The Pirate's Wish (17 page)

Marjani and me both looked at Naji.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Of course it’s fine!” boomed the manticore leader. “Servant-humans, bring us the wine!” He smiled, and he only showed the points of his teeth. “You will not be able to drink any of that human swill after tasting ahiial.”

Naji shrugged, and I got the sense that he’d had it before.

The servants trotted up to the table, half of ’em holding shallow porcelain bowls and the other half holding rough-hewn stone goblets. They lined ’em up on the table. Then another row of servants marched out, this time carting huge carved pitchers. They made their way around the table, slowly pouring a bit of ahiial for each guest.

The ahiial was pale gold, the color of morning sunlight and a manticore’s fur. It smelled sweet, like honey, like a man’s perfume.

We all waited till everybody’s cup or bowl had been filled. Then the manticore leader lifted one paw.

“To Ananna of the
Nadir
,” he said. “Who saved my eldest daughter, the heir to my pride. I am indebted to you.”

Naji squirmed beside me. I remembered what he’d said to me back on the Isles of the Sky – you made a deal with a manticore? And the way he said it, too, like I’d just confessed to killing my own mother. I could just about see him remembering it himself.

Well, too late now.

The manticore leader bowed his head and lapped at his wine. Even Marjani, who knew as well as I did how rude it was, hesitated.

But I also knew poison wasn’t how a manticore killed – not poison in a glass of wine. If they wanted us dead they would have shot us full of spines or launched across their table with their mouths wide open, showing us all three rows of teeth. So I picked up my glass and drank.

It was sweet, sweeter than honey, and the taste of it filled my mouth up with flowers.

When I didn’t keel over dead, or jump up, bewitched, and start clearing away the table like a servant, the rest of the crew followed suit. Jeric yi Niru knocked it back like a shot of rum. Marjani sipped it like a lady in a palace. Naji finished his off in a trio of gulps.

“What do you think?” the manticore leader asked me.

“Delicious,” I said. And stronger than a barrel of sailor’s rotgut. The whole garden was filled with light. All the flowers were glowing. Overhead, the stars left bright trails across the black sky. I laughed, suddenly full up with mirth, the way it happens when I get drunk under good circumstances, with a boat full of friends and the ocean stretching out empty and vast before us.

“Wonderful,” the manticore leader said. He nodded his head and the music struck up, some bawdy song I recognized from whenever Papa’s crew made port. “Servant-humans!” he called out. “Bring us more ahiial!”

CHAPTER NINE

I sprawled out on my bed, music still drifting in from the garden through my open window. The manticores had proceeded back into their palace of rocks, and the rest of the crew had come crawling off the boat to flirt with the servants and drink ahiial and rum, which was when I decided to slink back to my room. My injury left me too tired to deal with a true pirates’ feast.

Every now and then laughter exploded into the nighttime, drowning out the music. Men’s laughter, women’s laughter. The ahiial left me so happy I didn’t even feel left out.

Somebody knocked on my door.

“Who is it?” But I felt a wriggle in the back of my brain, and I knew–

“Naji.”

I sat up. “Ain’t locked or nothing.”

Naji pushed the door open. He had his mask on but his hair was all tousled from the wind. He hadn’t been dancing after the feast, I remembered. Just sat on the sides and watched.

“You need to change the… the spell that was making me better?”

He shook his head and stepped inside. Came up right close to me, close enough that I could smell him: honey and medicine. He kept his eyes on me.

It was weird, and it confused me, but my heart pounded loud and fast from the way he looked at me.

Like I was Leila. The river witch. His old lover.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

I was too nervous to speak. I shrugged.

He took off his mask, yanking it hard away from his face. He let it drop to the floor.

“Do you remember when you told me I wasn’t ugly?”

I stared at him. I couldn’t get past the light in his eyes.

“You don’t, do you?”

“Of course I do,” I said, and my voice came out real small.

“Did you mean it?”

“That I don’t think you’re ugly?”

He nodded.

I couldn’t think straight. All I knew was my heart slamming against my chest and his eyes drinking me up like ahiial. How many times had I thought about the answer to this question? How many nights had I spent trying to figure out the exact way to tell him what I thought of him, what I thought of his face and his hair and his body?

Too many to count.

“Of course,” I said, voice hardly a whisper again. I swallowed. “I think… I think you’re beautiful.”

His face didn’t move. “I thought you don’t trust beautiful people.”

“Not beautiful like that. I mean… I don’t ever want to stop looking at you.”

The funny thing is that I couldn’t actually look at his face while I said that cause I was so embarrassed, and so I looked at his throat instead, at the little triangle of skin poking up out of his shirt. He’d taken off the pirate coat.

For a minute I wondered why the hell he was asking me this anyway.

And then he was kissing me.

I ain’t kissed many boys before, but Naji knew what he was doing better than any of ’em. He put his hands on the side of my face and pressed himself close to me and the whole time it was like he and I were the only people in the world. My hands kept crawling over his chest and shoulders, trying to memorize the lines of his body, and I was dizzy, but in a good way, the way you get when you swing through the ropes on a clear sunny day. That was what kissing Naji was like: the best day at sea, warm sunlight and cool breeze. Happiness.

Kissing Naji was happiness.

When he pulled away from me he smoothed my hair off of my forehead. I was too stunned to do anything but stare at him.

“Is this alright?” he asked.

“Uh. Yeah.” I frowned. He kissed me again, and I worked up the nerve to press my hands against his hips. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me close, and the smell of him was everywhere, and I swear I could feel his blood pulsing through his veins. The closeness of his body was so distracting, so wonderful, that I forgot to be nervous.

He lay me down on the bed, still kissing me, and my thoughts were a jumble of confusion and excitement and desire – his desire and my desire both, like two pieces of silk braiding together. I couldn’t believe this was happening, couldn’t believe he was gazing at me like he wanted me.

“Why are you doing this?” It came out wrong, kinda accusatory. He stopped.

“You said it was alright,” he said.

Oh, now you’ve gone and messed everything up, I thought.

“It is.” I reached out, tentative, and cupped the scarred side of his face in my hand. He jerked at my touch, but didn’t pull away, and for a moment he looked as vulnerable as I felt. “I mean, I just don’t understand… why now…”

He traced the line of my profile, one finger running over my forehead and my nose and finally my lips.

“I should have done it sooner,” he said. “I should have done it on the Isles of the Sky.” And he kissed me before I could say anything more. I got lost in it, the kissing. It went on for a long time. My lips thrummed, and my body was hot and distracted.

After a while, he pulled away, just a little, and we lay in silence, looking at each other.

I touched his scar, the skin rough and slick at the same time. He flinched away. I dropped my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, I just… no one’s ever… before.”

“Oh.”

Another long silence, and then I lifted my hand and touched him again. This time he only blinked.

“I like it,” I said.

He didn’t answer. His face was so serious, like always. Except for his eyes, which were gentle right now. Almost kind.

“Why don’t you ever smile?”

“What?”

I traced a line from the unscarred skin of his brow down across the folds in his flesh to his chin. “I’ve never seen you smile.”

“You don’t want to.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

He pushed away from me. A coldness settled over me: he was going to leave.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just… Ain’t you happy right now?”

“You don’t want to see me smile.”

“But I do. Ever since…” There was no point. His eyes had gone cold and stony again. I’d ruined everything.

And then something dislodged itself in my brain.

I thought about him showing up at my room for no reason.

I thought about the kissing.

And a realization lit up bright and blazing as the sun.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, Kaol. You ain’t happy at all.”

He looked at me, pained, like he wanted to protest. But he didn’t.

“This isn’t you,” I said, and the words turned to panic in my throat. “This isn’t… you wouldn’t on your… the boon.”

Naji looked stricken. Confused. He didn’t deny anything.

I felt like I was spitting out poison. I shoved myself off the bed. Heat rose up hot and angry in my chest. “It’s the boon!” I shouted. “From the manticores!”

Kaol, why hadn’t I stopped him when he first came in? Why hadn’t I
known
?

“Ananna, no, you don’t understand.” His words shook. “The magic, it’s–”

“Shut up!” I drew my robe tight over my body – it had slipped off my shoulders before. “I can’t believe… I’m so sorry… I actually thought you wanted me–”

“I do.” Naji rubbed his head. He still looked confused. “I do want you–”

“Get out!” Part of me didn’t mean it. Part of me looked at Naji and thought about how he’d cared for me after I was shot, how he walked me around the gardens and stayed close to me even though I wasn’t in any danger. But I couldn’t run the risk of letting him hurt me. Not again.

“Get out of my room!” I shouted.

Naji stumbled out of the bed. He seemed drunk. The ahiial, I thought. They stuck something in his wine.

What you want most in the world. The manticore must’ve thought it was Naji.

“This isn’t how I wanted things to happen,” Naji said, still watching me with that pained, befuddled expression.

“It ain’t how I wanted ’em to happen neither!” I yanked my sword out from its hiding place under the bed and brandished it at him. I couldn’t decide if I was angry at him or at the manticores or at myself. “So get out now.”

He stared at the sword and looked sad. “I do want you,” he said.

Blood rushed in my ears. I remembered us standing in the sunlight of the garden, his hand on my arm, the scent of flowers heavy on the wind. I remember him looking at me, flush with happiness.

Naji turned and walked out the door.

I couldn’t sleep. The bed smelled like Naji.

I left my room and followed the hallway through the servants’ quarters, one hand trailing along the powdery walls, dust kicking up behind my feet. The quarters were silent and still, but the air was stuffy out in the hallways. No windows. So I went outside and sat down underneath a palm tree, leaning up against the trunk.

The desert swirled around me, cold and sad with the night-time.

I wasn’t going to cry, and I wasn’t going to remember.

“What are you doing awake?”

It was Marjani. She came walking from the direction of the desert, her robes stained with dirt at the hem.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Thinking.” She folded her arms in front of her chest. “You look like you had too much ahiial.”

“I left when you did,” I muttered.

“I know.” She sat down beside me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She folded her legs up against her chest and tucked her chin on her knees. “You got that boon yet?”

Kaol, she had to ask that, didn’t she? I spat in the dirt.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Take it as a yes.” I glared off into the darkness. “And I don’t want to talk about it so don’t ask.”

Marjani blinked at me and then lay her cheek against the top of her knees. We sat in the dusty quiet until I couldn’t stand the sound of silence no more.

“When we leaving?” I asked.

Marjani lifted her head. “Tomorrow, I imagine. Later, though. After the crew’ve all slept off their hangovers.”

“We got a course laid out yet?”