"I've been where you were before," the man with the cup said. "It'll get easier as soon as Grace trusts you're capable."
Edward took the cup with a shaking hand and downed the water in one enormous gulp. "If I don't die before then," he sputtered through his laboured breaths. He glanced over his shoulder and around the foremast towards where Nigel and his friends were talking amongst themselves.
The crewmate who gave him the water followed Edward's gaze. "Just ignore Nigel. He'll tire of you eventually. This is just his way." The man turned back to face Edward, and he smiled. "I'm John, by the way."
The name made Edward's eyes widen, and his pounding heart skipped a beat. John was a common name, but nonetheless, it still brought to mind the old crewmate Edward had had aboard his ship before he had become a pirate and stayed on afterwards. The same crewmate whose neck had been sliced open right in front of him by the same man who had tortured Edward for days before leaving him for dead. The thought brought with it the same unpleasant ache of a different kind.
His throat seized, and he couldn't move. He breathed deep through his nose, desperately trying to quell the raging squall in his mind. He reached for his flask, popped off the stopper, and tried to drink, but it was empty.
"Anything stronger than that swill?" Edward eked out, referring to the lightly rum-laced water he had been given. The rum kept the water from forming a scum on a long voyage with little fresh water but did little else for one looking to ease a particular pain.
John smiled and took the cup from Edward before filling it from a secret flask of his own. After getting it back, Edward downed it in one gulp just as he had the water before it. Edward knew and was hoping that with all the activity, the blood loss, and the sweat, it would hit him harder than it usually did. He wanted the numbness of a different kind.
"My thanks," he said after a moment.
The thought of Edward's former crewmate brought old memories of the man. The way he'd looked with his salt-and-pepper hair, his typically nervous disposition outside of battle, and his relationship with his father. Before John had been killed, when his tired eyes had showed Edward the look of an old man's soul stretched thin as smoke and ready to let the wind take it off, he had confirmed that Edward's father was still alive. Had John been aware of what Edward's father had become? Had he been aware of the things his father had done to him, or would do to him, or had he merely been trying to tighten Edward's resolve to live by telling him a sweet lie he'd had no way of knowing was accurate?
Edward's eyes shot up as the flood of memories came back to him. No, he thought, John knew. He was given the keys to my ship before I received it. He met Benjamin Hornigold, he said as much himself. He met my father and kept the lie to take me to the trials where I nearly died. How much did he know? How deep did this plot run?
Edward pondered the question for another moment, but it only served to heat his cheeks and his core with fresh anger over the lies he had been fed and embarrassment over his falling for them. He shook his head to cast away the demons he called the past and looked over the young man in front of him right now.
The John in front of him had little in common with Edward's old John. He was younger than Edward by quite the degree, in his early twenties if he wasn't in his teens still, and it was clear that he was new to the crew, or new to battle. He had a few small scars, one on his face and another few Edward could see snaking their way out of his shirt towards his neck, but he was far from the battle-hardened sailors aboard the Black Blood. His black hair was cropped short, too short for the youth's narrow features. In his mind, it was easy to separate this John from his John, but far harder for his body to.
"Strange for one on a crew such as this to show me a kindness," Edward commented as he turned his gaze to the horizon.
Being at the front of the ship meant getting the full force of each smash against the waves. Each time the ship lurched below the line of the ocean in front of them, seawater misted Edward and John. The mist was refreshing on Edward's hot, tired, aching body.
"You know much of Calico Jack's crew, I see," John said, his mouth a line. "Perhaps if this were Calico Jack or Lance Nhil's ships, your words may ring a bit truer. Grace doesn't use fear or magic to control the crew as they do. She just follows a simple rule: her word is law. Break that law, you're off at the next port if you even make it that far."
Edward took stock of the young man's choice of words, specifically the bit about magic. Did he mean Nhil? Silver Eyes? Or was his father implicated here as well? Edward had seen inexplicable things over the years—metal unlike any other, islands that would take far too long for human hands to construct—not to mention the visions his crew had seen in the Devil's Triangle.
Edward suddenly had a sickening feeling that he and Herbert were in over their heads. If his father had some unknown magic, how could they defend against it?
He noticed John looking at him, and he remembered where
