Page 85 of Rears & Vices

“Ah. No, Everard,” he said. He put a hand to Everard’s face, the juncture of jaw and neck, softly clutching. “I question nothing. What you did for me in Kingston proved you to be one of the bravest, most capable persons I have ever met. I don’t need battle to confirm what I already believe.”

“Oh,” Everard said. Proof. Belief.

Vitaliy wouldn’t say those words lightly.

Vitaliy said, “If you object to fighting, it won’t make me think differently of you. I object to fighting,” he admitted bitterly, “but I haven’t the choice of it, because of Varfolomey. The creature I’ve made him—myself—into. So, I am asking you. Asking, not assuming, because you still do have a choice, if you want it.”

Everard dropped his hand; Vitya caught it in his other.

“You are my matelot. My partner in all things. If you do choose, and we are to cross the rail together, it will be back-to-back, protecting the other. I pledged that, too. I would make you aware that I will fulfill it to the death. Either way, I will never let Lafitte give you to La Corona.”

“Oh,” Everard said. “No, you… needn’t worry over that.” If the Spanish weren’t hunting Varfolomey—supposedly—they absolutely weren’t hunting him, a complete unknown. “They shan’t get you, either. Not if I’ve say in the matter.”

Vitaliy didn’t blink. His steady gaze said simply: I know. I believe you.

“Well, then!” Everard said. “I’ll need sword and axe.”

Back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, Vitya kept his word.

Under cover of musket fire, they were up and over the gunwale in three heartbeats, a froth of screaming, jangling metal, creaking rope. The San Telmo was heeling so hard, they landed on a weather deck made into an uphill battle; worse, its new-built planking had been slicked with oil and water. They and six others plonked straight onto their arses first thing, which flattened them against the Spaniards’ receptive fire but nearly slid them into a miniature cheval-de-frise of sharp pikes beneath the rail. When in hell, Everard wondered, had they had time to build that?

Vitya swore, thunked his axe into the deck for purchase just in time, knuckles white, his grip painful beneath Everard’s left shoulder as he pressed him bodily down, but it halted their slide. He bellowed, “Sand bags!”

These flew, hitting dully around them and bursting; one grazed Everard like a punch, and he kicked it, coughing, spreading the sand.

A bit ahead of schedule, but they would’ve needed them for the blood, anyway.

Then a pirate—an enemy—with Quixote-era mustachios swung down to them from the high quarterdeck. The spike of his axe loomed towards Everard’s head. Everard raised his cutlass—crack—and the arc of the man’s axe jerked and collapsed into loose strings and floppy limbs, a marionette abruptly freed. Nothing Everard had done: a musket ball had spun its way through his ochre bandanna, exiting over the ear.

D’Arcy, he thought dimly, but couldn’t look back. He touched his filled glove to his lips and away in a kiss, tasting iron, and pushed the man and his brains off his lap. First blood.

Louis-Michel Alarie ran past, boots flinging sand, flanked by several of the Sévère’s pirates, screaming war. As if spurred, Vitya hauled Everard up; they went on.

Above them, the jolly roger threw a wavering noonday shadow. But Jean Lafitte was nowhere to be seen.

Vitaliy’s intuition had at least been correct about the San Telmo pirates; they were not slaves, but majority white men, Spaniards supplemented with mercenaries, from the sound of them, German, Irish, and American, sailors and infantry alike. There weren’t as many as expected—another advantage.

Everard had forgotten how to breathe, it seemed, but not how to fight. With every step, every swing of sabre, worry and hunger and shuddering nausea shoved down to a tiny corner of himself, forgotten. But as they crossed the chaos of the deck, something peculiar happened, over and over: Everard’s opponents spotted him and hitched, took a breath, paused.

Close quarters meant no one had much choice in their combatants, and in fact if one could easily tell friend from foe in the writhing chaos and the smoke, it was a lucky thing, even with the indigo armbands. But men went the way of least resistance, and in battle Everard had never been avoided so much as pushed aside, assumed to be neither a challenge nor an easy target.

Today, however…

Another Spaniard fell before him, kneecap shattered from Everard’s sabre hilt, and in the frenzy’s brief pause, Everard looked askance.

Yes, that would do it. Vitya—tall, broad, copper-haired from blood, teeth gritted and breathing hard—was certainly not the way of least resistance. Brutality surrounded him like an indestructible soap bubble, glimmering rainbow and poison swirl.

To Everard’s eyes he was half-unrecognisable.

“Back me,” Vitaliy gasped then, as though it needed repeating, “to amidships.” He hefted the axehead closer into his palm, looking oddly frustrated. “Change of plan. Something’s wrong.”

Everard nodded. He was amazed at Vitya’s clarity of thought; he himself felt encircled, cushioned from reason by gun smoke and blood-spray fog. He shook himself.

This is what they respect him for, he thought. This mask he wears. What a damned waste. Violence was common. Expected. Not particularly difficult.

They made their way, ducking, shoving, sabres outflung, to the midships rail, where Vitya applied his axe blade in wide, powerful swoops into the cheval-de-frise beneath, dismantling it to crumbles and splinters. His goal seemed to be the San Telmo’s yardarm braces.

Vitya swung at the larboard braces, rapid and accurate; rope after thick rope was cut. Like felling trap-set saplings, the braces sprang free from tension and flew high. The mast groaned as the wind took the yards round and got hold of the freed sails, setting them flapping.