The Pirate King Ch. 22

Sorry for the long wait. I'm working more hours than I ever have in my life and focusing on other writing projects as I finish a novel. I haven't forgotten about you, nor do I find this any less important than other things in my life.

May you never find yourself becoming conditional. Write your own stories. Walk through doors that others can't even see. May your eternity sit just below your skin and frighten those who wish that you something that was less.

Peace. Love. Until next time.

***

It takes three doorways to stop a wraith.

Minnie taught me that. In the kitchen as my arms pulled at sparks and hers at dough she taught me how to protect myself with the mundanity of the world. With entranceways. Tunning water. Salt. Things found in kitchens and the cupboards of those of us that knew.

I knew. It takes three doorways to stop a wraith. Five for a ghost. Thirteen for a demon, but you'll need other things for that. Runes. Spells. Physical weapons. Salt can be used on it's own or in concordance, depending on what you're stopping. Salt from the sea for land creatures; salt from the mountains for denizens of the deep. I learned how to make fresh water look like rivers to things that could not stand them; I learned how to lay stones so as to confuse beings that did not understand solidity. But mostly, I learned about the protection that comes from thresholds. It takes fifteen doorways to stop a kelpie in human form. Twenty three when it appears as a steed. Seventeen doorways for a shade. Nineteen for a gyre.

How many doorways does it take to stop a god?

I walked until Ichor stopped dead, his soul unwilling to go further. Then I walked through two doorways more, blessing the way we built ships like mazes, wondering how many builders knew the reasons and how many did it because it simply was the the way ships were built. Because sailors refused to sail on anything else.

It's dangerous to live on open plans on open water; you need a maze. You need turns, and twists, and pathways. You need doorways that even the ocean can close and know they will stay shut.

The room I came to was empty but for barrels and I placed the Captain (was this still the Captain? Or was the Captain somewhere deep within the ocean, far from my arm, was he lost, was he cold and dark and in the gaze of eyes that narrowed to slits and skin that felt like sandpaper and teeth that - but no, no this was the Captain, it had to be the Captain) down in the middle of the room and moved barrels until there was symmetry. Balance. It was hard work and I enjoyed not having to think.

By the time it was finished Alan stood in the doorway.

I wordlessly accepted what he had brought me; salt, a small bottle of oil. A bowl and chunks of incense. A coal wrapped in palm leaves that smelled sharp and felt dull. A knife that was the opposite. Tools. Ingredients. To make what? Did we not already have all the power we needed? A cook, the ocean, and the sky, all held in a room deep within the bowels of a ship...

Alan watched me light the incense, then place it close enough to the doorway for him to reach. He would refill it as needed. Then I began pouring the salt, whispering the words that I knew, carrying the ocean close enough that the smoke in the room sank low and heavy.

I breathed it in and wished it could teach me to dissipate, to disperse. To sink. I wanted to give up my body that hurt so badly, that ached, that held a cold shell and would one day be a shell itself, I wanted to remember what it was like to be endless, eternal. I wanted to crash against another ship, than another. Why had I ever stopped my rampage? Why had I ever returned to this state, to this existence? To life? I was the ocean, I was the storms, I poured a line of salt around my body twined with the Captain's and watched it clump with the humidity of my need. I wanted to dissolve it. I wanted to turn it back to solid rock. I wanted to be a god.

I paused, the circle inches away from complete. The Captain's arm draped limply over mine and at the sight of it I felt a sound well up within my stomach that had nowhere to go and so I simply swallowed it back down. It sat in my stomach heavy like brine and I found myself pulling the Captain closer to me as if his presence would give me some measure of comfort, as if the simple fact that he still was in some form could calm me. Should calm me.

It did not.

Every place his body touched mine burned with the memory of his warmth. I heard his laughter; I closed my eyes and in the darkness behind my lids I saw his eyes, that dark gaze boring into me with an intensity that sent a shudder down my spine and forced a sob from my throat. It was as if he were there with me for the briefest of moments.

And then it was over and I was alone in the room, sitting in a nearly-completed circle of salt.

No, I thought. I do not want to be a god. Being a god still means I am alone. It still means I don't have him. I don't want to be eternal, or immortal, or endless; I just don't want to hurt anymore.

I sat for a long time in my own darkness, my eyes closed tight, seeking some last moment of him. Wishing he would come back to me for the briefest of seconds. But he was not here. I held him, yes, held his body in my arms, and still I was alone.

This was untenable. This could not be. I felt myself refusing this, touching the impossibility of it and when I tapped that knowledge, I broke apart.

This was a different breaking than the one that had caused the deaths of so many men in the past few hours, the one that had caused Dave to flee before me and storm clouds to live within my soul. Instead it was a slow dissolving, a particle by particle return of such completeness I had never before experienced. I dispersed myself among the seas and should have lost myself, should have forgotten how to be a single being for I was so many faceted, directional things at once except that each of those directional things each had the same singular focus; to find the Captain.

My anger, it dissolved. My fear, my loss, my grief. It dissolved. My love. It dissolved, and when I slipped under the waves any who tasted the salt in that moment would have tasted all of those things in sharp relief. The water was made dilute with me.

In that form I could not speak, or hear, or see, but I could taste in the way you know things change. And in this way I searched the ocean depths for him, sought the black pits that were Dave's home and at some point I tasted the slightest hint of love and it was my love, I knew that love I would know that love anywhere, and I followed that taste and then found more and felt it shift, tasted him understand I was there all around him in the waters among the darkness and the salt and the small, green things that fed the tiniest of fish and the largest of whales and I felt his laughter resonate within every particle of my being even as I tasted the way a god's fear slipped into the water all around us.

The Captain did not belong here. I knew it more in that moment than I had ever been able to understand, feeling his laughter through my endless, eternal being. He was not a creature of the deep and he never would be and it was wrong, it was ludicrous, it was a crack in the ocean letting in the night breeze and I felt myself begin to laugh with him as I imagined how Dave must feel to have such a being stand beside him and air out his underwater caverns and because I was so relieved to feel him there close enough to me to understand the fibers of his soul and god, all the gods in the universe did it hurt to know he was there and I was not.

I wanted to snatch him back there, to grab him and turn and go but I was too spread through the all of it and so I simply gathered my love around that place and felt the way the love, My Love, increased, tasted how his love was so dark and so strange to be here at the ocean floor and how the fear all around us was tinged with squid ink.

***

I never did finish the salt circle. I could not, with my soul spread around the world and deep within the depths of the sea, my body empty holding the empty body of my love. If Dave came for us, so be it. I would know. I was with him; I tasted him and he watched me.

Alan came and left, came and left. Natch might have come and sat with us one night; I do not know. I wasn't there. I didn't notice. Time ceased to exist. Direction became meaningless. All directions were the same to me; what else was there but North? So I needed to go, and so we went. I spoke it. It was Truth. I sat in the ocean, as the ocean, I held my love and was so close I could taste him, and I waited.

They told me later that it was three days. It felt like eternity. It felt like a blink. It felt like nothing but the ocean and a voice to keep the room filled with the words it required. Alan burned hair and incense and spilled blood. I floated in voices and myself and learned what my soul tasted like when entwined with another. I felt the Captain just on the other side of mine and promised him, again and again and again, that I was going to get him back.

Three days. It takes three days and twenty three doorways to hold a god at bay, and the whole of the ocean.

***

On what they told me was the third day Alan did not refill the incense. Instead he turned it over smartly and allowed gravity to flip its purpose, dumping ash on the floor. He helped it along with taps, tapping louder and louder until he gained my attention.

I felt like I was swimming through water as thin as smoke, or perhaps as thick as it. I felt like I was breathing air and I should be breathing fluid. I felt upside down and and knew that I would not be returned my rightful place until the body in my arms again held breath.

"We're here," Alan said simply. And then he left.

I sat with those words for a long time. They swam around me, schools of brightly colored fish, shimmering and perhaps not as tangible as they looked or perhaps entirely more so. I watched them for what felt like years. Was I not already here? Was I not with my love, deep within the sea, particle for particle and soul for soul?

It was the burn of the volcano that brought me back. How long had it been since this place had threatened to make me nothing but flesh and bone? It tasted acrid, the fumes forever in the air and when they filtered down through three days of spells and twenty-three doorways, when they finally reached me through the thickness and the maze I had created the fish dropped to the floor and flopped in air suddenly far too thin for the suspension of bodies or belief.

My soul rushed back to my body with alarming speed. I tasted the briefest flicker of something as I was torn away - worry not, worry not, I am coming in such a more tangible way, and yet I could not say the words through my own keening loss - and then I was back in my body, disoriented, confined. Alone.

In the North.

We were here. I breathed in the air deep and let the burn pull my lungs inward. Felt how that sat familiar in my chest, how it ran up against memory and warnings.

How long, how long, and how many times since then had I looked North and thought; I will never go back?

The Captain. It was he, even still, crashing impossibilities down on my head like stars from the sky and I could almost hear his laugh as I sat threatened by the weight of it all, could almost hear him make fun of me for my seriousness but there was no laugh, there was no chide as I gathered the Captain close to my chest and stood. There was only silence. Silence, an unfinished circle of salt, and tattered remnants of spells.

They wouldn't last much longer, those protections Cookie had laid during my dissolution. They were things of the sea. Creations of the cool and wet and the lazy, dry air was deflating them, evaporating them.

No matter, I thought. Even Dave would not dare set foot here. She'd kill him. She'll kill you, Alan's voice rose on a sudden draft of heat. I paid it no heed. I think I thought I was already dead. I know I did not feel alive.

When I emerged on deck, carrying the Captain's body (The Captain, I reminded myself. This was the Captain) Alan was waiting.

"We've got company," he told me.

I squinted against the bright light of the day, scouring the deck for the shadow I was sure would materialize. But Alan instead pointed out across the bow to water that should be open, unoccupied. I followed his finger, unsure what I would find besides shoals and crashing sea. We were alone here, at least above the sea. Of course we were alone.

When I had tied Miranda to this isle I had decreed that no man would ever set foot here again. How many would desire to come and use her for her power, to steal her knowledge? How many would try to kill her for the audacity she had to simply exist as a being more powerful than they? Men are cruel, and fickle, and hate women for daring to believe that they are even equal and Miranda, Miranda was far more than any man's equal. Men feared her. They hated her. They wanted her dead.

The first two weeks she was on the island, I destroyed fifteen ships. After that, no one dared disobey my order.

I stared at the small fleet that bobbed and swayed near the shore before me and wondered, the briefest of concerns, if perhaps this was Dreyfus's doing. His desire to kill all Kings come before him. His hatred of his family so deep, so instilled, there can only be one, when the strongest remains you shall have a seat at my table, but no these ships flew no flags and what did it matter if they did? I stared at the ships and found myself unable to draw any sort of rage, any sort of emotion. I had left it all beneath the sea.

I turned back to Alan. "Are we within distance of the shore?"

"If you're swimming, yes."

Natch was approaching us, his face looking older than I remembered. More tired. I watched him walk towards me and wondered if it was possible for the ocean to make things stronger, or if it was my fate to watch every thing I loved slowly break down at my embrace.

"We can't get closer," he started, but my hand was already up to cut off his words.

"This is close enough," Alan told him for me. "He'll put in here."

Natch nodded. Sometime in the last three days the authority he felt in me must have extended to the cook. As it should be, a part of me thought. I'm sorry, the rest of me keened.

"I'll go with you," Natch volunteered, but Alan took hold of the back of his shirt before he could take any further steps.

"Nay, lad. You won't." Natch turned back to him, affronted, but Alan continued before he could protest. "You wonder why all those ships are as far out as we are? They don't want to die. The witch on that island will turn us all to ash."

"But Ghost -"

"Ghost has taken her before." Alan met my eyes, his concern clear. He knew I had bested Miranda on the sea, that I had taken her in her sleep, that she had been exhausted after killing so many others and possibly not in her right mind while I had been well rested and able to think more clearly. That I'd had Val. I'd had Dreyfus. I'd had the whole of the ocean and a ship's crew at my side.

Natch looked between us. He was not a man easily fooled. He read faces better than most, and situations even better. His eyes were sharp. His face was set. When he spoke, his voice was wet and damp and it had to crawl its way through the dry air to land at my feet. "How long should we wait?"

I understood his question. "If I die," I told them simply, "leave."

"How will we know?"

"Lad," Alan said. "We'll know."

Natch cast his eyes over the seas and chewed on his lip.

"She'll be stronger," Alan warned me. "Time's nothin' but a friend to her."

"I know." I nodded towards the ships, bobbing on the horizon. Disobeying me. "Kill them."

And then I gathered the Captain close and stepped off the side of the ship.

***

Natch did not bother to watch the large man disappear over the side. Or rather, he couldn't bear to watch; he stomach was eating itself at the thought of losing not just the Captain but his friend, his protector, the man he had come to rely on in the past few days as the direction for the ship and the men aboard it. He knew what that would mean. He knew that would leave him in charge, in the depths of the North, on a ship stolen from the King with a crew splintered by fear anchored next to an island he knew nothing about and did not exist on any map he'd ever seen.

He scrubbed his hands over his face, feeling the effects of two days without shaving on his palms. "Gods," he said, and it was as much as plea as a curse. "Please let this work."

"I wouldn't rely on the gods, lad." Natch raised his head to see the small cook frown out over the waves. "Have you got a plan for them there ships?"

He followed the cook's gaze. "Ghost was serious."

It had not been a question as much a delirious statement. Cookie still answered it. "I don't think he knows how not to be."

"Fuck." Natch counted at least five ships. "We don't have the men to take them all down." He thought of the headlong tumble of storms they had smashed through; he thought of the kraken, rising up and striking indiscriminately; he thought of the way he had seen mist take the shape of men and strike down the living; he thought, most of all, how all of felt like nothing compared to the death of his Captain. The world had turned upside down. His men were lost and no maps in the world could help with this. "Or the morale," he added.

"Morale, that's your job. Everything else?" Cookie sighed, a deep sound that pushed the air away from his lungs. It made a space for his words. "I might be able to do something about that." He looked up at Natch, a scowl spreading across his face. "Just between you and me, you hear? And nothin' fancy, just a small spell or two."

"Spell."

"Aye. Have you not been payin' attention?" Cookie turned his scowl towards the ships. "Doubt they have any protections up, tho' if they be attacking this place..." He trailed off.

Natch had been paying attention. He had been paying very, very close attention. He looked at the small man, framed in the dying sun, and thought about the kraken, the mist, the storms. He thought about how much of that had been the man that had just leapt into the sea. He thought about how much very well may not have been.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Lad." The cook stared out across the waves. He paused for a long time and Natch thought that perhaps some great knowledge was going to be imparted on him, some secret that he was no longer sure that he wanted to know. When the cook finally turned Natch swallowed to meet his eyes, so heavy with import.

"I'm the cook," he told him. He put equal weight on every word, and Natch felt each one attach to his chin and drag his head down in a nod.

As he watched Cookie walk away from him, light bouncing off his shoulders, Natch could not help but think how at home he would look at the helm of a ship. He held that thought in his mind as Cookie crossed the deck, until the small man hunched his shoulders, shook off the light of the sun into a small puddle on the deck, and descended back into the dark.

***

The swim was the hardest I had ever done.

I've done longer swims. I've done longer swims with heavier loads, with men clinging to me and the sea chopping at my arms, pulling at my legs, with debris floating around me and threatening the integrity of my body. I've done swims with merfolk who sang and lured and I've done swims with kelpies who attacked and I had to fend off hooves and knives while holding my breath and protecting my oxygen.

Nothing compared to those few hundred meters, carrying the Captain on my back.

My body had been neglected for three days and it protested, groaning and cramping as it reminded again and again that vessels need water, food. Stretching. But I had been through worse, the mines had seen longer stretches of days without and so I knew how to push on and besides, I had the Captain, I could do anything for the Captain, a part of me could still feel him trapped beneath the waves in the wrong kind of darkness with a man who was not me...