The Buccaneer's Apprentice Read online

  Nic couldn’t help but push a little. “But if he knew the Nuncio to Pays d’Azur was in distress, surely …”

  “No.” Jacopo was firm. “Besides, his business is in clearing the waters of pirates, not small affairs like ours.” Clearing the waters of pirates? Or colluding with them? No honorable officer would ever have pirates do his dirty work, of that Nic was certain. “But Niccolo, it is late, and we have all had long days. May I suggest that you make camp here near the fire and sleep? We can speak in the morning of our next actions.”

  Nic agreed to the suggestion. Now that the excitement of the fight had faded, his every muscle ached. The back of his head began to throb again. “We will speak in the morning,” he assured them both.

  Once they had left the fireside, however, Nic could hear the father and daughter arguing in hushed whispers, beneath the hanging fruit trees further down the rock face. The Colombos had lied to him. For whatever reason, they didn’t trust him with their story. Nic was not surprised at the discovery, exactly. In his experience, everyone had an agenda tailored to their own desires. The only truly altruistic man he’d ever met had been his last master, and even his kindness had not broken Nic’s curse. Knowing that the Colombos kept a secret did not make him dislike them—he would merely have to be careful until he knew exactly what they wanted.

  Nic curled into a ball atop a pile of empty burlap sacks, and let the fire warm him. The whispering continued for some time, then faded into the rustling of the tree branches and the constant rush of water upon the sands. Though his future was as uncertain as ever it had been, he slept soundly for the first time in days.

  Landlocked though Vereinigtelände may be, at least we are

  not prey to the whims and money-lusts of pirates, like those

  of Cassaforte. Their navy is constantly having to battle pirates determined to lay ruin to traders entering and exiting their ports.

  —The spy Gustophe Werner,

  in a secret missive to Baron Friedrich van Wiestel

  Fog the color of lamb’s wool had settled on the beach overnight. When Nic opened his eyes, he couldn’t see past the edge of the branches hanging over the area in front of the Colombos’ shelter. Something had awoken him. When he tried to sit up and take stock, he realized that somebody was behind him. Her hand was on his mouth.

  “Sssh,” Darcy warned him, in his ear.

  Nic rolled out from under the girl and sat up on his knees. His heart pounded and his chest began to heave, as if his body were readying for another tussle with the girl. “What are you doing?” he gasped out. “By the gods, you’re a lunatic!”

  “Sssh!” The girl’s scowl grew more furious at the sound of his voice. “My father is sleeping.”

  “Fine. Just don’t … don’t wake me like that ever again!” Honestly. The girl had been raised with every advantage, yet she was more of a savage than Nic ever had been. The look she threw his way was pure scorn. She rose from the pile of sacks where he’d slept, brushed off her knees, and retrieved a spade from beside a log near the dead fire. Or the almost-dead fire, that was. While Nic righted himself and rubbed his face to convince himself that this was not a dream, Darcy stooped to dig through the layer of gray ashes to the embers underneath. The buried nuggets glowed a bright red when she blew on them. Into the curved bottom of a pottery shard, she scooped a spadeful of the embers, then set it aside. She threw some tinder atop the stirred campfire, stood, and grabbed from the sand the tongs she had used the night before to poke the fire.

  “Follow,” she said.

  “I’m not your servant!”

  Darcy shushed him with a finger to her lips. Fine. Nic would come, but he wouldn’t have to like it. Carrying the ruined pot by the edge, Darcy began scurrying down the tide line, in the direction of the island’s other end. Nic’s boots spat up sand as he followed. He marveled at how the girl somehow managed, in her breeches and bare feet, to outpace him to an extent that she was almost invisible in the fog. Only once did she look back to see if he was still following. When her eyes met his across the mist, they seemed to measure him. She looked Nic up and down, taking in his height and breadth, the cut of his hair and the hang of his shirt, and summing it all up as she might a column in a ledger. It was only for a moment, but Nic found himself curious what she saw in that time.

  By the time they reached their destination, Nic was slightly out of breath from trying to keep pace. They were in a small grove of trees heavy with long, glossy fronds. The growth was not as dense as the small forest where the pool of water lay, but its branches hung nearly to the ground, providing them a sense of privacy. She ignored him completely as she set down the pot. “We had to come all the way out here to talk?” Nic said. His voice sounded almost angry. The girl spoke the same language as he, but at no time in the last day had she given him any indication that she actually listened. “I mean no disrespect, signorina, but while you and I are on this island, I think we should set a number of things straight.”

  “Oh?” Darcy turned, her eyebrows raised. Really, she looked like a Buonochio painting, with her fair hair falling around her pale skin. “What things are those, boy?”

  A Buonochio painting would not have captured the utter scorn she managed to pour into that single last word. “For one thing, do not address me as boy. I am not your servant.” He’d said the words a few minutes before, but now they sounded confident. “I’m happy to be consulted. I want to help. But I refuse to be ordered. I think your father would agree with me on …” Nic’s words trailed off into silence. Something had moved, within the cluster of trees.

  He thought it was a trick of the fog, but no, something living was stirring restlessly beside one of the trees. Not merely animal, either—it was a man, slumped and sitting, his arms wrapped behind him around the tree’s trunk. “By the gods,” Nic murmured, closing the distance between them. “Maxl?”

  The pirate’s lower lip was split and caked with dried blood. His eyelids seemed heavy, as if he could barely open them. A dark bruise was beginning to form over his left cheekbone. Groggily, he looked up at Nic. His mouth struggled to form a single word. “Help?”

  “What have you been doing?” Nic demanded, whirling around. Darcy had brought the bowl closer to the tree. Black smoke rose from the cinders within. Again, the girl made no sign of having heard. “I said …”

  Darcy whirled around. “I’m not your servant either,” she said. The intensity of her voice startled Nic. “And anyway, it’s not what I’m doing. It’s what you’re going to do.”

  Nic didn’t understand. He shook his head. “I’m going to let him go.”

  “No, you’re not.” Darcy flipped up the metal tongs so that they swung through the air and landed in the palm of her right hand. Again, she seemed to measure him with her eyes. “Why should we?”

  “Because you can’t—he’s injured!” When he’d observed Darcy summing him up before, Nic had wondered what total she might have reached. Judging by the scorn upon her face, she obviously found him wanting. “By the gods. You’ve been beating him!”

  “He has information,” she replied, marching over to the bowl.

  “What information?”

  Her head tilted. Her eyelids lowered. The sigh she let out was pure contempt. “This dog wasn’t aboard your ship. The one you ‘destroyed.’” She said the last word as if she didn’t quite believe his story. “He didn’t float to the island, like you. He says he left his crew before they invaded your craft. How did he get here?” Nic thought about it for a moment. She was right. There hadn’t been any large sections of destroyed ship for Maxl to cling to. “His ship must have been close enough for him to swim from—which it wasn’t. My father and I have both been watching these waters. Or else he had a boat.”

  Of course. Nic remembered seeing the trail on the grassy slope, the day before. Maxl had some kind of raft or small rowboat that he had dragg
ed from the beach through the field, leaving the deep trail he’d followed into the woods. It made total sense. What didn’t add up, however, was why Darcy was now using the tongs to clutch one of the embers from the pot. When she pulled it up, its surface had cooled and formed a black crust. The moment she blew on it, though, the ash flew away and sparks followed, exposing the hot, burning core. “Fine. He had a boat,” Nic said, trying to sound reasonable. “Ask him where it is.”

  “I have.” Darcy took the ember and thrust it against a tree trunk across from Maxl. The bark beneath it began to smoke, slowly at first, then with increasing vigor. When Darcy pulled away the tongs, the heat left a black scar. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “No boat,” said Maxl. He looked exhausted. Nic couldn’t look at the cut on his lip without wincing. “Maxl is having no boat.”

  “There is a boat,” she snapped. “And you’re going to tell us where it is.” She began to advance.

  “What are you planning to do?” Nic asked. His heart almost skipped a beat. “Torture him?” She was, he realized. She intended to harm the pirate in order to find out how he’d gotten to the island on his own. He waved his hands. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t do that!”

  “I could,” she announced. Without warning she thrust the tongs forward, so that his fingers wrapped instinctively around the long handles. “But I’m not. You are.”

  “What?” The biting ends of the tongs were close enough to his own face that he could feel the heat from the nugget of burning wood it held. “I’m not.”

  “Oh, but you will.” Nic was so wary of dropping the ember onto himself that even as she grasped him from behind and pushed him across the sand to the tree where Maxl was tied, he kept squeezing the handles. “You’re going to demand he tell you everything. And if he doesn’t …” She pointed to the black scar on the tree trunk nearby.

  “You’ve gone mad!” Nic tried to resist. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this nonsense. Still, he was wary of letting loose his grip of the hot coal. “You can’t expect to me to … I won’t!”

  Darcy’s accent might have been an exotic tickle in his ears, but her words were corrosive. “You said you’d help us in any way you could.”

  When Nic looked over at Maxl, he could see the pirate’s eyes had grown as large as the twin moons themselves. Perspiration beaded on his forehead, running along the worry lines there and catching at the brows. All of his wiry muscles struggled to loosen himself from the bonds that restrained him to the tree, but Darcy had tied the knots too tightly. Whether or not Maxl understood every word of their conversation, he certainly understood Darcy’s intent, and it frightened him so much that he was squirming like a trapped animal. “I’m not going to help you like this!” Nic snapped back.

  They were standing in front of Maxl now. The hot ember was only a handspan from the pirate’s face. It cast an orange glow that cut through the mist. “You’ve killed men before,” Darcy growled through her teeth. “This should be nothing to you.”

  She picked the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t have a choice.” Still squeezing the tongs, Nic wrenched himself out of the girl’s grasp. He turned around to face her. “It was either him or me. This situation is entirely different. If you want information from Maxl, I’m sure there are other ways to get it than torturing him.”

  “Yes!” said the pirate, nodding fervently. “Other ways!”

  “He’s one of them.” Darcy still looked at the tongs as if she intended to grab them from Nic and burn her captive herself. “He’s like an animal. They don’t have feelings.”

  “I am having feelings!” cried Maxl. “Many feelings. Many many feelings!”

  “Does your father know you’re doing this?” Nic demanded.

  The girl shook her head. “He doesn’t have to know everything.”

  Nic was outraged, now. “I don’t know what you’re up to. Perhaps living on this island has given you moon-fever. Maybe you were crazy before you left Pays d’Azur. But let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not your servant, and I certainly am not your executioner.” Nic looked over to Maxl, who was regarding him with hope. “Until he does something to merit it, I won’t lay a hand to this man.”

  Darcy’s lip curled. “Is that so?” The three words, combined with the girl’s obvious contempt, fanned even higher the flames of Nic’s indignation. She followed them up with another observation. “Perhaps it’s because you’re not man enough?”

  “You are insane.” Nic turned. The fog was just as thick as it had been all morning, but he could see far enough through it to discern a gap in the nearest outermost trees. He flung the burning coal through it like a javelin, then marched over to the spot in the sand where it had landed. His boot kicked some sand over its top to starve it of the air it needed to burn. “Absolutely insane,” he said, walking back with the tongs hanging from one hand.

  “What are you going to do?” Darcy taunted him. “Tell my papa?”

  “If I have to!” Nic threw the tongs down onto the ground, then let out a sound of utter exasperation. It was a purely animal cry, half grunt and half attempt to rid himself of the anger that roiled within. “Of all the bloody luck. I could have lived here quite nicely on my own. By myself. I could have lived on fruit and roots and small animals and been master of my own island. But no. I have to share it with … with a pirate …”

  The pirate in question, still looking apprehensive though not as panicked now that he was no longer in imminent danger of being burned, said, “I like fruits!”

  “… An old man, and a girl who clearly is worse than any savage. You’re scarcely civilized!”

  “We have no other options, boy.” Darcy’s words were blunt. “If you’re too soft for the grown-up world, then fine. Leave. Go back to your roots and fruit. I don’t want to see your ugly face again.”

  Nic was all astonishment. On top of his immense irritation with the lass, he now had to deal with the stinging notion that she thought he had an ugly face. Before he could react, though, the pirate spoke up. “Take Maxl,” he begged Nic. “Maxl good servant. Take me.”

  “You’re staying here.” Darcy spoke directly to him. “You and I still have business.” She moved for the tongs that Nic had thrown down.

  “No.” Nic grabbed the girl by the wrist. “I won’t let you.”

  Maxl had relaxed some in the previous moments, but now that his safety was once more in danger, he began babbling in a cracked and hoarse voice. “Listen to him. Listen to nice boy! I show you everything. Boat, everything. Is not needing to hurt me! Please!”

  Darcy arrested her struggle with Nic and turned to the pirate. “Everything?”

  Maxl nodded. “Not you. Him. Nice Niccolo.”

  “You’ll show him?” At Darcy’s question, the pirate nodded his head with vigor. “Fine,” she finally snarled, reclaiming her wrist from Nic’s grasp. To Nic, she added, “He’s all yours, then. I hope you don’t come to regret it.”

  That was all? She simply was intending to walk off and leave them? Nic couldn’t believe it at first, but Darcy crossed the little grove of trees to its other side. “I’ll be fine,” he told her. “I can handle myself.”

  She turned and snorted. “You might need this,” she said, holding up something that had been leaning against a tree trunk.

  It was his sword. The shivarsta. She hadn’t carried it when they’d walked here together, so she must have brought it earlier. Maybe, if the embers hadn’t worked, she’d intended a worse form of torture. The idea made him shiver as he closed the distance between them. “Thank you,” he said with the greatest formality as he took his weapon from her.

  “Good luck,” she said with the utmost of coldness. Nic was about to return to Maxl’s side without a word more when to Nic’s surprise she caught him by the wrist. Holding him as tightly as he had held her a minute before
, she pulled him close and stood on tiptoe so she could whisper into his ear. He expected another barb from her tongue—an insult, a poison-laden comment about his manhood, perhaps. Instead, though, she merely muttered, “Very good work.”

  “What?”

  His ears hadn’t deceived him. “Excellent performance,” she said, in a soft voice that Maxl wouldn’t be able to overhear at his distance. “It was almost as if you knew what you were doing.” To his slack-faced reaction, she cocked her head. “It’s one of the easiest ways to extract information,” she explained. “Two guards enter a room with a prisoner. One is awful and promises to do all kinds of terrible things. The other is nice and tries to talk the awful guard out of it. The prisoner almost always is grateful to the nice guard and agrees to cooperate.” Nic found it difficult to say anything, so astonished was he. “What? It worked.”

  “You used me,” he gasped, almost breathless.

  “Well, yes,” she said, releasing her grip on his wrist. “I had to. I didn’t think you’d do it willingly.”

  “I thought you were actually going to torture Maxl,” he hissed, becoming angry once more. “I thought you were out of your mind. You were play-acting.”

  “Of course I was,” she said, offended that he might think otherwise.

  “But his bruises!” Nic had to struggle to speak quietly. “His lip!”

  “What kind of monster do you think I am?” she asked. “He couldn’t see in the fog and ran face-first into a tree when I was dragging him here. He was so dazed after that I doubt he remembers it.”

  “Oh gods,” said Nic, deflating. “You duped me.”