Raised By Wolves 3 - Treasure (99 page)

“Too many people have seen us together,” the Bard drawled, and then he grinned and shrugged. “I don’t give a damn. The French ship cargo too.” But he, too, looked to his matelot.

“I have already been exiled from England once,” Dickey said. “I do not miss it. I can think of nothing of Port Royal I will miss, other than my share of the haberdashery.”

“You all have land,” I said.

The Bard snorted. “Will, they can take that too.”

“Aye, of course.” Then I felt compelled to ask. “And none of you question…”

The Bard and Cudro shook their heads.

“We’ve been talking of it for a while, now,” the Bard said. “The ship is a likely target. They can claim it never cleared the Admiralty Court.”

I nodded, and looked to Pete and Striker. They had been silent. Pete had spent much of the time watching his matelot, who was studying the floor.

“Sarah will be angry,” I prompted.

Pete smiled but kept his eyes on Striker, who snorted.

“What of your women?” Striker asked.

“Vivian is more afraid of men like my father than I am,” I said, “and Agnes will probably not care where she lives, as long as she is allowed the freedoms she desires.”

Unless, of course, she had acquired a lover while we were away.

In echo of my thoughts, Striker said, “We don’t know what has happened while we’ve been gone. It’s been six bloody months. We shouldn’t have left them.”

Pete grimaced and looked away. “It Were A Necessary Risk. KilledOff HastingsAn’SomeOthers, An’Will Made Friends With Morgan.”

Cudro and the Bard chuckled, but Striker was silent and still would not regard me.

“What do you wish to do?” I asked.

“Not have to learn French,” he said tiredly. “But I don’t see where we have much choice.” He finally met my gaze. “It’s like we spoke of with Theodore, that day before we left. I don’t blame you. It’s just not something I want.”

“I know,” I said with sorrow. “I am sorry.”

And there I was, apologizing for my friends having the misfortune of knowing me again.

Pete yawned and stretched. “ThePity Of ItIs, Killin’Yur Damn Father Won’tMend It All.”

“It will make me feel better,” I said.

Gaston smiled. “Amen.”

W.A. Hoffman, aka Wynette A. Hoffman, really hates trying to condense her life or her reasons for writing what she does into a paragraph. She knows how arbitrary and subjective words and labels are; and she would rather not make a bad impression, or have her work misconstrued because someone interprets a word differently than she intended. Words and terms that Wynette would use to describe herself, such as artist, storyteller, novelist, filmmaker, geek, nerd, genius, gamer, collector, pansexual, transgendered, fetishist, married, militant agnostic, humanist, lapsed atheist, heretical neo-pagan, borderline sociopath, anarchist, iconoclast, situational ethicist, and Venus-ruled Pisces with a Leo ascendant and a Sun/Mars/Mercury conjunction in the eighth house, have different meanings to different people, and they have had different meanings or levels of import in Wynette’s life over her forty plus years.

There has been one overriding constant in Wynette’s life, though: she has always been an outsider looking in: an alien perspective, from her relationship to her birth sex to her manner of pursuing her career in writing and publishing. Sometimes this has resulted from a fluke of genetics and upbringing, and other times it represents the sum total of all the times she’s been the outsider. Now she can’t really figure out how to conform even if she wants to – which she doesn’t.