The Pirate's Wish (34 page)

“Of course you do,” Marjani murmured, low enough that only I could hear her.

“Aw c’mon,” I said. “Not many of us get feasts thrown in our honor.”

“Yes, I suppose that does make the two of us members of a very particular club.”

I laughed. Marjani just shook her head.

But then Naji caught my eye, and my good mood evaporated. His expression was like the night sky during a full moon, dark dark dark, but in some ways bright enough to cast shadows.

I could feel Marjani looking at me. I knew she knew something was wrong. But she didn’t say anything, and Queen Saida was calling her away for preparations, and I slipped out of the sun room and down to the garden.

Naji knew not to follow.

The feast wound up being postponed, cause, like Marjani said, the kitchens didn’t have time to prepare everything to Queen Saida’s liking. All that meant was that Naji and me couldn’t stay for it. He needed to leave, needed to go back to the Order, back to Lisirra. And truth was I didn’t much want to stay in Jokja any longer anyway. Partly because seeing Marjani and Queen Saida made me sad, but partly too because of the way I’d missed the sea so bad during all my times on land. Papa used to talk about it with Mama, the way the sea meant more to him as he got older. Mama always said it was because of the sea’s magic, that he was finally feeling it.

And maybe I was finally feeling it too. I’d saved Naji with the sea’s magic. I’d saved him, just so he would have to leave me again.

I stayed out in the palace garden all afternoon, listening to the jungle creeping up along the other side of the fence, chatting with the guards as they changed positions, taking cover underneath the banana trees when the rains came. Naji never came around. I told him not to, in the whispers that still bound us together by blood and magic. I told him I wanted to be alone for a while, to think. And he honored that.

Although in my thinking I did, at one point, see just how well we were connected. I thought maybe it would come in handy, once he left and I sailed off to the merchant channels or the ice-islands or Qilar. It was during the rainstorm, and I was stretched out in the grass, rain beating against the wide, flat banana leaves. Everything smelled like soil. I closed my eyes and reached out with my thoughts. It didn’t take long.

He was in the palace library, pouring over some old Jokja text. I saw him like I was standing in the doorway, but he didn’t look up, didn’t greet me, at least not in the physical. Instead, I heard his voice in my head.

I thought you wanted to be alone.
 

I am alone. So are you.
 

For all I knew he was still reading that stupid book, but when I thought that he smiled. Just for a second.

Not so alone
, he told me.
You’re here.
 

Not really
.

Your thoughts are. It’s the same thing
.

No it ain’t. Except I didn’t say it, exactly, nor did I think those specific words. I just… disagreed with him.

We can do this across the seas
, he went on.
You do know that, right? We won’t really be splitting apart
–

Out in the garden, I sat up, knocking my head against the banana leaves. Rain soaked through my hair, though my clothes. The image of Naji in the library was lost. His voice in my head was a whisper:
Ananna? Where’d you go
?

I shook my head, trying to knock him out. It didn’t work. So I focused on the sound of the rain as it pattered across the garden, and in a few minutes I was alone again.

Won’t really be splitting apart.

I curled up beneath the banana tree, tucking my chin onto my knees. I knew he was right, but–

I just didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about anything.

At sunset, I walked down to the
Nadir
alone. She was waiting for me in her place at the docks, her sails drawn up tight, her pirate colors fluttering like they were the Jokja flag. In the golden light of day’s end, she looked like something out of a dream, like something out of one of Echo’s visions.

Almost too perfect for me.

“Ananna!” Marjani leaned over the railing and waved at me. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t show up.”

“Got lost in the garden.”

She laughed. I wondered if Queen Saida was gonna be on board, surrounded by her attendants. If there was gonna be a line of guards watching as Marjani told the crew I was their new captain.

But there wasn’t. It was just Marjani standing there in a simple blue dress, and the only person by her side was Naji.

His eyes crinkled when he saw me, and at first I wanted to ignore him, pretend he was just another scummy among the crew. But when he held out his hand I took it, and I let him drew me close and kiss me softly on the mouth. And I knew then that I’d missed his touch.

“Alright, men,” Marjani hollered. “I made you all come back here for a reason.”

“We leaving?” called out Bashar. “Finally sailing off to Lisirra like you promised?”

“
You
are,” Marjani said, and the crew whooped and hollered without thinking on what she might’ve meant by that.

“In fact, you can leave tonight,” she said, and the cheers picked up again. “Assuming that’s what your captain wants.”

That got their attention. Finally.

“And what do you want?” somebody called out.

“I’m not your captain anymore,” Marjani said.

Silence. My palms were sweating, and I wiped them on the edge of my dress.

“You saying he is?” Bashar asked, pointing at Naji. “He ain’t no captain. He don’t know his way around a boat–”

“I’m saying she is,” Marjani said.

Every eye on that boat turned to me. The silence was even thicker than before, so thick I choked on it like Otherworld mist. I realized, standing there, that I’d expected to be jeered, but this silence was worse.

And then Jeric yi Niru stepped out from the knot of crewman. “Annoying though she is,” he said, “I couldn’t imagine a finer captain.”

I glared at him.

Still, his words broke some spell, and the crew started cheering the way they had when Marjani said we were setting sail for Lisirra. I didn’t quite believe it at first, that they were cheering – well, not for me really, but for the idea of me as their captain.

“So are we setting sail tonight, Captain First Mate?” Jeric asked me.

“Don’t call me that.” I stepped forward and looked out over the crew, all of them staring back at me, waiting to give an order. And I knew I could order them to take me anywhere but Lisirra, all the way to the underside of the world if I wanted, and Naji couldn’t do a thing about it.

Except he could. Even if he didn’t blow the ship off course he could slip into the shadows or go through the trance-place and I’d never see him again.

“We’ll set sail tonight,” I said. I could feel Naji staring at me, but I didn’t say nothing. “We’ll set sail tonight, and we’ll set sail to Lisirra.”

Lisirra was as hot as I remembered, that dry baking heat that soaked into my skin and made me feel like I was home. Naji and me walked side by side through the streets of the pleasure district. It was the middle of the day, and everyone was tucked away in the shadowy coolness of the buildings, the way the
Nadir
was tucked into the Lisirran dock under a fake name and the promise of a few sheets of pressed silver.

Every now and then Naji’s hand touched mine. Every time it did my body shivered with happiness.

Naji took me to an inn. The Snake Shade Inn. The one we’d stayed at after I’d started up his curse. This time, though, the innkeep didn’t recognize him for what he was. When he handed us the key to our room, he looked at us like we were nothing but a pair of pirates.

Upstairs in the room, Naji undressed me slow and soft, starting with my boots and jacket and then undoing my dress with all the precision of a clockmaker. He stood behind me as he pulled my underclothes off me, and then he pulled my naked body close to him and kissed my neck and whispered in my ear, “I’m not leaving you.”

I twisted around to glare at him. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

He gazed at me for a few seconds. Then he tapped his finger against his temple, tapped it against mine.

“That ain’t the same!”

“I know,” he said softly, “but it’s there.”

He set me down on the bed and stood in front of me as he peeled off his own clothes. His tattoos gleamed in the light streaming through the windows. The scar on his chest looked a million years old. The scar on his face from the Mists lord’s knife did not.

He crawled on top of me and kissed my mouth and neck and my stomach. He kissed every part of me. Every time he kissed me he told me that he loved me, and after a while I knew I had to believe him.

We stayed in the inn room for a long time. The sun dropped in the sky. The light in the windows turned golden and rich and syrupy. I laid my head against Naji’s chest and listened to his heart beating.

“I’m not leaving you,” he said again.

“Don’t.” I was gonna start crying. I could feel the weight of it, lurking there right behind my eyes.

Naji rolled over so we were facing each other. Ran his fingers over my lips. “I’m not even talking about reading your thoughts,” he said. “Even if we couldn’t do that, I still wouldn’t be leaving you.”

I scowled up at the ceiling.

“Would you want to stay in one place?” he asked.

“What?”

“Say I bought you a house in Lisirra,” he said. “The garden district, maybe. And you lived there. And I could travel through the shadows to come see you–”

“Like the Hariris?” I frowned.

“You wouldn’t like that?”

“I like being on a boat.”

Naji brushed my hair away from my forehead. “I know,” he said. “It’s part of you. The ocean. The water. You can’t stay in one place. Even if you wanted to.”

I thought about those first few days after I ran away, how badly I wanted to be back out on the sea.

“I ain’t a sea witch,” I said.

He laughed hard enough that the bed shook. “Don’t you dare try to tell me you still believe that.”

I scowled. “It was just cause of your blood-bond.”

“It was not and you know it.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “If ever there was someone who was a part of the ocean, it was you.”

I didn’t say nothing.

“You have to follow the currents all over the world. It’s who you are.” He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my throat. “And I have to follow death all over the world at the Order’s command. It’s who I am.”

I frowned.

He rolled me onto my back and sat up and traced two paths over my belly with both hands. “Here I am,” he said. “And here’s you.”

The two paths crossed each other.

“I can make that happen,” he said. “I can make that happen anytime you need me.”

For a long time I didn’t answer. I just stared at him, at his beautiful face and his beautiful scars.

“I need you all the time,” I said.

“You do now.” He kissed my forehead. “And so do I. But after a while we won’t. And you’ll be glad to be rid of me.”

“I won’t stop loving you!”

“Did I say that?” His face darkened. “I said you’ll be glad to be on your own. And you will.”

I couldn’t imagine it at first, but then I thought about it and I could. I wasn’t like Marjani, who could give up a life on the sea in exchange for a life with her love. Because Naji was right: Marjani wasn’t a part of the ocean. I was.

And now I had a boat of my own, and a crew of my own. And we’d sailed to Lisirra with no trouble. They listened to me like I was Papa, like I was important. And when you got down to it that whole trip Naji’d just been a distraction, really. Keeping my mind away from the boat.

I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him deep and sure.

“Do you really want to see me smile?” he whispered into my neck. “I know the Otherworld lord tried…” His voice trailed off.

I hesitated. “I know how you look when you’re happy.”

“It’s not the same as a smile. I know that.” His fingers ran over the bridge of my nose. “After it happened,” he said, “after the blood-fire burned me, I would spend hours in front of a mirror Leila had given me, trying to find my face.” He dropped his head to the side and didn’t look at me as he spoke. “And one day I was going through my expressions, trying to find myself again.”

He paused, ran his hand over the tattoo on my belly.

“And I smiled. People used to like my smile. Women, you know.” He sighed. “And I’d never seen anything so monstrous.”

“You’re not a monster,” I said.

He looked at me.