Page 12 of Bloody Black

T he floor groans as we descend into the belly of the ship, a lantern gripped tightly in one hand.

The stench hits me first, thick as wool and twice as choking.

Shit, piss, blood. I gag, yank my nightgown over my nose, and keep going.

The torch casts a jittery halo on the walls, and cages— cages —line both sides of the passage, some too small for anything bigger than a dog.

Something cracks underfoot. A rib bone. Dry and snapped clean through.

In the first cell are twins. Dark-skinned, skin stretched too thin over bone, silver moons tattooed cleanly between their brows, then more moons and symbols covering their hands. Witches. One was badly burned, the other, unblemished and much better fed. Captive.

Past them, a red-haired woman stirs behind a wall of iron bars.

Her chest heaves, half her dress torn up to her waist, and when her eyes meet mine, they narrow with wary calculation.

The cell next to her holds a man clutching a pillow.

His hair hacked in patches, eyes sunken, cheeks scored with tear-tracks.

I stare down at the scrawny prisoner next to her, too beaten to lift his head. His body is horrifically bruised, like he’s been kicked over and over. He’s missing half of one ear.

My heart aches just to look at them.

“What’s your name?” I ask the red-head.

“Holly. And that’s…” Her chapped lips whisper, nearly too soft for me to hear.

At first I think he says, “Preach.” Preach? “What? Who?”

“Edward. His name is Edward Teach.”

His eyes remind me of a dog, brown and big and loyal. I steel myself against sympathy.

“Did they take you too? Or are you a trade?” he asks.

His question takes me by surprise. Trade? Taken?

“They’re hunters. Poachers.” The redhead, Holly, answers, then glances down at the other prison. “Stole us away to trade for coin to fatten the king.”

The king. The dead king, my father . He’d been more terrible than I ever knew. And even though I had no hand in that, I burn with shame.

Like me, they’d been ruined. By men. Men who didn’t earn it. Men who felt entitled to my place, to my body. Men who wished to punish me for wrongs I hadn’t even done to them—

These women have suffered just the same. More, even, than me.

“I’m not here as a trade. But I was taken. Taken from my home, taken…” I almost say, from my throne, but the moment doesn’t feel right. I want to be one of them, not elevated above them.

I clear my throat. “I want retribution.” Even as the words leave my mouth, they feel right.

As if the path was always there, and I’d always been upon it. Walking in the dark.

“Don’t we all.” A wet cough echoes from the cell beyond.

From her small size and beauty, I know she’s Fae.

Platinum haired and lean as a ribbon, her skin is a crosshatch of scars, shallow knife wounds.

Purposeful. In straight rows. The word WHORE is carved into her chest, healed.

If she hadn’t been so filthy, so scarred, I might have thought her beautiful.

“Who are you?” I ask her.

“Domino.” She eyes me. “I suppose I’ll call you, the woman with the black beard.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I suspect it has something to do with the terrible burning across my throat and chest. If I tilt my head down, I can just barely see a spiral of obsidian, tiny letters etched deep across my skin.

A demon’s mark, the sign of my agreement with Rokhur.

Without a mirror, though, I have no idea what they look like.

There’s a shift off to my right, in the pitch-black, and it alerts me to the fact that there are still more. More cells, these ones bathed in darkness. With no portholes for fresh air.

My torch illuminates a shape too large to be man, muscles spiked with thorny ridges, sea-urchin spines jutting from his arms and back. As he moves, purple and red spines shift against each other, crackling like rustling leaves.

Behind him, floating in a briny tub half-filled with seawater, a male Kelpie lies dead. He’s green, fish-eyed, web-fingered. A mermaid is rotting in the tub with him. Her skin is gooey, oozing. She’s been dead for several days, maybe weeks.

“I’m Anne,” I say, hastily looking away from the tub.

To my right, the half-burned witch leans against the wall. “Can we do introductions later? I’d like to get the hell out of here. Preferably before you’re captured by the bastards upstairs.”

Rokhur smiles at them through the bars. “No need to fret. They’re already taken care of.”

“The entire crew?” The redhead asks suspiciously.

“Down to the last man.” I hold up a set of keys. Let them make of that what they will.

“How did you all get here?”

“Teach, his wife, and me were mermaid watching when they captured our ship.”

His wife doesn’t appear to be here; she must be one of the dead bodies rotting in the corners of the room. The mermaid they stole from the water obviously didn’t survive either.

I clear my throat and unlock their cell. The door groans open with an otherworldly screech.

“Through bile and brine they creep and climb, men who would slit the throat of goddess time…” The spined man mumbles toward the ceiling.

“Knock it off, Samson. No one wants to hear your drivel.” The Fae says to the purple-spined behemoth. She limps over to the side of her cage.

Domino. What a strange name.

I unlock her door .

A small movement draws my eyes to the cell in the very back. In it lies a species completely unknown. Skin pulsing, iridescent black, as though stitched from midnight. Needle teeth glint under a snarling mouth. She’s stretched across a table, unclothed, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

Her genitals are a mess of open wounds; a fourth of one breast is missing. She’s been held down. Abused. Stabbed and left for dead.

Drawn in by pity, or perhaps its recognition, I jam a key into the lock, and try to turn it. Failing, I try another.

“I wouldn’t untie that one,” the mouthy witch says. “She bites.”

“Aye, she’s not very friendly.”

Neither am I, I thought. Not anymore.

“Be quiet, Prudence,” says the purple spined male. He’s talking to the witch. “We can’t leave her in there.”

Finally, a key works. As I approach, the creature blinks up at me and then smiles. A horrific nightmare of a smile with needles for teeth, bathed in black slime. My body involuntarily shudders.

“I’m Anne,” I tell her, and start searching for a way to remove the manacles that bind her.

“Xandretta.” Her voice is gravelly, like a rocky shore.

I do not know what she is. Pure instinct tells me that whatever her species, she’s the most dangerous beast on the ship. Which means two things: I must be wary, and also, I must befriend her.

“Do you eat people?” I ask, trying not to stare at her teeth, as if I’m inquiring about the weather.

“Only if they’re annoying.” Those great eyes blink, slowly. “Do you?”

A key with a skeleton head turns; I unlock her right wrist. “Will you kill me if I let you go?”

Xandretta flexes her hand; the claws on it are nearly as long as my fingers. “Not on purpose.”

Terrific.

I unlock her other wrist regardless. Despite her terrifying exterior, she and I are the same. We are all the same. Abused. Wounded.

Fury bubbles in my chest. The more I think about it, the more I see, the angrier I feel.

I stand there for a moment, keys clutched tight in my fist, surrounded by the broken and the beaten, the unwanted wreckage. The result of men’s power is nothing but pain. Nothing but suffering.

The truth coils in my gut like a serpent, uncoiling as it slithers up into clarity.

What would it be like, if they were the hunted? I close my eyes and see nothing but silk. White silk, white lace. My nightgown, with red blooming through it like a stain.

Absently, my fingers run over the bargain branded on my neck.

Everywhere else, I am cold. But not here.

Here, at my throat, it burns and burns. Like a fire under my skin.

If I’d known what would happen, I wouldn’t have married him.

I would have struck first. Now there’s no one left to avenge me, but why shouldn’t I do that myself?

Since the moment I was born, my destiny has been told to me. I’m a princess, meant to be queen. I don’t know how to do anything except lead… but now my kingdom has just been stolen from me.

With a shaking breath, I go to the next cell. Xandretta sits up behind me, rubbing the raw places on her arms.

“I’m recently married,” I say aloud. “On our wedding night, he had me murdered.” The words fall out of me, quiet as prayers. My eyes are glued to the lock, I don’t even glance up as I tell the story of my wedding night.

My gaze meets the eyes of the scarred Fae. “He was a no one, a nothing. A snake that I allowed into my nest, and I let it devour me like a golden egg.”

The cell doors groan as I wrench them open, one by one. “They left me for dead. They should have made sure I actually was.”

I paced between the cells.

“I’ll hunt them down. Every man who helped, and every man who knew. Anyone who failed me, who didn’t warn me. I’m going to rip out their hearts, the way they did mine.”

Samson’s purple spines bristle. “And the terms of justice shall be mine…”

“But not if you die here.” I tug open his door. “So join me. And be free.”

The witches watch me with interest, and by the time I unlock their door, both their eyes are gleaming, flecked with violet stars.

“ We’re free, but what about the others?”

“What others?” I genuinely don’t know what she means.

“ The Flying Rose was a poacher ship, one among many. All of them hunt magical creatures, women, mostly, and then sell them to the highest bidder. Whatever wasn’t good enough or didn’t sell at auction, they kept for themselves. ”

Thus the mermaid. The Fae. The urchin-like male. The bizarre piles of bones in the corners of the cells.

“Once they’re done torturing us, they drown us in the sea.”

Prudence stares at my neck, then at the small insignia across the pocket on my nightgown. “Even if you kill all the poachers, there’s always the king’s army. They’re worse than all the rest. Which, if that patch on your nightgown is any indication, you know a lot about.”

“I am not my father. Not my army.” I glance down at my nightgown. “But I will be queen. And I say we will save them. Every female held prisoner. Every child kept captive.”

“We are?” Both witches look skeptical.

“Saved by the woman with a black beard. That sounds like a bloody funny story.” Domino clearly doesn’t believe me.

“No one will expect a female ship captain,” Xandretta muses. “It’s never happened.”

My eyes narrow as I stare out at the sea. William doesn’t know that Rokhur saved me; he doesn’t realize that I’m in the world, walking free. Having a false name would hide me.

“What if I were a man… A man of legend and lore, a notorious scallywag, who burns ships to the ground and kills all the crew?”

“Blackbeard.” Domino nods enthusiastically. “The most bloodthirsty pirate in all the seven kingdoms. The man who took The Flying Rose and killed its crew.”

“Aye, it was he.” Samson joins in. “And a more terrifying captain I never did see. A demon on his shoulder, doing his bidding.”

I meet their eyes. “We’ll form a crew. You help me, and I’ll help you. ”

“That sounds like madness.” The man called Teach puts an arm around the redhead.

“Or desperation,” Rokhur shrugs a bony shoulder.

“I’ll teach you, exactly the way that Ben taught me. How to move, how to fight, how to bring an enemy to their knees.” Given their current state, that assuredly won’t be easy. They’re all staring at me awkwardly, waiting to be told what to do next.

“I don’t suppose any of you know how to sail?”

The long silence is magnified by the sound of seawater sloshing against the hull.

“I rowed a boat once.” The witch–Prudence–raises her chin. “But if you put a sword in my hand, and help me heal my magic… I’ll kill whoever you want. No questions asked.”

A tingle goes through me. She’s a fighter. I can tell. The expression on her face is the exact same as the soldiers. I extend my hand to her, and she grips it.

“In my army, they toast before each battle. They say, to the victors go the spoils, and to the losers go the scars.”

“What does that mean?” asks the redhead.

Prudence answers. “It means we leave them with nothing, Holly. We take everything but their wounds. That’s what it means.”

Domino steps closer. “It means we fight. Fight until our fury is spent.” She holds out her palm to me. “I’m in.”

“Aye.” The ugly one, Xandretta, leans forward. “I’m in.”

Holly, the redhead, seems interested. “We’ll free everyone we encounter along the way? All the slaves, all their women?”

“We will. I swear it. ”

“Then I’m in.” She hobbles away from Teach, and shakes my hand. “I’ll follow the woman with a black beard.”

For a moment, I’m ecstatic. I have a crew. I have a ship.

But then I’m struck by a sobering thought.

If none of us know how to sail, how are we supposed to find our way back to William?

It’ll be hard to get revenge on him or his men, when we’re on the other side of the ocean.

If no one could sail, if no one could steer…

it would be a miracle if we ever found them.