22. Chapter 22 #2
Vale read the flags, his mouth hardening before he reached the end. “He orders us to stop.”
“He means to come aboard,” Lorenzo said quietly.
Tristan kept his eyes on the advancing brig. “Say his words.”
Vale drew a breath. “Stand and be boarded.”
A murmur moved through the British crew.
Tristan smiled without warmth. “Not yet.”
The privateer’s bowsprit crept larger. Her hull surged down a swell, white water thrown back from either side. She was angling now, just as he had known she would, coming up to rake or force them round.
The distance shrank to madness. The privateer was near enough for Tristan to hear a cheer rise over the water, and for a Frenchman to fire a pistol that whizzed past Vale’s bicorn. Near enough for Sarkouf to believe the Sea Wolf was within his grasp.
Tristan drew one breath.
The frigate strained beneath him, obedient only because men held her together by rope. He felt kinship with her. Too much sail. Too much weight. Too much precious cargo locked below where he could not see it.
Cut.
Tristan lifted his hand. “Now.”
The deck erupted.
“Clew up! Haul down! Let go and haul!”
Men threw their weight on the lines. Clewlines flew through blocks. Buntlines snapped taut. Sheets were let go and hauled. The great white spread of canvas that had driven them like a hunted thing collapsed in one violent breath, folding, spilling, thrashing as if the sky itself had been cut loose.
“Helm hard a-weather,” Tristan said.
The wheel spun under the helmsman’s hands. The rudder bit. The frigate, robbed in an instant of the wind that had possessed her, checked so hard that every loose thing aboard lurched forward. Men staggered and caught themselves. Below, something shattered.
Tristan held fast to the rigging. He had made his ship stop.
One moment she had been flying ahead under every inch of canvas he dared carry; the next, he had stripped the wind from her sails and thrown her weight against the helm.
The frigate checked, swung, and hung in the water like a dancer halted at the edge of a precipice.
Sarkouf shot past, sails swollen, hull driving, every rope and spar committed to the chase. Faces flashed along his rail. Men shouted. Orders flew too late. His bowsprit swept past the frigate’s quarter like the point of a spear.
Tristan read the fury in Sarkouf’s face. Then the privateer ran on, unable to control her speed. Fifty yards. A hundred. A quarter mile. More.
The crew roared. The sound broke over the deck, men pounding shoulders, laughing too loudly, cursing Sarkouf, praising the Sea Wolf.
Tristan lowered the glass. The roar seemed to reach him as if through water.
Then his knees nearly went. It began high in the thighs, a sudden hollowness, as if the bones had been cut from within and replaced by air.
He had not breathed properly since she went below.
Not once. Now the air came in too hard, carrying salt and tar and the hot stink of strained rope.
Relief was too poor a word for how he felt.
Relief was for weather turning fair or a shot falling short.
This was something rougher, nearly savage.
She was safe.
Thank God, she was safe.
The officers had gone below. Their voices carried up through the companionway. Boots on the ladder. Someone’s laugh, too loud. The ordinary music of a ship that had survived.
Tristan remained on the quarterdeck. The night had settled over the ship.
Above, the moon rode clear of a torn bank of cloud, silvering the water.
The sea that had nearly carried Sarkouf to their quarter now looked innocent, each dark swell combed with light.
A treacherous element, the sea. It could swallow men and then shine prettily over the place where they had gone.
The deck beneath his boots was only now easing after the violence he had demanded of the old timbers. His hands ached. When he opened one, the palm still bore the mark of the glass. He stared at it for a moment, then closed his fist.
“Fratello.”
Lorenzo’s voice came from behind him, soft enough not to startle, which meant the boy had learned something after all.
Tristan did not turn. “The officers are below.”
“So I observed. They are eating as if each mouthful personally insults Sarkouf.”
“They’ve earned it.”
“You should go see our passenger,” Lorenzo said.
The words entered him like a cold gale, and he shook his head.
Lorenzo sighed. “She must be worried.”
Tristan looked out over the water. The privateer was gone now.
Why, then, could he still see Sarkouf’s feral grin?
And Marguerite below, hoping for the best. Tristan pressed a fist against his chest, cursing the ache within.
He could deal with the clean burn of blade wounds, or old scars that knew the weather, but not this raw thing.
“I said no.”
Lorenzo came to stand beside him. “You won the day. The Sea Wolf proved himself one more time. So what is wrong?”
What was wrong? The question was so simple it became obscene. Tristan lifted his face to the moon. He opened his eyes wide and let the silver light strike him. He willed it to burn. But the moon refused violence. It poured itself gently over the deck, over his hands, giving too much of herself.
Gentle, the moon. Always too gentle. He looked his fill, and still it did not hurt enough.
Lorenzo sighed. “You love her, don’t you?”
Love. A court word, a poet’s word, an excuse women were sold and men used when their appetite wished to wear a gentleman’s clothes. Love had no place on a quarterdeck after action. It did not brace a mast, stop shot, turn a ship, or keep a locked door from splintering under foreign hands.
Tristan’s fist closed around the rail. “I do not know what fairy-tale kingdom you live in, Lorenzo, but in my world people drown. They lose a leg, an arm, a ship, their lives. Masts fall. Fire takes magazines. A lucky shot enters through the stern and makes paste of whoever stands there.” His voice roughened, and he hated it.
“In my world, a captain survives because he knows what must be cut before it drags the whole ship under.”
“I know it hurt you,” Lorenzo said. “Facing battle with her aboard.”
Tristan gave a short, humorless laugh. “Hurt?”
“Yes.” Lorenzo’s hand came down on his shoulder. “But you only feel this because you have something to lose.”
The words sank through him slowly. Something to lose.
Indeed, he had. He had taken aboard a weight no seamanship could shift, no order could secure, no knife could safely cut.
Somewhere below, behind a door he had ordered her to lock, breathed the one thing he would rather lose a limb than cut away.
His chest tightened until breath came hard.
“Then I would rather not have it.”