Haunted
The pier groaned and shivered beneath their step, tortured by ship and sea. The planks stank of tar; both pier and tall ship were regularly painted in the thick substance. More open barrels waited in groups of three for the lift: silver fish and clams and sea crawlers and oysters tossed together in a welter of fresh catch.
“The real coin is there,” Mal said, nodding down the pier at a pyramid of stacked square crates. “Spice, chai, and kahve. Spice and chai from the north, and kahve from the Black Coast. Wilhaiim pays dearly for all three, the merchants and islanders are rich, all.”
Liam studied the crates. Blue and green sigils labeled their contents, dye faded after a long, hot voyage.
“Avani’s an islander,” the boy mused. “And not rich.”
“No.” Mal frowned, watching as Jacob chased a fat gull away from a dropped, flopping fish. The raven pinned the fish between sharp claws and plunged his beak into the glassy, dead eye. “Although once her family might have been. Before the eight islands sank, they were known for a rare fabric woven from the silk of orange butterflies.” He whistled, sharp, between two fingers. “The butterflies were lost with the islands and the islanders.”
Merchants and seaman froze at Mal’s whistle. The raven did not. Jacob swallowed down the fish’s eye, and went to work on its gills. Mal cursed.
“He’ll not come till he’s ready, my lord,” Liam said, wise beyond his years. Then, “Look, there, that fellow with the ring in his ear. He’s waving, my lord, do you know him? He looks like a pirate, but he ain’t, I mean, isn’t he? Can we go and say hello?”
“Pirates sighted near Selkirk are quickly keelhauled,” Mal replied, shaking his head over Liam’s tangled grammar. “The feather means he’s first mate. And the ring in his ear belongs to the ship. But I do believe I recognize those freckles. Come, lad, and let’s see if my suspicions are correct.”
Merchants and seamen dodged discreetly out of the way as Mal and Liam walked the pier. The man with the feather in his cap and the ring in his ear stood on the planks midway between sand and water, foot propped on a square crate, hands now full of net and blue glass. His dark, freckled face creased into pleased, sun-worn lines as Mal approached. He grinned, revealing tobacco-blackened teeth and a single true-gold incisor.
It was the tooth that convinced Mal.
“Cousin.” The sailor winked, turned and spat, then winked again, this time at Liam. “You’ve lost me twenty pieces of silver.”
“Have I?” Mal couldn’t help but smile back. “Still not learned from past mistakes, Seb?”
“It was a sure bet. Even Biaz misdoubted you’d bother show your face, Malachi Serrano.”
“Doyle,” Mal corrected. “Malachi Doyle, now, cousin.”
“More fool you, taking a flatlander name.” Sebastian Serrano spat again, then dropped the tangle of rope and blown glass globes into Liam’s arms. He held out a brown hand. “It won’t stick.”
Malachi clasped the offered hand, felt the scars and calluses.
“It has, and will,” he said, gently. “Seb, this is my lad, Liam. Liam, my cousin Sebastian, first mate,” Mal glanced at the ship rocking behind his cousin, “On The Laughing Queen?”
“Aye,” Sebastian said, taking his hand back, chest expanding with obvious pride. “Three years now, it’s been. She’s a good ship, outruns the best of them.”
“Fair way up from novice lineman,” Mal said. “Liam, Seb and my brother Rowan used to work the rigging together.”
Liam appeared deeply engrossed in a blue glass buoy. The stare he turned on Sebastian was calculating.
“I don’t like boats,” he said, quietly dismissive. “And neither does my lord.”
Surprised, Mal opened his mouth to protest, but Sebastian beat him to it.
“Your master had the makings of a great sea captain,” he corrected on a laugh. “Would have been, too, if not for the magic.” He carefully didn’t look at the ring on Mal’s hand. “Magic and the sea don’t mix, lad, because the sea is jealous of any power but its own.” He gathered net and glass back from the boy. “Ships are like songs, Liam. Some men can carry the tune, and some can’t. Now, Queenie here, she’s sweeter than the sweetest ballad, because she’s not just a merchant marine, she’s also part of the King’s Navy, best known for the pirates she’s brought to heel.”
“Aye?” Liam considered The Laughing Queen’s barnacled starboard. “Real pirates?”
“Are there any other sort? We’ve a collection of confiscated cutlass and chivs pinned to the dodger, some yet brown with old blood. Also a Black Coast flintlock, off the last corsair we drug beneath the keel.” Sebastian cupped his chin. “Mayhap you’d like to see?”
Liam was near quivering with excitement and curiosity. Mal saw the reluctant denial on his furrowing brow and spoke first.
“Go up, lad,” he said. “It’s fine. I’ll wait here.”
“But, my lord!” Liam looked horrified. “I don’t know—”
Sebastian interrupted, putting fingers to lips and splitting the air with a piercing whistle to match Mal’s earlier attempt. Immediately a man popped head and shoulders over the deck rail.
“Oi?” the man shouted over the wind. “Whatzit?”
“Visitor, Fiennes!” Sebastian called. “Come and show him up.”
“My lord!” Liam tried again, but Mal cut him off with a wave of his hand.
“Hold tight to the ropes,” he said, watching as Fiennes shimmied his way to the deck. “And don’t touch the cutlasses. I’ll be here when you’ve looked your fill.”
“Here to see the cutlasses, are you, lad?” Fiennes had even fewer teeth than Sebastian. “Well, don’t stand about with your tongue hanging. Come on, then.”
Liam gave in. He plucked the rose crown from his brow, set it on the planks, and jumped after Fiennes without further protest, scurrying up the rope ladder with an unnatural ease that might have made a more observant man pause. Sebastian only shook his head, pinched a fresh twist of tobacco from a pouch at his belt, and popped it between his lips.
“What happened?”
Mal arched his brows. “I became vocent, Sebastian. It’s been a while; I assumed you’d hear.”
“Most powerful man in the kingdom,” his cousin quoted, less than impressed. “I wiped your tears the day word of Rowan’s loss made Selkirk, or have you forgotten? No.” He swiveled and spat. “I meant the lad. What happened to his face and hands? More of your magic?”
“No.”
Sebastian waited a beat, then shrugged. “Come to pass on the title, have you? You’ll not be wanting it, I imagine.”
“You imagine correctly,” Mal said. “It was never mine to begin with.”
“Nay, it was Rowan’s.” Seb pursed his lips in thought. “Your mam still believes he’d have done well by it, but I’m not so sure.”
“Oh?” Gulls were diving the pier, shrieking. Mal caught a glimpse of black wings, and winced.
“Nay. Rowan never shed a tear in his life. Even as the tide dragged him down, he didn’t so much as squeak. Loved him like a brother, I did, but nothing ever roused him to passion, do you understand?”
Mal frowned.
“Music,” he said after a moment of thought. “Dancing. Good drink. Pretty lasses.”
“You remember differently than the rest of us.” Sebastian rolled his shoulders. The hem of his faded tunic flapped in the rising winds. “No matter. It’s been a long time, h’ain’t it? Come aboard?” It was a challenge.
“Nay,” Mal replied. “The pirates don’t look friendly.”
Sebastian stiffened. “Pirates?” His bare, cracked feet scratched on the planks as he turned to stare up at his ship. “We haven’t any pirates aboard.”
“You’ve plenty of them,” Mal said, mildly, showing his teeth. “Or did you think the rogues wouldn’t haunt the ship drowned them beneath her keel? Your afterdeck’s cluttered with vengeful spirits, cousin.”
Sebastian’s wrinkled face slackened. “Nay, not truly?” He shuddered. “Don’t you go spreading rumors, now, Mal. No good seaman will willingly sail a ghost-ridden ship. Word gets out she’s haunted, The Laughing Queen’s dead in the water.
Mal fixed his smile in place as Liam popped over the rails.
“I’ve no patience for rumors,” he said, watching as Liam half clamored, half jumped from ladder to pier. “I’ll see you tonight, Seb, at the dedication?”
“Aye,” his cousin muttered, distracted. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Mal put his arm around Liam’s sweaty neck, steering the lad away.
They walked the rest of the pier in silence, ignored by merchant and seaman both. Liam goggled over the remaining ships, but showed no inclination to visit another deck.
“You’re thoughtful,” Mal said as they turned about again, faces to Selkirk, wind against their backs. “Not cut out for adventure on the high seas?”
Liam shrugged, not quite dislodging Mal’s arm.
“It ain’t—isn’t—that, my lord,” he said. “The swords were fine, and the flintlock puzzling. It shoots a lead ball, my lord, like a canon, Fiennes said. With enough force to pass clean through a man, and kill him dead.”
They stepped off the pier and onto uneven sand. Morning was just giving way to afternoon, but already small boys and girls were using long, thin Selkirk matches to light the torches on the beach. Clouds raced overhead, and the young attendants had to shelter the flickering match-heads with their hands.
“That’s what’s bothering you, the flintlock? You likely won’t see another in your lifetime, lad. They’re extremely rare and by all accounts both difficult to manufacture and dangerously unreliable.”
“Not that, my lord.”
“Then what?”
“They’ve no respect, here, my lord. For you, or for the crown. They whisper behind your back, and spit. And I heard ’em call His Majesty a cheat and dishonest.”
“Ah.” Malachi urged Liam north along the beach, away from Selkirk and her pier, away from the torches. It didn’t escape his notice when Jacob left his game with the gulls and followed after, wheeling lazily overhead. “Most of the people on the coast have never had cause to make the trip into Wilhaiim, lad. To them, the king is only an idea, or an image. They watch their coin go to taxes, and see little in return. They’ve more local concerns; the tides, the weather, the catch. Even pirates are a rare threat these days; spooky stories used to scare infants in the cradle.”
Liam scuffed his sandals, kicking up sand. His hands were clenched at his side.
“His Majesty shouldn’t put up with it.”
“They pay their taxes, Liam. In truth, vague grumblings are natural, and nothing to worry yourself over.”
The boy’s low reply was made incomprehensible by a crash of feathers. Jacob landed hard on Mal’s shoulder, claws piercing linen, tongue clicking in his beak. Mal swore.
“God’s balls, monster. That hurts!”
“What’s that, my lord?” Liam asked, sulk interrupted. He pointed ahead, up the beach.
“That—” Mal reached up and tried to forcibly loosen the raven’s claws in his flesh. Jacob chortled, unrepentant. “—is where we’re walking to. One last thing to show you before we return to the keep.”
Liam cocked his head.
“It looks like part of a building, my lord. Sticking right out of the sand.”
“It is,” Mal answered. “Run ahead and take a look. There’s a plaque, I believe, in the royal lingua. You’ll be practiced enough to read it, I believe.”
The boy didn’t need to be told twice. Grievances forgotten for the moment, he galloped along the beach, scattering seaweed and gulls as he went. Mal followed more slowly, Jacob huffing in his ear.
“You know what it is, I imagine,” Mal said.
The bird didn’t bother to answer.
The stretch of beach was narrow, a silver strand between water and high cliffs. The spring winds, trapped against stone, howled. It had been on a similar spring night ten years earlier when the islands sank, that Gerald Doyle had sent Mal home to help with rescue and recovery, in the hopes that his blossoming magics might provide some assistance.
They hadn’t. Instead he’d waited on the sand, collecting limp, waterlogged bodies from skiff and rowboat and skipper, and in the dawn, directly from the rolling waves. He’d quickly lost count of corpses, but the spirits of the island dead hadn’t let him forget; they’d shrieked and wailed and called for their lost even as he pulled new bodies from the sea.
He’d wept with the violation of it, his inability to keep them out, the ineffectiveness of the few cants and mediations he’d begun to learn and his father had been embarrassed for his youngest son’s display of emotion. And angry. Later, after the island dead were piled and burnt according to their custom, while the flames were still hot, reaching high against the cliffs, the Selkirk had beaten Mal for cowardice, then sent him back to his foster father, ears still ringing with threats and recriminations.
The Serranos of Selkirk are men, Malachi, and not babes to weep over the sea’s fickle temper, the Selkirk had said between gritted teeth. You’re more flatlander than sea lord, now. Return home and tend your gentle fields.
“My lord,” Liam said, startling Mal from the past. “Is it a grave?”
“A monument,” Mal corrected. The beach was quiet, peaceful, those distraught spirits long moved on, or seeking shelter from the wicked wind. “There were too many corpses to inter, twelve times twelve at the end. Selkirk lit a great bonfire, and dedicated their souls to whatever gods they best loved, and stacked the corpses in the flames.”
“What’s this then?” Liam squinted at the monument. “Is it a rafter? It’s not part of a ship. I’ve never seen wood like this, striped and spotted.”
“The islanders call it monkey wood.” Mal regarded the beam. It had taken five of Selkirk’s men together to dig down deep enough to secure the monument against the tide. By all accounts they’d sunk it the length of a man into the earth, and still the beam over-topped the tallest man on the beach. “A support joist, part of a canopy or building. It floated past with the corpses; a few of my father’s men swam out and hauled it back in.”
He stretched past Liam, knocked the wood with this knuckles. “Hard as rock, but apparently very light. Can you read the plaque?”
Liam sank to his heels in the sand. He ran one finger over engraved bronze, touching each letter as he mouthed.
“All life springs from the waves. All life returns to the sea.” Liam frowned. “But that’s not right, my lord. We bury our dead in the ground, far away from any water, lest the bones rise and float away.”
“Flatland customs differ from coastal, just as island customs differ from both. Islanders burn their dead, flatlanders bury their dead. The coastal clans prefer to send the dead back into the sea.”
Liam’s face lit with curiosity. “How’s that, my lord? How’s it done?”
“Tonight,” Mal promised. “You’ll have the witnessing of it.”
Jacob clicked his tongue, unimpressed.
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