he said in a measured tone, “that we neither of us cared to marry. I see no reason why either of us should be inconvenienced by the other.” 

“You are very gracious,” said Michel, though she would not give him any gesture of kindness, still sitting on her hands in the window seat. “But it’s not necessary. Adam knows where I was. He will have told Captain Reyes as soon as he returned to the ship, and they are on their way to rescue me as we speak.”

“Oh.” John Cornelius’s laugh, short and high, escaped him impolitely. “I’m sorry,” he said in response to Michel’s look. “You didn’t know.” 

“Didn’t know what?” 

“Of course you didn’t.” 

“Didn’t know what?” she repeated, heart suddenly thunderous.

“Adam took you to that inn because he knew I was waiting there.” 

“What a horrible thing to say,” she snapped. 

John Cornelius crossed his arms. “We were lying in wait to slaughter every one of your men and carry you off. I told him so, and he did you a favor—all of us, really. The Victory was spared unnecessary loss in battle. He and his crew escaped with their miserable lives for another day. And you will be returned to good society, your reputation and fortune restored.” He said it all as if recounting a clever stock trade made at the Royal Exchange. “We agreed; it would be best for everyone.” 

A rage was on the tip of Michel’s tongue—he didn’t know Adam, how could they have agreed on anything, much less something so vile—but John Cornelius apologized that his presence was upsetting her and bowed his way out of the cabin. 

Abandoning all reserve, Michel rushed from her seat to strangle his skinny neck or commit some other desperate act, she knew not what, but the fine young Navy man locked the door between them, and she pounded on the solid oak till her hands ached, shouting herself hoarse for him to come back and explain himself. He was a callous, feckless, worthless bastard, the sort she had always loathed at home and was even more inexcusable at sea, and he was lying, and if he would let her out and give her a sword like a man, she would prove so much upon his person.

John Cornelius rudely neither accepted her challenge like a man nor even stood there to take it. He left to attend to business elsewhere on the ship, and her chastising fell without striking its target.

At last, rage gave way to despair; she collapsed against the door and began to cry as she had not cried since long before she was brought aboard the Victory, tears of pure exhaustion and fright. For afraid she was—not of the Royal Navy, and certainly not of her useless new fiancé, but afraid of what had happened aboard the Timberwolf. 

Adam’s strange looks on their final day ashore, which at the time she had called stress from ill sleep and their flight, she now recalled in minute detail and reinterpreted as guilt. Unbearable, unthinkable boy; she hated him for laying such a trap, and she hated herself for walking wide-eyed into it, with the feeling of his words breathed warm against her hair. 

That Adam had betrayed her, she could not but accept. Well, if it were Adam alone she had to hate, she believed she could do so without looking back. But could he have acted alone? Did he? She sat in the window, picking at a stain on her sleeve and watching the sea fall away behind them. Every day that did not bring sight of the wolf flag on the horizon, doubt crept further and further into her heart. Perhaps Adam had gone to the captain and explained the peril they were in, and perhaps the crew had voted that it was better to sacrifice one life than suffer death all together. And she was not even to be killed! In such cases, the exchange seemed too easy. She thought of the faces of the crew, and imagined that she could see into their hearts; who among them would not make such a bargain?

Would John? 

It was in these last contemplations that she cried the most stormily. 

They had been at sea four days and four nights. It was after five bells, and Michel had fallen into a fitful sleep in the great four-poster bed. She was still unused to the softness after years in a bunk, and only slept lightly most nights, so lightly that she might be awakened by any unusual sound—such as, in this case, the scratching of a housebreaker’s chisel in the window. The lady stirred and rolled over, watching through half-lidded eyes as if in a dream. 

In the bright moonlight, the figure who appeared was a black scarecrow-silhouette. Michel reached under her pillow for her letter-opener. The lord commodore had neglected to remove it from his chambers before locking her in them. She ought to thank him. The scarecrow lifted out the windowpane and fitted his long limbs through the gap, landing lightly on the cabin floor. Michel forced her breathing to slow. If he came from a ship, she could kill him and take his place. He crept near to the bed. 

They both moved at once, the shadowy figure covering Michel’s mouth, and her arm flinging up with the blade—so they both needed stifling, as he crumpled with a curse on his tongue and a new slice in his forearm, and she cried, “John!” into his hand. 

“Oh my God, John.” Michel threw her arms around her brother’s neck, and he caught her, his injured arm smearing blood across the back of her shirt. 

“Hey,” he mumbled, “hey. It’s all right. We’re all right.” 

“How—who—how did you—” Laughing and crying, she could hardly decide which of her questions to ask first. 

“Do you have anything to pack?” he asked, which was more to the point. She shook her head. So he took her to the window, she gripping his arm as if she might wake after all to find him gone. 

“Did anyone else…” come for me? she meant, but as she spoke it, she poked her head out the window and looked down to see Shaun Cooper beaming up at her from the boat below. It was the sweetest sight she could have seen. 

Michel and John climbed down the grappling rope John had set, and with a kick off the side of the Victory, he and Shaun took to the oars and pulled like hell. 

“I’m sorry it’s just the two of us,” said Shaun. 

Michel shook her head fiercely. “No one else,” she said. “From now on, we need no one else.” John agreed. 

Chapter Text

~1722~

After the disastrous meeting with the Great Golden, everyone lost the taste for shore excursions. The coast drifted by, and a few times a day, everyone’s eyes drifted to it, as if expecting another ship to emerge from a cove or come upon them from the horizon and demand their mysterious cargo. Five days and nights passed in this hush—a double hush, one half of expectancy, but the other half of relief. The rough weather between them had broken in the storm of their fight at the Hotel Cassadaga; the humidity passed, and in its wake only a gentle rain. 

Their mysterious cargo, at this moment, was sitting in its box in Michel’s open hand quite calmly: content, it seemed, with their direction. Adam and John joined her on the quarterdeck, looking like they had something to do but really just watching the coastline become more and more like New York, and then more and more like Long Island, the familiar gray sands, the drifting grasses waving along the shore. 

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Adam said casually, as if he were asking how the weather suited his friends, not how their emotional state was bearing up under a return to their long-exiled homeland. 

Michel laughed, a short fall of music notes. “When we left, I genuinely thought we would come back within months.” 

“Can you imagine?” said John, stretching out on the top step, his elbows back on the quarterdeck. “Imagine Mrs. Eisley’s face.” 

“Imagine I walked into the assembly rooms for the last ball of the season, seventeen and sun-tanned and freckled, with a fine new scar that my fichu cannot quite hide and that no story about tripping during my morning walk can quite account for.” She laughed again. “As if I would have bothered to invent such a story. I would have walked into that ballroom and told everyone how delighted I was to be home from my trip abroad with a crew of strange men.”

“Truly, imagine her face. That would be the best day of her life!”

“I heard she passed on last year,” said Michel.

“Oh. Did she?” They fell quiet, unable to be as sorry as they ought to be, but still, it was another blow to the idea of the home they had known. John leaned back further, tipping his head till he could find Adam. “I suppose this is only fair, isn’t it, that you’d come with us for this. Since I went home with you once, you know.”

Adam’s fingers itched with the memory of John’s brushing against his in the Lazzara Shipyards sail loft, but he only said, “I know.” He then went on to point out that this was not nearly such an imposition on him as his had been on John, for in the first place, they were not going to the Nolans’ home, only to the island—“unless you lived in a magical cave all along and are only now telling me!”—and furthermore because this was his quest into which they’d been dragged by virtue of their ship falling to pieces in the Gulf of Mexico, all of which Adam stumbled over in his customary manner until John interrupted him. 

“What,” he said, “is that?” 

Adam crossed his arms thoughtfully. “Well, John,” he said, “it looks to me sorta like a cave.” 

It looked very like a cave. This was strange, for as John had been averring for two weeks, there were no caves on Long Island, or at least had not been when he lived there. Indeed, the cave, or thing presenting itself as a cave, looked like it may have dropped in since John and Michel were last on the island, so ill did it fit its surroundings. From the gently sloping beaches on either side, sudden cliffs shot up into mid-air, meeting together in a grassy overhang set with a few wiry trees and a great bird’s nest, these all coming together to create a great yawning entryway, an inlet disappearing into what looked remarkably like a cave, planted on the south shore of Long Island as if by—

“Magic,” whispered Michel. Captain Rollins’s finger twitched meaningfully. 

~

Boarding parties were chosen by volunteer, but this, Adam pointed out, was not a boarding party but a landing party, so he bucked custom and asked his personally. It was to be a small party, for if they were to enter a cave that did not exist, and something unfortunate were to happen, it would be good to have some crew left to make a second attempt. 

“Or make a run for it, if they’re smart,” said Mark, who had been the first person Adam asked and the first to say yes. 

The last to be asked and to answer were the Nolans. “You’re under no obligations,” Adam said firmly. “As our guests…”

“Guests?” Michel teased. “You let all your guests steer the ship, do you? Everybody takes turns on the pleasure cruise?” 

“If I’m a guest, I’ve been doing far too much work around here,” John said, kicking back in his hammock. “You go on ahead. And tell Mr. Cooper to have a bottle of port brought to my chambers.” 

Mr. Cooper, who happened to be passing by, told the viscount where he could put that bottle of port. 

Adam flushed and stammered that he was, as always, grateful for all the help his old shipmates had afforded the voyage. “But this will be a strange one. I’d feel better to have you both by my side, but I won’t demand it.” 

Michel put a hand on his arm. “If you think I’ve been a pirate for ten years only to stay cozy at home when there’s finally a magical treasure hunt afoot, you’re the village idiot.” This settled the matter. 

The landing party met in the captain’s cabin to discuss last things. Besides the four mentioned, Shaun was to accompany them in case of medical emergency. Miss Williams asked several times to be allowed to go, but this they flatly forbade. “I need someone trustworthy running this ship if we all die in agonies,” said Adam, and the girl’s frowns were stormy, but the compliment pleased her. Will and Nathan also stayed behind, and between the three of them, the Timberwolf was as like to stay afloat as ever it could be hoped. 

“Do we bring our pal Henry?” asked Mark. 

“That’s no way to talk about the honorable and very late Captain Rollins,” said Adam, who was already unlocking his cabinet for the inlaid box. “But of course we’re bringing him. It’s the only clue we’ve got to get us through the…through whatever’s…” He waved a hand in the direction of the cave. Michel had laid out a map of Long Island on the long table, but as they circled it, frowning at the landmarks, it became clear that it would not yield any concrete wisdom. No such cave appeared on the map as the one that loomed before them. Whatever was to happen within, they were going in blind. Well, blind with the guidance of a magical severed finger. 

Michel steered the ship as near as she dared to the coast, and then, armed quite to the teeth, the expedition party let down the longboat and two jolly-boats (optimistically maximizing their space to stow treasure) and rowed into the deep mouth of the sea-cave.

As it arched over them, everyone looked up instinctively to watch the early summer sun disappear. No one had sailed into the belly of a whale, despite many stories of sailors doing exactly that, but all were thinking of those stories, and a few glanced back as if they expected—or even half hoped—to see the cave mouth snap shut behind them. It remained, however, wide and unmoving, fringed not with baleen but with overhanging leaves from the trees that clung valiantly to the cliffside above. That appeared to cling, John insisted in his own mind. The cave was not real, and therefore neither were any of its trappings. However, he had to admit that if they were not, his senses were conspiring to deceive him, for the walls of the cave dripped convincingly, the wet seaweed that climbed up the walls shimmering green in the last of the sunlight and giving the place a heady scent of rotting leaves. He pulled his coat close; it grew colder, too, as they sailed further in. 

The inlet grew narrower and shallower (though the cave itself remained towering and wide) until they grounded on a rocky little beach leading up to a stone pathway, the cave mouth behind them only the size of a dinner-plate in the distance. Adam alighted first and, with John’s help, pulled the longboat fully ashore, followed by Mark and Shaun in the jolly-boats. The slick stone felt solid beneath Michel’s feet as she stepped out of the last boat. If this were all an illusion set to melt away once they were well in, as John said, it was the best one she had ever heard tell of. She felt a pang. This was exactly the sort of adventure Jeff would have loved. 

Seeing this wash of melancholy settle over his shipmate, Adam did his best to raise spirits all round. Although he felt this quest ought to be conducted with a certain degree of solemnity, he could not repress the shiver in his bones that came not from the damp and chill, but from excitement. He lit the torches and lanterns they had brought from the Timberwolf and handed them out. The golden light danced off the blue-black water beneath them. Perhaps theirs was the first manmade light to breach this cave since Red Kira herself lay her treasure to rest. 

John noted, with some amusement, that Adam’s undisguisable pleasure as they started the trek into the cave was much the same that had crept over him as Frank Iero led them down the passageways of the Helena. Perhaps Captain Gerard Way would be waiting at the end of this journey too, outdated boots kicked up on a treasure chest, with a smug little grin for having led them such a madcap dance and a series of knowing, needling remarks about his long and storied acquaintance with Adam. 

John did not much care for Captain Gerard Way. If his quest got them all killed, he would tell him so.

The path leading away from the little beach ascended rapidly, then narrowed to a single-file trail, overlooking the cave floor ten feet below. Everyone cast glances downward, wondering alike whether it might not be easier to walk that wider path. But the tide was low when they entered the cave. God only knew what mischance might befall them, walking the bottom of a sea-cave as the tide came in. They hugged the wall a little tighter and marched on. 

Adam took the lead, his torch casting tall, flickering shadows far ahead of them, like creatures of fire were dancing just around each corner. Michel took the place behind him. In her left hand she held the open box with the finger of Captain Rollins; it lay almost completely still, with only a little twitch here and there to indicate that they were nearing their target. John and Shaun came next, and Mark brought up the rear. 

After passing under a lower outcropping, for which Adam especially had to duck his head, they came into a small enclosed chamber, all of stone, completely empty except for a skeleton seated against the far wall in an old wooden chair. It had no exits but the one they had come in, and when Shaun poked his head back out the “door,” he found that the larger cave they had been following ended there as well. 

“Well,” said he. “I can see why this fellow got stuck.” 

“Was there another path we were meant to take?” said Michel, holding up the finger box. No, their grisly compass continued pointing straight ahead, into the grinning skull. They crowded round and examined the body. It was a very clean skeleton; no strips of flesh clung to it that would mar its picturesque aspect. It was also quite naked. Either it had been sitting in this chair in this cave for some time, long enough for its clothing to dissolve completely to dust, or it had been placed here on purpose. The crew were not sure which would be worse. 

“Oh!” said Michel. “It’s missing a finger!” Indeed, one of its bony hands, resting on the arm of the chair, had no index finger. Michel gingerly lifted from its box the finger they had carried with them all the way from New Orleans. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t give this back to the captain?” 

“Is that Captain Rollins, do you think?” said Shaun.

“I heard he wasn’t dead,” said Mark. “Nothin’ could kill that old bear.” 

John shuddered, but he added, “Whether it’s actually Captain Rollins or not, it’s obviously meant to represent him. The real question is whether we ought to do the thing that the maker of this cave obviously meant us to do.” Surely, he argued, if Red Kira intended to protect her treasure, then following her clear directions would be walking into her traps. The others argued that their alternative was turning around and sailing back to the Timberwolf, which not only sounded dreadfully dull, but would win them no treasure, not to mention the ire of the Helena (whom Adam especially seemed keen not to cross). Unless they wanted to try using the skeleton’s arm to dig through the wall. They did not, so with no further ado, Michel set the finger into its place on the bony hand. It made an ill match: still-greying flesh joined to the cleaned bone. 

But as they watched it, waiting for an explosion, the dull sound of rock grinding against rock heralded the wall itself sliding open behind the skeleton. Folding into a slot in the walls around it like a curtain drawn back, it revealed to its watchers a dark tunnel sloping further into the cave. The skeleton’s bony face remained unchanged, but they could swear it was grinning wider than before, a morbid maître d’ welcoming them in. 

Adam let out his breath. His smile nearly matched that of his bony host. “Well,” he said. “Now that’s something.” 

“You are actually enjoying this!” John laughed incredulously.

“I am!” he confessed. “There are much duller ways to spend a Sunday morning than adventuring after lost treasure with the people I love most.” Adam’s face colored behind his sun-tan at the confession. “I mean—”

Michel smiled reassuringly. “No, you’re quite right. It could be much worse. You could listen to John give sermons!” They left the skeleton-room, John protesting that he had not been so bad a preacher as all that. Michel retorted over her shoulder, “Sometimes I wonder if God made you lose faith in him so that his flock in Hick’s Neck could get a better one.” 

Mark was the last to pass the skeleton’s chair and enter the farther tunnel. As soon as he did, the sound of grinding rock struck up again. “Shit!” He dashed back into the room, where the opening opposite was sliding closed—blocking their way to the boats! Shaun darted after him and pulled him back, sparing him from crushed fingers. “Shit,” Mark repeated, feeling the wall for a seam. But the closure was so tightly joined that only the evidence of their five witnesses proved there had ever been a gap. “Still excited, Odysseus?” he asked his captain. 

“There’s a healthy dose of fear mixed in,” said Adam. 

Mark thanked him for his honesty. But fear or no, nothing could be done now but press on and hope that another way out would present itself, lest they find the treasure and die without making any use of it. 

This leg of the journey, a little shorter and even narrower than the last, was made in less good humor; the loudest sound other than their boots on the graveled cave floor was an occasional dripping far away. Adam joked once half-heartedly about what a mess it would be to meet a flock of bats in a tunnel with such a low ceiling. John, even more half-heartedly, joked that they would be Captain Way’s minions, come to ensure they were not keeping the treasure to themselves. No one laughed much, or if they did, the heavy stone walls smothered the sound. 

When they were released into another room, all breathed a little easier. Perhaps it was ambitious to give the space such a name as “room,” one that implies human design or construction, since this chamber of the cave, like the last, was naturally shaped. But after all, if indeed the whole cave had been the work of a powerful sea-witch, her craft ought to be properly credited, even if the ensemble looked to be the work of nature. This room, then, was much of a piece with the first, though somewhat larger. Instead of its lone decoration being a seated skeleton, its many crevices were filled with piled objects. The pirates saw metals and boxes and thought themselves at the end of their journey. Then a closer inspection revealed the truth.

“We’ve found the Swinging Man’s trash heap!” said Shaun, holding up a pair of battered pewter tankards, black with age. As they looked closer, the mounds that seemed to have been treasure unfolded as nothing but rubbish and trinkets: some old garments, kitchen utensils, broken clocks. Was this a prank played from beyond the grave? Had they come so far only to be outwitted at the last? Or had someone else made the journey before them and taken away all the worthy treasure, leaving them the scraps?

“Wait,” said Adam, inspecting the far wall. “Mark, is this a door like the skeleton one?” 

“Could be. Let me see.” 

“Wait,” said John. In the center of the room stood a carved wooden table, such as might have been in a captain’s cabin. It was smooth but for a round impression the size of a plate in the center of it, and clear of trash except for a leather-bound log-book. “That looks like the one we saw on the Helena.” He spread the pages open, hoping for a map or journal, anything that might direct their path, but read aloud only the following: 

Two twins we are, and let it not surprise,

Alike in ev'ry feature, shape and size;

We're square or round, of brass or iron made,

Sometimes of wood, yet useful found in trade:

But to conclude, for all our daily pains,

We by the neck are often hung in chains.

“Twins we are… hung in chains…” he repeated the verse, fingers tapping the table.

“Sounds like you and Michel if the governor gets his hands on you,” quipped Mark, for which John bestowed on him a most withering glare. 

“It won’t be the governor doing them in unless we can get past this room,” Adam added. The dripping water, far off, ticked like an insistent clock. 

All started as Michel exclaimed. “Here!” She unburied from one of the trash mounds a pair of iron scales on a stand. Shaun came to her aid to heft them onto the table; the base fit perfectly into the divot. 

“That made a noise!” shouted Adam, whose ear was pressed to the wall. 

This discovery sent a rush of energy through the room. This was not the end of the treasure-hunt; if they could only solve the puzzle, they could carry on. Michel circled the table, looking at the scales from all sides. “What next? Are we meant to balance them?” They looked for a while among the trash for a set of weights, but there was none. If something was meant to go on the scales, it would not present itself so simply. “John, is there anything else in the book?” 

John turned the page. “More riddles.”

“Well, let’s see it.” Michel pulled up a large urn beside the table so she could sit and look over her brother’s shoulder. 

When to the sunrise thou hast set thy face

The King’s highway for twenty leagues to tread

Then on thy left hand pass by Carman Place;

A dextral turn—stop not to rest thy head!

When once these steps are trac’d, and journey’s through,

Who am I, that waits within your view? 

They frowned upon the lines of verse, Michel remarking that she had turned pirate to escape the interminable riddles that clever people always dragged out at parties. 

“Oh,” John said slowly. “This is our home.”

“What does that mean?” 

“Carman Place…is that not the old house we would pass on the way to church, not two miles from home?” 

Dawning understanding broke over Michel’s face. “You could see it from the king’s highway.” 

“Right. Right.” John rested his elbows on the table and set his face in his hands, closing his eyes to picture a land he had not visited in over ten years. “If we turned off the highway, with Carman Place on our left…what would have been off to the right, past the house?”

“God, we hardly ever went that way, did we?”

“I did…” He struck the table so hard that Shaun jumped. “It was the fucking windmill. Is there…” They began searching the piles of trash, as if someone might have left a stone windmill under a footstool. 

“Why were you spending so much time at the windmill?” asked Michel while they hunted. “Why were you spending any time at all, as a matter of fact?”

“Oh, when we were boys, some of us liked to have a drink there of an evening and smoke a bit.” God knew John had committed worse crimes since—had committed worse crimes with her—but he still flushed to confess it to his sister. 

“Why, your lordship!” Adam drawled, scandalized. But he could not keep chastising John, even in his best motherly tones, because at that moment, Shaun discovered a model windmill, made in perfect doll’s scale and tucked among a small collection of taxidermied alligators in dresses. It was not a precise match for the Long Island mill in the riddle, but it certainly answered to it. He set the little model on the left-hand plate and watched the scale dip and settle just above the table. A shiver raced along every shoulder in the room, some of excitement, and others with a stroke of nervous anticipation. 

“Does it feel pointed, to you, that this riddle from thirty years ago is something only we could ever have solved?” John murmured to Michel as they returned to the log-book. “Red Kira wasn’t even from Long Island, was she?” 

“Not as Frank said,” she replied. “But maybe she expected Long Island crews would find the cave and try their hand. Or maybe that’s the point; that it was impossible.”

“It feels odd.”

“You’re just on edge because Mark said the piece about twins being hanged was also about us. But that’s only two coincidences. If the next riddle is about our grandparents, then you may feel odd.” 

So saying, Michel reached across him to turn the page, having forgotten that she was meant to be bad at riddles, now eager for another puzzle to solve. Then she frowned and turned another page, then another and another to the end of the book. 

The third page was torn. It had the beginning of a riddle on it, a rhyme beginning with “My lady’s lord a marquis was”—which could have been so promising, for a rhyme on the niceties of the peerage that might have tripped up a common pirate would have been child’s play for the children of an earl, even one whose earldom was partly stolen—but half-way through the third line, a jagged rip across the width of the page, made by a knife or a dagger, left the conclusion quite unreadable. All other pages in the notebook were blank. 

Michel looked at John in concern. His brow furrowed. They puzzled over the extant lines, but found no way to divine their conclusion. Failing this, she set Shaun and John to searching the rubbish piles, and joined in herself a moment later, hoping that some object might appear that seemed so clearly signified by the start of the riddle that they might use it even without the last lines. Shaun suggested that if all else failed, they might begin setting objects on the scale at random, for there were a finite amount of trinkets, so they could not be kept in here forever. John remarked darkly that they did not know yet whether a wrong attempt might not trigger some kind of trap. This soured the mood, but they kept searching, for what else could they do?

A loud crash, as of metal striking stone, stopped them in their tracks. 

While the others were preoccupied with riddles, Adam and Mark had not been asked for their input, and so had some time to examine the room itself. The long delay had left them antsy, and the revelation of the incomplete riddle even more so. So, while the others dug through the piles, the two of them had concocted their own scheme, in which they would use the iron scales as a great-hammer and simply smash through the wall. This they did, and found it marvelously simple—one would say “easy,” but it did take exertion. With every swing of the scales, the wall cracked deeper and deeper, sending chips of stone flying out into the room from which their bewildered shipmates had to take cover. At last, they knocked a hole through the stone large enough around for a respectably broad-shouldered man to squeeze through. Panting with the effort, they beamed at each other, then at the others. 

John started and re-started his sentence multiple times, finally able to say only, “How did you know that would work?”

“Didn’t!” said Mark happily. 

“Don’t be cross, John,” said Adam. “The wall sounded thin right there, so we figured it was worth a shot.”

“I’m not…” John did a very poor job of explaining that he was not cross but amazed, but they understood him in good time, and then set to work hoisting one another up through their escape hatch into the narrow passage below.

“You don’t need to worry what I think,” said John, setting his foot in Adam’s interlaced hands to step up. “God knows you’re the captain here and can run this expedition as you please.” 

Adam simply looked up at him and said, “I know.” 

They had hoped that perhaps the riddle-room would lead them directly to the treasure, but it only opened to another passage below, darker and chiller than any yet. They hung close together, partly because the space demanded it and partly because this was simply what one did when one was afraid, even when one was a crew of big, strong pirates. 

The torches guttered in the damp (one of the lanterns had been forgotten on the riddle-room table). The tunnel now sloped sharply down, to the point that they had to brace their knees to keep from sliding into one another—made all the more difficult by the floor’s wetness. To the dripping that had become the background noise of the cave now was added a splashing sound, as of the drops striking a puddle.

“We had really better hope for another exit at the end of this,” said Shaun, “because otherwise we shall have to carry all the treasure back up this incline.” 

“Perhaps you shall have to, Mr. Cooper,” retorted Michel. “We must all remember that I am a lady of quality, in such high demand that I was abducted by the Royal Navy. Surely you would not have such a one lift a finger in manual labor!” 

Mark averred that he would absolutely have such a one lift a finger, because such a one didn’t have to do it every goddamn day and so wouldn’t be as tired of it as the rest of them. Their laughter was swallowed up again by the depth of the cave, but this time they could feel it among themselves. Adam and John exchanged glances. It was the first time since their ships became one that either of them had heard Michel joke so freely about what happened. Then John slipped into Adam’s shoulder. 

“Dammit, I’m sorry—”

“No, no, it’s all right—”

“I stepped in a hell of a puddle,” said John, looking down. “Oh. Interesting.” 

It was not enough to say he stepped into a puddle. The water shining in their torchlight was no longer still, but trickled past in a steady stream over the soles of their shoes. 

“I don’t like it. I know I don’t like a lot of shit, but I don’t like this,” said Mark. 

“No, you’re right. That doesn’t seem…” Before John could reassure Mark about his suspicions, they came to a halt. This corridor did not end in a larger room. It simply stopped. Water pooled against the far wall and dripped down the sides of the tunnel. 

“I don’t fucking like that!” 

Adam, who till now had been quiet, spoke firmly. “Thunderfoot O’Connell, if you panic now, you’ll walk the plank. We are going to turn around and march our sorry asses out of this tunnel, and we will be fine. You hear me?” 

“Aye aye, captain.” 

So they turned, but the going was not easy. While they took the time to speak, the water had begun running in earnest, turning the path back to the puzzle-room into a waterfall. They were wading, already bent against the steep incline and now trudging through water rushing over their boots as well. John pressed his hand into the walls, his blunt nails scratching for a grip, but his feet slipped again. The fall plunged him in cold water up to the wrists and scraped his palms on the stone floor. He was suddenly afraid. 

Shaun cursed. One of the torches fell into the water, fizzled, and went out. 

He was very afraid.

Their voices tangled as they exchanged worries and escape ideas and dismissed each of both in turn. If they made it back to the first room and the path out to the boats was still closed…if the water kept rising and rising…

It was Adam’s turn to slip, falling against the wall and tumbling a ways back down into the filling darkness. When he sat up, the black water now reached his chest. “I think there’s another tunnel breaking off here!” 

They crowded round him as well as they could in the narrow space. Adam crawled a few steps further in, touching the wall below the water. “Yes,” he said, his hand tracing out a space less than half the height of the main passage, and wide enough for a man.  “Just there.  The water’s rushin’ out—I can feel it. If I—”

“Absolutely not,” said John, already fearing what was not yet spoken.

“We didn’t see it as we came down because we were too busy chatting—typical Timberwolf mission, I guess—but I think—I think this is what we have to do. What I have to—I can do this. If this is a trick like all the others, it’s gotta have a solution,” Adam argued, scrambling to his feet to keep the water at bay. 

“And if that isn’t it? If that’s a dead end—in every sense of the word?” John shivered, and the words spilled through teeth gritted to stop their chatter. “We can’t lose you.” 

Adam smiled reassuringly. “Of course you can. You did just fine last time.” He meant it as a comfort, did not mean to throw the past in John’s face as a cruelty, but it still struck with all the force of a blow. You were not there; he wanted to grab Adam’s shoulders and shout at him; you do not know. But Adam had turned to Michel while he thought so, and asked, “Let me try.” And her face was wet, but she nodded. And then he was cracking jokes about Atlantis and taking a deep breath—and then a rush of water knocked everyone off-balance, taking the last torch clean out of Michel’s hand and plunging them all into darkness. 

“Where is Adam?” John said as soon as he could breathe again. “Where is he?” He had never been in darkness so complete. The water had risen to his chest. As he waded through it, reaching blindly, he found Mark’s back, found Shaun’s hand, found Michel. Adam—of course he had—had dived into the tunnel and was gone to rescue them. 

“We gotta get out of here,” said Mark, and if he was panicking still, he had done well to conquer it, for his voice was steady in the dark, like the ship’s master it belonged to. “This is the lowest spot in the whole cave system. If we get back up to the start—”

“What about Adam?” 

“If his idea works, he won’t need our help,” said Mark. “If it doesn’t…well. Our help won’t help much, will it?” 

“Mark’s right,” said Michel. “He’s trying to save us; don’t make his sacrifice meaningless.”

“Go, then!” John’s breathing seized as the cold struck him deep and the word sacrifice struck deeper still. He had lost his mind, he was sure of it, but his feet were leaving the cave floor, and the ceiling was not so very far overhead, and all he could think of was Adam. 

Shaun, who had been silent all this while, hmm’ed thoughtfully. “He’s been under too long.” And with another splash, John could no longer feel where Shaun was standing.  

If they were on deck, or perhaps at another hotel in a town of psychic mountebanks, they would have been at each other’s throats for this, for old habits died hard, and they were very good at arguing. John might have flung in Mark’s teeth that he defied him now to flee the tunnel, leaving not only Adam but Shaun to an unthinkable fate. Mark might then have given up on words, for in truth, John was the better arguer, and dragged his shipmate bodily toward a moment’s safety. But there was no time to plan an escape, even for those who wanted to try. Their heads were brushing the cavern ceiling now, black water splashing up into their mouths, their noses, their eyes. Michel gripped John’s shoulder, for it was all she could reach, so tight that it bruised, and he let go treading water to grab her wrist, and they sank.

Perhaps, at this moment, gentle readers may feel that their emotions are being toyed with unjustly. After all, they can see there are still many pages left in the book, and surely their friend would not have recommended this story if their favorite characters were all to die suddenly and horribly, after coming so far and without the proper catharsis that would make a tragedy worth the reading. “Hurry up!” they may complain. “We know they live; tell us how!” The author retorts that although we know very well that John and Michel and Adam and the rest shall not die in this ignominious fashion, John and Michel and Adam and the rest do not know that, and it is their feelings on the matter she wishes to capture. But very well, dear reader. You have borne it long enough.

Just as the water closed over their heads, there came the now-familiar scrape of a stone wall giving way. The dead end of the tunnel slid open with the grinding of rock on rock, and quicker even than it had rushed upon them, the water poured out into the next chamber, leaving the three remaining heroes and heroine gasping for air on the ground, able to see one another faintly in a new grey half-light. As they recovered their senses, they were joined by two more: Shaun crawled from the smaller tunnel, dragging something with him.  

“God fucking damn it,” Mark said hoarsely, and he crushed Shaun to his chest as if he meant to bury him there. 

The others could not share in his relief, transfixed as they were by the second figure. Adam lay before them, unmoving, his blue lips parted, dark hair clinging damply to his forehead and splayed out around his head like seaweed. Shaun said quietly that Adam was right: there had been a lever at the end of the tunnel, and in his last conscious moment he had pulled it, opening the final door. The treasure-room now lay beyond them; whatever it was they had traveled so far to find glinted softly through the open door, theirs for the taking. No one cared to even look at it. John, utterly exhausted, had only the strength to let his head fall to Adam’s chest, where he sobbed. The great, dark chasm he had carried in his heart for so long, finally unable to be suppressed in the moment it became impossible to fill, yawned wide enough to swallow him whole. Michel wrapped her arms around herself and wept alone.

They might have stayed like this for hours, or perhaps only a few moments that stretched to feel like it. However long, the spell was at last broken, because John stirred. In Adam’s still chest he had felt a rasping breath. Then another. Frantically, he dragged Adam up to lie on his side, where he coughed and coughed and coughed till all the water in the Long Island Sound was out of his lungs. 

Forehead resting against the ground, Adam blinked slowly. “John Nolan,” he said, “didn’t your mother ever tell you worrying will give you wrinkles?”

“I will fucking kill you!” John exclaimed, with a force unmatched since the last time he threatened to kill Adam, seven years before. 

Once Adam felt up to walking about, it occurred to the crew, one by one, that they were, in fact, sitting next to the open door of a treasure-chamber. Their trials, in an instant, settled into the past as legends of feats overcome, and the present was all about the prize achieved—after, of course, everyone shook Adam’s hand or embraced him or otherwise expressed the fumbling,  inexpressible gratitude that comes with having one’s life saved. 

Such a treasure as they had won! At many points along the voyage, one or another had doubted, first, that such a treasure existed at all, then that it could possibly be of such magnitude as the legends said. Any tale presented by Adam’s friend Frank Iero seemed much too tall to be true. Most of them, upon seeing the horde piled in the final chamber, privately resolved to apologize to Frank for their serious doubt. 

They spent the better part of an hour digging through the chests that lined the chamber, exclaiming over gold and pearls and fine fabrics, strange antique portraiture that made them shiver under the glares of the long-dead subjects, a locked cabinet filled with Spanish swords, and many other treasures that would take many pages to catalogue. The grey light that allowed them to see one another and their spoils turned out indeed to come from the hoped-for second exit to the cave, whereto also the water from the flood trap had drained. It was a location that made their heads turn to make sense of; either they had lost all sense of direction underground, or the magic of the cave was once again running them round. Whatever the case, they trekked far up the beach back to the main entrance, which felt much quicker when they were not winding through puzzles and traps, then swam back up the inlet to retrieve the boats. Thus reunited with their transportation, they stuffed the boats with enough treasure to nearly sink them and still had to come back for a second trip and a third. 

The crew left behind had plenty of questions, seeing their captain and his landing party return much later than expected, soaking wet and caked in dust. But those questions were put aside as they received the greatest treasure horde of their collective career and stashed it in the Timberwolf’s hold. Even those who had pooh-poohed the treasure’s existence the loudest felt a sense of pride in the great accomplishment. The lost treasure of Red Kira Roessler was theirs. 

Chapter Text

~1722~

As the Timberwolf set sail, sitting a little lower in the water due to its newfound immense wealth, several of its crew could not help but feeling a certain anxiety that had been laid aside while the treasure was still out of reach. 

To Adam, pacing the deck as sunset streaked the horizon, it meant the approaching loss of his newly reunited crew. He had tried every way he knew to mend things with the Nolans, but if it was not enough? If they reached New Orleans, delivered the Helena their share and shared the rest between them, and they bid him farewell again? The ocean felt dreadfully empty and wide before him. 

To Michel, resting on the helm, it meant the freedom of her own captaincy again. But she found, as she called to mind those plans that carried her through the ice-cold first days on the Timberwolf, they no longer brought her the unadulterated hope they once had. She faced the thought of a leave-taking like her first departure from Long Island; full of promise but full, too, of inescapable change. There is a kind of revelation that only comes in the face of death, and even if the death is reversed, the revelation cannot be so easily done away with. Such a discovery she had made as she watched Adam lie lifeless on the cave floor. He was not a person she could cut out of her heart entirely, even when she wished to—and she knew now that she no longer wished to. After suffering one loss in the past fortnight, now she dreaded another. 

To John, tossing and turning in his bunk, it meant that the decision point he had put off so long could be avoided no longer. Michel would buy herself a well-deserved ship and return to piracy restored, likely never to cross paths with the Timberwolf again if she could help it. Adam likewise would go on his way. And John? Where would he go? 

These and other pressing questions had to be put aside. There was great commotion on deck. Grumbling, sure it would be a whale, which they had not the equipment to hunt, or else a prize, which they had no space to store the spoils of even if they had a mind to take her, he dragged himself out of bed to put in his word for doing neither of those things and sailing on.

It was neither a whale, nor, it seemed, a prize. The water ahead was stirring and bubbling, as if a whirlpool was forming out of nowhere. John joined Michel and Adam on the quarterdeck to get some height and see the disturbance better. Murmuring broke out across the deck as mist, or else steam, rose from it. 

“Bring her around,” said Adam. 

“Yes, captain.” Michel adjusted the helm so they could skirt whatever was happening before them. It was not likely to be an active volcano in this part of the sea, but they had no need to find out by nosing into it like a dog to a pile of excrement.

Just then, the steam billowed forth in an enormous cloud that reached as high as a ship’s mast. Then it consolidated into what looked very like a ship’s mast—and a ship to go with it; a ship with its broadside to them, her colors the broken pyramid and the serpent, with golden sails and a name painted on her prow to match: the Great Golden. 

Michel swore. “It’s them! My God, it’s them! Run up a flag of parley; I must—” 

The Great Golden’s two rows of cannon fired as one. 

“Bring her around!” Adam bellowed. Michel spun the helm dangerously fast, the ship lurching hard to port as she tried to bring it broadside-on. Their opponent had appeared just right; with the Timberwolf’s nose to her, none of their guns would be any use till she had already laid waste to them, which she seemed thoroughly determined to do. Cannonballs buried themselves in the deck one after another, shrapnel and wood shards exploding where they tore through the planks, sending those crew lucky enough to be out of their paths diving for cover. Some were not so lucky. Their gunner took a ball straight to the chest. It was as if it took him clean off the face of the earth; one moment there, the next overboard or worse! 

Without hesitation, Mark leapt over the capstan and joined the shaken crew. “Run out your guns, my boys. Come on, they didn’t catch us sleeping! Bring up some canisters; let’s send em to fuckin’ hell!” 

The Timberwolf finally began to return fire, and they peppered their foe honorably, but it was too late to do much damage. They had drifted within boarding range. Grappling hooks flew across the divide; as fast as a man could cut one away, another took its place.

Adam left the deck to emerge from his cabin a minute later wearing two braces of pistols, his cutlass strapped to his side and two more in hand. “Captain Destry!” he called. “Delegate the helm-work, if you please. We need your sword!” So saying, he tossed one cutlass to her and one to her brother, who was also running to Adam’s side to face the marauders. 

Captain Green swung on a rope from his own rigging to land on the Timberwolf’s deck, so lightly it was as if he flew down. His bright eyes fell on Adam and the Nolans across the way. “So nice to see you again!” he called, his high voice carried as if it were a voice of the wind. “And so nice of you to collect my treasure for me!” 

Then the battle found them, and they could hear him no more. 

It was an epic battle, but not one of which any tactician among them would be proud. They had been surprised, and their best fighters were half-exhausted by the adventures of the cave. But of the great motivators to fighting, the chief are, of course, love (of family, mainly), pride (which is also what “love of country” often means if it does not mean love of the people in that country, which is the same as family), and spite. All three motives worked together in the breasts of the Timberwolf's crew, and they rallied bravely against their enemies, who were chiefly working with pride and only a little spite. 

Those who were not struck down at once circled the mainmast, guarding each other’s backs. Michel had taken a blow to the forehead, and could scarcely use one eye for the blood dripping down her face, but she stabbed at every man she could see. John turned to cover her bad side with a quick slash that took one man’s arm almost in half. Adam was pressed back by two or three at all times. He did not like this kind of fighting. He liked the kind where one could catch a breath to make a clever remark here and there, to lighten the mood or to trip up your enemy’s heels. But beggars and choosers, you know. He took some comfort in the fact that Mark was similarly hard-pressed, and reminded himself to keep count so they could compare their dead afterward. 

Then—“Whoah—whoa!” A rope snaked around his ankle—snaked indeed; he had not taken a step, and they took better care of their lines than to leave them about so. No, it moved, writhing as if it were alive, and like a serpent’s strike, coiled itself around Adam’s ankle and flung him several feet into the air overhead. More living ropes caught him there, suspending him by the wrists and under the shoulders. His crew shouted below, but he could not make anything out, only that his predicament must look as alarming down there as it felt up here. Moving quickly, the ropes twisted around their prey, binding his arms to his sides and his legs together at the knee. Adam became intimately aware of how fast he was breathing, for every breath tightened the loops stretched across his chest. His legs kicked wildly and uselessly; the first rope was still tangled around his ankle, trailing to the deck as if he were some human kite. 

The moment Adam went flying, Michel searched the deck for Captain Green. He was the source of all the magic goings-on; if she wanted answers and to rescue Adam, he was the man to find. She spotted him through the crowds, eyes fixed above. Ducking and weaving through his men and hers, she knocked him back. 

If she hoped that breaking his concentration would break his spell on Adam, that hope was dashed, but she did redirect his attention. “You’re always in the way, my lady.” He drew his sword (looking back, she would marvel at how long he must have fought without it, but in the moment she did not make the connection). 

The words spilled from her; no time for banter. “Have you a prisoner on your ship?” 

Captain Green’s blue eyes narrowed. “Oh, that’s interesting.” 

Their swords crashed together. The close quarters in which they fought made their clash messy and inelegant, grappling close almost as much as they struck and parried. Michel glanced up at Adam, still struggling against his bonds overhead. Maybe their sorcerer opponent could only cast one spell at a time. In that case, she was fighting him as a normal man. She’d killed many a normal man. 

Unhappily, Captain Green’s elbow caught her wrist and knocked her sword out of her hand. 

“No!” 

He grinned. Then he lunged in, buried one hand in her curls and jerked her head back till she cried. Forcing her back by the handful of her hair and the flat of his sword across her chest, he drove her against the mainmast. “Everyone else is finished,” he hissed into her ear. Over his shoulder, she could see it was true. Most of the living crew had been herded into a tight circle by the Great Golden’s bloody men. Miss Williams was spitting and kicking underneath someone’s boot. John lay face-down on the deck, his sword kicked far away. John… “And so are you.”

From some hidden sheath, he drew a silver dagger and stabbed. Pain screamed through Michel’s shoulder, then the wet heat of blood. She was pinned to the mast! Captain Green surveyed his handiwork with some pleasure. When he smiled, she could see her blood on his teeth. Then, casually, he left her hanging there so he could attend to other matters.

It was Michel’s scream that forced Adam’s attention back from his own predicament to the scene below. Captain Green strolled to the loose end of the rope and picked it up, tilting his head up to Adam at the other end. “Well, well,” he said breathlessly. “Don’t you look nice like that.” 

“I’m flattered, but not interested just now,” Adam called down, affecting more courage than he felt, unable even to break his fall should Captain Green stop casting whatever spell he had Adam trapped in. 

“Your only mistress is the sea, I guess,” said Captain Green with a thin smirk. “Or else a secret love among your crew?”

The crew. Adam looked below. His chest lurched; Michel hung limply against the mainmast, almost unrecognizable with blood, and John, still and lifeless. But as he watched, and as Captain Green gave a pleasant little monologue about how well they had all fought, John stirred and began to crawl toward the nearest weapon. Adam wished him fortune and wished he would have lain still. Heroic idiocy was supposed to be his specialty. 

“Oh,” said Captain Green, noticing the motion at his feet as one might notice a crawling thing in the garden. “No.” He brought the heel of his boot down hard, crushing John’s outstretched fingers—John cried out through gritted teeth. With a wave, Captain Green sent the tail end of Adam’s rope to wrap itself neatly around a cleat on the mast. He bent down and cupped John’s chin in one hand. Adam could not hear the words that passed between them at his distance, but John cursed again, and that was loud enough to hear. Then Captain Green dragged John up to his knees, where he remained, trembling as if against some force holding him frozen. 

“You’ve got quite the crew, Captain Lazzara!” called Captain Green. “I said so the first time we met. My boys and I got back to our ship, and I said, damn. I can’t wait to meet them again.” 

“Did you follow us all this way?” 

“I didn’t have to. I was tracking you.” Adam remembered the sensation of the mist clinging to him after Captain Green vanished at the Hotel Cassadaga, and he shuddered again. “You led us to Red Kira’s cave. I almost thought about joining you when you ventured in. But whatever my dear aunt had ready for intruders, I figured I’d better let someone else take a look first.”

“Your aunt? That Frank Iero said she was his aunt,” said John, managing to convey an impressive amount of disdain for someone in such pain. 

Captain Green was not pleased to hear this name. “Did he? Sounds like sweet Francis is taking my stories as well as my artifacts. Did he also mention that he stole Captain Rollins’ finger and log-book from me in the first place?” Of course, he had not. “We were on the way to get an apology from him when we met you in that storm.” Adam could only imagine how the vicious captain might go about exacting his apology. “He was so sorry when I caught up to his Helena. Told me exactly who had it. But it was only fortune that led us to each other in Cassadaga.” He looked up at Adam with mingled hunger and admiration. “I’ve never fought anyone like you. My God, it makes me feel alive.” Adam almost wished he were not required to hate this eccentric figure. What a sparring partner he would make if they were allies. Captain Green shared the sentiment. “I’m sorry the chase is done. But after all, a very great treasure of mine lies in your hold.”

From Adam’s vantage point, he could see, though the others could not, one of the Great Golden’s men, far at the back of the party, near the railing as if he had been the last to cross over. This man had been angling himself, while his captain was speaking, to get a better sight of the figures around the mainmast. Suddenly, recognition broke over his face. Adam had never seen such a transformation, not even in one who had seen a ghost. 

The man abandoned his place guarding Nathan and some of the others, rushing to Captain Green. “Captain, you gotta—you gotta call it off.” 

The sound that tore from deep in Michel’s chest as she recognized the man was barely human—anguish and joy. “Jeff!” It was as if her wounds no longer existed; she wrenched the dagger from her shoulder and threw it aside like a toy. 

The man rushed to her and caught her up in his arms, saying only, “My God…my God…” Foreheads pressed together, they exchanged in whispers all the burden of their hearts that had passed in the weeks since they thought each other lost to the sea. The passion of their reunion was so pure, so concentrated, the observers felt ashamed for watching and looked away. 

“My love,” said Michel firmly. 

“Yes?”

“If I faint, either now or in the next minutes, I want you to know I have not become hysterical since you left. It’s the blood loss.” 

Indeed, as she spoke, her head grew heavy, and she slumped against him. Jeff DaRosa ordered one of the Great Golden’s men to fetch water and brandy (Adam noted his obedience with some surprise, having assumed Michel’s husband, now that he was proven not to be dead, to be some form of prisoner) and binding up her shoulder with a scarf. 

Once Michel revived, Jeff was all politeness. “Captain,” he said, clutching Michel’s hand as if he thought she might vanish again, “would you mind putting that fellow down so that I can introduce you to my wife?” Captain Green, face alight with wonder, let his hand fall to his side, and the ropes holding Adam aloft loosed and descended, bringing their prisoner back to solid ground, where he coughed a few times and announced to no one in particular that he was fine. “You remember,” began Mr. DaRosa, “that when you rescued me from that storm, I told you I came from a ship called the Terror, that I thought lost with everyone on it. The most feeling loss of these was my captain and my wife.” 

“Well, thank you!” said John in mock affront.

“John!” exclaimed Jeff, who had not, till now, noticed his brother-in-law. “Damn, it’s good to see you, brother.” He went on, now addressing the Timberwolf as well. “I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t eat; I could hardly stand to come on deck to see the sunlight. So I was not with the party who went ashore in Cassadaga, and I never knew who was aboard the ship we were tracking. You can’t imagine, truly you cannot, what I felt when I realized.”

“I guess,” said Captain Green, “you want me not to kill them.” And the smile that crept over him was the most genuine thing his prisoners had ever seen on his pointed face. 

“Yes, sir. In fact, if you did, I’d kill you!” 

“I know you would. But you won’t have to.” With a broad and welcoming gesture, Captain Green ushered his men away from their prisoners. “If I’d known they were family, I wouldn’t have been so harsh!” The spell lifted from him, John fell forward again, catching himself on his good hand, the other cradled against his chest. Shaun, who had had one eye on him even when occupied with his own captor, now hurried to him to tend his broken fingers. Meanwhile, Captain Green offered an apologetic hand to Michel, “Had I only known, my lady! Your husband has become very dear to us, and any friend of his…” 

“Are we free to go on our way?” she asked. 

“That’s not even a question!” 

“And will you put your surgeon to work with ours mending our crew?” 

“At once.” 

“Very good.” With all the imperious grace of her upbringing, Michel allowed him to take her hand.

So they went about, mending what was broken and cleaning what was ruined. It is a strange thing among pirates, that although they are some of the quickest to hold grudges, they are also some of the quickest to drop them when once the cause for the grudge has been put behind. I have known a man who went to sea with his best friend, and though that friend left the ship—left it twice, mind you!—to join the king’s astronomers, in good time he would repent, and off they went a-plundering again, merry as ever. And after all, the Great Golden were generally good fellows, if possessed of that bloodthirsty spirit that made them such formidable foes. 

Adam had not been seriously wounded, barring the rope bruises that he would find marking him in purple and blue coils when he undressed that night, so he made himself busy about cleaning up, even taking up the mop like olden times. The nearer they came to finishing their work, the more a grip of fear tightened around his heart.

~

At last, all was set right, and the two crews were to part. The moon had risen full overhead, glinting off the gentle waves as bright as a winter sun.

“Well,” said Adam to Michel, who had not let Jeff leave her side for a second all evening. “Shall I wish you good-bye, then?” 

“Oh,” she said. “Must you?”

“I just meant—” he began, now unsure. “If your husband is happy with his new crew, and if you…I know you’ve want—you’ve wanted to see the tail end of this ship since you came back to it.” 

“I did,” she agreed, almost as afraid to make the offer as Adam was to hear the farewell. “Adam, we’ve been talking, Jeff and I. I still mean to take my share of the treasure and set myself up as captain again. You know there’s no feeling quite like it.” 

“I know.” 

“But I think that I cannot be rid of the Timberwolf after all. What would you say to a consort? I think we two shall conquer much more of the sea together than apart.” 

Adam tried to school his features, but he had never been a good liar, so he smiled. “It would be an honor. And more than that, it’d be a pleasure.” The pleasure was true, but bittersweet. They would be nearby, at least. 

Mark and Shaun had been engrossed in a conference of their own, from which Mark appeared. “If we’re shaking up the hierarchy again, can I abdicate?” 

“Can you what?” asked his captain, who was too much absorbed in his own feelings to quite process the question. 

“I don’t wanna be quartermaster anymore. It’s fuckin’ weird not answering to John when he’s right here. He’ll have the votes in one second. Put him back in charge.” 

Adam started and stopped his sentence at least four times. “I think John is—John’s leaving—again,” was all he could stammer out. 

“Then make him stay, asshole.” 

Adam turned to John, who had been the quietest of them all. Flushed in the cool of the night, he clasped his hands behind his back. “What say you?” he asked. “I’ve heard the man who least wants to be king should wear the crown. Or something like it.” 

“That’s the trouble.” John finally looked up, green eyes meeting Adam’s brown with a rare intensity. “I want this.” 

“Do you?” 

“Very much.” 

“John—” Adam said breathlessly. With such earnestness it ached, he took up John’s injured hand in both of his, his lips brushing the poor, bandaged fingers. 

John shook his head and, with his free hand, he touched Adam’s face, dragged it to his own, and kissed him fiercely, desperately. For once, for once, he cared nothing for who might be watching, for who might know too much if he were too bold. He cared only for Adam’s strong arms wrapped around him, for the bruising press of his lips against John’s, for the boy laughing across from him at an inn in Bath whom he had wanted and wanted and wanted every day since then, even when he was lost to him forever. 

When they finally broke apart, there were wolf-whistles and smart remarks to receive gracefully—although when Mark congratulated John, saying that Adam was not a bad captain to serve under “or over!", said captain did threaten to give him a taste of the cat for his insubordination. But Adam’s eyes sparkled so brightly as he made the threat that it was as good as a blessing. He could not be contained. He shook hands with Jeff DaRosa, wishing to know him better soon; threatened again to turn Mark and Shaun in to the Royal Navy if they kept laughing at him so; told Michel to keep her share of the treasure, for he would steal her the finest ship of the fleet as a re-wedding present. He came to Captain Green, and clapped hands warmly with him. “And you have to take my share of the treasure before you go. No, I insist. After all, you defeated us fair and square—I’ve never seen anything like it. And what do I need with gold and silk?” He beamed at his crew. “I’ve found what I went searching for.” 

For this pronouncement, he was mocked half-way to hell, but he kissed John again and cared nothing for it. 

Chapter Text

~1714~

Adam had talked a big talk when he asked John to spar. “I’ve picked up a few things,” he said, bouncing on his heels. John knew whatever his claims about fighting, Adam had at least picked up that no one on this ship believed in going easy on their pupils. Mark had told the boy to his face that if he lost a fight with him, into the Sound he went! Swimming back to the ship would teach as much as any duel! So John was hardly surprised when Adam came to the least athletic-looking person he could find, assuming he could get good hits in. It made it all the more fun to disillusion him. 

The weapons were the first pettiness: most folks fought with swords and pistols, or else one or the other (Mark wanted a battle hammer once, but Shaun pointed out that shipboard fights were in closer quarters than battle hammers best served, and did he want to patch up the broken faces of every ally Mark accidentally backhanded? He did not!) Sword-and-dagger fencing was telling, like choosing one’s own composition to play as a duet. But Adam was game as he was for everything—as he had been for turning pirate in the first place—and he faced off against John on the deserted deck, flourishing a little more than necessary. 

The fight was furious, but hardly long. Before the gulls in the rigging were even troubled enough by the clashing weapons to ruffle their wings and leave, John had Adam forced against the railing, sword fallen among the ropes, dagger arm pinned useless by the flat of his sword. John laughed breathlessly at his wide-eyed surprise. “Did you think Michel was the only one who had a fencing master?” 

From where Adam was standing, the spray tossed up by the ship’s motion wet his back, which was actually somewhat less comfortable than the dagger at his heart. John wasn’t giving him an inch of grace either way. Mean of him. “You do sort of look like you had a servant lace up your boots ‘cause it was tricky for you.”

“Watch it.” 

A quick turn of the wrist—Adam yelped; the dagger’s point dug into his chest, tearing his shirt and bringing up drops of blood against the white linen. He bit his tongue and put on a casual front, like he was leaning against the railing of his own free will, not pressed there by a provably sharp blade. “If you do that every time I mouth off to you,” he complained languidly, “I won’t have any shirts left.”

John smiled narrowly, leaned in over the hilt. “You’ll have to find something better to do with your mouth, then.” 

A breath passed between them, shoulders heaving from exertion, chests all but touching, if not for the eight inches of steel holding them apart. Adam’s eyes flickered to John’s lips, his eyelashes caught gold in the late afternoon sun. 

Then he spit straight in John’s face.

“Jesus…Christ!” John stumbled back just enough for Adam, laughing madly, to dive, retrieve his sword, and face off again. “You picked up a few things, did you?” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. “You shit, I should knock you—”

“Into the Sound? I’ve heard that one. You need more threats. You know, as a crew.” 

Adam still couldn’t fence worth a damn, tricks and smart-mouthing aside, so John disarmed him properly in another minute and sent him off to scrub some floors or peel some apples or…something or other to make up for it. 

Adam paused at the stairs; looked over his shoulder. He hadn’t stopped smiling, even when tasked with chores that were technically not his duty.  “John.” 

“Yes?”

“I should have kissed you, back there.” 

“Should you have?” John’s face was unreadable, perhaps interested, perhaps only amused. 

“If I had, I could have stolen your sword completely!” 

He liked making him laugh. John was too serious, and it brightened his eyes prettily. “Oh, of course you could. Try that next time and see how it goes for you.”

~1723~

Captain Destry and her first mate Miss Williams sailed the little way across Clew Bay to the Timberwolf without the usual signaling beforehand, so really it was her own fault that when she boarded (the ladder having been left over the side when the rest of the crew went ashore), she was just in time to witness the moment when Adam and John’s sparring devolved from its martial purposes into such matters as will make the delicate reader turn the page (and will make the indelicate reader much beshrew me for not describing in graphic detail). 

“Captain Lazzara!” she cried as their swords clattered, forgotten, to the deck. “Unhand my brother, if you please!”

Adam leapt back, blushing right up to his hairline with an exclamation of, “Captain Destry! An honor as always!” while John scrambled to his feet from the stairs, grumbling, “My God, Michel, your timing.” 

She smiled. “I couldn’t wait. Wait till you hear the adventure I’ve found for us next.” 

~

Much, much more could be said of this bold crew. Having once conquered storms, foes, and their own treacherous hearts, there was nothing left to do but to conquer the rest of the seven seas. Of course, with their job for the Helena completed to everyone’s satisfaction, many more peculiar quests came to them from that peculiar ship. One could tell tales of their quest for a box full of sharp objects, of encountering sirens off the coast of Mexico, of Captain Mascherino’s return after escaping Marooner’s Isle. One could, if one had less of a taste for action, sit by the fire and tell fond domestic tales of our heroes under the stars, swapping unlistenably bad jokes with their future ahead of them. 

But tonight is not the night for those stories. Another night, perhaps. For now, rest assured that as far as I know, the Timberwolf and her friends still roam the seas, finding adventure wherever they seek it. 

THE END