The Pirate's Wish (4 page)

“Girl-human, I am in need of your assistance.” The manticore came ambling down the beach, flicking her tail left and right. That tail still gave me the shivers.

“What do you want?”

“There’s a burr in my mane.” The manticore shook her head. “A great tangle. Would you remove it for me?”

I stared at her.

“The hell would you do if you were on the Island of the Sun?” I asked. “Take it out yourself.”

The manticore growled. Growls I didn’t mind, but you best believe I had my eyes fixed firmly on the poisoned tip of her tail.

“I would command one of my servant-humans to remove it for me,” she said. “And she would remove it without complaint, singing all the while.”

“Servant-humans.”

“Yes. We fill our palace with your kind and they do our bidding and offer themselves as food whenever we are hungry.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her. She had a lot of stories about the Island of the Sun, and its great red-sand desert and the great wealth of her family and what an
honor
I’d give them, one they would certainly thank with a
boon
, if only I delivered an uncursed Jadorr’a to their eating table.

She trotted over and sat down beside me, tucking her massive paws underneath her body, sticking her head close to my lap. There was a snarl in her mane, a big knot where something’d gotten stuck.

“Fine,” I said. “But I ain’t singing.”

She sniffed like she wasn’t too happy, but then she stuck her chin on my knee. The weight of her head was a lot more than I expected.

I combed my fingers through her mane, which was surprisingly soft, plucking out around the tangle. I moved slow and steady cause the last thing I wanted was to pull too hard and have those big white teeth of hers slice through my leg. Ain’t no way it was a burr in that huge mass of fur – a burr’s too small – but I felt around with my fingers and I realized she had a pine cone stuck in there.

“This may take a while,” I said.

The manticore didn’t answer save for that trumpeting sound she made whenever she was content. Everything about her voice sounded like a musical instrument. Even her full name – Ongraygeeomryn – kinda sounded like a bell chiming when she said it. I couldn’t say it, which was why I just called her the manticore and left it at that.

When I had the pine cone about halfway untangled from her mane, my stomach growled, and I thought about the fish I’d flung at Naji.

“Hey,” I said, plucking at her fur like it was a guitar string. “Would you go hunting with me?”

The manticore lifted her head a little, enough that I got a face full of her mane.

“Hunting?”

“Yeah.” I leaned back, wiping her fur from my mouth. “I’m sick of eating fish.”

“Fish is not food.”

“It is for people. Look, could you help me or not? I just want to bring down one of those horse-animals I’ve seen in the woods.”

“Caribou. That is what the wizard-human called them.”

“Fine, the caribou. Could you bring one down for me? Don’t use your stinger,” I added. “I want to eat it, remember.”

The manticore laughed. “To bring down such a clumsy creature will be easy. Tis a shame there are no more humans on this island.”

I didn’t say nothing to that, just tugged at the pine cone, hoping it’d come free. It didn’t.

“If I bring you a caribou,” the manticore said, “will you groom me whenever I ask?”

I stopped. “Groom?” There I went, making deals with a manticore again.

“Aye. Brush my mane and coat, and pull the thorns from my feet.”

“That all? You want me to wipe your ass, too?”

“Don’t be crude, girl-human.”

“I’m just checking on the particulars before I agree to anything.”

“No, that service I will not require of you. Manticores bathe themselves.”

Well, that was something, at least. In truth plucking the pine cone from her mane wasn’t that terrible – kind of relaxing, actually. Took my mind off Naji.

“Sure, I’ll groom you. But not for one caribou – for any you catch. And you’ll catch ’em anytime I ask.”

She made a
hmmm
noise of displeasure.

“Look, it’ll take me and Naji awhile to get through a whole one of the things.”

The manticore sighed. “Yes, I suppose that is true.”

“Plus you said it was easy hunting.”

I had her there. She got this squished-up look on her face that meant I’d just called her manticore-ness into question.

“I agree to your terms, girl-human. A lifetime of caribou for a lifetime of grooming.”

I hope not a lifetime, I thought, but I picked up her paw and shook on it.

The manticore stayed true to her word. I pulled the pine cone from her hair and the next morning I woke to the sound of claws scratching across the shack’s door. Naji stirred over in the corner, still asleep. The fire in the hearth had burned down to ash. I stumbled over to the door and opened it.

The manticore sat with a dead caribou at her feet, her face smeared with blood.

“Here is your caribou, girl-human,” she said.

A jagged tear ripped across the caribou’s throat, and its head hung at an angle. “You didn’t sting it, did you?”

“On the spirits of my mothers, no, I did not.” The manticore gave me this solemn look. “Enjoy your meat, girl-human.” Then she trotted off, wings bouncing, toward the shadow of the forest.

When I turned around, Naji was lurking behind me, sword and knife drawn.

“Kaol!” I shouted. “How long you been standing there?”

“I was in the shadows,” he said. “I didn’t want the manticore to see me.” He walked up to the caribou and poked it with the toe of his boot. “Why did she bring you this?”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest and didn’t answer.

Naji turned around. “Ananna, you have no idea how dangerous that creature is–”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “She can’t eat either of us.”

“She
won’t
eat either of us,” Naji said. “There is a difference.”

I scowled at him cause I knew he was right.

“Now answer my question,” he said. “Why did she bring this to you?”

I sighed. Naji kept his eyes on me, waiting. And so I told him what happened the night before, with the pine cone and all. His face didn’t move while I spoke, though his eyes got darker and darker.

“That was a mistake,” he said. “Making a deal with a manticore.”

“Well, it got us meat, didn’t it? Something that ain’t fish.” I yanked his sword away from him. “You don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.”

He didn’t say nothing, and I stomped outside and pushed the caribou to its side and stuck the knife into the skin of its belly. I’d cleaned fish before – big fish, too, sharks and monster eels – so I figured a land creature couldn’t be much different.

Naji came out and watched me. I could feel him standing there, the weight of his presence. It made my skin prickle up sometimes, having him watch me. Not in a bad way.

“I would still check for spines,” he said. “You shouldn’t take a manticore on its word.”

“Planning on it.” I had been, too. I ain’t stupid.

It took me close to an hour to skin the caribou and gut it and slice the meat from the bones. I didn’t find any spines, and I checked everywhere I could think of – in the stomach and mouth, in case she tried to hide one. Nothing. By then Naji had the hearth fire going, and he roasted some of the meat and we had a right proper meal.

The caribou didn’t taste like any meat I’d had before – it was a bit like sheep meat, only wilder and leaner – but it was sure better than another round of fish. Naji ate it without saying nothing, and I figured he was sick of fish too but wasn’t gonna admit it.

When we finished eating, Naji told me to start cutting the raw meat into strips.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because otherwise we’re going to wind up with a mountain of rotting caribou carcass,” he said. “Which is something I’m guessing you didn’t think about when you asked the manticore to hunt for you.”

I hadn’t, mostly cause I didn’t realize how much meat was on ’em, nor how dense it was. So I went outside and started hacking at the caribou with his sword. I laid the strips out on some flat stones, figuring Naji planned on drying ’em out but not sure of the procedure for it.

He disappeared with the water bucket into the tree shadows and returned a few minutes later, the bucket full of seawater. He went into the house, then came back out and started gathering up the meat strips.

“What did you get all that seawater for?”

“We need the salt.” Naji draped the meat strips over his forearms. “Keep cutting. We’ll probably have to sleep outside while the meat is processing.”

I frowned at that, thinking about the rainstorms that stirred up the woods without warning.

By the time I finished cutting up the caribou my arms ached something fierce and the whole front of my coat was stained with blood. And I couldn’t run over to Eirnin’s house and get a spare, neither.

I carted the sword back into the shack and dumped it next to the hearth for cleaning. Naji was scraping salt out of the bucket, this big pile of it glittering on a piece of tree bark like sand. Another kettle boiled and rattled over the fire, and the air smelled like his magic. He’d already hung up some of the meat strips, hooking ’em to the rafters with little bits of vine from the woods. They swayed a little from the breeze blowing through the open door, looking like dancing snakes.

“How’d you know to do all this?” I asked.

“I learned when I was a child,” he said. “Did you finish slicing up the carcass?”

I nodded, wanting to ask him about his childhood, wanting to know everything I could about him. But I figured he’d snap at me if I said anything.

“Good. Start hanging the rest of the meat from the ceiling.”

I did what he asked. It was satisfying work – we’d pack the strips in sea salt, let ’em sit, and then lash ’em to the ceiling. Plus, I liked working with Naji, being close to him without having to find anything to say or without having to worry about the stupid curse. It reminded me of the way Mama and Papa used to work together on the rigging, in the early parts of the dawn, clambering over the ropes and shouting instructions at one another. I used to watch ’em from the crow’s nest and think about how that must be what it’s like to love someone.

When we finished the whole shack smelled like meat and you could hardly walk from one side to the other on account of all the slivers of caribou dangling in the way.

“How long’s it gonna take?” I asked. “Till it’s all dried out?”

“A few weeks.” Naji glanced at me. He was over at the hearth, messing with the fire. “There’s a cave not far from here. We should start moving our things.”

“The cave!” I said. “The rain’ll get in.”

“Exactly. It’s why we had to hang the caribou up in here.” Smoke trickled up from the fire, gray and thick. It made my nose run.

“I know that.” I scowled. “Just don’t know why we have to live in the cave is all.”

Naji stepped away from the hearth. “Would you rather move into Eirnin’s house?” He glanced at me. “Spend the next few weeks living side by side with ghosts and magic-homunculi?”

I glared at him. He looked like he wanted to laugh. I knew he had me.

CHAPTER THREE

Living in a cave wasn’t so bad, despite the way the dampness flooded in every time the skies opened up with rain. This soft, thick moss grew over the rocks and made for a bed more comfortable than my big pile of ferns back in the shack. We kept a fire burning near the entrance and ate half-cured caribou and berries and the occasional fish to mix it up.

After a few days, the manticore sniffed us out.

“Girl-human,” she said. “Did you and the Jadorr’a think you could flee from me?”

It was nighttime, the sky starless from the rainclouds, and Naji was sleeping down deeper in the cave, his tattoos lighting up the darkness. I didn’t know if he was dreaming or casting magic in his sleep. He’d told me once he talked to the Order sometimes, though he never told me what about. They would’ve rescued him weeks ago, when we first landed, but they wouldn’t have rescued me. That’s why he was still here.

And no one else is crazy enough to sail to the Isles of the Sky. Hadn’t seen so much as a sail on the horizon the entire time we’d been on the island.

I popped my head out of the cave’s entrance. The manticore sniffed at me and flicked her tail back and forth.

“The shack’s filled up with meat,” I said.

“Caribou is not
meat
,” she told me. “Too gristly, too tough. Like tree bark.”

I couldn’t imagine the manticore having ever actually tried tree bark, but I didn’t say nothing, just shuffled out into the woods. The air was damp and cold like always, and I pulled my coat tight around me.