Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Falling felt like freedom.

He snaked through the air into the water and did not look back.

Southern waters ran warmer than he should have been used to. He knew this in the same way he knew he should have been faster than he was, that he should have been able to go farther than he could, and that he listed toward the starboard side without meaning to. That is to say, he understood all of it as facts, as things to realize and catalogue and eventually overcome, and that none of it really, truly mattered, because he could turn himself downward and swim and swim and swim until blackness covered him and echoes from distant rocks and the even more distant sea-floor were the only way he knew he wasn’t about to smash into a wall.

It felt like freedom. He fell from the ship’s deck, the humans’ hand-prints shedding from his skin and scales, and went down, down, down.

He ran into nothing.

He swam past a startled shark and school of silverfish.

The sun faded, the dark greeted him, and the water cooled. He ran into nothing.

He stopped when his throat closed around frost and his fins stiffened too much to turn. There he stilled, vision black but ears open; there, he heard the twist of a creature intrigued by something warm-blooded and new; there, he drank in the drag and pull over his skin, the waters close to still but not as still as he’d grown used to; there, he relaxed, stretched out and weightless, his muscles screaming from too much too fast, his gills slow in the cold. Far from any depth a human could reach and largely empty, every small shift against him felt like a wave in shallow waters, felt like his mother ripped from him, felt like gentle fingers in his hair. He stayed as long as he could, wondering distantly and quietly at how the cold felt so strange.

Then the dark closed in and he saw candles extinguished without the sailors noticing and a tarp secured without reason and he began an ascent, marveling in his exhaustion at the lack of a ceiling.

The creature below him lost interest and continued on its way. It didn’t need him. It didn’t want him. It didn’t care in the least what he did.

That, too, felt like freedom.

He surfaced from the dark in time to watch a weathered hull disappear into the distance, cradling his arms and balling up to relieve the ache in his tail.

Did that count as looking back?

To make it clear what he thought, he turned and raced in the opposite direction.

(That was something he’d taken to, he supposed, something that was different from before cold waters could prickle his skin: watching himself, correcting himself, challenging himself, proving I can survive this to himself. In the dark room before the louder humans, he once held himself in the middle of his cage without touching the walls until unconsciousness took him just to see if he could.)

(It hurt awfully, but he could.)

When he happened upon the silverfish again, he darted through their school, sent them scattering in shining flashes. Ready and hungry, he lashed with his tail. Though he hit a few, they ran into nothing because there was nothing but water around them, and then they swam away.

It took him far longer than it should’ve, but eventually he caught them with his claws and slid them down his gullet and felt a little better.

We haven’t seen your type for many generations, the sea turtles with their algae-covered shells and slow glide tell him. They speak not in words, but in glances and twitches, as was the way of creatures that could not best their baser instinct.

He opened his mouth to sing a greeting for them, as he’d been taught by his mother and those like him. It came to him like knowing his dorsal wasn’t supposed to shudder with weakness so soon; that is to say, it stayed in his head and caught in his throat and he stared at them in silence until they moved past and beyond him, giving him more space than he thought they usually did. He remembered friendly nudges and, when his hands were smaller and claws duller, clinging to their shells as they ferried him under streaks of light and clouds of jellyfish.

When they disappeared, he prodded his throat and sides, a frown on his face.

A second time, determination in his chest, he opened his mouth. Notes, melodious and quiet, trembled through the water, a greeting whispered where it should have soared.

He frowned again.

Bringing before to mind, he spun closer to the surface and tried again.

His greeting rang out like a bell, too loud and too harsh. A flinch, and he decided to practice later, twisting away from the empty space he drifted in and putting his head against the current.

On his back, his dorsal fin shuddered and swayed, curving him to the right for several stretches. He didn’t realize until he found himself swimming with the current, his body instinctive in turning him in a circle.

That would not do.

That would not do at all.

It shook up his thoughts and made his teeth clatter, whole body wracked with shivers.

He looked down to find nothing below him. He looked up to find nothing above him. All at once, it was too big, too sprawling, too open, it was going to consume him and erase him and his heart raced and he turned and swam as fast as he could for shallower waters, eyes focused forward through force of will alone.

Being around anything alive made his throat close and vision swim, but it passed because he needed it to pass and it was one thing he couldn’t, and didn’t want to, afford. Shallow waters came slowly. He forced himself to pass those that swam his way: another shark, and a pod of dolphins, and white porpoises, and silverfish and trout and sea bass. Those he could not think of as food greeted him, saying, we have not seen your type for many generations, and, what are you fleeing from? because porpoises were soft creatures and the shark was not so far behind.

He whispered back, hello, and clicked his tongue in a series of starts and stops, long, short, pause, long long long. They tittered and clicked back with incomprehension and uncertainty, and swiftly took their leave.

The shallows were farther away than he thought possible.

A blue mountain rose as the first sign of progress. He dipped without thinking toward it, felt the way the water curved around its unyielding sides and stalled in its deeper crevices -- then he felt along its rough facade, caught his claw-tips on loose pebbles and salty grains, and everything in him that had rattled loose quieted. His muscles didn’t ache so much, and his fins felt sturdy. He felt in control of himself and his surroundings, and the texture amazed him, the rough scrape without metal’s bite. Before he knew it, he had curled loosely into one of its shallow holes and fallen asleep in a tangle of seaweed. He woke to swat away a smaller fish before rolling over and sleeping again, the sun from above warming his flank but the bumpy, uneven stone cradling him, safe and secure and alone, and he felt as if it could be before.

Not a good way to think, he told himself, whispering the words into cupped hands to hear the sound bounce back to him even though now there was sound all around. Those things happened. I can’t deny it.

Who cares? He replied. Who do I have to impress?

I don’t know, he muttered in the educated tongue, bubbles winding from mouth to surface, and dropped his hands to rub his forehead into the loose rocks of the wall. The scrap was pleasant, beyond pleasant, borderline ecstasy shivering warm and good down his spine. What if it makes me sloppy?

It won’t.

It could.

It won’t. Not again, never again. I’m smarter now.

Because I’ll remember.

Fine. Fine. Because I’ll remember.

The mountain made him feel smug, which was a nice feeling after so much swimming. Hah, he thought, I was right, the mountains are grander here, the one that pierced the clouds that they stopped at for fourteen days in his mind. He didn’t dare think who he meant to be smug toward. For two days and one night, he explored it - crawled from cliff to cave, rolled through loose rock and against hard stone, ate his fill of greens and fish, and in general, had a good time of it. He found himself catching fish just to hold them, quieted by the feel of their scales and fins, the struggle for life against near-certain death. It wasn’t a good thing to do, maybe, but he let them go at the end and followed as they fled, astounded and amazed at how much difference a creature smaller than his forearm could make in the water’s ebb and flow.

Glass didn’t move. Glass didn’t struggle. Glass was smooth, and clean, and warmed to whatever was pressed against it, and he realized with a jolt what he missed most was the texture of life.

That was when he left the mountain behind.

The shallows were full of all breeds and shapes of creatures: the mountain folded into a sprawling skeleton, a million tiny carcasses stacked one on top of each other. Living beings bred and ate and slept and swam all along it. A coral reef, he’d heard a human call it. For the first night, it was too much - he watched from the last tip of the mountain as turtles and stingrays and colorful fishes fluttered about. When he finally remembered what emptiness he’d left behind and where his scant options lay, he drifted over to join them.

We have not seen your type in many generations, the turtles tell him. You look ill. Are you ill?

No, he said (correctly, this time). I’m fine.

Transparent lids closed over black eyes and heads bobbed. They asked, will you join us? We are going to the north.

No, he replied, and said, “There’s nothing for me in the north.”

They hummed, slow and easy, wished him well, and returned to their scavenging. He brushed a hand across their slick shells as he passed, and wove his way between the reef’s white-and-blue-and-green-and-pink towers. A shrimp ducked into its hovel as he passed; he dug it out, if only because he hadn’t had shrimp in months. It was as delicious as he remembered.

An octopus, its skin startlingly orange and the rings along its arms a blue to match his eyes, tossed sand in his face for taking its meal. He swam on feeling much, much better, even though he had to brush tiny shells and sand from his hair.

Which reminded him. His hair.

Armed with a goal, he curved along the reef’s twisting corridors until he found the sharpest shell and, snatching it up, immediately set upon the disgustingly long mane that had become his hair. It was so annoying, so irritating, always in his face and dragging behind him -- no wonder he’d been so slow in the water! - and when the locks drifted away, he sighed in relief, his head much, much lighter. He’d thought about cutting the stupid tangle for ages, had promised himself it’d be the first thing he did when - when - he was out, but he’d been too distracted by freedom to remember what he planned to do when he was free.

Then he thought of someone finding the strands and connecting him to their reddish hue, and scrambled to gather them up and bury them in the sands.

A few stingray and one flounder scattered as he dug, the stingray admonishing him for ruining good sand with his fibers, but he whipped around and snarled and flared his fins and looked far bigger than them and they fled without further comment.

When he laid down to sleep, he brushed against a hidden rockfish. Its mouth gaped wide at him, its poisonous spines long and sharp, and it grumbled, ever unhappy as rockfish were, are you human? Get away.

He swiftly took his leave.

The coral was so busy. He coaxed a sea anemone to let him slide a hand through its tingling tendrils; he brushed along the sides of dolphins, declining their invitations for play but appreciating their ease; he flipped a sea slug onto its back to watch it curl up in distaste. He cracked lobsters on rocks and chased orange and white clownfish and perpetually swatted tetra from his eyes. Seahorses tittered at him. Clams bubbled. Every crevice and every plateau had a family or occupant, and as he went further in, the surface dipped closer. Soon enough, it took all his concentration not to pierce the water. Shining from directly above, the sun felt warm and nice and welcoming, and his memories told him how fantastic it felt to sunbathe in the pools the tide left behind, how he could stretch out and maybe nap and not worry about a thing. It’d been rare before, his mother’s warnings about humans ringing in his ears, but it was undoubtedly the best way to relax.

He angled himself to break the surface and stopped a hair’s breadth away. The water above shifted and turned, peaking and dipping in little ripples caused by all the activity below it and some of the activity farther away.

Humans hadn’t caught him because he sunbathed. They’d caught him because he’d been sloppy, and starving, and risked the ship for the flyfish that circled below it, and they’d seen him, and followed him, and pursued him, and he had to rest but their ships didn’t. If they’d never seen him, maybe he wouldn’t have been caught.

By and large - as he now knew better than he’d ever wanted to -, humans were blind to what lay below the surface. If he stayed below, they were less likely to see him.

Simple.

Deciding the warm-watered shallows were far too crowded for him, he made himself a bag from and for its best kelp, and left.

With nothing better to do, he followed echoing songs through the ocean deep.

We have seen your sort before, they tell him when he finds them, four massive air-breathers and one calf that kept close to his mother. They swim with another creature, or another creature swims with them, but the last one wasn’t within immediate view. They were old, and wise, and allowed him close as long as he would pluck the parasites from their bellies and scrape the green from their backs. After pushing her calf to the surface, one told him, we have seen your sort before, but she remembers your birth.

“She?” He asked, because whales always understood the educated tongue even if they could not speak it.

Then he spotted the one he heard but could not see -- because she was too big, and he’d thought her a mountain when he first approached, indistinct in the murky dark of the ocean. Her scales are like boulders, her arms thick as a ravine was wide, her head broad enough for two whales to comfortably lay side-by-side. He was, at most, the span of her eye. With his reflection mirrored at him in the deep black, square pupil, he felt small, and childish, and weak, and stupid.

Hello, young one, she whispered, her voice old as an island, and it crashed into him like a cliff crumbling into the sea. Do not be afraid.

The whales laughed as he lost his voice and fell back by the calf. The Leviathan hummed; above her, the surface waters were disturbed into waves.

You may join us, they say with clicks and a high, fluting whistle, but only until your bag is empty.

You may rest on my back, she says, her great head slowly turning away from him, but not forever.

He looked above him at the sun streaking through the surface, and below him at a stretch of darkness, and took their offer. He didn’t sleep on the Leviathan’s back, but he skimmed along her spine, brushed hand and flank along the crest and dip of skin solid as stone.

The great beasts didn’t always travel together, he learned. In fact, they’ve met only - only - ten years past, and when the calf grows, the whales think it’s time to take their leave from her side. It isn’t because she eats all the krill or because she would eat them. For one, she eats seldomly; for two, she feeds on shipwrecks and arrogance, gobbling any humans that cross her path along with their vessels. She was Mother Nature’s child, grown from when the sea was young out of rock and the unknown. Neil, for his part, had never met a Leviathan, and thinks it lucky the louder humans he’d been with hadn’t, either.

(He does not think about how he thinks about them, not with his cheek pressed to a bumpy whale’s back and joyous song reverberating around him.)

Relieved to have something closer to his size, the calf invited him to play. He tried to decline, but then he was bumped and nudged and pushed like a ball by a giggling youth, and the mother watched so closely that if he didn’t allow it, Neil thought he might be crushed flat against the nearest mountain.

You look ill, one said to him after the moon has become a sliver in the sky.

“I’m fine.”

You drift to the right when you don’t pay attention.

“I have a weak fin. I was born with it.”

You act odd.

“How?”

Like a human.

“I’m not.”

We know, another said. But you act like one. With your eyes, you look to the sky; with your hands, you hold and marvel. You are astounded by your own world.

In his chest his lungs constricted. He snapped his jaw shut tight. Irritation flicked his tail fin, and he resolutely did not cross his arms.

Watery eyes regard him with the sympathy the old have for the young, for their passion and recklessness that will burn them to nothing if they aren’t careful. Neil carefully does not snap at them to cut it out, the words belonging to a human with a haughty look on her face.

Where is your family? Asked the calf as he nosed along his side. Neil jerked away, leaving him confused and chirping in question. Swiftly, his mother took him under her fin and led him away to the surface for air.

He dropped the conversation.

(It was a very human thing to do, ignoring someone that speaks to you.)

The moon disappeared, and his bag has mostly been emptied. Typically the whales rested at the surface, the calf on top and the adults taking turns propping him up; Neil would sleep somewhere below them, a loose line of red in open water. It wasn’t the best way to sleep, and he jerked awake more often than his body appreciated, but there wasn’t much choice.

Then the moon disappeared.

He forced himself to sleep on the Leviathan’s back during that darkest night, his skin crawling at slumbering in nothing but sea water as the light fades. Since the first day, she hadn’t spoken to him or the whale. He prefered it that way.

Of course that meant after he woke and drifted down from the grove behind her largest spinal knob, she turned her head to catch him with one giant, glassy eye.

She said, You have a family.

He lost his voice again. This time, she didn’t look away, but waited, and he was certain she could wait until his scales dropped from his tail and his bones turned to dust if she felt the need to. Gathering courage, the whales swimming on without them, he replied, “I don’t. She was taken from me many moons ago.”

Months is the word he wanted to use, but didn't.

She wasn’t unimpressed - it would take something far greater than him to disappoint her - but she had no patience for a minnow’s game. Her voice raised a few octaves over her whisper, her great maw opened to reveal monstrous teeth and splintered planks. Immediately he had to fight away from her as it filled with water, his heart in his throat and tail beating fast.

Go, child. He was out of the pull, enough distance between them that he could see the webbed paws on her feet and the sharp talons dripping with inevitability. Hewas not near far enough away to see all of her, and still, her voice rattled his bones. And hope I do not find them before you.

That was an observation and promise he couldn't, wouldn't, think on, not as he raced away on fins that feel stronger but not as strong as they had been. Cloudy water obscured her mass, though he knows if she were on land, he would hardly be out of her reach. As he swims, echoing songs bid him farewell, and then shift into odes to persistence, and then they fade and he was headed back to nowhere because the ones the Leviathan wanted him to find are on a boat and he had never made it a habit to track boats.

Feeling disgruntled and oddly adrift, he asked the first shark that passes if she’s seen any boats. Big ones. A particular big one. The one he wants has light-colored wood, almost orange, and looks as if it’s seen better days. No, he doesn’t actually know what pattern it has on its base. He hasn’t actually seen its base.

She circled him once and then, certain of how bad he’d taste and not hungry besides, tells him she’s seen a few ships, and if he follows the sun when it rises, he’ll find the main current that the humans like to use.

Then she took her leave, not trusting any creature that asks about humans’ whereabouts.

He swam east.

The first time he spotted the hull of a ship, he almost doesn’t check its color before turning and fleeing.

The fifth time he crossed paths with a ship, it was all dark wood and red sails, and he thinks he might know where to go.

He raced down the direction that it came from.

He started to think about why he’s heading so close to shore while looking for a human ship at the same time that he finishes eating the kelp in his bag. It kick-starts something unpleasant in his gut and has him swimming in tight circles without thought or reason or the ability to stop, until he’s so dizzy and his side screams so much from being crunched up that he spirals into the ground and kicks up a cloud of sand. Laying there panting, gills working double-time and fear turning his mind to mush, he tries to think about why he’s scared when he hasn’t even found the ship, can’t imagine why, can’t barely think, and works on eating his bag to keep his hands occupied.

You’re thrice-damned stupid, he muttered to himself after he can swim in a mostly straight line, voice startling a small school of fish from his path. An idiot. An actual idiot. What a dumb fishman.

Nothing looked familiar, and no ships were in sight.

He settled down on a ledge at a drop-off, curling tight against the rough wall and tangling himself up until he couldn’t see out and, so he’d told himself aboard a ship to keep from swallowing the steel brush and let it tear up his insides, no one could see him.

A siren’s song woke him.

Its heady edges curled around his ears and threaded fingers through his hair. He shook off the call the moment he’d blinked into consciousness, uncurling from his huddle to peer warily in its direction. Sirens were territorial creatures at the best of times, and his exhausted, tense sleep hadn’t exactly been restful. A fight was one of the last things he needed or wanted. But as all he wanted to do was pick a direction and swim until the static came back into his brain, he pushed himself from the ledge and picked his way along the song’s outskirts.

As he swam, it deepened. Ah. So their targets were giving them trouble.

In the clear sunlight, he glanced toward its origins, and saw-- a ship. One of decent size but old make, its hull covered in algae and white barnacles. It had light-ish wood, he supposed. He couldn’t really tell.

Figuring the sirens were distracting its passengers well enough, he drifted closer until he could.

It was orange. Maybe. A gross, unclean orange, like a rotting octopus. Closer to tan than yellow, farther from brown than red. Why didn’t humans ever clean the bottoms of their ships? He couldn’t match such a dirty thing to the obsessively mopped deck.

Letting the sea’s slow pull and give hold him, he watched as the siren’s first morsels fell from ship to water. They were impressive creatures, sirens - when they weren’t getting in his or his mother’s face about hunting grounds’ not so clear borders, he admired their efficiency. No human caught a siren; it was too dangerous for them. If there was a next life, he wouldn’t mind being a siren. Better than merfolk, selkie or human.

A siren grew impatient with one resistant figure, her arm cutting between the two. He just about turned around to swim on when the shape of a struggling human struck him as familiar, and then the fact the two humans matched caught his attention, and then he swam the wrong way and told himself to stop but couldn’t, and snarled out the sense of family and belonging to, curved down and spiked up and dragged a siren from the surface to his preferred hunting ground.

The fight didn’t last long. They rarely did.

Objectively, he knew the fight didn’t last long, but it felt like it: one down, easy in her surprise; two more, rougher, but they were used to prey that did not fight; and the final, the one that stretched time the most despite its death before he arrived. The one with a human in its dying grasp, the one that took force to remove, the one Neil let drop without a glance because he knew what it was to suffocate and knew even better that humans did not do well with water in their lungs.

He’d suspected but didn’t realize just how obnoxious all the layers humans wore were in the water: it made the surface farther away than it should’ve been, and once they reached the top, harder to hold onto. Andrew was dead weight in his arms, coughing and wheezing like the pathetic air-breather he was. Warm air brushed by them, and Neil’s skin prickled from it. He hadn’t felt the air in two moons’ time. He wasn’t sure he missed it.

Eyes on the startled, blinking Aaron paddling not five lengths away, Neil said something into the man’s ear.

“Unfair comparison,” he gasped back, which was the only bit of the conversation Neil would remember.

His tail brushed the human’s legs as he orientated himself to hold position; tension lanced through Andrew’s back, but breathing was too much of a priority for him to do much more than that, not that Neil could imagine what exactly he’d otherwise do.

By virtue of who they were, the humans above exploded into noise. Neil shifted his grip on the one in his arms as he glanced up; four, six-- no, twelve, twelve different faces peered down at them, at least two fingers pointing and one hand waving. Neil realized with a sinking feeling he didn’t recognize all of them.

The humans exchanged shouts. Aaron at last ripped his eyes away from Neil to look upward and, presumably at something said or the lack of something done, flipped them the bird.

(Neil would never understand the meaning behind that phrase, he really wouldn’t.)

Soon enough they fastened a rope ladder to The Fox’s railing and tossed it down. With one last indiscernible glance at Neil and his brother, Aaron paddled to it.

Someone above shouted, “Neil!”

Nicky, Neil’s mind supplied. The one that had been waving.

“Get out of here.”

Neil blinked back to the one in his arms.

Andrew looked at him from the very corner of his eye, his head barely turned and, arguably, his attention on anything but Neil. Tension spread further through the pirate’s body, his brush with a watery death replaced with thinly restrained hostility. While Neil watched, his lip curled and he shrugged out of Neil’s grasp, his elbow narrowly missing his side.

“Didn’t you hear me? Get out of here.”

It didn’t make sense. No human told a merman to leave.

But without a body covering his front, the air worked to dry his skin, the shouts above increasing in alarm and argument, and he -- ducked, chest tight and teeth buzzing.

He swam down, down, down. The sirens’ corpses, one in shreds and all prodded by hungry fish, greeted him - he twisted from them and swam away, away, away.

Not too far away.

Maybe.

Not too far away by a whale’s estimate, maybe.

But.

He circled.

It was always a circle.

That night, he slept on a mushy nest of sand, sticky bubbles and kelp. A few fish whined at him for ruining their homes; he ignored them, and then, when one refused to cease its protests, ate one. The rest left him alone after that.

Sleep was not good. Between swaying stalks and stripes, between the taste of one fitful dream and another, he kept one eye on the barnacle-bottomed boat overhead, his fins snapped tight to his body.

Eventually, a smaller boat appeared next to the bigger boat.

More specifically: the loud humans dropped a lifeboat next to The Fox.

A glance around proved the shoreline not too far. Neil hunkered down deeper into the kelp grove, burying his damningly light-catching tail deeper in shadowed green.

Overhead, though the water gurgled the meaning, the loud humans were loud. They yelled. They yelled some more. They were insistent. They said--- one word in particular, over and over, with varying degrees of emotion. Neil didn't move.

A shadow preceded the body; Matt broke the surface, treading water with his clumsy legs, one arm hooked over the boat's hem. Neil frowned.

Matt let go of the boat and ducked down, his eyes open underwater. Looking for him. They were looking for him. Humans would always look for him.

Neil didn't move.

Eventually they gave up and hauled the lifeboat, humans included, back to the deck.

Neil moved only when the ship did, one sun rise later.

In its shadow and deep enough to see it as little more than a dark oval, he followed.

Here, fishy fishy fishy… Come on… If you hold still, I won’t miss. It’d be a shame for the both of us if I missed.

Admiral?

Yeah? What is it?

A raven arrived with the transfer point’s coordinates.

Put it on my desk. I’ll be there in a bit.

…

Yes, Jackson?

The King won’t be happy with damaged goods, sir.

Hah! Don’t you worry about our payment, Jackson; I won’t touch a single scale on his pretty little tail. So long as that heart keeps pumping, the King doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the rest.

…

Looks human, don’t it? The songs go on and on about their alluring eyes and how they’re crafted from sea foam and a wave’s crest. This’s the second best part about netting one: stick it in the side with a blade and see it bleed like the rest of us. The songs are horse shit. Fishy, fishy, come now, stop squirming, or I’ll pop those baby blues right out of your skull. Don’t need eyes for our King’s extra lives.

…

…

…

Well, I’ll be. Cheeky little bastard, isn’t he. What’s that? You heard I won’t touch your scales and you do that?

Admiral…

I’m coming, Jackson, I’m coming. We’ll see how long he can hold that. Must be mighty uncomfortable, a critter his size.

If Neil curled just right, the humans couldn’t see him.

(Sleep was not good in the midst of empty water.)

Above the calm sea, dusk meandered in. Tasks done, dinner taken and no magical creatures in sight, a First Mate, a sooth-sayer and a pirate dressed too well to be a pirate leaned against a newly set railing.

One hand running along the polished bannister, one hand around the neck of a brown bottle, Dan muttered, “I swear this ship’s had more holes patched than my trousers.”

“Doesn’t make either less flattering,” Renee replied, though she grinned while doing so. Dan eyed her.

“It definitely does,” Allison said while reaching for the rum. Dan surrendered the bottle without complaint. “We should’ve upgraded. We had the funds. We have the funds - I’ve seen the goblets and rings the Captain keeps stowed in his dresser.”

“His room’s off-limits. What were you doing snooping in his dresser?”

“Helping Renee find a misplaced map,” Allison said, and tucked a piece of beaded hair behind her ear. Dan eyed her, too. “We found it, by the way.”

“You found the goblets that were part of the betting pool on which treasures the Captain kept to sell last, you mean?”

“No, no, Dan. The map.”

“Hm.”

“The goblets and five coppers they netted us were a happy coincidence.”

“Mhmm.”

Mouth covered with a hand, Renee chuckled.

Shaking her head, Dan turned back to the sea. Behind her, the new recruits - Lily, or some such, a girl with curly black hair and a perpetual, crooked tooth grin, and her friends, Leon and Brian - passed with mouths as full of gossip as their stomachs were of Katelyn’s cooking. Their conservation fell away when they passed the three older crewmates. Predictably, it started up again the second they disappeared into the hold, and Dan was sure if she strained her ears, she’d hear words about myths and mermaids.

Under-breath, Allison growled, “I am not ready for another five months of mer-talk.”

“Do you think he’s still following us?”

“Dan.”

“You’ve asked that seven times in the last two days. I will dump this rum on your head.”

“I just can’t believe it. He shows up to save the Minyards, and then disappears without so much as a how-do-you-do!”

“Are you that surprised?” Renee asked, quietly.

Since she was right, Dan blew a raspberry at her.

On the other side of her, Allison rolled her eyes and took a long, long drink. After, she leaned a little heavier on the railing and drawled, “Maybe if we use Andrew as bait, he’ll nip again.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll take a stop at the siren school and ask if any wouldn’t mind volunteering for a re-enactment. What do you think they’d charge? One grown man per hour?”

“One man per ten minutes, more like.”

“Honestly, you two…”

Dan nudged Renee with her elbow, her smile lopsided. She was joking about trying to find sirens for hire. Mostly. “You’ve tracked ships for us before. Can’t you do that to him? Get us a little dot on a map to watch?”

Fingers laced over the railing, Renee’s kohl-darkened eyes settled on her, all traces of good humor gone. “I couldn’t do that to him, Dan.”

And if that didn’t chastise the First Mate something bad, she didn’t know what would. Nodding assent and mumbling an apology a moment later, Dan sighed and slouched heavier on the railing, her eyes once more skimming the sea’s uselessly unbroken surface. It was a beautiful sunset. She should’ve been getting drunk and paying attention to that, not getting drunk and being morose over someone who didn’t want to be found for a very, very good reason.

“For fuck’s sake,” Allison grumbled around the bottle’s mouth. Dan pointedly did not look at her. A few more seconds, and, more vehemently, “For fuck’s sake,” rum swishing as she took another long pull and, swallowing, twisted around to shout, “Hey! Hemmick!”

A pause.

“Ugh. I swear, I should be paid.” Allison cupped her free hand around her mouth and yelled, “Earth to Hemmick! Nicholas Hemmick! -- Klose!”

Within the next second, Nicky’s face appeared from over the crow’s nest. Even from the deck, the flush on his cheeks was red as the evening clouds.

He called down, admirably clear-voiced, “Horizon’s clear! What more do you want, Reynolds?”

Dan considered chiding him for skirting duty, but the hypocrisy was a little too much to swallow.

Allison didn’t have as much sympathy. “Get down here!”

This time, it wasn’t hard to tell Nicky had to clear his throat before replying. The flush on his cheeks had darkened. “I’m a little busy!”

“Uh-huh. At least Klose is. We all have watch duty, Hemmick! We all have to sit up there! That’s disgusting!”

“When we kept catching you in the galley, I didn’t make any comments about you and--” Nicky started, but cut himself off in the nick of time. Probably, Dan thought, due to Erik’s interference, if the way Hemmick’s face jerked downward said anything. Then again, she also thought someone from the southern port could see the cold fury that spread over Allison’s face.

“Get your ass down here, Hemmick, or I’m cutting the ropes and you’ll be trapped up there for the rest of your days. Bet Klose wouldn’t appreciate you as much when you both fry.”

Nicky groaned in a decidedly displeased, non-sexual fashion. He disappeared from view, presumably to straighten himself out, and reappeared to clamber down. A few moments later, face more amused than ashamed (again, Dan couldn’t blame him: privacy was hell to find with ten-plus people on one boat), Erik appeared to lean over the nest and watch what Allison had planned for his man.

Distinctly more disgruntled than Erik, Nicky hooked a finger in the bandanna around his neck and tugged it higher. The weathered fabric did nothing to hide the red splotch under his jaw.

“What is it?”

“You’re a decent swimmer,” Allison said, and shoved the bottle into Dan’s chest as she swaggered to Nicky. “I’ve seen your diving form. It’s pretty good.”

Suspicious but not sure how suspicious he should be, Nicky eyed her, fingers still playing with his bandanna.

“You called me down here to compliment my diving?”

“No.” Looping an arm around his shoulders, she pulled him toward the railing. He stumbled, eyebrows pinched together. “I called you down here to get you to practice.”

And with that, she fisted a hand in his shirt collar, another in his belt, and hauled him bodily over the railing.

Erik’s “Nicky!” and scramble to get down from the nest occurred simultaneously with Dan’s, “Allison! What the hell!” and, unnoticed, Renee’s silent surprise.

It took a moment to hear the splash Nicky meeting water made, but by then, a few other crewmates poked their heads onto the deck to check out the commotion.

“Someone fetch a ladder! Nicky’s overboard!” Dan yelled, shooting Allison a look. She received nothing but an upturned nose and rolled eyes in return.

Erik, pale-faced but practical, went to fetch a rope ladder.

“He’s fine,” Allison said, though it should be noted she only said that after shouts of indignation and betrayal came up from the sea. Both Minyards, Kevin and Jean appeared from the galley. One Minyard took in the scene, caught Dan’s pointed look at Allison, and started forward. “A little swim never hurt anyb--”

Andrew’s fist met her teeth, and she barely caught herself on the railing. Shouts erupted immediately, half between Aaron and Matt, half between Erik and Dan, all between Allison and everyone else, the new recruits wide-eyed and wondering at the explosion of in-fighting. Renee hastily put her hands on Allison’s upper arms, helping her up and away from Andrew while Kevin and Jean fell in to up Allison's chances for survival.

“Whore’s tits, Minyard, he’s fine,” Allison snarled at him, and he took a step forward.

“People have broken their necks from less,” Renee murmured, just for them to hear.

“Thought I made it clear you shouldn’t mess with my people, Reynolds,” Andrew retorted, grin and words sugary sweet even as Kevin and Jean yanked him back.

Rather than reply, she spat blood between them.

“The hell is going on out here?” The Captain demanded, Abby hot on his heels.

“Allison tossed Nicky overboard,” Dan replied, “we’re fetching a ladder now. He’s fine. Er, by the sounds of it.”

Although, just as she said that and the deck fell silent for Wymack’s long strides to the railing, it became clear Nicky had stopped cursing Allison as well as her mother and her mother’s mother in between his furious splashing. In fact, Nicky had stopped making noise altogether.

Hands flat on the rails, Wymack leaned over to look.

Half the crew edged their way into mimicking him.

Down below, Nicky Hemmick bobbed with the ship’s waves. Whereas one expected to find him shocked, indignant, frightened or angered (or all the above), he was dead silent and staring at someone else.

Half the crew’s eyes found the someone else, and couldn’t move away.

Neil looked first at Nicky and then up at them, his face as tense as it had been when he’d held up Andrew. The merman would have looked like any other - albeit naked - person helping a friend stay afloat if not for the black claws curled around Nicky’s sides and red scales that disappeared into the darkened water below. This time around, the crew didn’t immediately start shouting at him; breath, collectively, was held.

Then Nicky twisted in Neil’s grip and said something that those on deck couldn’t catch. The tension on Neil’s face broke into pure bafflement, and the merman dropped Nicky to dive under.

Despite again having to keep himself afloat, Nicky laughed.

A broad, pink-webbed fin broke the surface and heaved a bucket’s worth of water on him. Laughter turned to sputtering, and, the spell broken, Erik let down the rope ladder.

Wiping the blood from her lips, Allison looked Dan dead in the eye and huffed, “As you can see. He hasn’t disappeared.”

For a woman who didn’t want mer-talk for the next five months, that comment began a whole new tidal wave of gossip.

It took two more ‘rescues’ before Neil caught on to what they were doing.

When Nicky dropped over, Neil couldn’t fathom why the loud humans were tossing out their own, but then reasoned that Nicky always had been the butt of the joke. Maybe they were thinning out their weaker links since they’d taken on new blood.

When Matt fell not a day later, Neil believed him when he said he’d tripped.

When Jean fell…

“Can you blame them?” The former stowaway asked, one arm looped around Neil’s shoulders as they waited for the rope ladder to drop. He’d taken one look at the dawning realization on the merman’s face and didn’t even bother giving Neil an excuse. It was a good show of respect on his part, but it was the least Jean could give after dragging Neil away from his very important and boring job of scraping the underside of The Fox clean.

(It wasn’t as safe as the depths, but there was absolutely no way for the humans to see him exactly under their ship’s hull.)

Neil scowled.

“If you’d show yourself some more,” Jean told him, “they’d stop doing this.”

Neil shrugged one shoulder.

He contemplated his expression, then continued with, “I know it goes against everything in your nature and experience -- and I can read between the lines of any story, I know my grandmother regretted giving my grandfather her pelt more than anything in her life -- but, you can’t be so dense as to think they want to sell you. If anything, they owe you.”

It would take more than an acrobatic array of facial expressions to convey what he thought about that, but the way his scowl didn’t lighten probably informed enough of it.

The rope ladder reached the surface. Neil let Jean paddle his way to it by himself.

Though he sunk lower, just his eyes and hair above water, he didn’t completely disappear by the time that, half-way up, Jean glanced down.

I haven’t been here long, he called down, his voice a little off, a little more gutteral, a little more of a bark, a little more selkie, and those above him exchanged confused glances as they lost track of the language, but they take debts as seriously as their bets.

Below, Neil clicked his teeth.

We’ll see, he said with a turn and dive, and maybe, just maybe, he made a point to flash the long, imposing length of his tail.

He meant to forget the whole conversation and return to his job under the ship. So of course that meant he couldn’t catch a wink’s worth of sleep as he turned the idea - the implication - the anxieties - the possibilities - over and over in his mind.

At one point or another during his careful, cautious sifting through loud human related memories which involved distracting himself with swimming loops as much as it did anything vaguely close to reminiscing, he wondered: do they still play cards together?

Following that was an immediate thought of, I hope so.

After that, he cursed ever protecting a stowaway.

That next morning, the outline of a pirate with a familiar hat watched the sun rise from the railing.

If she caught sight of a red-spined, translucent-webbed dorsal fin breaking the surface alongside The Fox’s length, well. She commended herself on not telling anyone about it until that afternoon.

Needless the say, very little was done that day.

“What’s our plan, Captain?”

“Aside from courting mermen into being our personal escorts?” Abby patted Wymack’s shoulder with a hint of pity but not a shred of sympathy. When neither Renee nor Dan took the bait, Wymack sighed, stood, and dug a key on a leather string out of his pocket to unlock his dresser. “Before we left port, a crone sold Abby an interesting map. The script on its back reads that whomever reaches its mark before Halley’s Comet splits the sky will uncover a King’s ransom. The comet’s not due for another four years, and I can’t imagine this map being older than my father.”

Dan raised an eyebrow and attempted to exchange a questioning look with Renee, but true to her nature, she only smiled back.

Slowly, eyes back on Wymack, she said, “We’re trusting the word of a… crone,” very respectfully.

Wymack looked as put-upon about the task as she felt.

And yet, he unfurled the old, frayed map, its colors washed out and paper thin enough to crumble in a breeze, and looked at Dan as if he expected her to fall in line about this. “By Renee’s word, it’s legitimate.”

“There’s runes in its weaving,” Renee happily explained. “It promises truth for whomever reads it.”

“Sounds like a foolish thing for a treasure map. Couldn’t anyone read it?”

“I’m guessing it was made under duress, for the person causing the duress. That person must have… accidentally lost it.”

“Sounds cursed.”

“I’d like to think of it as a classic example of what goes around, comes around.”

Wymack, back in his chair, waved a hand. “Whatever the cause, a King’s ransom sounds promising. By our calculations, the mark’s in the heart of the southern isles. It’ll take some careful maneuvering to reach; the water’s far too shallow for The Fox. We’ll have to rely on private excursions.”

Dan gave the map due consideration, teeth worrying at her lip. It looked important. It looked damming. It looked…

“Wait. The mark?” She squinted, checked it over again, but found no red trail or convenient X. “What mark?”

Wymack looked at Renee.

“That’s also in the weaving,” she admitted, a touch abashed. “See how the stitching that starts here goes the opposite way of the rest? If you connect it to the merged forests, and then connect that with the only mountain painted with yellow…”

She drew an imaginary line with her finger across the parchment. Although she tried to follow, Dan found the conclusions to be stretched at best, and absolute bullshit at worst. Nonetheless, when Renee finished and her Captain nodded, Abby tilting her head side-to-side as if to say oh, sure, Dan sighed, crossed her arms, and rocked back to her heels.

“Good thing I trust you, or this would be the oddest thing we’ve done since...” Her face screwed up. It was not as long ago as she’d hoped. “Defeating The Raven.”

“There is room for doubt,” Renee said, because she was a generous person. “I’m not entirely sure if the blot near the cove was intentional or the artist’s poor quill quality. We may need to go ashore more than once.”

“We’ve three months’ worth of supplies. I won’t have this last longer than that.” The Captain grumped, then glanced at his First Mate. “It’ll be a good chance to get the new recruits in line. Pay especial attention to Jack and Sheena; for two street urchins, they idolize Kevin an awful amount for his time in His Majesty’s service.”

Dan scrunched her nose. Jack and Sheena were close to nightmares, quick with their hands or not, but in the end all she said was, “Aye, Captain.”

When she turned to go, Wymack cleared his throat. She stopped and glanced back.

“Neil won’t be a problem, will he?”

That surprised a laugh out of her. Trust Wymack to ask after they’d decided to stop chucking people overboard.

“Even though we don’t have to feed him anymore, Captain, I don’t think it’s possible for that merman to not be a problem.”

Wymack very carefully did not smile, nod, or give any indication he was okay with that.

Dan left with a bounce in her step to relay his commands, and didn’t worry about any more directives to leave the merman alone.

Behind her, heard only by the Captain and Abby, Renee rolled up the magical map, her smile gentle and cleverly mischievous.

“Who knows, Captain,” she said, which made Wymack groan. Those were never good words from Renee. Her clever smile grew, and she continued with, “Who knows, Captain. Having a merman on our side might be the knife up our sleeve that we’ve been waiting for.”

“That sounds as if we’re planning for something grander than treasure hunts.” Even, calm, and not fooling anyone left in the room. “I thought you gave up knives, Walker.”

Renee hummed.

“It’s worrisome, the not too miniscule matter of our bounty and its origin. People are going to get ideas. People are going to think we’re fearsome.”

“People can think what they will. It won’t change who we are, or what we stand for.”

Renee and Abby did not reply.

After the ship’s soft creaking settled into their ears, Wymack dismissed them both.

“If it’s revenge for his brother the King wants,” he told them on their way out, “let him come to us. As far as ships full of vindictive bastards go, we’re not far from the top of the ladder.”

Rumors of their search stemming from a magicked treasure map gifted by a crone somehow made its rounds in the crew, despite Dan’s clear explanation that they were to search the southern isles on a dead merchant’s faded notes. The reason she couldn’t give specifics was because when the merchant died, he’d bled all over the notes, and no, Nicky, you can’t see the notes, and yes, Kevin, this did mean they were going to have to deploy lifeboats and making excursions on land, and no, Aaron, you aren’t allowed to opt-out, what is wrong with you little monsters? Get to work! We have three months to scour a dozen islands!

While everyone dispersed, Dan took Renee aside and asked, “Alright. What exactly are we looking for, anyway?”

“A horse skeleton. It should look ready to gallop into the stars.”

“That sounds…”

“Poetic?”

Dan see-sawed her hand. Renee giggled, and broke off to find Allison.

It took less than three days to reach the first, and smallest, of the islands. Preparations were made: a few of the islands they could split and take two during the same day; a few they would need at least a week to comb; and still another looked to be nothing more than a volcano, and an active at that. They’d have to draw straws for who explored that one. No one could be sure if the islands were inhabited by people - neither Jean nor Nicky, of whom had traveled the region before, could say - so they prepared for that, too. They still only had two lifeboats, and there’d always need to be someone on the ship. Some of the crew wanted to explore unknown islands more than others. A fair, equal rotation was set up, which was to say, by the end, everyone was unhappy.

The only highlight to be found was that every day, someone reported spotting the merman.

Someone bet that someone else wouldn’t spot Neil more than them, while yet another bet Neil wouldn’t do more than break the surface with his fin on this day, or that Neil would do a jump on that day, and so merman-watching became a sport. When she thought about it like that, Dan had to admit it sounded terribly boring. It’d be pathetically wishful if The Fox didn’t, as Wymack had put it, have a personal half-human escort.

And yet, its novelty was taking its time in wearing off. Neil’s daily appearances, brief though they were, also spurred the newer recruits to ask the older for stories that they previously hadn’t believed. The story of The Raven’s sinking, rather than being regarded as an agreed-upon and modest retelling, came alive in the newer pirates’ eyes. As they whispered about it like a legend in the making, Matt, Erik and Katelyn grew uncomfortable, but there was little to be done about stories that breathed on their own.

In any case, they reached their first destination.

It wasn’t on the outskirts of the southern isles. It was in the circle that constituted the so-called heart, a rough stretch of land that Renee’s careful eye picked out from the map’s small clues. It meant navigation became hell and a half. Waters ran shallow without warning, sandbars and narrow ravines both sprouting and disappearing, and more than once they all flinched as The Fox’s hull scraped along sand. Fortunately, winds turned them away before they were beached, but it was a painstakingly slow process to pick their way to the isles’ inner circle.

And once they were there…

“I know it’s the smallest one,” Matt muttered, the formerly enthused lead for the first expeditiation, “but I didn’t realize we’d be looking into a kid’s sandbox. Dan, that’s an ambitious sandbar, not an island. We really don’t need to land.”

“The skeleton might be in the sands,” Dan replied, arms folded over her chest. She wouldn’t let her voice sound doubtful in front of the new recruits or Andrew’s lot, but she felt it, and she saw how Matt noticed it. “At least you’ll all return soon.”

Sighing, Matt finished packing the lifeboat with their standard packs (overkill for the spit of an island, but part of the regime) and clambered in. The pulleys squeaked as him, Aaron, Kevin and two fresh recruits, Brian and Alma, dropped themselves to row ashore.

There was no horse skeleton.

There was barely any sand to sift through.

There were a few crabs, one baleful-looking sea bird, and the saddest collection of withered palm trees Matt had ever seen.

Empty-handed, Kevin shrugged at one end of the island. Matt shrugged back at him around one tree, and motioned them to fall back. It took as long to reach the island as it had to search it; with the ship as motivation, it should’ve taken less time to reach their mobile home.

“Wait,” Kevin said, “Hold position,” which was the only warning Matt had before he stuck his oars straight down, turned the rudder and brought them to a rocking halt. He was just about to ask what Kevin meant by that when, by looking back, he found his eyes drawn to Neil.

Exposed to the shoulders, the merman watched them from well out of their arms’ or oars’ reach. It was the closest he’d come to more than one of them since he’d reappeared (and Matt could still feel the prick of his claws on his back and hard, inhuman strength under warm, oil-smooth skin). Alma let out a squeak. Neil’s eyes snapped to her, then to Brian; he tilted his head one way, and then the other, looking at each of the newer recruits with suspicion so strong Matt wondered if they’d met before. Typically, only little, weathered, old ladies of very small, closed villages could manage such distrust for new-comers.

When they failed to do anything more damning than look amazed at seeing a merman in the flesh, Neil drifted an inch closer and moved his gaze to Aaron.

“What are you searching for?” He asked.

Matt’s mouth dropped open.

Aaron stared, but recovered well. Too well, Matt would say. He was, maybe, a little bit jealous of the idea that Aaron might have known that Neil could talk.

“A King’s ransom.”

Neil frowned, his shoulders drawing back, and snapped his mouth shut.

Aaron let out a barely audible guffaw. “Were you expecting Andrew?” A beat. The merman did not move. “Too bad. Now your secret’s out. Be more careful, and you wouldn’t screw up as much as you do.”

Matt wanted to smack him for saying something so rude and dashing their chance at talking with Neil, that was a thing, that was something they could apparently do, why had Neil not talked before? Fortunately, rather than take Aaron’s word as representative for all of them, Neil’s eyes jumped to Kevin and then Matt, and he asked-- he asked! He asked Matt! Holy shit! That was awesome, Dan was going to turn green with envy! He was so going to bring this up at any opportunity for the next week! No, no, the next year. No! The next decade!

He asked Matt, voice clear as a bell and far too normal-young-adult for a merman to have, “What’s a King’s ransom?”

“Er,” Matt said first, then, “That is,” and shifted his weight, straightened up, slouched, and finally put all his sudden nervously excited energy into a bright smile at Neil for talking to him, “Treasure. Enough treasure to paint the ship gold, if we wanted.”

Neil’s eyes narrowed.

Matt faltered.

Neil said, “Your ship would sink if it were painted gold.”

Matt laughed.

Kevin cut in with, “We don’t know what it’ll be. The directions say a King’s ransom, but what King? A self-proclaimed King? A King of pigs? What if it’s leading us to pay a King’s ransom?” He said these things because he was a professional buzzkill, and also because out of the whole crew, no one was less fond of wild goose chases than Kevin Day. In his defense, this very much felt like a wild goose chase.

Neil’s face did the funny thing where it looked exactly like a human inconvenienced in a small but memorably annoying way. Which, Matt mentally amended, was because, apparently, he was basically human. The talking cinched it. Not that speech was a requirement to be human, but-- a little part of him always caught sight of the fish tail and thought, animal. Clever animal, an animal willing to rescue drowning humans, but like Renee said: merfolk were akin to dolphins. If he had a dolphin stuck in a tank for five months, Matt was sure he’d get attached to that, too.

But, no. Neil was human. Essentially.

The guilt at how they treated him was something Matt refused to entertain while the merman was no less than two boat-lengths away.

“Why?” Neil asked.

“Exactly,” Kevin growled, because of course he wasn’t surprised by their merman talking, he was an incredibly dense human being unable to appreciate the fantastical things in life.

“We’re pirates,” Matt said. Neil’s eyes snapped lightning-fast back to him. “Treasure hunting is part of the job. Even if we’re not sure where the treasure is, or what it might be.”

With a noise unlike a human’s (as if to prove Matt’s previous thoughts incorrect on thinking him basically one), Neil hummed. It was closer to the noises he’d made aboard the ship, a fluting sound that belonged to a bird rather than a half-fish. It must’ve, Matt thought, sounded beautiful underwater.

In the boat’s middle, Alma shifted and opened her mouth.

Neil instantly glared at her and, in a flash of red, disappeared back under the surface. The waters were shallow and clear enough to track him for a distance, though he moved fast enough that it was like tracking a merlin: more impression than substance, more awe than belief.

In his wake, he left a silent boat.

“That better not become a habit,” Aaron muttered.

“Are you kidding?” Brian yelped, swinging around to stare at the Minyard twin.

“I can already tell he’s three times as annoying when he talks,” Aaron groused.

“Aaron,” Matt warned, putting on his I am the leader of this exploration voice, even though the island was barely anything to explore and he hadn’t a slice of Dan’s authority, “if you jinx this, I swear I’ll let Dan sleep on her stomach for the next two weeks, and you won’t get any sleep through her snores.”

Kevin huffed and asked, “Can we keep going, now?” -- But Matt saw the glances he sent in the direction Neil disappeared to, and hah! No one could escape the merman’s mystery.

The annoyance of patrolling a glorified sandbar vanished. He couldn’t stop grinning. When Alma looked at him curiously, he said, “They’re gonna flip when they hear they missed his first words.”

“Second,” Aaron said, his eyes on the boat’s floor.

“What?”

“Second words. He spoke his first to Andrew.”

“--- And he didn’t tell us?”

Aaron shrugged.

Fair point, Matt thought, it was Andrew.

Wait.

“And you didn’t tell us?”

Aaron leveled an unimpressed look at him. “I had been coming back from a siren’s song. I was sure I misheard it.”

“Obviously not,” Kevin muttered.

Aaron shrugged again. The Minyard ability to not particularly care was, in Matt’s opinion, an astoundingly thorough one.

Matt was right.

They flipped.

The next island wasn’t far. When they reached it, Nicky made a demand for a re-selection of teams. Dan asked for his reasons. Without a speck of shame, he said, because whoever goes might hear the gorgeous Neil speak!

Erik found it amusing, which was more than could be said for Dan.

It was decided the teams would not be re-arranged because of possible mermaid sightings and speeches. Nicky pointed out that she was a biased person to make that rule, what with her being the leader of the next expedition. She told him to shut his trap and roped Allison, Lily, Leon and Renee into going with her.

Neither Neil nor the skeleton horse made an appearance.

Dan pretended she was mostly disappointed about the lack of treasure. Renee didn’t call her on it, but had her help pluck a delicate blue flowers from the top of the island’s hill.

The next stop required two lifeboats for one island and at least three days of searching, the beach giving way to thick jungle that peaked in the middle with threateningly dark rock. Fumes spewed from cracks at the barely sleeping volcano’s base. The pirates eyed a thin but walkable strip that led to the top, and drew straws on which party had to hike it. Decayed horses remained out of sight and out of reach, but vibrant fruits and small, monkey-like mammals came in abundance. Katelyn always checked for poisonous elements before allowing them to cook it, but they stocked up on variety as well as they could, figuring they might as well make the most of their sweaty, meandering adventure.

A new recruit proposed a bonfire and camp-out on the beach rather than immediately returning to the boat. Half agreed and stayed. Half did not.

Those that didn’t packed up spare fruits and coconuts and rowed themselves back to the ship with lanterns and the moon lighting their way. The water glimmered around them and lapped gently at the lifeboat’s sides, the sands below disappearing as they rowed farther from shore.

A shadow slithered from the corner of Kevin’s eye to under the boat; tense, he called, “Hold!” and jerked his oars down.

One jabbed into the thing; the boat rocked as the creature bucked and knocked into its side, and scabbards rattled as Andrew and Jean pulled swords.

When a disgruntled ginger broke the surface, hand rubbing at his head, Andrew tsked.

Swords were replaced. Neil eyed them all in the flickering lamplight, this time starting with Kevin, the offending oars, then Jean, and ending on Andrew.

“This time, you have the right Minyard,” Kevin said when everyone else failed to break the silence. Neil shot him a look, but maybe, maybe, relaxed.

He asked, “What does a King’s ransom look like?”

“Is that an offer to help?” Andrew returned.

Neil ducked underwater.

Jean sighed.

Neil reappeared on the boat’s other side, closer to Kevin. He was, for someone with Kevin and Jean’s height, within reach. That didn’t necessarily mean much: it would take longer for them to reach than for him to retreat.

“It was a question,” he said. “If it was an offer, I’d have made it an offer.”

“Sure,” Andrew drawled. “You’ve always been very upfront.”

“This King’s ransom,” Jean cut in, vaguely annoyed at whatever spat was happening with him sitting in the middle, “will be found by a horse’s skeleton. You wouldn’t know what that is.”

Neil’s nose crinkled, the corners of his mouth tightening.

“We could bring you a picture,” Kevin said.

For a moment, the merman contemplated this. He sunk until the water covered him to the eyes, and they flitted every which way but theirs.

With boredom weighing down his words, Andrew said, “We don’t have all night, fish-face. If you don’t want to help, leave us be.”

Neil tilted his head back to speak. “Give me something, and I’ll help.”

“Like what?”

“The yellow fruit.” He rose higher, his hands held to the surface as if it were something solid. “I want a bundle.”

“Have you ever tasted it?”

“No. But it looks good.”

“Glad to know you still think with your stomach first, brain second.”

Evidently deciding Andrew was of no use, Neil ignored him, and looked to Jean.

Jean looked back.

Kevin said, “The location’s instructions are vague enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found our imaginary treasure buried in the sea. It’d be good to have eyes looking down there, too.”

“This isn’t really our decision,” Jean said, stiffly.

“Oh, Moreau. You need to learn not to care so much about what the Captain thinks. The rest of us don’t.”

“I don’t have all night,” Neil quoted, the drawl an incredible impression of Andrew’s.

“We’ve eight islands left after this one. One bundle of bananas is going to net your help for all of them?”

“Bananas aren’t--”

“-- Hush, Kevin.”

Neil eyed them. “One bundle, one island. More for more land. Same even if there’s less.”

Andrew deadpanned, “Deal.”

“Get the picture,” Neil told Kevin.

They had to have Abby sketch one (and she was no artist, but at least she knew what a horse looked like), briefly explained why, and lowered the lifeboat back to the waters to show Neil before Abby could shake the Captain awake to stop them.

“I’ve seen half of those before,” the merman said.

“The Laughing Jackal kept horse meat? That’s against regulation.”

That got Kevin an odd look, but rather than reply, Neil crept closer, little ripples following his drifting, and stuck his hand out. The tips of his claws were less than a forearm’s length from the boat’s edge. Immediately Jean passed over the bananas; almost as immediately, Neil disappeared into the deep with them.

The three left behind didn’t exchange glances, but they did watch the dark surface until the only disturbance came from the ships. When they pulled themselves up, the Captain had a few stern words for them; after he finished, however, he admitted grudging respect for their taking unique opportunities by the horns, and permitted the exchange of fruity goods for Neil’s extra eyes.

In the early morning light, the trio rowed back to the island-- or, tried to. A spiny dorsal fin appeared alongside their boat, and then, once Kevin stopped its progress, an unhappy Neil surfaced properly.

“Scale out of line? Someone twist your fin?”

A soggy banana with tooth marks all along its outside caught Andrew in the shoulder.

“These taste disgusting. I want something else.”

Jean picked it up. Kevin looked to see what was wrong with it.

Andrew rolled his eyes.

“Try peeling it, moron.”

Kevin, taking it from Jean, helpfully demonstrated, and tossed it back, wiping his hands on his pants with the first signs of disbelief over what his life had become on his face.

Snatching it from the air, Neil frowned and ducked underwater.

“Keep going,” Andrew told Kevin.

After the oars started rowing, Neil reappeared in their wake.

“Well?” Andrew asked, without glancing at him. Kevin hesitated, but didn’t stop.

“Decent.” Neil muttered. “I still want something else for the next island.”

“Then you should’ve made that part of the deal.”

As Jean watched, Neil flicked water in their direction (not near enough to reach them) and disappeared again.

Islands four, five and six yielded no skeletons, more jungle, and even a little lava that snaked its slow, molten way to the shoreline.

Island six, the rumbling, smoking volcano island, intimidated. No one really wanted to go. Even though exploring became lucrative after Matt and Erik pumped everyone up with illusions of what they might find if this was successful, that they’d hauled a prince’s ransom from Riko but this was a King’s, and - for those not swayed from the feebleness of Dan and Wymack’s explanations of why they were looking for the treasure - Neil personally appeared for most of the trips to the islands, lava was… hot, for one, and noxious, for two, and no matter that a dog without legs could out-run its slow crawl, there was something about its powerful inevitability that straightened a person’s spine and told them to stay away.

Neither Andrew, Kevin nor Jean were on the rotation for volcano island, and that lowered the cheer for those who were into the pits.

It was simple observational fact that Neil appeared most, drifted closest and - a phenomenon a handful of the crew had yet to hear (mostly the new recruits, but also Katelyn and Abby) - spoke longest around those three. Outside of that trio, the merman had chatted directly with Matt twice, Dan thrice, and Nicky once. The merman-sighting betting pool gathered dust as sighting was the least The Fox’s crew came to expect, which would have been a development they’d take larger pride in if they weren’t so greedy for more.

“If we can’t have a King’s ransom,” Allison explained to Dan, who was horribly biased by what she thought of as budding friendship with the creature, “at least we could learn enough to write a book about something no one else has. That’d make us rich.”

“If anyone believed us,” Dan sniffed.

Allison shrugged. “It’s all in the marketing.”

Despite her entrepreneurial talk, the first conversation Allison had with Neil involved her shutting him down with a comment on the awful cut of his hair. After the second and third - long after Dan’s tenth - Allison stopped bringing up taking notes on what they learned about the ocean world altogether, to Dan or anyone else. It wasn’t as if Neil jumped at the chance to describe his species’ culture or habits. In fact, she complained, he specifically avoided any topic about merfolk.

(The name Seth was not brought up, but maybe the return of one from the deep reminded her of how another would not.)

And if Renee’s first conversation became her only conversation with Neil, and it involved little more than her asking him what fruit he preferred, well. Allison noticed, but didn’t ask. Andrew noticed, asked Neil, and then didn’t need to ask further.

Merman aside, the treasure hunt had to continue. Captain’s orders.

No one but Abby knew of Wymack’s solo chats with Neil late in the night. They were mostly to reaffirm the merman meant no harm to his crew. The merman freely admitted the trouble he thought humans were, and his being around The Fox was only until the season for him to swim north came.

Wymack suspected merfolk didn’t need to follow migratory seasons, but he let Neil have the lie.

After, Neil asked him, “Why do you fight the Crown?”

“You care about human affairs?” Wymack returned, wry.

“This one involves me,” Neil answered, stiff. “According to you, the Crown’s why I was caught.”

That wasn’t the entire story of what they’d said, but he let Neil have that lie by omission, too.

“I used to be a sailor in His Majesty’s navy.” He began, and took a moment to decide how much, exactly, he wanted to share. In the end, it was most of it: he didn’t have anything to hide, really. The crew knew. Anyone without a uniform that asked would know. It still took a moment for him to arrange tender, scraped memories into what Neil wanted: his reasons. “I captained the first ship the royal shipwright, Kayleigh Day, ever launched. I wasn’t a part of the first fleet they sent south, but I saw how the empire changed the people there. The agreement was that local law remained in power as long as they paid taxes and sent tributes in fidelity. One bad harvest, one bad year, and they’d send ships like mine to deliver diplomats and soldiers and anyone else who didn’t see those outside the mainland as human.

“So,” Wymack blew out a breath, Neil’s expression unchanging and eyes unwavering on his, “I lost nerve. I couldn’t stomach ferrying those people around, or fighting villagers who couldn’t afford to eat, let alone buy proper weaponry.”

“You left.”

“I left.”

Neil drew a slow circle around Wymack’s dinghy, but his eyes had moved to The Fox. She was, as ever, impressive in her reliability despite her old age and numerous patchwork repairs.

After stopping out of Wymack’s reach but directly before his path, Neil asked, “Did you take Kayleigh Day’s ship when you left?”

“That,” Wymack replied, the sea-roughened skin around his eyes crinkling up, breath huffing out of him in a warm gust, “would have been piracy. Practically, as some said, a declaration.”

“If there’s a skeleton here,” Matt said on volcano island, his bandanna drawn up to cover his mouth and eyes watering in the black fumes, “it’s cinders, and any treasure along with it.”

“Agreed,” Allison grumbled. “Let’s go.”

Without further ado, they packed back up and rowed toward their ship. A familiar dorsal fin heralded Neil’s appearance at their sides, but for once, they didn’t slow down their rowing.

“Sorry, Neil,” Matt told him, “no fruit from there.”

“The sands are shifting,” Neil told him, his long body trailing after him as he kept pace with them, “the sea will rise soon.”

Allison scoffed. Neil’s eyes moved to her, less of a snap and more a passive shift in interest.

She said, “That’s needlessly foreboding.”

He looked confused. Matt turned the words over, asked, “What do you mean, the sea will rise soon?” And, as soon as he said it, added, “Like an earthquake?”

Neil didn’t know if it was like an earthquake. His vocabulary was set in the water, not the earth.

“Right.” Matt said. “Sorry.”

“The waves grow,” Neil tried, frustration edging his voice as the conversation drew out, “and do their best to pull families apart and put you belly-up. It’s best to be in the deep while the sands shift.”

“Earthquake,” Allison said. “Definitely an earthquake. And tsunami.”

“Renee didn’t say anything about that.”

“She’s hasn’t been checking as much while she gathers.”

“Oh.”

“When’s this supposed to happen, Neil?”

Neil had dipped back into being a dorsal fin moseying along their boat, but he surfaced at his name. When he just looked at them, Allison rolled her eyes and repeated her question impatiently.

“By early morning,” he said. And shrugged. “Maybe. It won’t be strong. But you’ll want to get your ship out of that narrow ravine. It might tip.”

In the back, Jack, previously silent, bit out, “Are we seriously taking advice from a mermaid? He’s part fish.”

“We are long past that argument,” Allison replied, airy and unconcerned even as Neil curled his lip at the new recruit and rumbled with a low, displeased noise. “And don’t be dense. Neil’s clearly a merman.”

“Thanks, Neil.” Matt said with a smile. Neil’s rumble disappeared in a flash, his expression smoothing out as he looked away from Jack. Matt wondered briefly if he should be concerned with how Neil’s dislike for the new recruits persisted, but it didn’t really seem like a threat outside of their feelings. “We’ll move out by dusk.”

One blue eye watched him from its corner, the merman abruptly silent and blank-faced. Matt kept his smile, but after a moment, felt unnerved enough to focus on rowing and their encroaching home.

Although he kept pace with them under the surface until they reached the ship, Neil said nothing else.

Jack muttered, “He’s fucking creepy,” but Allison replied, “And yet, you make really good competition for top freak,” and Neil heard but didn’t glance over.

It took some hasty maneuvering, but they edged their way out of the isles’ heart’s immediate shallows by the time the ocean’s surface began to ripple. When the waves rose to rock their ship, though it was nothing strong, they tilted and swayed and didn’t catch on any underwater cliffs or sandbars. A ways from them, they watched as trees swayed, cracked, and fell.

All in all, it was over before they knew it, and - under Dan and Wymack’s insistence - pressed back in.

Island seven, and eight yielded nothing. Adventuring spirit shrank. Not even Matt mustered up much cheer for the constant on-and-off shore trudging they had to do, the tedious lugging of packs from one end of jungle to another wearing on them.

The only one whose profits grew was Neil, as he tasted oranges and coconuts and bananas and mangoes and, once again, managed to eat as well, if not better, than the humans aboard the ship. Dan was pretty sure Nicky tossed Neil extra fruit on the side, too, but-- so did she, so she couldn’t in good faith scold him for it. One night while she snuck into the galley to pilfer a pineapple, she ran into Katelyn. The cook waved off her apologies and admitted she’d been doing the exact same thing, which was why she hadn’t reported the theft to Erik or made records of it. She just lowered the numbers of whatever they hauled in with an expectation that half the stock would disappear within a day or two.

“Does Aaron know?”

“He doesn’t like Neil much. He thinks his brother gets on too well with him to be trustworthy, or… something.” Katelyn caught Dan’s amused grin, and cracked one of her own. “They’ll fight over anything as long as they don’t have to acknowledge they’re arguing. So, no, I haven’t told him.”

The First Mate barely understood how Katelyn managed to make Aaron Minyard more bearable, but it was undeniable she had him wrapped around her finger.

Island nine turned up barren of bone, but teeming with little people.

They lined the sandy stretch that stuck out from their densely forested island, their heads covered by furry dog masks that disappeared under their tunics. As they stepped from the jungle’s shadows into the light only once Dan, Renee, Matt and Kevin’s lifeboat was half-way out from The Fox, they were a little startling.

“Renee?” Dan murmured.

“It’s alright. I suspected they’d be here.”

“Who’s they, exactly?”

“Cynocephaly.”

Sure, Dan thought. Sigh-no-see-- aw, fuck it. “Who do they pledge to? Are we about to gain a lot of holes?”

Oddly, the usually shy Neil allowed every fin lining his tail to flare above water. Dan glanced over, as did everyone else on the boat, but she didn’t know what to make of it.

“We won’t as long as we’re respectful.”

“I can’t say I’ve been trained in dog mask etiquette.”

“Honesty,” Renee whispered, so low Dan almost couldn’t hear her, and Matt and Kevin both almost fell out the boat leaning in to catch it. “Honesty’s most important. Be clear, be true, and they won’t harm us. We may have to pass searching this island up, however.”

“By the look of those muzzles, I wouldn’t mi--” Matt said, but Renee shushed him. Dan gave her a look for cutting Matt off, but then they were about to reach the sand peninsula's tip.

Neil continued to pace back and forth, back and forth, behind them. Dan did her best not to turn and stare.

Instead she stood in their boat as it banked in the sand and, before anything else, cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “Hello! We come in peace!”

“But what do you come for?” One yipped back, voice high, crackling and suspicious.

Dan faltered, taken off-guard with how realistic the masks moved. Renee cleared her throat, Matt gave her a nod, Kevin continued staring at the peoples, and she rediscovered her voice.

“In search of a horse poised to gallop into the stars.”

At her side, Renee winced.

The dog masks snapped their teeth and pinned their ears; a few snarled, and growled, and put hands on blades and spears. Very suddenly, Dan realized these were people in the sense that Neil was people, that the masks weren’t masks, and when Renee said cynocephaly, I suspected they’d be here, she’d meant in the sense that legends told of dog-headed people in the southern isles.

“A lie!” One barked. “We can smell it on you. You come to our home and lie?”

“It-- it--” Dan started, her stomach dropping, stopped, and restarted, “- not entirely, sir- er, ma’am-- no. We’re looking for the horse because it marks a King’s ransom.”

One human hand shot up to bid for his fellows to quiet. Slowly, they did.

“What need have you for a King’s ransom?”

In her chest, Dan’s heart began to pound. Did that mean they had one?

“Not… need,” she hedged. At her side, Renee nodded, the rest of her held very, very still. “Want. We want the King’s ransom.”

Black and pink noses twitched and sniffed.

One different from the first speaker asked, her fur a ragged, patchy brown, “Do you mean us harm?”

“No,” Dan said.

“Do you mean our home harm?”

“No.”

Fur settled. Ears swiveled, to their neighbors and then to the pirates.

“Do you vouch for them?” All humans turned to follow the black dog’s line of sight to see Neil, his pacing halted as he watched, out of the water to his shoulders. He kept still and a ways from the shallows, voice barely raised when he at last replied.

“Depends on what for.”

“We have not seen your sort in many generations,” the brown one said. Dan and Matt thought Neil wanted to roll his eyes, but somehow, he restrained himself. “We used to swim with your kind before they disappeared from these isles. The humans hunted them like we hunt boar, with fervor and passion.”

This time, Neil didn’t keep himself from scowling.

“These ones won’t do that. At worst, they’ll make a racket and accidentally stomp on your gardens before they leave.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong, Dan admitted.

The brown one regarded him for a second before turning and whining something to the black one. The others took up an exchange of barks and yips, all the natives seeming to converse and share their opinions at once. If one ignored the fact they sounded like a kennel full of upset hounds, it… no, it still was a strange sight to behold.

At last the black one stepped forward, his bare feet brushed by the tide. Again, those behind him tapered into silence.

“You have the day to search for your dead horse,” he barked. “If you aren’t gone by the night, we’ll feast on your flesh and give your bones to our children.”

Magical creatures were always so blunt with their intentions. Or, Dan amended with a glance to the huffy merman that had helped them get to this point, maybe that was just an alpha male thing. If these dog-headed people had alphas, anyway. She wasn’t sure she wanted to ask.

The tip of the tallest islands’ natives’ ears couldn’t have topped Matt’s belly-button, but they moved as a pack, a shaggy mass of black and brown and grey and speckled tan that crowded close the moment the pirates dragged their boat ashore. That may have been amusing on closer inspection, but the way they snapped their yellowed canine teeth and spoke in deafening yips and barks to one another made them more off-putting than anything else. It took careful steps to not knock one over, especially because even after being sniffed and checked twice over, their concept of personal space seemed non-existent. After three minutes of struggling to reach the tree line and far too many muzzles poked in places they shouldn’t, Dan finally snapped and shoved one back.

Tan and hardly three feet tall, she yelped, high and piercing.

Matt was at Dan’s elbow in a flash, not even caring if he checked one with his hip, but, feeling far out of depth and overwhelmed with their numbers, Dan hastily reached out for the girl (the pup?) and stuttered, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t-- hurt you, did I?”

The girl looked at her with huge, hurt eyes, and fled.

The brown one with patchy fur, having somehow weaved her way up to a tree branch, cackled.

“Raari is fine, she’s always been a whiner. You must forgive our excitement. We don’t often get visitors.”

“It’s fine,” Dan said.

She cackled again. “You lie. But that’s alright. Humans are always rude creatures.” Then she pinned her ears and snarled something to the crowd, and, like magic, the locals shrank back enough that the pirates could make their way into the trees.

Behind them, Neil once more disappeared.

Matt marveled at the huts and burrows they passed, the dog-headed people’s homes an intricate network of caves and hand-dug dens that ran from one end of the island to, presumably, the other. A few locals laughed at him after overhearing the awe, saying they’d passed at least a dozen entrances. Meanwhile, because when he enjoyed something he apparently enjoyed it whole-heartedly, Kevin took to asking one grey furred and floppy eared boy everything he could possibly think of in relation to their day-to-day, their hunting, their culture, their history, and Dan could just see the two of them getting attached to one another. The boy, for one, grew so eager to chat that he dissolved into yips at the tougher explanations, and Kevin, oddly patient, always waited him out. Renee stuck close to Kevin for his boldness, her own interest obvious but her words kept to herself.

One dopey-eyed speckled native that spent the better part of the afternoon trailing after Dan told her, utterly sincere, “I wouldn’t eat you. At least, I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Right, then.

They did much less exploring than they should’ve, but the sun barely began to set before Dan hooked her arm in Matt’s, gave Kevin an encouraging shove to get a move on, and hurried them all to the boat.

Neil waited for them along the beach, head pillowed on folded arms and body a quarter submerged in the low tide. His scales caught the light beautifully as waves washed over him, but what truly held the pirates’ eyes was his half-lidded contentment and lazy sprawl, pale skin darkened to a warm bronze. Off a ways, a miniature pack of children splashed and tumbled with one another; with how they’d look but not venture near, Neil had made his large personal bubble well-known.

Of course the moment they stepped out of the forest and saw the whole picture of a happily sunbathing merman, said merman locked up and tracked their movements with sharp eyes.

Catching look of the pirates’ cautious facing and possibly misinterpreting its reason, the black male that had spent the afternoon patrolling their boat with his spear shook the thick fur around his neck and told them, “That used to be a common sight, when both their families and ours spanned for miles. We were trading partners since before your sort knew how to cross the great waters. Nothing needed, nothing but what made life sweeter: they brought us fish and we gave them fruit. You humans ruin any good you find.”

They frowned to varying degrees, but didn’t reply.

“What of your horse?”

Matt said, “We didn’t find it.”

“I’m glad,” he growled. “It sounds like something good.”

Kevin ruffled his conversational partner’s ears before they left, his good-bye otherwise subdued.

Although they gave Neil a wide breadth, the merman snaked his way back toward the deep before they even shoved off.

Later that evening, in part due to the dog-headed people and in part due to flagging morale, Dan suggested to Wymack they give up the hunt and continue on to Troy as planned. The Captain’s mouth thinned and he gave it thought, but in the end, shook his head.

“Renee still needs certain materials.”

“Can’t she get them at the market?”

“No. They only exist in these waters.”

Dan frowned. She didn’t want to be suspicious, but the emotion curled in-between her ribs nonetheless.

Wymack eyed her expression, his own giving up any fight.

“Speak your mind, Wilds. You always do.”

She did. “Is there even a King’s ransom to be found, Captain?”

“According to Renee,” he told her. “Yes. There is.”

Then, Dan told herself, forcibly shaking away her doubt, there had to be.

They moseyed their way to the tenth and significantly more flat and less forested island. The new recruits were unimpressed and restless. The older crewmates were displeased but resigned. Allison, Nicky, Lily and Sheena went down with the first lifeboat, only to immediately be nudged by Neil.

“What the--?” Lily asked, but then Neil hooked his claws over the side and pulled himself not an inch from Nicky’s elbow, and she practically jumped out of her skin.

Nicky did not blame her. He also almost fell off his bench.

“Uh-- Neil?”

“Not them,” the merman said in a voice on the wrong side of human, the vowels raising too high and consonants clicked short too fast. He stared at Lily and Sheena, and then at Nicky. “Not them. The one that reeks of nature. And Andrew. Bring them.”

“You remember Renee’s name,” Allison shot back, quite possibly to cover up the fact his sudden appearance and very sudden intrusion into their choices rattled her.

He stared at her with a look reminiscent to his time in the tank, and dropped underwater.

“Wait!” Nicky tried, but the merman was gone. He did, Nicky noticed, leave claw-marks on the lifeboat’s softwood. “Oh. Shit. Well, that was weird as hell. But…” Nicky’s face screwed up. “He hasn’t steered us wrong yet.”

Sheena started up a protest when Allison huffed agreement and rowed them back to the pulley’s ropes, but she mostly quieted when leveled with a flat glare.

They exchanged new for old, though Nicky could tell Dan and Wymack both came very close to demanding he and Allison swap with them. Andrew’s blithe comment of this being nothing more than Neil having a fit over a funnily shaped crab made Dan back off with uncomfortably crossed arms. The Captain wasn’t so easily swayed, his dark eyes lingering long on each of the four in the life boat.

After what felt like forever, the rest of the crew gathered around and whispering amongst themselves about what would make a merman urgent or necessitate their sooth-sayer, the Captain tipped his hat.

“Come back to us,” he commanded.

Nicky gave him a salute.

“We’re not in the navy, stupid,” Allison grumbled, but mirrored him toward Dan when the First Mate looked ready to break and tell her to switch.

Ropes creaking and pulley clattering, Andrew, Allison, Nicky and Renee, armed with a bag of dried plants and rocks, their swords, one rifle, that expedition’s bag and their clothing, dropped down.

In the morning light, Neil’s flashing red scales and fin were easy things to follow. He refused to explain, and the silence in the boat stilled even Nicky’s tongue. It pressed around them, dripped between the oars’ steady rhythm and packed into the space left behind. It put a shiver down Nicky’s spine, and made his teeth want to clatter. He wasn’t going to take a whole expedition of the tension, but with the way Neil spun in tight circles when he edged too far and waited for them to catch up, silence didn’t seem like it’d last forever.

The tenth island looked flat from far off, and it remained so as they drew closer. A few palm trees stuck up here and there, the barest underbrush struggling to turn an otherwise white land green. It wasn’t big.

Still silent, Neil curbed around it. They followed.

(It probably would’ve been faster for them to hoof it and meet him on the other side, but Nicky wasn’t sure how well the merman would take them straying from his path.)

The island’s side was as unremarkable as its front. Sparse though they were, the palm trees hid The Fox as they rowed by. When they cleared to what Nicky supposed was the opposite side, a variance at last appeared: where the sea had carved its way inland, what should have been a shallow river bed ran far, far darker than it should have. Nothing else around it begged curiousity; it was, at first glance, simply a sink hole.

“Your horse is in there,” Neil said, and this time, Nicky jumped with a fuck, Neil! Warn somebody before you do that! as he popped up right at Andrew’s elbow. His jumping helped Allison and Renee feel better, he thought, because both gave themselves a shake and leaned toward the merman hanging on the side of their boat. Andrew looked at Neil as if he were intentionally hiding something from him.

“And what else?” Renee asked.

Neil’s eyes jumped between all of them, but at the end, he held his tongue and shrugged.

“I’ll have to lead you.” He said, voice tight and shoulders rigid. If he didn’t propose that-- even though it did, it sounded sketchy as hell. Follow a merman into a sinkhole? That was just begging to pander to the they’ll drown you legends. “Beach your boat.”

Allison and Nicky exchanged looks.

Are you believing this?

Fuck no. I don’t have a death wish.

They beached the boat.

He swam with easy up the short river, and let himself hover in the middle of the sinkhole. From up close, it looked like a portal to the night sky: Nicky could tell there were somethings shining at the black bottom, but he couldn’t possibly make out what from where he stood.

Neil twisted in a circle once, stopped, said, “I can only take two at once. Any more, and we’ll get stuck,” and then ducked to swim another while all pirates exchanged looks.

“We should know more before we go in the creepy black void,” Nicky tittered.

Allison hugged her elbows. “For once, I agree. And what’s he mean, he can only take two of us? Is he giving us a ride?”

“Seems so,” Renee murmured. “To what, I don’t know. I can’t imagine it’s something that would hurt us. At least. Not something he thinks could hurt us.”

Andrew didn’t say a thing, but stepped closer to the pond.

“Oi, wait, Andrew, we really need to talk about this,” Nicky said, taking one step after him but freezing as Neil surfaced to look at them. He barely glanced at Andrew, even as the man turned to look at them, too. Gods. It was like they were working in tandem.

“Who else?”

Renee took a step forward.

Allison grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back. “Hemmick. Get in the pond.”

“I’m not letting you toss me in the deep aga--”

“Don’t boss him around,” Neil snapped.

“--n-- er--” Nicky faltered. Met Andrew’s eyes. Looked at Neil’s clearly uncomfortable expression. And, slouching, sighed. “Alright. Okay. We’re first, I guess.”

Neil backed up.

Andrew and Nicky got in the pond. It was less of an easing your way in, more an ice bucket plung.

Nicky’s teeth really did start to chatter. “W-why is it freezing?”

“Hold your breath,” Neil told them as he drifted closer, as if that wasn’t the scariest fucking thing to hear from someone fixing to drag you underwater, “and don’t let go of me until we’re there.”

“Until we’re where?”

“Nicky,” Andrew said, “take a big gulp, and hold your breath.”

Nicky did.

Neil snaked an arm around both their waists, pulled them together like they were the best of friends so they had to link arms over shoulders lest they be awkwardly crushed, and, in one sharp motion, dragged them under.

It was.

Not pleasant.

It was ice water and a morning’s surprising chill all at once, and Nicky definitely lost his breath within the first ten seconds. He couldn’t track the bubbles on their way to the surface, however, given how quickly Neil moved them; force pushed Nicky’s head down and he risked the ache from salt to open his eyes, watching as stone flashed by and red twisted behind them; the pirate’s ears popped and his head felt pressure grow behind his eyes; on the cusp of too much, Neil broke his dive and swerved into an entrance that looked no different from the walls; it grew tight, black and black and a gleam of silver or white, was that actually ice, and Nicky had a dead man’s grip on Andrew’s shoulder, and then they breached a surface and took gulps of frigid air that gusted back out their lungs as puffs of smoke. It made both humans choke as Neil moved them to a ledge, and both of them shook too much to haul themselves up without a little help from the merman.

Andrew just about kicked Nicky in the throat when he got up and pushed himself back, snarling, “Where the fuck did you take us, Neil?” with an anger and discomfort that bordered panic, a tone his cousin had never before heard, and then it crashed on Nicky just how stupid they’d been to take a dive without more than ‘there’s a horse’ as an explanation.

“Down the hall,” Neil told him, already drifting back. “He’ll keep you warm.” Nicky’s eyes widened. No, no, wait, shit, he was their ticket out, he couldn’t just--

“I have to get the others.”

In a flash, he disappeared.

Andrew cursed under his breath, shaking his hands out. When Nicky didn’t stand up to follow his stomping, he came back, curled a fist in his cousin’s vest, and dragged him up. “Come on,” he hissed, shoulders rigid and legs stiff from rage or cold or both. His own joints locking up, Nicky followed, arms hugged around his chest.

Down the hall meant running the air pocket’s length. A glance at the water running parallel their path proved the shining pieces he’d seen had been ice, which made absolutely no sense, and for a second, Nicky honestly wondered if they’d been left to die.

But, no. Neil wouldn’t leave Andrew to die with him. With the way the merman sometimes looked at the guy, Nicky thought out of all of them, Andrew would be the last Neil would leave to die.

(Erik called him a romantic with freaky kinks; that was a human and merman he was talking about, and anyway, Erik was sure Neil looked at Andrew like that because everyone knew Andrew slipped him the best fruit).

(This was so not the last line of thought Nicky wanted when left to die.)

Nerves made him run his mouth. This was undeniable fact, and he didn’t try to stop himself now. “What’s causing the ice?”

Unfortunately, Andrew was not a happy conversationalist under the best of circumstances.

“Magic.”

“And the light? How come we can see?”

“Magic.”

“That’s a cop-out answer!”

“It’s the true one.”

Nicky shivered. “I can’t believe Neil just left us. Just like that. This place is awful. What if we run out of air?”

“He’ll be back.”

“He didn’t explain a thing! Where are we walking now? What’s around that corner? A bear?”

Andrew rounded the corner. A bear did not maul him. Nicky retained a healthy skepticism of their chances of survival.

“Nicky.”

“It could be nothing. He might’ve just left us here to starve.”

“Shut up, Nicky.”

“My fingers are going to fall off, I’m never going to be able to hold Erik’s hand aga--” Nicky rounded the corner and stopped, body and mouth. With a small noise, the sort a man made after a catching sight of his child’s first steps, a breathy, quiet oh, Nicky stared at the horse that looked ready to gallop to the stars.

It wasn’t a skeleton. It wasn’t completely a horse.

Renee and Allison’s arrival echoed through the cave as gasps, splashing and curses; they were much faster and louder in their recovery, or else shock had simply slowed Nicky’s perception of theirs, and Allison was thorough in her disgust for Neil’s mother and his water-logged brains while Renee, presumably, kept her moving. In no time at all, the women rounded the corner as well and stopped dead on either side of him with their own stunned silence.

Andrew was the only one to edge closer, and even he didn’t dare touch it.

The beast was wide as a lifeboat, long as a church pew and whiter than the ice. Half horse, half fish, it had hauled its top half onto the stone ledge and left its tail to drag in the cold waters. It took Nicky a moment to look past his awe and notice its wrinkled muzzle and slow breathing, to see the grey hairs that crept to its black eyes and the thin, brittle quality of its long mane.

When Neil surfaced at its side, one hand running up its tail until he very nearly draped himself on the massive creature’s flank, it moved its head to whicker at him. The sound echoed through the cave, brief and inexplicably tired.

“Hippocamp,” Renee whispered. Nicky barely heard her, too busy taking in the scene. “The sea king’s steed.”

“Worth a king’s ransom,” Andrew said.

“Not a dead horse,” Renee said, and sounded oddly mournful. “A dying horse.”

The backs of his hands rubbing soothing circles where the creature’s neck met its shoulder, Neil watched them and only them. “He thinks he has another three years. Four, if he’s lucky.”

The hippocamp’s breath gusted from flared nostrils, and it laid its great head on the ledge.

“Halley’s comet,” Renee murmured.

Nicky twisted to jab an accusing, trembling finger at her. “How much, exactly, did you know about this?”

The cold could not be ignored. Their lungs would close up if they stayed too long in sodden clothes. The creature was a sad, dying thing, and Nicky had a healthy, persistent respect for the old; worth The Raven a thousand times over or not, he wished they hadn’t found the beast.

Andrew and Allison turned to face Renee, too, neither jumping to mitigate Nicky’s demand.

She looked between them all, her lips white with cold and tension, before settling her eyes on Neil and spreading her hands at her side.

“I suspected we’d find something from legend, but I didn’t know it’d still be alive.”

“Well, he is,” Neil said, ducked, and then heaved himself onto the ledge to curl closer to the thing, gills closed and breath held. It seemed like a move to keep them from asking him questions. It also seemed like a move to reach the hippocamp’s mane, which Neil immediately buried his fingers into and began to straighten.

Allison asked, “How much is it worth?”

“In magical supplies alone, enough to pay for a comfortable retirement in a Baron’s villa three times over.” She paused. Sucked in a breath, and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. “Whole and alive? We could buy out half the king’s navy.”

“That’s tempting.”

“It’s not. We’ve been through this before with that red-tailed bastard-- we’re not taking on another living creature.”

“That’s not for you to decide, Nicky. We need to discuss with the Captain.”

“I don’t care. We’re not doing it!”

“It’s now or never,” Andrew cut in. “Unless one of you can swim down here by yourselves, that red-tailed bastard won’t be hauling another human down here.”

“How do you know?” Allison demanded. “You two chat about this beforehand? Plan it out, did you?”

“Because he barely had the guts to do it once. You think he’ll work up the courage for a second go-around?”

Nicky glanced at the merman that, for all intents and purposes, ignored them. The single-minded focus he had on the hippocamp lent credit to Andrew’s assessment.

And also made for his excellent second point. “How are we supposed to haul something that size above ground? How are we supposed to convince it to do anything?”

“Neil,” Renee said, and Nicky wanted to step on her foot because he just knew she had something to counteract his perfect points, “did he give you permission to lead us here?”

Neil stopped untangling the horse’s mane. His eyes damned them for being greedy creatures, or so Nicky saw, but he nodded.

Renee wrapped her arms around herself.

She licked her lips.

She asked:

“Did you convince him to?”

One furred hoof, large as a man’s head, scraped against the stone. The beast raised its head to snort at them, sway, and then drop back down. Fingers disentangled from its hair, Neil slipped himself back underwater and, after breath, reappeared at their side.

His eyes were for Renee.

“He’s dying. He’s outlived his children, his mates, and his herd. He longs to rejoin the tide and race again along a wave’s crest with all those who died before him.”

A pause which felt as threatening as the ice, the beat of silence wrapping icy talons around their throats.

“It’s his choice, and his choice alone, for what and why he gives his life.”

Renee, wisely, nodded her understanding.

Another deadly pause passed, but then Neil blinked and jerked his head away, a muscle on his jaw working as he turned over whatever he meant to say next.

“Fuckin’ freezing,” Allison chattered, and Nicky whole-heartedly and loudly agreed.

Even Andrew shifted boot to sodden boot, impatience creeping into his expression.

The continuation was this:

“He’ll follow you to your ship and let you pull him up if you want. If you decide to sell him, he only asks you slit his throat first. He says he’s too old to suffer further.”

Nicky’s throat made a complicated strangled noise.

Renee and Andrew held a conversation between themselves with eyebrow twitches and long stares, which was wholly unhelpful to the rest of them.

Allison let out a shaky, cloudy breath, and then straightened from her chilly hunch. Turning to face the merman, her chin jerked up a few degrees.

“Accepted.”

“Allison--”

“You can’t honestl--”

She cut them off with a steely glare. “If he’s serious, tell him to show up at dusk. Make sure he has his hippocampy affairs in order, that he’s made peace with himself, whatever other shit a half-fish, half-horse can do. If he’s sure, then we’ll take him.”

Neil tilted his head at her.

She bared her teeth at him. “Is that fucking clear, fish boy?”

“He understands every word you say,” Neil said. Blinked. Blinked again. “So. Yes.”

Somehow, the cave seemed to warm to a few degrees shy of glacier.

“Good,” Allison growled. “Now get us the fuck out of this ice box before my nose falls off.”

He did, Allison and Nicky first, Renee and Andrew second. It took a suspiciously long time for the second duo to re-emerge, but Nicky had resolved not to think about it or talk for at least a day to any of them for agreeing so easily, and he kept to it as Neil said he’d rather spend the day with the hippocamp and, merman-less, they hauled their thawing asses back to the boat.

When dusk came, the air warm and wind rustling through distant trees, a horse’s braying broke the quiet.

No matter who did and didn’t fully believe their tale, all of The Fox’s crew found faith as the great beast reared from the sea below them, its hooves throwing water and its head tossed back in a proud arc. True to its translated word, it allowed them to fasten ropes under its legs and around its waist, and it didn’t struggle free as they heaved it to the deck. For whatever reason, it didn’t seem to need water or air to breathe; laid out on the deck, its greying coat and thick ropes of muscle made it a marvel from another world, as if it were made from magic itself.

When the Captain approached it with steel drawn, it bared its neck and closed its old eyes.

It was quietly decided that they would sell it at the second largest and nearest southern port. Despite the humid weather and their worries, the body did not rot. It did bring a mournful and morose atmosphere to The Fox’s crew, and for the week it took to reach the market, laughter was sparse and choked.

The body did not rot, but it took days for the blood to cease running.

Neil did not show himself as long as the creature’s corpse laid on their deck.

Truthfully, the pirates didn’t look for him, either.

The hippocamp fetched a price that would buy a third of the King’s navy.

It felt like less than what the ancient beast was worth, but Wymack didn’t have the gumption to negotiate longer than he had.

They sailed out the same day they arrived, largely uninterested what the port had to offer. Of the two that protested, Jack and Sheena, the Captain told them to go, but if they did, they weren’t welcome back. They remained.

The nose pointed for Troy, white sails unfurled, and on they went.

“Andrew? Where are you taking those oranges?”

“Calm down, Wilds. We never paid our leech for the last island.”

“He hasn’t come to collect it.”

“I doubt that. It’s more likely whoever was on duty was too blind to notice.”

“...”

“Any other questions?”

“Not immediately.”

“Then get out of my way, Wilds.”

She didn’t, but he shouldered past her all the same.

The rope ladder’s wooden rungs clattered against The Fox’s siding as it unfurled from the railing; Andrew waited for the plunk! that signified it reaching its final destination, stuffed three oranges into generously roomy pockets, and began to make his way down.

The only thing to follow him was:

“Show your First Mate a little more respect, Minyard!”

-- Which he ignored.

Given the sounds he left behind on the deck, a few others turned out to grumble and groan with sympathy at Dan. With tasks finished, their earnings from the hippocamp heavy in their pockets, and the evening thirty minutes from darkening enough for lanterns, the crew loitered in doorways and on overturned buckets. Andrew put them out of his mind before he was half-way down the ladder.

Legs slipped through the second bottom-most rung and feet hooked around the sidings, he dug out an orange, scanned the quiet waters, and got comfortable.

It took until he contemplated fishing out his flint for a cigarette and some light for Neil to show himself. That was, Andrew had to admit, far longer than usual. The merman was upset.

The merman didn’t look upset. The merman looked blank-faced, if not bored, as he held out an expectant hand for the orange.

That, Andrew decided, was not going to work.

Straightening up to cock his arm back, he said, “Catch,” and chucked it at Neil’s head.

It bounced off harmlessly, though the merman made a show of jerking back, snatching it, and disappearing for twenty seconds. Andrew used the time to get out his flint and rolled tobacco, not looking up from striking a spark when Neil once more reappeared. This time, he looked about a tenth of how upset he had to be.

The spark caught and he took a puff. Regarding the merman with little concern, smoke a silver shiver in the air, he said, “Oops.”

Neil splashed him in the face.

Shaking dripping hair from his eyes, Andrew spat out the sodden paper and fixed him with a not-so-sincere sneer. “Figured you’d do that, you ungrateful mooch. That was my second best one.”

Neil stuck his nose in the air. “I could pull you in. That’ll ruin your sparker, and then you’ll be shit out of luck until this rust-bucket picks its way back to shore.”

“Is that right? Good thing Nicky’s boyfriend has one.”

Eyes rolling and anger regulated to the backburner, Neil drifted close enough to curl a hand around the ladder’s rope. If that meant squeezing his fingers between Andrew’s leg and the rope itself, at least he kept his claws from tearing any holes in the fabric. When he fell silent and kept his head tipped down to his chest, Andrew resisted the urge to throw another orange at him.

“What happened to it being his choice?” If derision lined his voice and had anything to do with how quickly Neil looked at him, so be it. “You gave a real touching speech to Reynolds. Sure, without you, that old beast never would’ve let us find him, and, sure, if you hadn’t convinced him we were humans worth helping, he’d still be peacefully waiting to die, but you did those things. You found him. You told him about us. You let him decide. You led us to him. You--”

“I get it,” Neil cut in, back to looking down and away from Andrew.

“So why are you sulking?”

“I’m--”

“You’re sulking. It’s obnoxious.”

“Well, sorry,” he muttered and yanked once on the rope. Andrew huffed out an annoyed breath. In the dark, the scales speckled along his arms and back glimmered, little bits of reflected starlight that made it quite clear what spoke to him wasn’t and couldn’t be human. In more than a few ways, he was something more -- in a few others, something less. It balanced out. Andrew would appreciate the equal field if he could think about abstract potentials and not how defined Neil’s jawline could be at the right angle (and the right angle being any angle).

Reaching out to thread his fingers through Neil’s hair was not a compromise.

Teeth and tongue clicking in what was by then a recognizable language, albeit one Andrew had no hope in learning, Neil adjusted his grip on the ladder until he had his cheek pressed against his leg, bits of his side and tail breaching the surface as he turned himself horizontal.

Fine. Fuck off. It was a compromise.

“I never realized how much our numbers have shrunk.” he said. It took Andrew a second to remember what they were talking about. “Hippocamps. Merfolk. Selkie. Sirens, even. These isles should be crawling with them.” He paused. He frowned. He continued. “Before the tank, it wasn’t as if I’d cared to notice what we passed. My mother and I, we traveled alone. Originally we’d been part of a larger group. Probably. I don’t fully remember it. But my mother said it wasn’t safe, that the numbers made us too obvious to humans, and we left.”

He paused to think.

Talking was, as far as he knew, a good sign. The morose note in Neil’s voice made his skin itch for tobacco, but he put that restlessness into scratching along his scalp.

Neil’s eyes drooped before he continued, but his tone hadn’t changed. “You have a distinction for creatures like me. It took me a while to pick out what it was.”

“Sirens are pretty different from lobsters.”

“Not really. You call them magical because they understand humans without being one, but they’re-- they’re as magical as squid. They’re just smarter than squid. That’s all.”

“What’s your point, Neil?”

“Humans stalked his herd for decades. He should’ve lost his family to disease, or predators, or bad luck, not… because you think his blood’s better than something else’s.”

“Most times,” with words chosen with as much intention as anything else he did - more than enough to be sincere, “it is.”

The rope under Neil’s hand creaked as he strangled it, eyes no longer half-lidded and tail ducked back below the surface. Briefly, Andrew felt it nudge against his boots. Briefly, it did again. The merman kept pressed close to his leg, but he was working himself into a fit between one breath and the next.

Where his hand rested on Neil’s head, Andrew gave a tug to bring him back. “Neil. Breathe.”

“Five moons,” he gasped, as if speaking the words carved his throat bloody, “I’ve been free for five moons, and only some whales remember seeing my kind. Where did they go? When did that happen?”

He shook like a sheet in a windstorm, all panic and fear and barely-holding-on. Andrew slid his hand to his nape and gave him a shake of his own; Neil buried his face into the pirate’s side, one hand twisted into the hem of his rough shirt, and keened, the sound low and pitiful and carrying. At the end, he took a deep breath and made it again. And again.

Eventually he tired himself into panting silence. On deck, Andrew heard the alarmed shuffle of boots and uncertain chatter of pirates pulled from their conversations. Lanterns held to shed light on them cast shadows in the water.

A few farther back from the railing demanded to know what was going on. One could be identified as Jack. Those at the railing and those who weren’t anywhere close to being new recruits didn’t answer him, and made no demands.

Andrew ignored them all, kept one hand to Neil’s nape and the other on his shiver-wracked shoulder.

Soon enough, lanterns and humans receded. The quiet night once more blanketed them.

Neil hiccupped once, and then visibly, forcibly wrestled his breathing under control. Eventually he loosened his grip on Andrew’s shirt, though he didn’t let go, and turned his head to once more press his cheek against his leg. His eyes were clear and dry, but also duller, the fire within doused.

“They’re dead,” Andrew told him.

His jaw clenched, the muscle jumping against his leg, but he didn’t reply.

“One of you can give one of us years more to live. Do you understand? No mere animal can do that. Creatures like you, rare as you’ve become, are worth a dozen men. That won’t change. You’ll always be hunted. If you meet another of your kind, they’ll always be hunted, too.

“But you escaped once,” he continued, and felt Neil still, “and you’re here now. If you want to squander your life by brooding around our ship’s hull, I’ll put you out of your misery and see that your blood, at least, is put to some use. If you don’t, if you’re willing to live even if it means a life as one of the last, then know you’re not entirely alone. The fools up there killed for you. They’ll do it again.”

Neil opened his mouth around a question, his eyes on Andrew’s.

He answered before it could be voiced. “That depends on which you choose.”

Neil’s laugh shuddered out of him, short and breathy. “Oh, it’s my choice.”

“How old are you, again? Five?”

“Two hundred and seventy-six.” Involuntarily, Andrew’s leg jumped. Neil’s eyebrows went up, then scrunched down, and -- “Moons. Two hundred and seventy-six moons. That’s… twenty-three years.”

Realization came upon Neil all at once; the smile to follow was so full of laughter and disbelieving mockery, Andrew gave the other’s hair another tug to cut it off.

Another puff of laughter nonetheless escaped, but he sobered up after, the exhaustion from too much emotion at once smudging his edges and lessening his tension as much as it made him seem frailer. When he kept quiet for a while, Andrew didn’t interrupt it. Rather, he took his hand from Neil’s shoulder and looped the arm once more through a ladder rung, boot-tips dipped a few inches more into the sea.

Eventually he made to move his other hand, too, but Neil caught its wrist as it lifted off his head and asked, “Does… Matt’s knee still jump whenever he’s dealt a good hand?”

Andrew didn’t often join their games, but he knew to say, “He continues to have a horrible poker face, yes.”

“Hm,” Neil said.

“There’s been distinctly less cheating in recent months.”

“Hmm,” Neil said again.

“The new recruits aren’t always invited.”

“Whenever they’re not,” he asked, and hooked his chin on Andrew’s knee, “is there a spot open?”

Andrew hesitated, realized he hesitated, and shoved Neil back with one hand to his face. Beneath his palm, he felt the grin -- between his fingers, tired eyes smiled at him. “Ask them, not me. Now back off, I’ve got a crick in my neck from talking like this.”

When he climbed up no less than an hour later, his other two oranges gone and citrus on his tongue, Dan Wilds greeted him with her arms crossed and her eyes worried. Kevin loitered at the mast-post trying to look as if he wasn’t. Nicky joined him and did a much worse job at not casting hopeful looks in Andrew’s direction. Matt, Renee, Abby, Katelyn and three of the nosier new recruits peered around doorways and corners, and in general were even more obvious than Nicky. Andrew stared Jack down until he frowned, bristled and backed off to the barracks.

While he started in on staring the other newer bodies into doing the same, Dan cleared her throat and asked, “So?”

“You’ll have to use more words than that to make a clear question,” Andrew told her.

She bristled, but didn’t back down. She knew she couldn’t make him talk if he didn’t want to, and she refused to let it intimidate her. That was respectable in some circles, Andrew supposed.

“Is he alright?” She asked, because she was also predictable. He appreciated that more, as it made talking with her not as much of a headache as it could’ve been.

“He’s fine.” Nicky shot a happy look at Kevin, who realized it gave his interest away and immediately turned toward perfectly tied lines to busy himself with re-tying. Andrew continued with, “He wants to play cards again.”

Dan’s stern expression stumbled.

“Cards?” She asked.

Andrew looked at her, and turned to pull up the rope ladder. With the way the First Mate’s hand reached out before retracting, he thought it a good idea; Neil wouldn’t surface again for the rest of the night, and that would just make Dan’s hurt feelings over not being a preferred conversationalist worse.

Why the merman didn’t talk as much with the louder crew members, Andrew thought was obvious. Neil was choosing whether or not he wanted to stay, and whether or not the cost was worth it. An annoyingly indecisive process, if you asked Andrew (which Neil did not, and Andrew didn't care to share on his own). That they took the cold shouldering personally didn't surprise him, but - if he had to be fair, which he never did, and wasn't, and thought in fairness of why they took it personally as an exercise in boredom alone - but, of course it obvious to him: it wasn’t his emotions getting in the way.

“Er. We could… try to finagle a game night on the ocean.” She said, which meant they would.

Andrew shrugged at her, ignored Matt, Katelyn and Nicky’s immediate hopping into ideas of how, and hauled the dripping rope ladder back to its place.

(Two days later, they folded their sails, dropped the life-boats with a four empty barrels and a loop of far too much rope in between, and Neil appeared, subdued and skittish, for a few hands. They let him have his silence, throwing insults and jabs at one another without lingering too long on where they hoped he would butt in.)

(It was the most boisterous, back-slapping, accusation-throwing, fun night they had in ages.)

(We have places to be, Wymack told them the day after, but once a week, they were allowed to stall progress for a game night with their fourteenth crewmember.)

Mourning the hippocamp meant they forgot urgency until they had a week’s worth of supplies before they starved, and three days’ travel to reach any town.

Hearing Katelyn say they only had potatoes and fish left woke them up. The ship moved even faster after Renee tempted the wind into helping and Kevin took it upon himself to inform every crewmate how lazy and sluggish they were being by not keeping the hold in order, as well as how the quality of their boots matched the quality of their ties, and if they didn’t shape up, he’d personally ship them out.

On day two of the three day travel, Nicky (who had become very attentive in the nest, as he’d be the first to spot land) squinted into his eyepiece at yellow sails and a blue flag. He called down a warning, but didn’t truly think much of the passing merchant ship until it became less of a speck and more of a powerhouse beelining right for them.

The ship named itself Charity, and under the blue flag, flew His Majesty’s colors. The ship proved charitable with its arrows and cannons, its crew a pack of mercenaries that screamed for The Fox’s bounty.

Wymack had them answer by littering the Charity with holes.

Fortunately, no boarding had to be done, and the Captain sank with her ship. Unfortunately, half mercenaries escaped onto life-rafts, and as The Fox sailed on, her Captain spied them release a raven that swiftly flew northward. Dan caught his eye. He had only grim predictions for their future skirmishes to give her.

Before any others could try their hand at looting their thrice-deep coffers, however, they reached Columbia’s shining shore.

Aside from them, two stout merchant ships and one brig had their anchors outside the river’s delta. Columbia was a modest port town that huddled at the edge of a green, well-farmed valley, its land divided in half with a wide river; its agriculture was its pride, and as the pirates disembarked for shore, it became clear the townspeople prioritized space for market tents over blacksmiths, shipwrights or rich peoples’ mansions. The inspectors for their ships spoke with a thick southern accent and were just as happy to discuss the local crops as they were The Fox’s origins. With no merman to hide and all gold locked away, tensions ran low.

Aaron, Andrew, Kevin, Jean and Nicky were among the first to take their shore leave, Erik and Katelyn forced to wait until the documents were updated. Armed with a list of supplies to seek, Kevin pulled the rest of them along to the largest market at the second day’s first light, despite the fact that out of all of them, he possibly suffered the worst hangover-inspired headache.

(Jean gave him a run for his money, but Kevin had determination.)

“Fruit stand, starboard-bound,” Nicky quipped, and laughed. Aaron groaned, but went for it. Andrew followed, but split off for the candied apples sold next to it.

“If someone hadn’t been throwing mangoes over the edge, we’d have had more left,” Kevin said.

“Really? That’s not too bad. I like it fresh, not pickled, personally.”

“There were more than one or two someones,” Jean muttered. “I shouldn’t have been surprised he kept helping you all.”

“Jean,” Nicky gasped, “you’re talking as if you’re not one of us.”

“I’m not. I’m an unfortunate passenger.”

“You completed a treasure hunt with us. Face it! You’re a pirate!”

“Never,” he snapped, “and keep your voice down. People are staring.”

By people, he meant one person. A woman with a wild shock of black hair that she tried in vain to pin back, her pristine clothing off-white and stark against her weathered, darkened skin. A bushel of apples hung from her arm, but she looked as if she’d forgotten where she was, nevermind what she was there for.

Nicky followed Jean’s gaze to her, grinning and ready to charm this suspicious person, and froze.

She took a step forward, her hand to her mouth.

“Nicky?”

“Hi, mom.” Nicky said; his two companions frowned at how meek he became. “Long time no see.”

“You’re back.” Her eyes went to and dismissed Kevin and Jean, but then Aaron returned with a slip promising three barrels of assorted fruits, and she took another step forward. “Are you all back?”

Aaron’s lip curled at her, but Nicky tangled his fingers in front of him and asked, “Do you want us back?”

“Even if you did,” Andrew interrupted, stepping neatly between her and his brother, his flat tone at odds with his candied apple that was missing a bite’s worth of its side, “we aren’t.”

“Andrew,” Martha sighed. “I see you haven’t changed.”

Andrew didn’t reply, or blink.

Nicky, sensing an end and wishing to postpone it, asked, “How long are you here for, mom? How’s-- you’re looking good.”

She smiled at him, all dimples and affection. He practically glowed. “I am good. We’ll be here for two months more, at the least. You should visit, Nicky, for supper or breakfast or whatever you’d like; you too, Aaron, Andrew. And-- you two. You’re friends?”

Jean kept silent while Kevin, with his best I’m an officer of His Majesty’s navy and I’m here to protect you voice, said, “Crewmates. We’re an exploration vessel for Mr. Harrington, simply stopping in Columbia for a quick supply run. You may not have heard of him; he’s from the northern mainland.”

“Oh, my,” she laughed, a pleasant, if generic, sound, “you must have seen so much. Really, you should visit the encampment. We’d love to hear all about your adventures.”

“You would?” At first hopeful, Nicky’s voice tipped into light confusion. “Is there-- I mean, is there a reason you haven’t been responding to my letters?”

Martha’s eyebrows twitched, but she waved away the emotion before it could be caught. “You know how hard it is for post to reach us, Nicky.”

He deflated, sinking back onto his heels. “Right.”

“Funny,” Andrew said. “No one else has had that problem, and our other crewmate has a mother without a home.”

Martha gave him a patient look. “We’ve been expanding,” she explained, as if that explained anything. “There’s many more sects just like ours all over the isles, and even the western mountains. I wouldn’t be surprised if your letters accidentally went to one of them.”

Nicky nodded.

The twins looked unconvinced.

“Dinner, tomorrow night,” she impressed, reaching out to take her son by the shoulder. “Bring your friends. Bring whoever you like. There’ll be plenty of food.”

“We’re busy,” Andrew said.

For the first time, she frowned. “Too busy for family? Cass would love to see you, Andrew. Yes, she’s still with us, her and Richard. Drake left for the navy a few years back, but everyone else who can be is there.”

He didn’t move.

“Is it Tilda’s accident?” She murmured. “We all know it wasn’t your fault, Andrew. That Aaron’s with you -- you two must have found the peace you left to look for.”

“That wasn’t why we left,” Aaron said, flat as his stare.

She winced. “A work in progress, then. That’s alright. The whole world is.”

Surprisingly, it was Kevin who said, “We do have business to attend before the market closes,” and, with a small look at the tension in the cousins’ bodies, added after a pause, “ma’am. I’m sorry to cut your reunion short...”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she sighed, and stepped back with a new, only slightly strained smile. “Dinner. Tomorrow. At the usual time, I know you must remember it. We’ll be happy to have you and any of your friends for a night, but please, no hocus pocus.”

With that, she took her apples and her leave.

Kevin and Jean turned on them with questions the second they were rowing back the ship, their slips for payment a thick roll of parchment in Kevin’s bag.

“No ‘hocus pocus?’”

“Sects?”

“We’re not visiting,” Andrew said. “It doesn’t matter.”

And yet, Nicky swallowed and, with a cautious glance at his cousin, said, “My parents-- er, Aaron and my parents, Andrew’s foster parents, belong to the New Agers.”

“Bunch of Blanks,” Aaron muttered.

Nicky’s expression grew tense. “Don’t call them that, please.”

Jean’s face said he knew what they meant and didn’t like it. Kevin’s said he hadn’t the faintest clue what they were on about.

Nicky explained, rowing temporarily forgotten, “They believe the time for magic is in the past. That the rarity of sooth-sayers and the threat the remaining ones hold over normal people, plus the disappearance of magical creatures and the threat they hold over normal people, proves anything gifted by the nature gods means to hold back mankind, if not outright enslave and kill us.”

“So blanking out magic is a mission objective.”

“If they knew my grandmother was a selkie, they’d have me hung,” Jean said, stiff, “and you want us to visit them for a friendly chat?”

“They’re family.”

“Then why’d you leave?”

Nicky shot another look at his cousin. Andrew stared straight forward and didn’t deign to acknowledge it.

Licking his lips and at last remembering to row, Nicky gave an uncomfortable shrug. “Each New Age sect moves towns every three years or so. To spread the word, and because-- well- anyway. One town had a sooth-sayer as a mayor. She hated having us in her town, but some people hated her policies and sided with us as a reason for why she was a poor mayor. She couldn’t throw us out without starting a riot. That’s the town Cass adopted Andrew at, too. Tilda said she had her hands full with Aaron, that she’d had to leave a baby behind for a reason.”

He stopped.

“Okay,” Kevin said after a few beats too long.

“She had a son and Nicky had a crush,” Aaron filled in, his voice black and not a little vicious.

Nicky wouldn’t look up from his boots.

“Like Jean said. New Agers kill any magical creature they find, and if a sooth-sayer doesn’t repent from their practice, they’re considered a magical creature, too. After two and a half years, almost the entire town had pledged to our sect. Those who didn’t turned a blind eye when they locked the mayor and her family in a barn and set it ablaze.”

For a moment, the group fell silent. They were minutes from reaching The Fox.

“Then Tilda died,” Nicky mumbled, barely audible, “and we didn’t have much reason to stay.”

On the way back to shore after the Captain doled out the necessary coins for supplies, everyone except Wymack and Abby going, Nicky asked Erik if he’d come with. Erik, who knew the most of Nicky’s origins after the twins, adamantly refused and reminded Nicky that there was a reason he’d left.

The discussion turned into an argument-that-wasn’t-an-argument. Erik left Nicky at the pier to cool off before he said something he regretted, and Katelyn asked Aaron, “What was that all about?”

“Family’s in town.” Aaron told her.

“Oh! Shouldn’t we say hi?”

“No.”

Katelyn frowned, but let it drop.

While everyone split into twos and threes for much-needed shore leave, Nicky sat himself at the end of a tavern table that wasn’t anywhere near Erik and sighed, wistful and sullen, into his mug. He alternated between staring into it and sneaking glances toward the door, until Aaron grew so sick of his behaviour, snatched Katelyn’s hand, and dragged her out toward the dance floor.

Kevin eyed him distastefully, too, and left to dance as well.

Nicky turned his doe eyes on Andrew, the only other one left at the table.

Andrew stared back, unimpressed and unyielding.

“They weren’t all bad. They weren’t always bad,” Nicky said.

“I haven’t spoken to them in ages, and she looked happy to have us,” he pleaded.

“What if they had another kid? I wouldn’t even know,” he moaned.

“They must understand we’ve seen the world, and magic still has a home in some places--”

“Some places?” Andrew asked, light.

Nicky winced.

“I… just miss my mom.” He mumbled, this time into his ale. “And dad. A little.”

Around them, drunks and wenches alike hooted and hollered. The tavern was packed. People were having a good time.

“That’s your problem,” Andrew told him.

Nicky laid his head on his table and, fiercely, missed Erik. “I know.”

If he split off from the tavern before it grew too dark and wasn’t to be found at any of the inns they stayed at for the next three days, well. He returned to the pier before they returned to the ship.

Erik tried to ignore him when he sidled up to his side, apologetic and strained, but a muttered, “Sorry. You were right,” made him sigh and give in to wrapping an arm around his shoulders to pull him in tight.

As the sun set and water bugs grew thicker, Dan counted them off, pausing to eye a new, ornate, and utterly useless dagger strapped to Alma’s side with vague distaste. At the end of the line-up, she paused, frowned, and looked through the bored, half-asleep pirates again.

“Where’s Allison?”

One Fox glanced at another. Allison was not among their number.

“And Renee? Where’s Renee?”

Another glance to double check that, no, none of them were Renee.

“I saw them at the central market earlier today,” Matt offered. “They were buying flowers. You know. For Renee’s supplies.”

“Never seen her use roses before,” someone murmured from the side of their mouth, and another stifled a laugh.

Try as she might to look annoyed, the twitching corner of her mouth betrayed Dan’s pride for what may or may not have conspired between her friends. They waited next to their boats for a few minutes longer, weight shuffled and yawns stifled, before she finally sighed and called, “Matt. Erik. Nicky. Katelyn. Aaron. You’re waiting here with me. The rest of you can head back. Day’s in charge until I return.”

The new recruits groaned, which of course made Kevin snap for them to pick up their feet.

When two blonds didn’t budge, Dan picked one to point at. “Whichever Minyard you are, get hopping. The boat’s not big enough for both of you and Allison and Renee.”

“Then send back Erik,” that one replied. “He doesn’t know anything more about this town than Matt, and he lacks the brawn for if there’s trouble.”

“Andrew,” Dan growled, “I’m not asking twice.”

“And I’m not going.”

They squared off for a moment, one immobile and one visibly nearing the end of her rope.

From the side, Katelyn volunteered to double up with Aaron. It still pushed the weight limit, but Aaron certainly had no complaints (by the glance Andrew shot her after Dan acquiesced, he did, but it went ignored).

The first boat left without Erik or Andrew, and the sun continued its descent.

When birds began their good-night singing from thatch rooftops, Matt pulled Dan aside and mumbled, “They’d never be this late.”

“I know.” She took off her hat to fan away the heat, the sleepless nights ashore catching up in shrinking her energy. Staying up to crawl through every bar Columbia had to offer had been worth it at the time. Now, she felt a little regret; mostly in how high her irritation climbed at the missing parties, the annoyance threaded with worry. “Something’s holding them up. And it’s not each other.”

From the loose group slumped in the boat, ever waiting, Andrew asked with an unusually carrying voice:

“Nicky. Where’s the New Ager’s camp?”

Lifting his head from Erik’s shoulder, he took a moment to look confused. “On the west side of town. Why? I didn’t think you wanted to visit.”

“I don’t.”

“Then… -- Oh! It’s on the river, yeah, but don’t worry, there’s no way Neil would swim that far inlan--”

Andrew cut him off as he stood, the boat rocking from the abrupt movement.

“What are New Agers?” Matt asked, both he and Dan openly staring at the exchange. “I kept hearing their name tossed around town, but it wasn’t too clear what they were around for. Folks said they’d improved their crop yield without any magic.”

“They’re here to champion progress,” Andrew said, and stepped back to the pier, “at the expense of a few.” Realization dropped Nicky’s mouth to a small oh, and he scrambled to follow, Erik hot on his heels. Aaron wasn’t too far behind, though he kept a much more level head.

Dread stiffening her spine, Dan put herself in his way; he very nearly shoved her back, but she demanded, “No. Renee’s not just your friend. You’re going to share what’s lit a fire under your ass, and we’re working as a team to fix it.”

“They’re a group, we grew up with them, they hate magic, and if they suspected Renee was a sooth-sayer, they’d ask her to repent.” Nicky babbled as, for the second time, Dan and Andrew squared off like two pissed bulldog, unwilling to give any ground to one another. The word repent snapped Dan’s eyes to him, though; behind her, Matt’s widened. “They’d want to explain their cause. They wouldn’t have-- they won’t hurt her, she’s just passing through.”

With a tone that brooked no argument, Andrew said, “You don’t know that.”

“I do! My dad’s the head of the sect, and he’s, I mean, he can be extreme, but they’d never harm someone on their first meeting. They’re not insane.”

Sharp: “Then why did you come back looking like they’d threatened to shoot your new boyfriend?”

Erik looked affronted at the very thought, if not the terminology. Nicky stuttered, stopped, protested, and finally shrugged, uncomfortable and a little shaken, “They’d asked about what we’d done. I… I told them about The Raven fight - I didn’t name Riko, I’m not stupid, I said they were the pirates - and, maybe, how Renee’s winds ripped one sail to shreds. I was caught up in the story, I wasn’t thinking, I--”

Matt gaped at him. “You told a bunch of magic-haters about your friend the sooth-sayer? You should’ve thrown in a cheery tale about our honorary crewmate, the merman, just to really tick them off.”

“I wasn’t thinking! I was just talking with my mom.”

“And Luther overheard,” Aaron didn’t ask.

“What’d he threaten?” Andrew did ask.

When Nicky hesitated, Dan redirected her rising and furious alarm at him. “The hell’d he say, Hemmick?”

“I didn’t like it,” he started, voice small, but a glance back at Erik showed he’d find no help there, “so I left. It wasn’t anything he’d have said before. I’d been younger, they’d kept me away from the conversion processes, but I know it wasn’t what they’d have done back then. He’d always been extreme, but I think how the movement’s grown has gone to his head.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Andrew sneered. Nicky flinched, arms wrapping around himself. “I warned you when we left that they were only going to get worse. People always do.”

“Renee can handle herself,” Dan said, possibly to stave off her own fear, “and with Allison, there aren’t many people who can make them go somewhere they don’t want to.”

“You might not have picked up on it,” Aaron said, “but this town’s eaten up the New Age’s sciences. Could Renee and Allison fight off an ambush when no one was willing to call the guards?”

“We’re going to the camp,” Andrew told Nicky, his hand snapping out to give the man a shove forward as Dan stepped aside, “now.”

He led, pace close to a run, and they followed, Matt posing questions in between hurried steps and receiving terse, dark answers from Aaron and, when Nicky couldn’t, Erik.

It didn’t take long to reach the river that ran through Columbia, and from there, it was an even shorter race to where cloth tents overtook wooden townhouses in number. The shift from one to the other was seamless; Dan noticed they’d entered the innermost New Age’s territory only as color was leeched from their surroundings, tents and knapsacks and clothing shifting to nothing but shades of black and white. The people came in the usual colors people came in, but their surroundings dimmed them, and Dan, at least, became conscious of the blue on her bandanna, the worn brown of her boots, and the yellow trimming on her deep red hat. The greyed people stared at the strangers racing through their camp -- a few appeared to recognize Nicky, but none welcomed them, called to them, or otherwise moved to intercept them. The Foxes were unapologetically loud in their arrival, and it baffled them.

There should have been more people, Nicky gasped to his fellows. There had definitely been more people the day before, even the morning before.

By virtue of his stay, he knew what curving path to take to reach the camp’s main gathering place. Lined with fireless lanterns that neither flickered nor dimmed, an off-white platform stood by the river bank. It boasted a podium, an unadorned altar stacked with grey books, and Luther Hemmick.

“The wonders the gods offer are tempting,” he declared, “but we mustn’t allow our baser natures to control us. Each of us are equally capable of harnessing the world.”

Around the platform, they found the rest of the New Age people. They also found a bruised and fuming Allison Reynolds, her ankles shackled in iron and her arms held back by two sour-faced, burly women. By one woman’s blackened eye and both their expression, Allison had given them hell for shackling her feet and not her hands.

Matt put himself in front and began to shove through the crowd, but he barely needed to bother once those gathered realized they were there; they parted like the sea before a sooth-sayer’s staff, their eyes widening and whispers beginning but none moving to stop them. A few whispered, that’s Luther’s son. It was a toss up on whether or not they sounded happy about it.

As if his gathering wasn’t being interrupted, Luther continued with his dry, relentless speech. “Power does not need to belong to the few. Those who attempt to subjugate their fellow men and women, no matter how well-meaning, are dangers to our freedom as individuals. In fact, I daresay those who claim to be for the people to be the most dangerous of all.”

They stumbled to the front in a burst, the crowd shrinking back behind them. It was too easy, Dan thought.

“Finally,” Allison snarled at them without regard for Luther’s words, her captors’ grip tightening as she jerked forward, her face full of fear hidden under fury, “the river! Get her out!”

Dan, Katelyn and Matt swiveled from her to the river.

Calm and unconcerned, Luther raised his hand. Before they could catch more than a glimpse of three figures standing waist-deep in the darkened waters, the crowd that had shrunk back surged forward, blocking their view and boxing them in. Struggling renewed, Allison cursed them all, pirate and blanks.

Dan saw a glint of metal from Andrew’s sleeve, hidden swiftly beneath a palm; she saw, too, Erik and Matt’s hands drop to their swords, and Aaron reach for his pistol. Around them, the crowd appeared to have no weapons, though they didn’t shirk at the sight of the pirates’. A woman that matched Erik’s description of Martha Hemmick stood among them, a frizzy-haired woman and tall, bespectacled man beside her.

Nicky, meanwhile, turned to his father.

“Dad,” he pleaded, “let them go.”

“You should know well enough that we will,” Luther replied, his expression faintly disappointed and highly disapproving, “as soon as she repents. We aren’t monsters. We haven’t harmed her any worse than she has harmed those around her.”

“Lying son of a bitch!” Allison raged.

Beyond the crowd erupted the familiar, desperate sounds of splashing and coughing; the painful mix a woman might make on finding air after coming within an inch of drowning, her lungs burning for oxygen.

They didn’t hear Renee’s voice, but then, they didn’t need to. For one, Dan felt certain she’d never beg for her life. For two, it sounded like all she had breath for was breathing. How long had this been going on?

“You’ve strayed before,” Luther was saying. “You may be my son, Nicky, but you’ve been corrupted. We can’t trust you. And we can’t trust your friends.”

Nicky shook his head, rambling denial tumbling from his mouth, his face ashen and shoulders shaking.

Andrew started toward the river; the crowd closed ranks in front of him, one man reaching out to push him back.

Dan blinked, and that man’s white robes bloomed red from the side. He stumbled back into his fellows. Another blink, and Matt crashed bodily into those who caught him, clearing back three men with the ease of those in a blind rage. Another blink, and Dan kept her eyes open, as it was her sword scaring and cutting people out of her way; without discussion, the men beelined for Renee, while Dan and Katelyn moved for Allison.

The New Age followers were largely civilians. Mostly scholars and scientists, those with weight gained muscle from years spent plowing land or hauling heavy materials, not fighting. That they willingly stepped in front of the blade as if their empty hands would protect them was more unsettling than it should have been, but it meant clearing a path was a struggle because of overwhelming numbers alone. It seemed worse for those behind her, but she couldn’t look back. Under different circumstances the way men and women fell before her would have given Dan pause, but then she heard the disgust they had for her protecting the gods’ whore, and whatever sympathy she might’ve had disappeared.

“They slaughter innocents for her magic!” Luther shouted over the screams and rioting anger. “It’s just as we feared! She’s bewitched them all! Kill them!”

Those who could fight, it turned out, were those in charge of the prisoners. They waited until she’d reached the edge of the crowd to pull their blades, three roughened guards with black leather armor and hatred in their faces. “I’ll take them,” she told Katelyn, who was no trained brawler and holding her own from the crowd far worse than Dan. She didn’t wait for a reply before rushing forward, and then the real fighting began.

In a flash, she had one down at the expense of leaving her back open. A club smashed into her head and she stumbled, fell. Before the other stuck a sword through her ribs, a snarling blur of violence smashed into its holder, and Allison’s fists laid into the woman’s face until it was more pulp than skin.

Dan kicked the club-holder’s legs out from under him, and did to him what his friend had hoped to do to her.

“Allison!” She hadn’t stopped even after the man’s skull caved. She looked to be in a frenzy, and Dan fought to drag her off the dead body, her own muscles aching and blood slicking her grip, “Allison, stop, he’s dead, he’s dead, it’s fine, Renee’s--”

Face wet with tears more than blood, Allison screamed at her to let go, that she’d gut Hemmick’s bastard of a father, that everyone else around them was the scum of the Earth; when Dan didn’t let go and the chaos around them shifted solely to the river bank, she finally collapsed in silent, sightless staring, and Dan staggered under the weight. Katelyn appeared to take over the shackled woman, and Dan passed her on with no little concern. But the battle was going on, and she had a sword, and she meant to use it.

It turned out the reason she’s been able to reach Allison without much issue was because most of the fighters went to intercept the others.

“Thanks,” Matt smiled grimly at her when she cut his opponents from four to three. He was beyond bloody, one hand bent to an unnatural angle, and as they fell back-to-back, Dan observed they didn’t have much fight left in them.

Aaron had his dagger, not his pistol, out - he must have fired the rounds and been unable to reload. Nicky, Erik and he kept close to Matt and Dan, and even then, they barely held round. Sheer numbers with murderous intent became a much larger force to reckon, and if they didn’t leave soon--

“Andrew!” Dan yelled, though she couldn’t find the blond in the mess and trusted only her gut instinct on where he’d be, “We have to go!”

“You aren’t going anywhere, you monsters,” a woman snarled, their blades clashing.

Dan grit her teeth and shoved her back. Another took her place with a roar and much, much more energy than the pirate held.

Not twenty feet away, a frizzy-haired woman held a pale, barely conscious Renee by the arm. Renee’s chest continued to heave, her eyes glassy and shudders wracking her frame.

“Andrew,” she said, “you don’t have to do this.”

“Drop her,” he replied through grit teeth, feet unwilling to move.

“I won’t,” she replied, and smiled, thin and saddened. “Not if this is what she’s done to you.”

Renee coughed again, legs weakly kicking out. Andrew tossed his knives down, the gleaming metal sinking into the river.

Cass watched him, her mouth a grim line.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, meaning that she couldn’t help him, that she’d let him spiral into the dark, that she hadn’t been there for him after he left.

“Me too,” he said, meaning almost the same thing.

Renee’s eyes snapped open and she wrenched her arm forward with the whole of her body; Cass cried out as she slipped on mossy rocks, as her former captive snatched a knife from the river and cut a clean slice between two ribs. Then she was down and Renee was up, and Andrew helped haul her out of the river, and if both of them were a little shaken, neither would mention it and no one else had the time to notice.

The knives were left behind them both.

Luther had disappeared into camp.

Camp was alive, awake, and awash with fear and bloodlust.

Columbia did not fare much better, its alarm bells ringing from the warning of one fleet-footed boy in a white tunic. Guards, startled from their dice games and lazy drinking, clattered into the streets on horses and on foot, torches in one hand and steel in the other. Dogs howled, horses screamed, and under it all, a handful of pirates raced to their boat.

They were met with a handful of guards. By the end, Erik had to be carried and laid out on the boat’s floor, and Matt limped to the post to untie its lead, half-jumping and half-falling in after shoving off.

Ahead of them, they realized in panting, terror-drenched silence, guards rowed for The Fox, the lanterns on the back of their boats swaying yellow and bright over the still waters.

“If we don’t cast off immediately,” Aaron said, voice level but just barely, “we’re sunk.”

“If they board,” Dan summarized, “we’re not casting off immediately.”

Unspoken, they realized: the Captain might suspect, but he won’t turn them away on a whim. That’d blow our cover.

Nicky muttered a curse through a nose clogged with blood.

Renee kept her silence, side-to-side with Allison.

Fast as they rowed, the guards had an incredible head-start on them. They weren’t going to catch up, and - if the guards were armed with bows - they couldn’t risk screaming out their presence to warn those aboard The Fox. The swaying lanterns held all eyes, attention narrowed to a point.

One lantern swung heavier than the others.

One lantern-- rather, one boat- upended itself into the water, its passengers’ shouts of surprise cut short as they crashed into the bay.

Its neighbor called for an explanation, and then it too capsized. The guards from the first struggled to stay afloat with their weaponry and metal armor, and neither parties could do a thing as the pirates’ boat rowed past for The Fox.

After they’d passed one man who demanded a gurgling halt! at them before almost sinking himself, a surprised laugh burst from Matt’s chest.

“Fuckin’ Neil,” he said, unbelievable relief and affection in his voice.

The rest, with hoots and whistles and a few grimly stretched smiles, agreed.

The Fox hauled her missing children up in record time, Dan shouting for an immediate cast off before they’d even reached the deck. The Captain didn’t question her, but rather echoed the order and threw himself into unfurling the sails along the rest. They pulled anchor before the guards scrounged up more boats, and - with a touch of Renee’s magic, dust and flowers cast with silence and no expression - they sped from the arbor as if His Majesty himself could be found in their wake.

After Columbia shrank to less than a blip of light on a pitch-black horizon, Allison propped her iron-clad foot on the galley’s bench and demanded, “Get these fucking things off me.”

They’d clipped a link in the back of an open blacksmith’s shop with paranoia in their throats over every voice that seemed to get closer so she could run, but it wasn’t until Renee borrowed Andrew’s lockpicking set that the chains truly came off. Allison rubbed at the reddened skin underneath while Renee set aside the kit, and for a few seconds, they sat side-to-back and simply breathed.

Renee kept herself very still.

When she thought she might have found a feeling similar to courage, or at least felt the lack of anything else that might stop her, she said, “Allison--”

“Seth drowned.”

Renee’s mouth closed around her words, teeth clicking shut.

Allison continued as if she hadn’t stopped, her eyes on the red lines around her ankles. “He could’ve had his throat slit before he fell. I doubt it. He was too quick for that. I bet he drowned. I’d put money on him drowning if anyone would ever argue with me on it.”

But they won’t. No one could say Seth’s name and look her in the eye anymore.

That wasn’t the point.

Renee thought she might see the point, and leaned more against Allison’s back.

Against her cheek, she felt a tremble become a shudder become shaking sobs, Allison’s shoulders hunched in and her hand covering her face.

“I was sure you’d drown,” she gasped out.

Renee immediately pulled her close, gently hushed her as she folded into the smaller woman’s chest and, as she caught her breath, pressed her lips to Allison’s crown.

(Incredibly, no one disturbed them even after the air quieted and the morning broke through the night.)

The two left the galley together somewhere around bumfuck o’clock, as Allison oh-so-eloquently put it. When Andrew was the only one on deck, smoke curling up from his tobacco, Renee wished she could’ve been a little less surprised. But, she thought, it had been a long night, and Allison was fairly distracting.

Allison’s lip curled at Andrew’s silent watching, but she pointedly fixed her already straightened jacket and, with a quicker glance to check Renee meant to stay behind, moved past him to the barracks. His eyes followed her until she ducked into through the doors; then, all his attention rested on Renee. Mustering up a light smile, she offered him his lockpicking kit. He took it, tucked it into a pocket, and motioned her to the railing.

They stood there until Andrew’s tobacco crumbled to ash and he had to roll another one. Half-way through that, she finally told him, “I won’t ask.”

Everything she’d needed to know about how much and, most importantly, what that woman meant to him had been made clear in his inability to harm her. Anything extra became evident in how he’d waited all night to make sure he caught her alone, and the two and a half sticks of ash.

“There’s no reason for you to,” he said. He wasn’t wrong.

The sun was a sliver of vivid orange over a mottled green sea.

As she glanced down, she caught Neil looking up; his head was cocked, and, though too far to be exact, she thought him suspicious. When he noticed that she saw him, he straightened himself out and sped ahead of The Fox, visible until he rounded the ship’s nose.

“I know someone who could help him,” she murmured to Andrew.

“Little late to help that one,” he said, his eyes lingering where Neil had disappeared. She didn’t think he realized he did that. She wouldn’t be the one to tell him.

“I mean, someone who could help him.” She paused, tested her words in her head, and accepted there wasn’t much of a way to beat around the bush. “Help him hide. Help him live without having to hide. Someone who could turn him hu--”

“Don’t.”

She stopped.

Around the railing, Andrew’s knuckles had whitened. His jaw clenched tight enough to startle the end of his cigarette into falling off; forcibly, he relaxed, a slow, piece-by-piece process done through sheer force of will.

After, he said, “He’d hate it. He’d hate himself. He’d wake every day, look at his legs, and hate us for ever giving him the idea.”

“He’d do it if you made the proposal.”

“You always know someone,” he murmured, and she realized that for the first time in a while, she walked on thin ice indeed. “Where does your black book end, I wonder. Never at yourself.”

She reminded him, “I specialize simply in weather and tides.”

“A speciality doesn’t imply a limit.”

Danger or not, that made the corner of her mouth quirk up.

Andrew flicked the burned stub of his tobacco into the sea and turned to lean against the railing, head tipped back.

Renee watched him for a moment longer, and felt her smile dim.

Taking a step back, she lowered her eyes and told him, “She’ll live, whoever she was to you. I made sure to cut so she would. With a bit of magic, she won’t even scar.” With a bit of magic, she’d never have tightness in her chest; with a bit of magic, she could erase it; without a bit of magic, she’d always have a reminder of that night.

It was, maybe, cruel.

But Renee still felt it, water in her nose and ears and almost her lungs, the burn in her chest and terror in her mind, and what colored the memory of cutting down at least one of them wasn’t anything like regret. In fact, she easily named its opposite.