So different, this sport, from any he’d experienced thus far: Clione Attesee was God’s own gift, a lady born, all-observing, passionate and discreet, whose hungers and interests matched his own. Though surely innocent as he’d once been, she had no modesty, and no seeming need of any. Parry felt himself swept away, fast and sure as he’d ever been while pinned in Rusk’s arms, but without the sour accompanying tang of defeat, the total ruinous overthrow. Instead, he was allowed to set his pace in tidal fashion, their joining never quite complete and never entirely over. Great waves crashed then split apart, gathering themselves for a fresh crescendo, with everything in between rendered hot and salt and sweet, so all-encompassing he could never be entirely sure whether he had actually spent at any point, or no. Though neither did it truly seem to matter, overmuch . . .
“So many books, Captain Parry,” she observed, leaning in from above, so that her hair fell to curtain them both. “Have you really read them all?”
“Many times. For there is always far too much gold and jewelry on these ships we take, and never enough new literary matter.”
“Ah, is your hold quite stuffed with treasure, then?”
“Like as much. I do not concern myself with its reckoning—that job goes to my ship’s purser, with the bo’sun watching over. But I somewhat doubt these bastards would resign themselves to my command if they were not paid for it, and plentifully.”
“I do not see how anyone could hate you, Captain, for all your prickliness, or the terror of your reputation. Though I can well see now why Captain Rusk wanted you kept chained to him, beyond mere utility.”
This was a note he’d not heard in her voice, before—coolly assessing, older than she seemed—and Parry stiffened at the sound of it, eyes skittering to where Rusk’s ghost leant against the wall, alternately watchful and sulking, but increasingly frustrated by his own inability to join in.
“You . . . know? What passed between us?”
“Yes, of course.” She touched his scar, lightly stroking balm into the contorted tissues. “I can see it, the closer we draw together. What you feel, when you think on him—and what he feels, too, thinking on you.”
“But how?”
She shook her head. “I cannot tell. A voice seems to whisper it from the walls, or the planks below.”
At that very moment, the Salina juddered under them, for all the world like some great creature twitching in its sleep, a dog whose back legs kick when it senses its name being uttered. Parry looked at her, a bit wonderingly, and asked: “Are you a witch, too, then? Like my mother, or myself?”
“They called you wizard whenever I was told your tale, previously.”
“‘Tis all the same, or almost so. ‘Man-witch,’ Rusk called me, whenever he wished to tweak my pride—but there is no insult in truth. Cold iron burns me, and I bear the scars to prove it.”
“Yes,” she said, gently touching his collar’s print once more—
then leant in, impulsively, to lay a small kiss upon it also, so sweet it set his sore head ringing. “Did she have such eyes as yours, your mother?”
“Aye, these I get from her, along with my craft. Of the rest, I know not exactly who to credit—only that the man I should, by rights, call father was some ‘man of parts’ who could not think of paying for my upkeep, or saving her the noose.”
“To see your mother hanged . . . oh, Captain. I am sorry.”
“Most witches end so, madam, at least where England reigns. Had she been Scots instead of Cornish, ‘twould have been the fire before, not after.”
“And yet she named you for the City of God.”
Parry paused, breath shortening. “She was . . . not an educated woman, by any means,” he said, finally. And counted himself grateful when Clione pulled him down with her, rolling them both so that he could take the upper hand, drowning himself in her again.
They were sweating hard by the time they pulled apart once more, panting, and Parry saw her eyes travel back to where Rusk lurked. “How he scowls at us, now!” she exclaimed, with a sort of triumph. “Yet it only serves him right, and he knows it; he lost whatever chance he might have had to turn your hate to something softer long before you used him to scrape the ship clean. What an infamous fellow! He burns to have you still, were it only possible. But we shall confound him of that base desire, you and I—shall we not, Captain Parry?”
“Yes, with the world’s best will. And you may make free to call me Jerusalem, Miss Attesee—Clione—if it please you.”
“Oh, it does, Jerusalem . . . yes, there, please! It does, very much, indeed.”
Fireworks came and went behind his eyes, then, a shower of red-tinged silver bright as his own gaze’s reflection when briefly glimpsed in hers. Midst-caught, Parry thought he saw those eyes change—their pupils slide sidelong, opening like a cuttlefish’s, even as her hips slipped, knees gone triple-jointed, twining ‘round his legs like two fishtail tentacles. While the inside of her grew scaled and stringent, scraping him tip to root, leaving her mark forever.
Mine, he thought, incoherently. All blissful-unaware, at the time, how he’d traded ownership of one kind for one of another.
What followed in this maelstrom’s spindrift, however, was pleasure piled on pleasure: laxity, satiation, a deep and pleasant slumber, and for once blessedly dreamless . . .
. . . but only to a point.
***
As the ship’s bells rang midnight, Parry came to, opening his mind’s eyes only to find himself already meshed tight in memory’s toils: later in that first bout of “sport” after his initial defilement, with Rusk still at him like a rat with cheese. Tugging at the man’s mane hard enough to rip scalp and hoping it hurt, as he complained: “Christ, leave off—leave off, did you hear me? What possible pleasure could you get from—”