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Some kind of an endless hell.
The fear gripping Eleanor’s heart, squeezing out a final warning, was a familiar one. She had had hundreds of nightmares just like this, the Spanish soldiers always blood-soaked and blood-crazed, clothed in grey, their faces a blur of violence or set into feral snarls. Nothing human about them—
Nothing fantastical either. She had made her deal with Flint too late, and her worst enemies had crossed over from the realm of imaginings and into her reality, all-powerful and sweeping through New Providence like a plague of locusts. Her next mistake would likely be her last, and she would never know —
She cocked the pistol, meeting that soulless stare with the unyielding resolve that had sparked up so much hatred and earned her so many enemies. If it misfired...
In one world, it did. In another, the shot went wide of the mark, missing any vital organs. Here, though, it struck true. It struck bone, shattering the Spaniard’s ribcage and piercing a lung.
He did not go out quietly. Some people - and things - just kept refusing to die. Even with a gaping wound in his chest, his frame wrecked with convulsions, he was crawling towards Eleanor, a puppet of the past that she was never going to escape. A trick of the dirty-bottle glass light, and the features behind the curtain of matted hair were Charles’s, then Teach’s, and finally, any pirate’s, all of them morphed into one being that was snatching at her ankles.
Eleanor woke up. Desperation turning to fury borne from the blunt, insistent ache in her belly, she kicked at her attacker’s head and then again, putting all her strength into it; stomped on his filthy hands; heard his nose crunch, wishing all the while for heavier boots. The violence had leapt into her, taking hold, and perhaps for the first time in her life, with her back against the wall, she welcomed it like an old friend.
Afterwards, she could not tell for how long it had raged on. When she was herself again, the Spaniard’s body was lying still, its strings cut, his face and clothing a bloody ruin and the butt of her pistol covered in more of the same. A number of things she could not remember grabbing was littering the floor in shards and pieces.
Breathing heavily, she sank to the floor and tucked in her knees to avoid the mess. Her pulse hammered in her ears as she wrapped her arm over the front of her gown. She had heard such tales of horror from the brothel... God damn it all to hell, if she miscarried because of some crazy, sick Spanish fuck! But the pain and the nausea seemed no different from before, leading up to no greater tragedy than a couple of cracked ribs.
It was over. She could rest now—
An urgent thought broke through the fog in her mind: “Madi!”
Fucking hell!
Eleanor scrambled over to her onetime childhood friend, leaning over her in a fresh wave of panic. “Madi, for fuck’s sake, wake up!”
Madi would not so much as stir in response, and it was no use shaking her. She had tried to fend off that creature with the fireplace poker - Eleanor could see it where it had fallen, but more importantly, she could see where Madi had been hit with it instead. For a long, terrifying moment, Eleanor could not find her pulse.
Pressing her ear to Madi’s chest, she began to babble like a child, saying things like, “I need you!” and: “Damn you! Damn you for always leaving me alone!” She was crying, too - for herself, for her unborn child, for her friend, for everyone around her who would not simply do as they were supposed to and help her make Nassau a little less chaotic, a little less horrible place to live in.
This is who you are, a voice whispered as she knelt beside Madi in defeat, the voice sounding suspiciously like her own. A survivor.
She hated that voice most of all.
Hours might have passed before Flint came back. Hours like days.
Eleanor could not bear to stay in this death trap for another minute, but there was only one dead Spaniard in here, and swarms of live ones out there in the open. She should probably have dragged him outside before barricading herself in, but now that he had been beaten into a bloody pulp, she found his company almost tolerable save for the stench. She had traded the dull fog for the warm, familiar buzz of drink, another old friend of hers.
“Thank fuck,” she managed to say, her voice rough from the kind of day she was having. “There isn’t a clean bandage left in this house.” She had made do, tearing strips from her and Madi’s underthings, but the end result looked more like a poor man’s imitation of Flint’s infamous turban. “Or a sober nurse, for that matter.”
Whatever she had expected, the naked terror in Flint’s eyes wasn’t it. She had never known him to fear anything, not like this - and the sight of Madi wounded and unconscious seemed to paralyze him.
Yes, Madi’s mother would not be pleased.
“It wouldn’t be such a fucking problem if your husband’s chief henchman hadn’t hanged our only doctor,” he snapped.
They glared at each other like a pair of half-drowned cats, as furious with each other as they had ever been. Then the moment was gone as if it had never been.
“Can you walk,” Flint uttered as Eleanor swayed on her feet. “Are you injured?”
She set her jaw, steadying herself against his shoulder. “I will help you carry her to the shore.”
They did a lot more walking before getting anywhere, but they needed the oars to row their boat, not to bury the dead. The blisters from her shoes were actually a welcome distraction: every lurch in her stomach tended to feel like the end of the world. She willed Max to be here with her, as if her will alone could move ships and people, but that was clearly too much to ask for in her present situation.
The consensus among Flint’s men was that she belonged in the brig, if not overboard - if there was anything a bunch of pirates could always agree on, it was what to do with a woman. Not that any voices but three could decide Eleanor’s fate. Flint argued her case as she cleaned Madi’s wound - it wasn’t too deep, just in a bad place - and Silver kept watching her hawkishly like she couldn’t be trusted even with that simple task. Well.
“Why are you here?” Silver demanded, the question sounding more forceful than she would have thought him capable of. The make-believe yarns did not need a real king behind it, but they seemed to have him anyway.
A reversal of fortunes. Eleanor and Flint swapping places as the valuable hostage. Except, what on earth would he exchange her for? If she had not been killed on the spot by now, he would let her go sooner or later.
She would not be so sure about Silver’s intentions, though.
The added weight of Flint’s gaze came to rest upon her, frank and assessing. But his words were addressed to Silver as he spoke: “Eleanor and Madi were sisters once. She has done everything she could to protect her.”
Silver was not convinced: “Madi always does more.”
“Is this really the time to be deliberately obtuse?”
“Can’t she speak for herself?”
“She and I shared a vision of Nassau’s future once,” Flint went on stubbornly.
Sometimes Eleanor would tell herself that she had merely imagined it. That Flint had only ever been no more than yet another soft-spoken devil, selling her the fantasy that had ultimately ruined her. But come hell or high water, she could not honestly believe that.
“It is only fair to give her a choice,” he concluded. “And besides, we have lost too many allies to pick and choose now.”
“And what choice would that be?” Eleanor had to wonder. She still hadn’t asked the question. If she did, there would be no way back, and that frightened her more than a Spanish invasion, which had already happened twice.
“To open your eyes,” Flint’s tone was strangely mild, almost gentle, “and accept the hard truth that honour among thieves is the best deal any of us will ever be offered. Or to remain as you are, committed to the very man who has brought Spain to your doorstep. The choice have always been yours.”
“No,” she protested helplessly. He, who had done everything he could to keep them away, how could he ever turn to them for aid, make deals with them? “ No, no, no!”
But she could not afford to break down, not in front of Silver, so she folded it all away so that it was no longer showing, like a stain on a handkerchief. “I will stay by Madi’s side until she opens her eyes.” And God help anybody who tried to challenge that.
“How did Spain know where to look for the treasure?” Silver asked.
Max’s hasty transactions, far less anonymous than her wishful thinking had suggested. “They have spies everywhere,” Eleanor replied. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“But was it their spies, or was it because Rogers had told them where it was and promised to retrieve it to secure his own position?”
Eleanor narrowed her eyes. “I don’t care for your mindgames, Mr. Silver. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be here.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again, reconsidering. “It stings, doesn’t it?”
“I have seen more mobs since then,” was her arid reply.
Flint cleared his throat. “If the matter has been settled-” He nodded at Silver to follow him out of the cabin, which the shape-shifter did with a partying hard look.
Silver and Flint kept coming and going, sometimes in pair and other times one after the other. The former liked to ask questions and then answer them himself, trying different bait and hooks. He was worse than Rackham, honestly, never knowing when to shut the fuck up. The latter, for his part, brought her something to eat.
“Have you found a new cook, then?” It tasted suspiciously like real food.
“No,” he replied at length, as if divulging a secret of the state, “I have cooked this myself.”
She cracked a smile - what a sight that must have been. “I should have hired you when the tavern was mine.”
“Perhaps.” His forehead twitched noncommittally. “Or perhaps you should have gone to sea yourself.”
The sea had never served her well, in the end. It was there to wash things off the sand. “Does Madi know her pirate king used to be just some little shit you’d chained to my favourite couch?”
“Eleanor,” Flint said wearily, in the tone of a schoolmaster. “While I fully understand your and John’s need to channel your frustration into a fight, I would greatly appreciate it if you held your fire at least until we make land.”
“She could do better-” Eleanor started saying, stirring the stew with the wooden spoon. Flint was hovering. “ Fine. As a personal favour to you.”
“No,” he corrected Eleanor, not looking at her, “she truly couldn’t.” It settled between them, another sharp warning. “And thank you.”
“Stay,” she called after him as he made to leave. “It was more peaceful in your cell, to be honest.”
“Would you like a book?”
Knowing him, that had not even been a quip. And Madi had grown up to be the same, with a piratical eye drawn to every bookshelf.
The spite ebbed away between one spoonful and the next; at least the rolling of the ship did not seek to spoil the meal. “I should have run away with Max when I had the chance.”
“Does she know that?”
“Yes, I have told her.” When it had been too late.
“You still could,” Flint murmured in all earnesty, standing behind her chair. “Someone should get something out of this.”
She scoffed: and live on what, exactly? The charity of her grandparents? Nassau, her Nassau was gone - burnt to the ground. Or perhaps it had never existed in the first place. “It has become clear to me that there is no walking away from what we started. We’ll just have to finish it one way or another, or it will finish us.”
“What do you have in mind?”
As if she already had some madcap new scheme to drive the Spanish forces back to where they had come from. Flint was the one full of plans, she was the one with the wrong men.
“Tell me I’m not crazy,” she whispered, unable to sit still. He mirrored the motion, and she leaned into him and pressed her forehead to his shoulder gratefully. He smelt of the sea, not the war. “I wanted to believe in him even if it killed me. I wanted to believe in so many things.”
Flint kissed the crown of her head. “You’re not crazy.”
“Do you actually believe that?”
“I wouldn’t have let anyone crazy put me in chains ever again.”
That… was a good argument. She pulled away. “I’m sorry about Charles Town,” she offered. “Mrs. Barlow.” It seemed like the right thing to say now.
“If we start listing all the things we’re sorry for, we won’t be done before we reach the Maroon island.”
“You did want me to stop bickering with your quartermaster,” she pointed out.
Flint considered that. “I’m sorry you were put on trial, then. It should have been me.”
What a strange, strange man he was. “Even you couldn’t have been put on trial in two different places at once.” He chuckled - an actual, audible chuckle. “I’m sorry, but I can’t picture you as a Mrs. Rogers. Can you embroider?”
His face turned stony, a glitter in his eyes. “Do not challenge a man’s embroidery skills if you are not prepared to be proven wrong.”
“Welcome,” the Maroon Queen had said briskly, and paid no more attention to her.
It had been one blunder after another. First, Eleanor had called her by her old name, the servant one. The Queen and Cicely, the woman that Eleanor remembered, differed like night and day. Then she curtseyed, attracting a round of stares. And finally, she seemed to be in everybody’s way and not allowed to wait in Madi’s shack.
She should have taken Flint up on his offer of Boston. No temptation to finish what the Spanish soldier had started if Madi shared her father’s fate.
The day wore on, interminable, and just as Eleanor’s hundredth escape plan stopped at stealing a boat, Silver hobbled out, his face transformed. “She is awake! She recognises everyone! Well, she pretended not to recognise me, that was a villainous thing to do.”
When Eleanor came back ashore, with Madi and the idiot a few paces behind her, Max was standing there, the waves frothing behind her.