a world’s atlas: Algiers, Goa, Puerto Cabellos, Mocha, Guayaquil, Havana, Campeche. Fights, battles, beatings, tortures, and imprisonment, every variety of calamity, wreck, and ruin that could befall a body was there. Some were old and faded, virtually erased by time. Many were interlaced, one over the other, over the other. Some appeared to have healed well, while others showed the ravages of infection. One such rested on his upper left arm.
“Broken arm; fell from a tree, trying to fly. I was six,” he added as an all-encompassing explanation.
The tattoo on his forearm she knew: a swallow carrying a stabbed and bleeding heart. The swallow a mariner’s symbol for thousands of miles traversed, she had seen it often, but it was still a wonder if it had been the heart that was stabbed, or the spirit? His hooded lids precluded her inquiry; it was a confidence Nathan wasn’t willing to share. Nor did she inquire as to the squarish patch of corrupted skin over his heart, just below the “Freedom” tattoo. Thomas had told her of it, for it the scar had been by his hand, when he had cut away where Nathan had been branded.
His right hand laid palm up on his leg, the “S” brand in plain view.
“Lord Breaston Creswicke, of the Royal West Indies Mercantile Company.” Otherwise detached, that came through a set jaw.
Nathan looked to see Cate’s reaction. He had told her of how he had come to be branded, but it had been a half-truth. His eyes hardened, desiring to know how much she knew. She dropped hers to the space between them.
Everything.
The corner of his mouth tucked up, and he sighed, displeased, but resigned.
Years at sea were revealed in the tattoos of the swallows on Nathan's knuckles. The harshness of that life could be seen in his fingers, the off-angled and enlarged joints from multiple fractures and dislocations. Violence showed in the lacework of scars and the severed tips of the last two fingers of his right hand.
On the fat of his underarm was the rounded mark of a musket ball, its twin directly across, where the ball had passed through. There were two more—on his side, another on his upper leg—in which he hadn’t been so lucky: their rounded shape distorted by whatever implement had been used to dig them out. High on his right breast was another. The margins were blackened, however, the result of a weapon fired at very close range. He flinched when she touched it, not from soreness, but a sensitivity of another sort. She placed her hand lightly over it and met his gaze. Nothing further was necessary, unless he was so inclined.
He wasn’t.
Even in such a moment of intimacy, she either hadn’t sufficiently gained his confidence—or he couldn’t bring himself to speak of it.
Nathan's thighs and calves were curved and dipped with muscle. The hair there was like that on his arms: nearly as fine on his head, and not near as dense on his chest. Down the length of his left thigh ran the wickedest scar of all, thick and gnarled, cleaving deep into the muscle. She didn’t have to ask; Thomas had told her. It had nearly cost Nathan his leg.
His toes curled slightly in self-consciousness, the tip of one considerably shortened.
“Frozen rounding the Horn,” he said. “Lost part of me ear on another.” He lifted his hair to show that a goodly portion of the top curve of his ear was missing.
“And here?” she asked.
It was the first time she had dared to touch the scar at his neck. It lay in the soft notch of his neck, between his Adam’s apple and the notch. The delicate skin tortured into a thick gnarl, it was a reverse branding of sorts, the curving arcs of a rope’s twist permanently etched in the skin.
“Were you hung?” Cate bit her lip at her boldness.
The amber and cinnamon eyes held hers for the briefest bit, and then fell away. Nathan smiled grimly. “Aye, but dancing the hempen jig of a different sort.”
Nathan was hesitant, taking time to form his thoughts, deciding how much to reveal. “A cabin boy I was, as fresh and hairless as a lass. You’ll mind of me stowing away?”
She nodded. Living in Matelotage—a pirate haven and a place he loathed—driven by the death of his mother and a deep-seated hatred for the man who assumed his custody, he had left.
“Mark me, I’d made precious sure it was a merchant and not a pirate ship,” Nathan