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Summer, 1667.
Kevin’s in the creek again, crouching down to stare through the water. The little fishies catch the scattered light, silver and bright, darting away from his fingertips.
He creeps forward, trying not to spook his real prey: where the creek cuts through the edge of the undergrowth and spreads wide onto the sand, there’s a round green shell moving carefully over the rocks on its tiny flippers.
“It’s all right, little guy,” Kevin whispers, sliding his palm under the turtle hatchling. “We all get turned around sometimes. Let’s get you back where you belong, little one.”
Down the beach, someone shrieks, and the turtle startles, lurching forward, and Kevin barely manages to catch him in his own small palm. The turtle fits in his hand only barely: he’s small for his age, short and round, and the turtle’s flippers flap helplessly over the edge of his pinky and forefinger. He brings his other hand up, curls it around, supports the little guy better, and starts to stand carefully.
“Kev!” a deep voice bellows, and Kevin flinches. It’s not that his father will be angry that he’s spending his time hunting for creatures to rescue instead of building boats or fishing or any of the other things a seven year old boy should be doing to help the community—he’ll be disappointed, which is worse, somehow.
(It’s not worse. He has friends who have fathers and mothers who get so, so terrifyingly angry, and he knows he’s lucky with his own. But he just wishes they would listen when he talked, would let him try and convince them how fascinating the animals all around them are.)
“Kevin!” his father’s voice comes again, and he shrinks down, hoping the scattered shade of the trees around him, sparse though they are, will hide him until his task is done.
“We’re gonna get you to the water,” he promises his tiny charge, running a thumb over its patterned, beautiful shell. “You’re safe, I promise. I’ve got you.”
He takes another step, foot landing on a rock—
The rock tips, wobbles, he can’t throw his arms out for balance without dropping his little friend—
Warm, clever hands, smaller than his own but just as solid and definitely stronger, catch him around the waist, steadying him.
“I’ll distract him,” says Hinewai, her voice firm in his ear. “Do what you have to do. I’ll be back.”
Kevin nods, heart beating fast, and something in his chest flutters as she squeezes him around the waist once then pulls away, leaving him steady on his feet. He doesn’t turn to watch her go, knows he can trust her perfectly, because she’s never, ever let him down. Her footsteps are quick and heavy, pounding the sand, and as he picks his way down the creek to where it fans out to a thin sheet of water on the beach, he hears his father’s laugh, fading in the distance.
Three days later, Hinewai is gone: her family part of the group heading for new lands—had she known? Had she kept it secret from him?
He never finds out. Over the next half century, her face fades from his memory, and even her voice—but that feeling of solid stability, of someone whose very presence made the ground firmer under his feet? That stays with him. And when he boards his first pirate ship six years later and leaves his home forever, he dreams of her that first night as the waves sway the hammock he’s hung in a corner deep below decks.
#
Spring, 1718
Fang has heard the rumors, of course— all the legends. Zheng Yi Sao, pirate queen, and her fearsome crew of women from the wondrous East (though not as far east as he and the Boss are from, it has to be said, and not that mysterious: Fang’s been to China a couple times, loves the tea and the spicy red peppers). It’s not that Fang had dismissed what he’s heard, not really, although again, the world’s all connected and he knows better than most that they’re just people like everybody else over there. It’s more that he knows the way the pirate community talks about anyone from his side of the world, and he’d assumed the rumors were exaggerated.
And then they crash into his life in a rising tide of bells and blue cloth and razor-sharp pirating skills.
Zheng is incredible, of course: a true queen, a brilliant pirate in the way he’s only ever seen Blackbeard be. Her crew is disciplined and efficient in a way that would make Izzy pop wood on the spot if he weren’t an absolute fucking disaster of a human rumflask these days. (Somebody’s gonna have to do something about that. Fang really, really doesn’t want it to be him.)
So yeah. Zheng? Once in a generation talent, obviously. Terrorized the Pacific. Carried her ships over Panama. Amazing. John Bartholomew hangs on her every word (Fang’s got to get that story eventually—maybe he’ll borrow some of Izzy’s rum).
But behind Zheng? Keeping order, running the ship with an iron fist?
Oh, Fang might be in love.
He hangs back at first, because Auntie’s busy doing her thing—and it’s amazing, really, the clues she finds and the narrative she builds from them, even if it’s pretty bad news for him and the crew.
There’s something about her: something that makes his jaw hang loose, slack-jawed like a cabin boy watching his first raid: competence, obviously, a solidity that makes him think she’d toss him around like a sack of potatoes, a strength in her core that makes him want to fall to his knees at her feet—and maybe explore what’s above them. It’s been years since he’s been with a woman, what with the whole pirate lifestyle, but Auntie... something about her (everything about her?) makes him remember that yes, he’s always loved a woman who knows what she wants.
But then there’s the whole thing with the guy with the nose, and the exploding clocks, and Jackie and poisoning the English navy, and losing Izzy, and it’s all sort of a blur.
(He wishes he had Ivan with him to talk it through. He misses the guy every day, hopes in a secret desperate part of his heart that the wound hadn’t been fatal, that he’d disappeared himself on purpose, faked his death to get out of the life or to start a new one and that one day Fang will catch a glimpse of a crescent moon and sparkling, dark eyes, and know.)
So he doesn’t get a chance to take a breath until much later, the only respite his spa day with Roach and the couple nights he’s spent with Lucius. Eventually, though, everything’s all worked out with Ed and with Captain Bonnet and whatever it is they’re going off to do (Fang can’t imagine them actually running an inn, knows them both well enough to know that’s not going to work out too well). The crew has some time, finally, together on the open sea, where they belong.
It’s when he takes his turn at the wheel, as twilight’s casting the deck in golden-purple shadows, that he hears footsteps behind him.
“All good up here, Kevin?” she says in that deep, beautiful voice of hers, laced with an accent that makes his soul sing.
Fang nods, locks the wheel, turns. “Yeah, boss, everything’s fine,” he replies, and then—
There’s something in her eyes, something familiar, something more than the accent, more than the shape of her and the deep, wide-set bronze of her irises in the fading light. He steps closer, mind reeling, and when she smiles—for the first time since the two halves of the crew reunited—he can’t believe it.
“It’s you,” he murmurs, almost silent. “How can it be you?”
Her smile deepens, widens, eyes crinkling. “I said I’d be back,” she says, and Fang’s chest fills with warmth. “Hey, you!” she yells at Pete, whose head flies up so fast he clonks it on a hanging pulley. “Take the wheel.”
Pete scurries over, already forgotten, and when Auntie holds out her hand, Fang takes it in his own.
It’s just as solid, just as grounding as he remembers.