once again leaving out Rody Hawk. If I didn’t want him manifesting in my office, I sure didn’t want him here.
When I finished, she said, “Wow. Angelina’s a grandmother. Hell, even picturing her as a mother is hard. Or a cranky aunt. She hates kids.”
“Maybe that’s why. If every kid reminds you of the one you abandoned, you probably wouldn’t want to be around them.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I think she likes me okay.”
She tugged on my beard. “No, kids. What about you and kids?”
“They’re all right.” I hadn’t been around many, but they didn’t make me nervous like they did some men. I’d found that if you were honest with them, they were pretty much like anyone else, except smaller and with shorter attention spans.
“You ever thought about having any?” Liz asked.
“Who says I don’t? I was a wild blade for a long time before I met you.”
She chuckled. “If you had kids and knew about it, I’d know, too. You’d be sending them money and making sure they stayed out of trouble.”
“Maybe.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “Think we’re too old to have any of our own?”
“Yes.”
“You’re probably right. Tough to squeeze ’em in between my deliveries and your saving the damsels.”
I turned on my side to look at her. “Have you been thinking about this much?”
“No, not really. I mean, the time for this was when we were both twenty years younger, right?”
“Yes. Nobody wants their dad to be so old, he could be their grandpa.”
“Yeah.” She snuggled close, and I kissed the top of her head. I felt her breathing change as she settled in to sleep, but I stayed awake staring at the ceiling. If I found him alive, I wondered how Edward Tew would react when I told him he was a grandfather.
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed I was on a ship. Two men stood at the wheel: Rody Hawk, and a man with Duncan Tew’s jet-black hair whose face I couldn’t see. Hawk smiled, pointed at me, and gestured that I should join them. I was terrified down to my toenails and screamed, “Son of-”
Chapter Eight
“ — a bitch!”
I snapped wide awake, finishing the curse I’d begun in my sleep. I looked around, momentarily disoriented, then remembered I was on a pirate-hunter ship headed for the Southern Ocean, and had been for two weeks. I tossed the light blanket aside, sat up, and shook my head to clear it.
In my half-awake state I’d just realized something that should have been obvious, and I was astounded at my own idiocy. How had I missed that? It was right in front of me, plain as day, and hadn’t registered.
I swung my bare feet off the bed. The wooden deck was damp with condensation, as was my skin. The tiny master’s cabin-a closet-sized space located between the much more spacious captain’s quarters and the equally claustrophobic one belonging to the purser-had one round window that was essentially useless unless the door was open to allow a cross breeze. Seated on the edge of the bunk, I could touch my forehead to the opposite wall if I leaned far enough. My saddlebags lay beside the door, and my sword rested under my bunk.
I stood, wiped the sweat from my face, and looked around for my tunic. I’d cut the sleeves off my second day at sea; now my face and arms were deep brown, and the crisscross marks of old sword battles stood out pink and white against my new tan. I could’ve gone shirtless like most of the crew, but I’d discovered over the years that the big scar on my chest, and its matching one on my back, led to lots of questions I’d rather not answer.
I pulled on my trousers and boots, then opened the door. I was still furious. The little cabin boy who generally slept right outside jumped to his feet when he saw me. “Yes, sir!” he exclaimed with a rigid salute.
“At ease,” I said as I tied a bandanna around my sweatmatted hair. “Dorsal, is Captain Argo in her cabin?” She’d been given the purser’s cabin next to mine.
“No, sir, she went on deck about an hour ago.” He had the serious face of a child for whom childhood was not an option. I guessed he was about nine or ten, barefoot and dressed in adult clothes cut down and cinched up to fit him. “I think she’s talking to Captain Clift.”
“Thanks,” I said, and he jumped aside as I went out into the dim hold. A good number of men still slept in the hammocks, as the ship carried a crew twice what was required to operate on a day-to-day basis. Since I was paying for this charter, I was also subsidizing their apparent laziness. I was assured, though, that in battle every man would earn his keep.
The heat was just as oppressive in the hold, but the smells were worse. This was the odor of pirates, all right, and even if they now worked on the right side of the law, they hadn’t substantially changed their ways, certainly not their personal hygiene routines. I’d let myself slip a bit, too, but I still managed to wash in vital places every day.
I stopped at the piss barrel. Apparently stale urine did a great job getting blood out of clothes, so everyone contributed; well, except the female crew members, although I wouldn’t put it past Jane. I added my allotment, marveling again at how the human nose can eventually get used to any smell. I wondered if I’d ever be able to appreciate a rose or good cooking again.
“Hey, sword jockey,” a man said sleepily. One leg dangled off the edge of his cot, and was long enough to rest his bare foot flat on the ground. This was Suhonen, the biggest man aboard, a towering piece of muscle who, I suspected, played dumber than he was. “What’s the hurry? We won’t hit the Southern Ocean for another two days.”
“I just thought of something,” I said honestly. I left out that I should’ve caught a damn month ago. No need to advertise my shortcomings.
“Must be some thought to have you busting out like a moray eel,” he said. Other heads popped up from hammocks, aroused by the voices and any break in routine.
“Nah, nothing important,” I said. I went up the stairs to the main hatch and stood halfway out as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the blinding sun. I heard a voice below me murmur, “Cap’n Jane says he’s the most vicious swordsman in Muscodia.”
“That’s not saying much,” someone replied, and I fought not to laugh.
“She also says he took a sword to the heart and lived.”
“And that’s just impossible.”
“Did you ever know Cap’n Jane to lie?”
“I never sailed with her before. All I know is what you moony-eyed schoolboys tell me about her.”
“Well, call her a liar, wake up a eunuch, so say those of us who did sail with her.”
I climbed through the main hatch and emerged on deck before I laughed out loud. Instantly the breeze hit me, a rush of clean salt air that felt especially wonderful after passing through the hold. The morning sun was about a hand’s-width above the horizon, and the heat had not reached the eggboiling proportions it would by midday. If this was what it was like at this latitude, I really wasn’t looking forward to the heat of the Southern Ocean.
But at the moment, the heat I was most concerned with was my own temper. I looked around the ship that had been my home for the last two weeks, seeking Jane Argo.
Our ship bore the unlikely name Red Cow. She was a twomasted schooner eighty feet long and weighing in at about 220 tons. The crew complement was around a hundred. I knew very little about ships, but I did notice that the Red Cow sported an extra-long bowsprit, the purpose of which I had yet to discover.
She was a twenty-gunner as well, with five ballistae mounted on either side of the deck, and five more set to fire through ports below. The bolts might not pierce the hull of another ship, but they pierced the crew just fine. They could also grab fast to the other ship’s wood and allow the Red Cow to winch the two ships together, which was how pirates often secured their prey. Using their own tactic against them was just one of the ironies about the whole pirate-hunter enterprise.
The Red Cow was one of the fleet supported by the international coalition known as the Anti-Freebootery
