blocked their way, and so they perched there, watching the tide purl out. A number of tidal pools formed in the scooped-out rock, the diamond-like grains of sand in their bottoms sparkling in the now-rising moon. It was a miniscule world of claws, antennas, and spines.
“Me and Garrick tried to care for him,” Thomas went on, kicking at a shell with the toe of his boot. “Nathan was out of his head for days. Rum and laudanum didn't answer. I had the knife in my hand, ready to cut the damned ‘S’ off him.” he said, looking down at his own palm, flexing his hand. “It might have cost him his hand, the use of it at the least, but at least he’d be free.”
He shook himself of the thought. “But Garrick stopped me, representing that there was another way.”
“Pirate,” she heard herself say dully.
Nathan was a marked man. He could either live among the vilest of the vile, where capture meant to be hung, his body tarred and left on display to rot, or his head on a pike, the walnut eyes gone black in death, picked to vacant holes by the crows; or he could risk being caught as a slave, meaning captivity and degradation at the hands of a monster.
“Aye,” Thomas sighed solemnly. “Freedom, in another world. There was no escape else. Every bounty hunter in the Seven Seas knows what that ‘S’ meant. But it needed to be Nathan’s choice, so we waited.”
The strength of friendship. “Two, mebbe three” Nathan had said, when she had asked how many he had had in his life. Two, for sure, for they had held his life in their hands and kept him safe.
“We took him to a conjure woman—at least I think she was a woman. She sent us off, made us leave him there. I paid my last respects, because I figured him to be a dead man.”
He stared, but was seeing something far different than the campfires, now directly across, flickering orange jewels along the shore. The gay voices and music could still be heard, broken and muted by the distance. The Morganse andGriselle sat like somber queens, adorned in their amber-glow necklaces of lamplight.
Gone in thought, or overwhelmed by the memories, Thomas was quiet for some time. The rattle of crabs scuttling behind her, Cate watched a phosphorescent fish dart about in one of the pools. Feeling as if she were being watched, she turned slightly to find a pair of disembodied eyes on stalks peering interestedly back.
“Never sure what happened,” Thomas threw into the silence, his angular features troubled. “If it was that conjure woman, or Creswicke, but Nathan was never the same. I mean, aye, on the outside he was, but inside…When you looked him in the eye, he just wasn’t there anymore.”
“I wish I could have known him before.”
His mouth a firm line, he said with gentle sadness, “No, you don’t. That person is gone; it wouldn’t answer.”
His fist balled where it rested on his thigh. “That was when we all turned pirate: Nathan, Garrick, and me. Garrick had been in the Brethren. He had been aiming to go honest, but went back, and took us with him. Neither one of us wanted to leave Nathan alone; we knew he’d go do something crazed, just to get himself killed. He did his best, in spite of us. We mended him from burned to broken, beaten to slashed. We were with him when a blade run him through. Killed that bastard myself,” he added in a pride-laden aside. “You’ve seen his leg?”
“No, I've never seen him—” Cate looked away, industriously brushing at a non-existent spot on her skirt.
“Oh, aye, of course.” Thomas demonstrably cleared his throat. “Aye, well…hmm…we almost lost him there. It festered to where we considered takin’ it. Then a conjure woman showed up; I swear she stepped out of the night.” He frowned, pondering. “She gave him some herbs or potions, or some such, and brought him through. He walked with a crutch for months after; made it bloody difficult for him on board.”
“But there isn’t a brand on his chest now,” Cate said haltingly.
Looking off into the night, Thomas nodded grimly. “Nathan put up a fair front—he’s good at that, you’ll have noticed?”
She nodded wryly. “Fair front” was a vast understatement.
“He did his best not to let on, but you could see the thing eating at him. The ‘S’ was bad enough, but to have Creswicke’s initials on him, marked