Her coal-red hair was cropped short and, if not for her attractive features, would have made her look more a boy than a woman. Her body was voluptuous and well figured, with plenty of meat on her bones and quite different from the women on his ship, but from what Edward could tell, it was all muscle.
"My, my, you are a big one, aren't ye?" she said as she eyed Edward up and down, her voice drawn out with a hint of Gaelic on the edges. Her accent was faint, as though weathered away after years away from home. The barest hint remained like single boulder on a sandy beach.
She walked around Edward, poring over him, studying his features beneath his loose clothes. Though she was far shorter than he, and shorter than most of the men aboard, her gaze made Edward feel exposed. A woman he should be wary of was measuring him against some unknown weights.
Edward clenched his jaw and returned the gaze. He needed to project strength, match her, and beat her at her own game to impress her. He needed her to need him more than how little she would feel she needed Herbert. And so, he scrutinized her in return.
She was built like the northern mothers he had heard about from other sailors telling stories—the mothers who could match the men in feats of strength and could cook you dinner after breaking your arm in an arm-wrestling match. He had thought they were jovial jesting meant as a tall tale of boasting, or a jibe when the sailor lost a match but claimed his mother could whup the other sailor handily. Edward now suspected they weren't just stories.
Most striking was her legs, or that which covered her legs. She had on solid copper greaves, which covered her feet, calves, and knees, stopping just short of her thighs. Edward could see small indents and holes in symmetrical vertical lines on either side of the front of the armour, but they didn't look like bullet holes from battle, they looked to be there by design. What design they served, Edward could not even guess.
The medieval armour seemed out of place on a wood-and rope-and canvas-laden ship, but not so out of place on her, perhaps. Her hair nearly matched the shade of the greaves, and she walked in them with no sign of hindrance.
He noticed her looking straight at him, and so he ended his inspection and returned her steely gaze.
After a moment, O'Malley nodded appreciatively. "I'll have to test you further, but for now, I think you'd make a good addition to our crew. You've obviously been hardened in battle, and you've got a sailor's calluses." She turned a sidelong look over to Herbert. "You, however, need to leave. We can't have you on our crew."
Just as Edward had predicted, but without the preamble given to him. No inquisitive inspection, no scrutinizing of his features, only a dismissal. Edward had known this would be difficult, but he hadn't thought it would be this difficult.
"This man is my brother. Wherever I go, he goes."
"We don't have cripples on our ship," she replied curtly. "They slow us down." She let out a sigh. "Off my ship then, the both of you. No more wasting my time."
With a wave of her hand, some of the crew moved forward, pressing Edward and Herbert back to the gangplank.
"My brother has the best eyes you've seen. He's also the best man at the helm you could ever want."
"I already have a helmsman," the captain replied as she walked away. Then she glanced over her shoulder. "Besides, I don't like the look of him. All I've seen from his eyes are hatred, he's like a cornered dog ready to strike."
Edward flashed Herbert a glance and noticed she was right. Herbert had the same look in his eyes he'd had when they'd faced off against Gregory Dunn, one of Calico Jack's other crewmates, and a crewmate Herbert had personally known.
Thinking on his feet as the crew pressed in on them further, Edward created a convenient excuse. "How can you blame him? Five of your crewmates have had their weapons at the ready from the moment we stepped onto the deck."
This stopped the captain in her tracks for a moment, and, as though they had eyes in the back of their heads, the crewmates pushing them off the ship stopped as well.
"There were six, Ed," Herbert chimed in. "You missed the one with his hand on the hilt of a cutlass hidden by the fife rail." Herbert pointed to a man standing half behind the mainmast.
Edward followed the finger to the man, and with the too-casual, too-slow movement of a man caught in the act, the crewmate moved his hand from where it had rested to the top of the fife rail.
Edward looked over at O'Malley again, and she too had followed Herbert's pointed finger to the crewmate whose hands had been hidden from their view. When she turned her gaze back to Herbert, it was with a bit more scrutiny than before. Just a bit.
This was the opening that Edward needed. If he just pushed a bit more… "If you won't accept my brother as a crewmate, then accept him as a passenger. I'll do the work of two crewmates to make up for it." The words would have come out as pleading from any other man, but coming from Edward, they were a statement of fact.
O'Malley spat. "You'd have to work as hard as three men for all the trouble it'll be worth to bring him along." There was a pause as she glanced at the floorboards of the ship for a moment. Edward let her her peace as she thought it over. The tension in the air lifted as she considered. After another moment passed, she looked straight into Edward's eyes. "If you can pass our tests, you and your brother
