Chapter Two
Wes kicked at a pile of clothes at the foot of Delauney’s bed. Most Starian ships had spells in the hull to repel bugs and vermin, but shipwrights didn’t always hire the best workers, and some messes were too much for the best protective rune. Thankfully, nothing skittered out from under the pile.
Wes had refused to train as a proper service submissive, even though his parents tried to convince him to give it a go.
They thought noble doms wanted submissives who got off on house cleaning or licking boots, but in Wes’ opinion, nobles had enough bootlickers to last them a while.
Wes enjoyed the act of taking a mess and finding order in the chaos; he just didn’t like the thought of someone lording it over him.
It felt demeaning, even if he didn’t begrudge other submissives who did like service.
Wes picked up one of the papers littered over the floor. Delauney had said not to read anything, but nobles gave meaningless orders all the time. He couldn’t sort the papers if he didn’t know what they were.
“If you don’t know how to read, you’re fucked,” one of Wes’ old friends had said, back when he still lived in Duciel.
He’d been a boy at the time, running with fellow lower-city kids whose parents didn’t act like they had half a dozen titles.
Most of his friends had worked for noble families in the Star District, delivering messages and helping the other servants.
“If you can’t read what nobles are writing, you won’t know when they’re pulling something over on you. ”
It had been one of the more useful lessons of Wes’ early life, and one he hadn’t listened to properly until it had been too late.
If he’d bothered to read his parents’ correspondence, maybe he would have known they were planning to send him to the navy in time to escape.
He wasn’t about to be caught unawares again.
Wes squinted at the page he’d picked up from one of Delauney’s piles.
Crossed-out formulas and strings of digits crowded in corners and around sketches of overlapping rings and stripes.
The only letters were wedged in with the formulas, a type of math Wes had barely learned by the time he’d been shipped off to the navy.
He didn’t even know what some of the symbols were.
How on earth was Delauney supposed to think that Wes could glean anything from a page full of numbers?
The other papers were the same. Some had pages of rings and circles, and he unfolded an entire sheet of grid lines with a hole in the middle.
There was a map marked with even more numbers and a journal Wes didn’t bother to open.
He set them all on a bare patch of floor and stared down at them, frowning.
Who was Delauney? The papers indicated a frenetic intellect, but Delauney didn’t pretend to be anything other than an uncomplicated, jovial noble who couldn’t be bothered to do any real work.
What was all that math for? It couldn’t be for navigation.
The first captain Wes served under couldn't count without his fingers, and he still managed to keep the ship on course.
Delauney tried to come in twice as Wes started sorting out the mess on the floor, but all it took was a stern look for him to go shrinking back out again.
He was the least commanding officer Wes had ever met, even for a submissive.
He was also a secret peacock, if his clothes were any indication.
There were piles of folded, unused clothes under the uniforms he’d discarded, and every untouched vest and jacket was worth a small fortune.
Wes put them all in netted bags for laundering, which he found in their own pile in the corner.
When he finally let Delauney in, Delauney gave him a nervous smile. “Look at that! I can see the floor!”
“Pieces of it,” Wes said. Delauney’s face went pink. “Those piles are getting laundered. That’s probably trash. You should go through the papers and toss out what isn’t important, and that’ll give me enough space to scrub the floors.”
“I’ll just put them in the chest,” Delauney said. He stopped short as Wes sat down on the chest in question. “Wes. The chest.”
Wes didn’t move.
“Is this your version of tying me to the mast?”
“You’re a submissive,” Wes said. “For all I know, you might like it.” He stopped short, uncertain how Delauney might react. He’d forgotten, in the chaotic mess and Delauney’s overly casual attitude, that Delauney was technically still his captain. But Delauney only grinned.
“I can’t be tied up for long,” he said. “I wriggle too much.”
“Some doms like that.”
“Point me in their direction and I’ll give you a promotion,” Delauney said. He started looking over the papers. “The doms in the brothels of Diabolos are few and far between, and they generally give you a firm spank and tell you to be a good boy before sending you on your way.”
That wasn’t Wes’ experience, but he had a feeling noble officers didn’t visit the same brothels as enlisted sailors.
“I do wonder, though.” Delauney smoothed out a paper and put it under a book on his desk, probably to flatten the creases. It looked too far gone for that, but Delauney seemed like a man who didn’t know when to give up. “How did the rest of the ship let you tie the captain to the mast?”
Wes froze.
“Funny that Cecil didn’t mention it,” Delauney said. “How long before there’s a proper mutiny on that ship, do you think?”
“The others weren’t involved,” Wes said. He wasn’t about to rat out his mates, especially not to a well-meaning busybody who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“Of course they weren’t,” Delauney said.
His smile was too bright for a man talking about potential mutiny.
“Just a friendly inquiry.” He picked up an envelope and fished out a yellowing sheet of paper.
After a few seconds, he pulled a face and handed it to Wes.
“This handwriting is terrible. Read this aloud while I sort through the rest, will you?”
“I thought you didn’t want me to read anything.”
Delauney’s cheeks went pink again. “I meant these,” he said, waving one of the pages full of numbers.
“Wouldn’t be able to understand that anyway,” Wes said, smoothing out the letter in his hands. “Never got that far in maths.”
“Really? Neither did I, officially. My tutors gave up on me early.” Delauney’s eyes twinkled.
They actually twinkled. Wes thought that only happened in copper-a-piece serials, but it was like someone had dunked Delauney in a vat of stars and lit him up.
How did he do it? What was remotely amusing about tutors giving up on a kid?
Wes would have killed to have tutors who cared more about math than mimicking noble etiquette.
“So I filched my brother’s old schoolbooks. Or the ones I liked, in any case.”
“What are these papers all for, though?” Wes asked. Delauney went pinker still. Wes hadn’t known that particular shade was possible on someone so pale.
“Oh. You know. Something to pass the time.”
A pile of papers filled to the margins with numbers wasn’t something to pass the time.
Wes shouldn’t care, regardless. Delauney was a strange fellow, but he was also a true noble.
He was wealthy, flighty, and with no sense of the world outside his little bubble.
Wes had no reason to care what his scribbles meant.
Except, as Wes read aloud from a letter by Delauney’s older brother about crops and tenant disputes, he couldn’t help noticing how Delauney’s gaze lingered on some of the pages.
The sparkle in his eyes strengthened, turning into something more substantial.
There was real, genuine interest there, something Wes hadn’t seen in most of his commanding officers since he’d joined the navy.
It made him want to rattle Delauney and see what spilled out.
Instead, he finished the letter, which had perfectly legible handwriting, and gathered a bag of Delauney’s clothes while Delauney was distracted with the papers.
He stepped out of the captain’s quarters to find that the girl with the book had been joined by Delauney’s first mate, who gave Wes a calculating look.
There was something familiar about him that Wes couldn’t quite figure out at first. He had dark brown skin like Wes and a touch of silver in his hair, and the arch of his nose and his sharp jaw dragged Wes back to the ancient schoolroom of his childhood, where his parents had lined up wooden tablets of every noble family worth knowing.
De Burre, he thought. Of course that was what he remembered. His parents couldn’t have made him memorize history or science. They’d filled his head with noble faces instead, and what good did that do out at sea?
“He actually let you clean up?” De Burre asked. “Impressive. His last valet gave up and joined the crew on the gun deck. What was your name again?”
“Leonhart, sir,” Wes said. “Wes.”
De Burre nodded. “Go about your business, then.”
That was the sort of noble Wes was used to.
Officers weren’t supposed to get too involved.
They could be friendly, but they knew they couldn’t be actual friends.
Delauney must have forgotten that rule. It was utterly bewildering, and Wes was relieved to find that the rest of the ship operated properly.
He scrubbed Delauney’s clothes on deck with soap, and other enlisted sailors came wandering by, curious to find a new member of the crew.
“Who tricked you into being a steward for the captain?” a woman asked, kneeling down to scrub her clothes on the deck next to him. She had wispy blond hair and a stocky frame, and she wore a gold necklace with a claw wrapped in wire at the end.
Wes shrugged. “Transferred from Captain Lennox’s crew. There was some trouble there and I had the chance to leave, so I took it.”
“Oh, yeah, Janey said someone whipped the captain.” The woman whistled low. “Did you see it happen?”