The Buccaneer's Apprentice (8 page)

“Why not come out and say it, old man? There was an assassin.” Darcy’s voice was flat.

“Our lives have been lived on edge for many months. Then yes, there was an assassination attempt. My daughter did not take it well.” Nic felt a sudden stab of sympathy for the girl. He’d thought her cold and hard. Perhaps she had to be, with her father’s life in constant danger. “So we left,” Jacopo continued. “I told our household that my daughter and I were taking a month in the countryside, to settle our nerves. A trusted servant helped us gain passage on a craft from Côte Nazze sailing for Cassaforte. A mere sailboat, really—a pleasure craft that had belonged to one of the Azurite aristocracy. My plan was to report back to King Alessandro and beg him to relieve me of my duties, so that my daughter would be assured her father might live for a little while more, at least.” He reached out and stroked his daughter’s hair. She, in turn, returned his affectionate gesture with a sunny beam that exposed all her teeth. After a moment in which they basked in each other’s smiles, they both turned to Nic.

“Of course, signor,” said Nic, inclining his head to them both. Inwardly, however, his heart thudded. For a little over a year now, he had been spectator to many a drama on the stage. He could tell when someone was acting. “Yet how came you to this island?”

“Oh.” Jacopo seemed surprised he’d skipped over that part of the narrative. “Of course. There was a storm …”

“We lost the wind …” Darcy began to say at the same time as her father. Panic-stricken, she stopped talking.

“There was a storm and you lost the wind?” Nic asked, cocking his head. He felt even more uneasy.

“There was a storm,” Jacopo said, slowly and carefully, as he watched his daughter’s reaction. “We lost the
good
wind, then found ourselves stranded.”

“And your boat?”

Darcy looked stricken, somehow. She turned her head to conceal her emotions. “Gone,” said Jacopo. It was obvious he wished to bring the story to a hasty close. “But surely I’ve convinced you that returning to Cassaforte as quickly as possible is in all of our best interests.”

Nic nodded gravely. Jacopo and Darcy Colombo had convinced him indeed—convinced him that they were lying, at any rate. Little of their story added up. Their conflicting tales about how they’d come to be stranded were only part of it. Why, for example, would a debt collector carry on a vendetta against an ambassador, much less murder him? And why would the same debt collector attempt the same with a man of no blood relation to his predecessor? Perhaps parts of the story had been cobbled together from half-truths. It was obvious that Darcy was highly protective of her father. Something must have happened to frighten them both.

“Of course,” Nic murmured, trying to seem understanding. In the near-darkness, his face gave away none of his misgivings. “But perhaps rescue might be closer at hand than we thought,” he said, suddenly inspired. Once convinced he had the Colombos’ full attention, he explained. “There was a man from Pays d’Azur who boarded the
Pride of Muro
at Massina. His name was …” Nic pretended to think. “Dumond?”

Oh, yes. The white lie had the exact effect as he’d thought it might. Darcy ceased her restless fidgeting and sat still. If it had not been so dark, Nic might have been able to see how white her skin had gone. Jacopo, too, froze. He drew in one very long and raspy breath. “Dumond?” he finally asked. “It’s a common enough name in that country.”

“He was quite tall,” Nic said. “He wore a blue military coat with gold braid, insignia upon his shoulders, and sported a mole upon his cheekbone. He was looking for someone. Cassaforteans, he said. Perhaps the court at Côte Nazze was worried at your disappearance and dispatched him to assure your safety?”

Nic was not mistaken in his suspicions. Jacopo quelled whatever his daughter was about to say with one raised finger. “Oh,” he said, weighing his words carefully. “That sounds very much like the Comte Dumond. I wouldn’t say he was concerned about us, though. I doubt he’s even heard of our departure. No,” he continued, his voice gaining in strength as he spun the tale, “the Comte Dumond is a high officer in the navy of Pays d’Azur. An ambitious man. But no, he wouldn’t be interested in the pair of us, not at all.”

Nic couldn’t help but push a little. “But if he knew the Nuncio to Pays d’Azur was in distress, surely …”

“No.” Jacopo was firm. “Besides, his business is in clearing the waters of pirates, not small affairs like ours.” Clearing the waters of pirates? Or colluding with them? No honorable officer would ever have pirates do his dirty work, of that Nic was certain. “But Niccolo, it is late, and we have all had long days. May I suggest that you make camp here near the fire and sleep? We can speak in the morning of our next actions.”

Nic agreed to the suggestion. Now that the excitement of the fight had faded, his every muscle ached. The back of his head began to throb again. “We will speak in the morning,” he assured them both.

Once they had left the fireside, however, Nic could hear the father and daughter arguing in hushed whispers, beneath the hanging fruit trees further down the rock face. The Colombos had lied to him. For whatever reason, they didn’t trust him with their story. Nic was not surprised at the discovery, exactly. In his experience, everyone had an agenda tailored to their own desires. The only truly altruistic man he’d ever met had been his last master, and even his kindness had not broken Nic’s curse. Knowing that the Colombos kept a secret did not make him dislike them—he would merely have to be careful until he knew exactly what they wanted.

Nic curled into a ball atop a pile of empty burlap sacks, and let the fire warm him. The whispering continued for some time, then faded into the rustling of the tree branches and the constant rush of water upon the sands. Though his future was as uncertain as ever it had been, he slept soundly for the first time in days.

Landlocked though Vereinigtelände may be, at least we are
not prey to the whims and money-lusts of pirates, like those
of Cassaforte. Their navy is constantly having to battle pirates determined to lay ruin to traders entering and exiting their ports.

—The spy Gustophe Werner,
in a secret missive to Baron Friedrich van Wiestel

F
og the color of lamb’s wool had settled on the beach overnight. When Nic opened his eyes, he couldn’t see past the edge of the branches hanging over the area in front of the Colombos’ shelter. Something had awoken him. When he tried to sit up and take stock, he realized that somebody was behind him. Her hand was on his mouth.

“Sssh,” Darcy warned him, in his ear.

Nic rolled out from under the girl and sat up on his knees. His heart pounded and his chest began to heave, as if his body were readying for another tussle with the girl. “What are you doing?” he gasped out. “By the gods, you’re a lunatic!”

“Sssh!” The girl’s scowl grew more furious at the sound of his voice. “My father is sleeping.”

“Fine. Just don’t … don’t wake me like that
ever
again!” Honestly. The girl had been raised with every advantage, yet she was more of a savage than Nic ever had been. The look she threw his way was pure scorn. She rose from the pile of sacks where he’d slept, brushed off her knees, and retrieved a spade from beside a log near the dead fire. Or the almost-dead fire, that was. While Nic righted himself and rubbed his face to convince himself that this was not a dream, Darcy stooped to dig through the layer of gray ashes to the embers underneath. The buried nuggets glowed a bright red when she blew on them. Into the curved bottom of a pottery shard, she scooped a spadeful of the embers, then set it aside. She threw some tinder atop the stirred campfire, stood, and grabbed from the sand the tongs she had used the night before to poke the fire.

“Follow,” she said.

“I’m not your servant!”

Darcy shushed him with a finger to her lips. Fine. Nic would come, but he wouldn’t have to like it. Carrying the ruined pot by the edge, Darcy began scurrying down the tide line, in the direction of the island’s other end. Nic’s boots spat up sand as he followed. He marveled at how the girl somehow managed, in her breeches and bare feet, to outpace him to an extent that she was almost invisible in the fog. Only once did she look back to see if he was still following. When her eyes met his across the mist, they seemed to measure him. She looked Nic up and down, taking in his height and breadth, the cut of his hair and the hang of his shirt, and summing it all up as she might a column in a ledger. It was only for a moment, but Nic found himself curious what she saw in that time.

By the time they reached their destination, Nic was slightly out of breath from trying to keep pace. They were in a small grove of trees heavy with long, glossy fronds. The growth was not as dense as the small forest where the pool of water lay, but its branches hung nearly to the ground, providing them a sense of privacy. She ignored him completely as she set down the pot. “We had to come all the way out here to talk?” Nic said. His voice sounded almost angry. The girl spoke the same language as he, but at no time in the last day had she given him any indication that she actually listened. “I mean no disrespect, signorina, but while you and I are on this island, I think we should set a number of things straight.”

“Oh?” Darcy turned, her eyebrows raised. Really, she looked like a Buonochio painting, with her fair hair falling around her pale skin. “What things are those, boy?”

A Buonochio painting would not have captured the utter scorn she managed to pour into that single last word. “For one thing, do not address me as
boy
. I am not your servant.” He’d said the words a few minutes before, but now they sounded confident. “I’m happy to be consulted. I want to help. But I refuse to be ordered. I think your father would agree with me on …” Nic’s words trailed off into silence. Something had moved, within the cluster of trees.

He thought it was a trick of the fog, but no, something living was stirring restlessly beside one of the trees. Not merely animal, either—it was a man, slumped and sitting, his arms wrapped behind him around the tree’s trunk. “By the gods,” Nic murmured, closing the distance between them. “Maxl?”

The pirate’s lower lip was split and caked with dried blood. His eyelids seemed heavy, as if he could barely open them. A dark bruise was beginning to form over his left cheekbone. Groggily, he looked up at Nic. His mouth struggled to form a single word. “Help?”

“What have you been doing?” Nic demanded, whirling around. Darcy had brought the bowl closer to the tree. Black smoke rose from the cinders within. Again, the girl made no sign of having heard. “I said …”

Darcy whirled around. “I’m not your servant either,” she said. The intensity of her voice startled Nic. “And anyway, it’s not what I’m doing. It’s what you’re going to do.”

Nic didn’t understand. He shook his head. “I’m going to let him go.”

“No, you’re not.” Darcy flipped up the metal tongs so that they swung through the air and landed in the palm of her right hand. Again, she seemed to measure him with her eyes. “Why should we?”

“Because you can’t—he’s injured!” When he’d observed Darcy summing him up before, Nic had wondered what total she might have reached. Judging by the scorn upon her face, she obviously found him wanting. “By the gods. You’ve been beating him!”

“He has information,” she replied, marching over to the bowl.

“What information?”

Her head tilted. Her eyelids lowered. The sigh she let out was pure contempt. “This dog wasn’t aboard your ship. The one you ‘destroyed.’” She said the last word as if she didn’t quite believe his story. “He didn’t float to the island, like you. He says he left his crew before they invaded your craft. How did he get here?” Nic thought about it for a moment. She was right. There hadn’t been any large sections of destroyed ship for Maxl to cling to. “His ship must have been close enough for him to swim from—which it wasn’t. My father and I have both been watching these waters. Or else he had a boat.”

Of course. Nic remembered seeing the trail on the grassy slope, the day before. Maxl had some kind of raft or small rowboat that he had dragged from the beach through the field, leaving the deep trail he’d followed into the woods. It made total sense. What didn’t add up, however, was why Darcy was now using the tongs to clutch one of the embers from the pot. When she pulled it up, its surface had cooled and formed a black crust. The moment she blew on it, though, the ash flew away and sparks followed, exposing the hot, burning core. “Fine. He had a boat,” Nic said, trying to sound reasonable. “Ask him where it is.”

“I have.” Darcy took the ember and thrust it against a tree trunk across from Maxl. The bark beneath it began to smoke, slowly at first, then with increasing vigor. When Darcy pulled away the tongs, the heat left a black scar. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

“No boat,” said Maxl. He looked exhausted. Nic couldn’t look at the cut on his lip without wincing. “Maxl is having no boat.”

“There
is
a boat,” she snapped. “And you’re going to tell us where it is.” She began to advance.

“What are you planning to do?” Nic asked. His heart almost skipped a beat. “Torture him?” She was, he realized. She intended to harm the pirate in order to find out how he’d gotten to the island on his own. He waved his hands. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t do that!”

“I could,” she announced. Without warning she thrust the tongs forward, so that his fingers wrapped instinctively around the long handles. “But I’m not. You are.”

“What?” The biting ends of the tongs were close enough to his own face that he could feel the heat from the nugget of burning wood it held. “I’m not.”

“Oh, but you will.” Nic was so wary of dropping the ember onto himself that even as she grasped him from behind and pushed him across the sand to the tree where Maxl was tied, he kept squeezing the handles. “You’re going to demand he tell you everything. And if he doesn’t …” She pointed to the black scar on the tree trunk nearby.

“You’ve gone mad!” Nic tried to resist. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this nonsense. Still, he was wary of letting loose his grip of the hot coal. “You can’t expect to me to … I won’t!”

Darcy’s accent might have been an exotic tickle in his ears, but her words were corrosive. “You said you’d help us in any way you could.”

When Nic looked over at Maxl, he could see the pirate’s eyes had grown as large as the twin moons themselves. Perspiration beaded on his forehead, running along the worry lines there and catching at the brows. All of his wiry muscles struggled to loosen himself from the bonds that restrained him to the tree, but Darcy had tied the knots too tightly. Whether or not Maxl understood every word of their conversation, he certainly understood Darcy’s intent, and it frightened him so much that he was squirming like a trapped animal. “I’m not going to help you like this!” Nic snapped back.

They were standing in front of Maxl now. The hot ember was only a handspan from the pirate’s face. It cast an orange glow that cut through the mist. “You’ve killed men before,” Darcy growled through her teeth. “This should be nothing to you.”

She picked the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t have a choice.” Still squeezing the tongs, Nic wrenched himself out of the girl’s grasp. He turned around to face her. “It was either him or me. This situation is entirely different. If you want information from Maxl, I’m sure there are other ways to get it than
torturing
him.”

“Yes!” said the pirate, nodding fervently. “Other ways!”

“He’s one of
them
.” Darcy still looked at the tongs as if she intended to grab them from Nic and burn her captive herself. “He’s like an animal. They don’t have feelings.”

“I am having feelings!” cried Maxl. “Many feelings. Many many feelings!”

“Does your father know you’re doing this?” Nic demanded.

The girl shook her head. “He doesn’t have to know everything.”

Nic was outraged, now. “I don’t know what you’re up to. Perhaps living on this island has given you moon-fever. Maybe you were crazy before you left Pays d’Azur. But let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not your servant, and I
certainly
am not your executioner.” Nic looked over to Maxl, who was regarding him with hope. “Until he does something to merit it, I won’t lay a hand to this man.”

Darcy’s lip curled. “Is that so?” The three words, combined with the girl’s obvious contempt, fanned even higher the flames of Nic’s indignation. She followed them up with another observation. “Perhaps it’s because you’re not man enough?”

“You are insane.” Nic turned. The fog was just as thick as it had been all morning, but he could see far enough through it to discern a gap in the nearest outermost trees. He flung the burning coal through it like a javelin, then marched over to the spot in the sand where it had landed. His boot kicked some sand over its top to starve it of the air it needed to burn. “Absolutely insane,” he said, walking back with the tongs hanging from one hand.

“What are you going to do?” Darcy taunted him. “Tell my papa?”

“If I have to!” Nic threw the tongs down onto the ground, then let out a sound of utter exasperation. It was a purely animal cry, half grunt and half attempt to rid himself of the anger that roiled within. “Of all the bloody luck. I could have lived here quite nicely on my own. By myself. I could have lived on fruit and roots and small animals and been master of my own island. But no. I have to share it with … with a pirate …”