Page 12

Captain Betts

I never want them to leave. As ratline climbers arrange dampened sail cloth over their tentacles to keep them from drying out, I can’t stop staring.

My cheeks hurt from smiling. I can’t believe my family sits in my quarters.

Every visit from my sister is too brief, overstuffed with pirate stuff, and the highlight of my life.

I want to know everything they’re doing in the ocean. How are my favorite reefs? Are the corals expanding? New anemone blooming? How was it releasing her first clutch of eggs? Are their human sensibilities at war with their octopus instincts to release their young without a backward glance?

“Are you okay?” I ask for the thousandth time as I cling to Sabrina’s hands.

“Seriously, Betts, you’re still a party killer,” she says, extracting her hands from mine.

She rolls her shoulders as if to shrug out of the shirt I gave her to calm my crew.

Her dairy flashing spun them into a frenzy.

“Yeah, it sucked the biscuit to let the buggers go, but I’ll see them again eventually.

Teeth and I agreed we’d be rubbish parents anyway.

Besides, they weren’t fully-formed kraken with faces or personalities.

They looked more like translucent bugs.”

“Your sister is the worst fireship I’ve ever sailed.

What emerged from those eggs resembled a case of crabs from hell with twice the burn—” Sabrina slaps Teeth’s arm at his impertinence, and he fakes injury.

Whether the two ever mourned their first hatching clutch or not, we’ll never get a straight answer.

Maybe some things are sacred between the wild couple.

He says something else that I miss as I study the pair.

“We’re here for you, Betts,” Sabrina says when Teeth howls at a brutal nipple twist from her. I guess his remark was a zinger.

“You straight or in the sweet trade?” Teeth asks as Chub sits at the table in the captain’s quarters. Chub picks up my forgotten breakfast to reveal the map. Teeth snags the tray from his hands and swallows a herring without chewing.

Chub makes a gagging noise behind his fist.

“We’re heading for the prize off our bow,” I say confidently and ignore Sabrina’s giggle. On the table, the black pawn represents our ship. I stand the brown pawn upright where the prize sits.

“Then why’s your bow pointed north? The wind’s coming from the south after that last gale. You’re turned arse to front,” Teeth says before slurping my second herring. The only one left is the headless one, which has had the time to dry out since my guests arrived.

“I’ll swing around it and spiral inward,” I say, snatching the last fish off the tray. It’s dry and tough when I tear into it, but dammit, it’s mine. “They don’t know we’re here, so we’ve got room to ensnare them in our wake like a spider with a web.”

“True, they have no clue your boat sails under the black,” Sabrina says. “I convinced their night watch I’m a mermaid, so they told me all about the trailing ships that are supposedly meeting them out here. They think they’re east of Mexico and you’re their trading partner.”

“But they’re east of Florida,” Chub says with a wicked smile. “Too far for their friends to hear their screams."

"They may be lost, but I don’t know about the screams part…

” Sabrina trails off and shares a conspiratory smile with Teeth.

The pair giggles like children. I don’t know whether it’s anger in my chest at the fact that they’re hiding something funny, or jealousy.

I should have had someone sharing smiles with me…

but my man turned out to be an adulterous ass.

“The treasure in their hold is not gold—” Teeth can’t finish his sentence, he’s laughing so hard.

"What’s in there? Avast ye, it’s not more pineapples, is it? Please, say it’s not more pineapples. After the Amelia was stuffed to the brim with pineapples, we had to eat them all. I hope I never see another pineapple again,” Chub says with a groan.

“I’ve never had a pineapple,” I reply, flipping my hair. Chub’s eyes widen as if I can’t be serious about wanting hundreds of the fruit.

“This is worse than pineapple,” Teeth says, rolling to the side with giggles. “Grab your poop scoops. It’s birds from South America.”

“What’s a bunch of blooming crockpots doing with a ship full of birds?” Chub smears a hand down his bacon face.

“Selling the feathers?” I ask, thinking of Catalina’s textile legacy and how they could sew the colorful feathers onto hats or sashes.

“The sailors do have to clean and bag the feathers, but the birds are also sold as pets to those in Europe. Fussy people will do anything to impress their friends,” Sabrina reports.

“Where can we house birds on Patricia’s Wish ? We can’t just stack their cages in the ship’s stores,” I say as I think aloud. “Maybe the most humane thing to do is release them…but where? Will they tire before they reach the shores?”

“Maybe Catalina can roast them,” Teeth replies with a wiggle of his eyebrows.

“Blimey,” Chub says as if he can’t believe his ears. He jumps out of his seat to wander around the room in disbelief. “Imagine keeping a noisy thing that shites all over your home just to impress some rich nutmegs. What’s next? Snakes in glass bottles?”

“Actually, snakes are kept in baskets,” says a voice from the doorway.

Hybris crosses the room to Teeth and offers his hand.

“Hybris Astor, heir to the Astor Imports and Exports, unlimited subsidiary to the East India Company, but the crew calls me Flint. I happen to be an expert on rich nutmegs with more money than sense.”

“Who’s this Molly, and how is he not tied to the ship’s bow with all the other useless figureheads?” Teeth laughs as he slaps Hybris’s hand away.

“He’s an irritant who was told to stay below deck…where he usually wastes his days,” Chub scolds, waving his hand to dismiss Hybris.

“A quick study is never a waste,” Hybris says, undeterred. My jaw drops when he pulls Chub’s vacated chair out further and straddles it. He has one of the captain’s logbooks in his hands. “I’ve read Magda’s notes, and Betts is approaching the prize just like she would. You see—"

Chub and Teeth’s raucous laughter cuts off Hybris midsentence.

Chub leans into Teeth, who wipes his eyes.

“Magda? That’s a name I’d hoped I would never hear again, but to hear you call her a navigation expert is worth the fright.

Don’t say her name twice, though, or she may materialize out of the boards.

She-devil couldn’t find a port from her arse, but that didn’t stop her from pointing the boat to her will.

Branko could sail and navigate. Problem was he didn’t know how to get his ideas past Magda. ”

“Can she really flow from the planks like mist if she’s called?

” Hybris’s face lights up as if he’d chant her name all night to summon her to the boat.

I hate how jealous I am of his obvious hero-worship of the former captain.

I’m just as much a captain as she was…and I don’t have a consort at my side with years of sailing experience to help me.

“No, ye nutmeg! She’s flesh and blood—”

“—Like the men she eats!” Chub and Teeth bust their chair and collapse in a heap of limbs and tentacles on the floor. My treacherous sister giggles behind her hand.

The men look to me to throw Hybris out, but my interest is piqued.

He’s been able to sort out Magda’s gibberish and visualize the plans.

He has to understand her to recognize why we’re sailing without the wind at our back.

And if Magda and Branko’s ship wasn’t shipshape, why did Chub have me spend so much time studying her journals?

Was it to learn how to play Captain instead of actually being one?

Guilt twists my guts for suspecting my closest friends—family, really—of setting me up for failure.

And to what end? It’s not like anyone else is vying for the job.

“What would you do, Teeth?” I ask when the laughter quiets.

“Don’t answer that,” Chub yells. “Your navigation was worse than Magda’s, but you added theater to convince the crew to go with it.

What made Magda’s captures brilliant wasn’t her sailing ability but her ability to convince everyone that she knew how to sail.

Betts doesn’t have the time to digest months of sailing under a captain who would shave your nutmegs for the hell of it.

She needs to learn to be something their boat fears more than their blasted birds’ shite. ”

“Part of the fear came from her attacking at night, right? That’s simple to do,” I think aloud.

“There was always an element of supernatural or spiritual, too,” Hybris replies. “Did the sailors seem to be God-fearing men or superstitious in any way?”

“Not to me—”

“Because you lured them to the railing with your dairy, love,” Teeth interrupts. “They had weekly services where a bald sailor with no metals and a cleft through his lip said grace. They also prayed between day and night watch, but those things aren’t out of the ordinary.”

“It’s not like I can dress up as some phantom atop a ghost ship anyway,” I reply with a sigh. “Ever since the governor wrote about Sam Black taking the Widah with such a stunt, the sailors aren’t scared of ghosts.”

“No, this must be something unique to them,” Hybris says, rubbing his chin.

“We can’t just copy Magda’s ideas because the sailors didn’t have the writings on pirates back then.

The pamphlets they circulated when Magda was captain were to scare the colonists so they wouldn’t trade with or befriend pirates.

That backfired. Now, the pamphlets are designed to discredit the stories that helped to elevate us into legends. ”

Many dangers lurk in the deep, like schools of sharks or… “What if they weren’t afraid of us? I mean…what if we rescued them from something truly terrifying?”

“What could be more terrifying than Magda?” Chub asks with a twinkle in his eye.

“Teeth, do you think you could tip that boat over? Not enough to capsize it, but enough to scare them?” His tentacles ripple with excitement at my proposal.

“He might not be able to alone,” Sabrina interjects. “But together, we can give them the ride of their lives.”

“The crew won’t be happy; they’re spoiling for a fight. And won’t the birdbrains suspect we’re flying under the black when we arrive with our floorboards discarded for cannons?”

“Well, put the floor back,” comments Sabrina with a hair flick.

“No, we can’t, and it’s all my fault—”

“Blasted puddinghead set the kitchen ablaze, baking hardtack in fancy dress!” Chub elbows Teeth as he rubs in Hybris’s mistake.

I wish the two would settle down. Hybris was about to take responsibility for something other than some woman’s orgasms. He could have shown real growth, but instead, the immature nutmegs at my feet made fun of it.

“Our main deck planks now reside in the kitchen,” I explain with a tired wave. “Whether we’re pirooting or sailing straight, we don’t have enough floorboards.”

“If you attack at night, they won’t see the missing floorboards until you’re too close to use the cannons,” Teeth says. “They will count their lucky stars you didn’t fire on them. If anything, the missing floor will make you seem kinder—”

“Or dumber,” Chub says with a chuckle. “You’ve got a point. I’ll have the crew secure the cannons and shot to the middle of the boat, so one doesn’t roll forward and accidentally open the cannon doors.”

“Maybe lay them sideways so they aren’t on wheels either,” Hybris adds.

“So that’s the plan?” Sabrina says to Betts. “Tomorrow night, Teeth and I will rock their boat and reveal our kraken nature. Patricia’s Wish will sail along broadside and—”

“Steal her planks for floorboards when they try to build a bridge between the two boats?” Teeth and Chub roll with laughter once again. I don’t know which nutmeg blurted out the comment to make Hybris blush. This time, Sabrina shares my eye-roll.

“Yes, we will also tie lines to her as if we’re her savior,” I add.

“That’s one role I know you can play,” Sabrina says with a bittersweet smile.