“Have you risen to meet them?”
He shrugs. “I’d tell you to ask my parents, but they’re dead and gone nearly twenty years now.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, my heart immediately aching for him.
“Don’t be. If they’d lived, I’d either have become a fishmonger myself—a miserable one—or I’d have run away to go to sea and left them onshore with their disappointed hopes and fish heads.”
“You needn’t make everything a joke,” I say, gently. To be honest, however, his insistence on using humor to distance himself from his feelings rattles me a bit. I never know when he’s going to take something seriously, and it always catches me by surprise.
“I’m not joking. They would have been unhappy with me, orI would have been unhappy with the life they wanted for me, and either way, it worked out.”
“So they died…and you were what, ten?” He can’t be more than thirty.
“About that. My mother’s brother came in to run the shop, and I joined the merchant marines as soon as I could manage it. He was glad to have one less mouth to feed, as far as I could tell.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Did you live? Portside? Mydmouth?” Those are our two largest port cities.
He smiles, a little ruefully. “Crambrook.”
“Crambrook,” I repeat. “On the south coast?” It’s a tiny town, hardly accessible by land, being surrounded by steep hills on three sides and the sea on the fourth. It’s well-known for its isolation and revolutionary politics. It’s hard to imagine anyone with half this man’s raw charisma growing up in such a tiny place.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you’re familiar with it.”
“Only by reputation. Hardly even that. Just from books. I’ve never been.”
“Nor have I, not since I left,” he says.
“From what I’ve read—it would seem a bit small for you.”
“That’s about right.” He resumes cleaning his nails. I try again—and fail again—to imagine him, the fishmonger’s boy, in a tiny, isolated seaside town. Staying in Crambrook, becoming a fishmonger, marrying a lovely fishwife…For no reason at all, the thought makes my cheeks heat up.
“And the sea witch?” I try, in the hopes of distracting myself from whatever I was about to think.
“Not from Crambrook.”
I counsel myself in patience and try again. “How’d you go from the merchant marines to being a pirate? Also”—I pause, suddenly outraged—“the minimum age for the merchant marines is thirteen. You said you ran away when you were ten!”
He chuckles. “I disguised myself as a girl so they’d accept that I was smaller and had a high-pitched voice. Got away with it for a few years and then, alas, Nature dobbed me in.”
“You’re not going to tell me anything real about piracy or the curse, are you?”
He shrugs.
I put my head down on the desk. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting to see what your miserable new prince does. If he ever deigns to show up.”
“He’ll show up. I’m sure he’s just…”Trying to find a strengthening line in one of his favorite poems; something about having to do one’s duty even in the unlikely event that one’s duty results in curse-breaking and some sort of dreadful automatic betrothal.“Just tired from the road.”
“Your other suitors are getting along quite well, you’ll be glad to know. They’ve set aside their differences, by and large, and spend a great deal of time declaiming at each other.”
I haven’t raised my head from the desk yet. “Delightful.”
“The Inn of the Two Princes is doing great business these days.”
