When I was younger, the old grandfathers who hung around the docks and came to the tavern for their midday food and drink would tell me stories about theterra indigene, the earth natives who ruled so much of the world and viewed humans much the same way we viewed fish or deer. They told me about islands inthe Mediterran—dangerous, secret places where the Others lived and where the dark ship lay anchored when its captain and crew weren’t hunting human prey.
In some stories, the ship would appear out of the fog, a marauder that sank the ships of honest merchants who ferried a variety of goods among the Cel-Romano nations. In other stories, the ship was crewed by men the sea had never released. But when the moon was full, beings wearing the skins of those men would come ashore for a reckoning, and woe to those who had somehow escaped the justice of the living.
I heard birds overhead and jerked out of my musing. What was wrong with me? I had to get away from here!
I ran home and slipped up to my attic room unseen. I washed up and plaited my hair, but I didn’t wash up enough to smell clean, and I didn’t plait my hair to look that neat. I didn’t want the men who came to drink in the tavern to see anything pleasing enough to make up for what my father had done to my face after a young man, who was in Pyetra to sell the olive oil produced by his family, wanted to marry me and take me back to his family’s villa, depriving my father and his wife Mara of unpaid labor.
I used to be pretty before my father took a knife to one side of my face, before his fist damaged the sight in one eye.
I never saw the young man again. For a long time, I hoped he would come back and take me away, despite the damage to my face. But he never returned. Once I stopped feeling bitter about that, I wondered if something had happened to him and he couldn’t return.
My father had wielded the knife, but it says something about my stepmother that the only gift she ever gave me after the bandages were removed was a gilt-edged mirror that my father hung over my dresser.
This is what you are now.As if I could ever forget while I was trapped within these walls, waiting on tables and cleaning up blood and puke after the men had their fun. But when I walked along the shore or stood on one of the rock walls and looked out to sea, I could dream of freedom. I could dream of being someone else, living somewhere else.
I turned toward the bedroom door to go downstairs when I heard a sound at my open window, which reminded me to close it, despite how the heat would build in the attic during the day.
A seashell lay on the windowsill. A perfect, undamaged shell that looked like a white fan with a pearly peach interior.
A raven perched on the neighboring roof, watching me. I don’t know how long we stared at each other before it flew away, but I had a feeling the bird was connected to the pony and to the man I had seen on the rock wall.
As I went about my work that day, I thought about the raven, and the gift of a perfect seashell. I thought about a midnight blue pony with a mane and tail the color of surf and moonlight. I thought about the man who had disappeared like smoke. And I wondered if the dark ship would appear in Pyetra’s harbor.
But it wasn’t the dark ship and its monstrous crew that docked in Pyetra the next day.
It was Captain Starr.
His name was Jonathan Brogan, but no one who wanted to keep their tongue called him anything but Captain Starr. A big, barrel-chested man with thick, wheat-colored hair, a round face, and big square teeth that you couldn’t help but notice since he laughed and smiled a lot. But his blue eyes were cold as a shark’s, and what made him smile was often someone else’s pain.
Before the war, he’d been a bully with a ship, a thug who strong-armed weaker men into paying protection money if they didn’t want their merchant ships to mysteriously disappear or their fishing boats to be found adrift with the hold empty and no sign of the captain and crew. Now he was Pyetra’s protector against the Others, Pyetra’s hero who could murder a village girl for trying to free an orphan from a baited trap. Anything he or his men wanted, they took in exchange for escorting merchant ships past islands that Starr claimed were inhabited by beings that wanted nothing to do with Cel-Romano except when they came ashore to kill and destroy.
They say he was in a fight when he was young, receiving a terrible blow on the forehead that dented his skull in the shape of a star—a mark still visible and distinctive. They whispered that, perhaps, the damage had gone deeper than his skull and that was what made him such a savage adversary.
Whatever the reason, everyone in Pyetra lived in fear from the moment his sails were sighted to the moment his ship sailed away, its hold carrying precious fuel for the engine that allowed him to maneuver even when there was no wind for the sails, as well as the best foods, ales, and wines from our shops.
That afternoon he walked into my father’s tavern—and everyone fell silent. Captain Starr’s crew ate and drank here, but Starr and his first mate stayed at an inn far enough from the docks that the rooms didn’t stink of fish, and fancy enough that the captain dressed like a gentleman when he met with the village leaders to discuss payments and accommodations.
Captain Starr sat down at a table Mara hurriedly wiped clean and smiled that toothy smile. “Enzo, my good man. A round of drinks for everyone, and your best ale and whiskey for me and my mate.”
My father poured the drinks and brought them to the table. No one rushed to the bar to receive their free drink. I hid in the hallway that provided access to the storeroom and the door to the alley, overwhelmed by the feeling that something was going to happen.
Captain Starr sampled the ale and gave a nod of approval. My father relaxed. Everyone else in the tavern was smarter and waited to find out what Starr wanted before they believed they would be allowed to leave unharmed.
“I left two men here to keep an eye on the docks and the fishing boats and to take note of returning merchant ships,” Starr said. “And to keep an eye on the baited trap since our enemies often come in by the sea. My men are nowhere to be found, and my first mate tells me the trap’s net has been cut in a way that suggests someone freed whatever had been caught. Anyone here know anything about that?” He looked at my father. “Enzo?”
My father shook his head. “I’ve not been down to the water in days. Neither has my wife. Been too busy with running this place and putting up the supplies that came in the other day.”
“What about that daughter of yours?” Starr still sounded friendly, but everyone knew there was nothing friendly about the question or what would happen if he didn’t like the answer.
I eased back a little more. A couple of old grandfathers, sitting at the back table, saw me, then pointedly looked away—and said nothing.
“She must be about,” my father said, “although she barely does enough work to deserve the food she eats.”
“Find out where she was this morning,” Starr said. “I don’t think she fully appreciates that a daughter should be obedient in all things.”
In other words, when he found me, my father would tie myhands to a spike he’d driven into the wall and beat me until I couldn’t stand.
The tavern door opened and something, some change in the air or in the room’s silence made me peer around the corner. The man I’d seen on the rock wall that morning walked up to the bar, set a gold coin on the wood, and said, “Whiskey.”
