He leans back, the mad pull I feel toward him weakening a bit. I hope.
“I’ve heard it drives women wild,” he says, the mask he wears dropping back into place. “Eau de dead fish.”
“Is it a spell?”
He sighs. “I think it’s the curse. Some sort of side effect.”
“Oh no, that’s not a side effect. That’s an ironic curse.”
He raises an eyebrow at me and I blush, annoyingly. “That is, according to what I’ve read. It sounds like an ironic curse.”
“Isn’t my whole situation essentially an ironic curse?”
“To be cursed to be afraid of the sea, but to always smell it.” I sigh. And truly, the thought of it makes my heart hurt. The sea witch who cursed him thought of everything. “Yes, probably.”
He gives me a funny look, almost as though he’s surprised I should find the idea tragic rather than comic.
“Do you love the sea?” I ask, suddenly very sad. “I’ve heard that for sailors, the sea exerts a pull that’s almost supernatural in its power.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Get that from one of your tragic romances?”
I frown. I did, actually. “I’m trying to be understanding. Some people call it kindness.”
I think, for a moment, that he might leave; he draws a breath, as though to say something—probably to warn me off from kind impulses, as Honey has so often—but finally he seats himself on the stairs opposite me again and resumes his lounging, insouciant pose. “Yes,” he finally says. “I do love the sea. The witch probably thought it would drive me mad, to smell the sea air at all times while feeling nothing but terror at the idea of the sea, but…” He pauses, examines his nails for a moment. “I grew up seaside; my parents were fishmongers. I’ve never known anythingbutthe scent of salt water. To live in eternal dread of the ocean is one thing, but to smell the sea air wherever I go; it’s no curse. It smells like home.”
I wait, but it seems his moment of honest introspection is over.
He shrugs. “That’s how I knew your loud prince hadn’t broken my curse. I could still smell the sea.”
“Ah,” I say. We’re silent for a moment too long. It’s much toointimate. I clear my throat. “Tell me how you get into and out of my shop. And steal my things.”
“You know already—magic,” he says, smiling.
“Is it an incantation? Maybe if it’s something you speak…I know it can’t be a spelled object you carry around,” I say, more to myself than to him. “We both know you haven’t got anywhere to put it.”
He looks up at me and grins, devilishly. “Princess, what do you know about sailors?”
“Very little,” I admit.
“You haven’t got much, and what you do have is generally at risk of getting lost or traded or swept overboard. Some of us wear jewelry, amulets, earrings. But I started my life in the merchant marines, where such things aren’t allowed.” He sits up, unbuttons the cuff of his left sleeve, and rolls it up his arm. There, on his sun-darkened skin, on the swell of his muscle, just above his elbow, I can see a black symbol inked into his skin.
“Oh,” I say, softly. “How foolish of me.”
Tattoos. Of course. He wouldn’t carry magical objects, which could be lost or washed away. He wears his magic on his own skin.
He’s rolled his sleeve back down and is buttoning his cuff. I watch him for a moment: the sun-gold hair falling over his cheekbones, tied in a neat queue at the nape of his neck; the soft, perfectly white shirt; the almost obscenely tight black breeches; the perfectly polished boots. If he truly does live on a hammock in a barn, there’s no way to tell by looking at him. He’s utterly out of place here, in this tiny town with its rolling hills and steep cliffs and sheep, endless sheep. The tidy pink and yellow buildings; the small joys and sorrows of day-to-day life in Little Pepperidge.Even if I didn’t know he was a cursed pirate who speaks only in ironic detachment and smells like the wild sea, I think I would be able to see it. Eventually.
He looks up and my face bursts into flame, again. He leans back and smiles at me. “Any other questions?”
“Yes.” I cough, and clear my throat noisily. “What kind of a name is Bash?”
Chapter 24
“Sebastian,” he says. “Bash.”
“That’s a fancy name for a fishmonger’s son,” I say.
“My parents had great expectations.”
