“You put me at a . . . disadvantage, sir,” the man managed, after two attempts at speech, both equally exhausting.
To which Rusk replied: “You’d seem to’ve done that yourself, already, given where I find ye.” Continuing, as the man arched a fine-cut brow: “We’ve searched this whole brig and found nothing t’ warrant our investment, save for rats, rot—and one prisoner. Might such an estimation be correct?”
“Having not seen the rest of this ship since they . . . brought me aboard, I . . . couldn’t possibly say.”
“Well. And what am I t’do with you, then, exactly?”
The man snorted, setting himself off once more. Then snapped back, nonetheless, far too haughtily for any ordinary prisoner: “As you please, I’m sure! I obviously can’t prevent it.”
A bit too sharp to count as showing proper respect, though since Rusk could only assume the po
or bastard was in pain, he forgave it. Yet here the captain felt his own eyebrows hike, fast as sparks striking from cold flint, and peered closer, suddenly aware how that shadow the man was trying to hide beneath his close-held blanket was, in fact, the rim of a collar—cold iron over puffed scar, with portions of it adhering yet to the sadly tormented skin below.
A wizard, Rusk thought. They’d meant him for Admiralty justice, obviously—been taking him on to the next lawful port, where he’d be burnt or hanged, or both.
The man did not seem to notice; he was deep-engaged in trying not to cough again, pale face flush-blotched with sudden, indignant scarlet. But looked up again nonetheless, when Rusk told him—“You interest me, ‘sir.’”
“I . . . do not mean to,” the man replied, regaining some sense of caution.
“No, y’wouldn’t, and yet—maybe I’ve not wasted my men’s time entirely, in playing out this lark. For any prize comes wi’ a man-witch already netted in its hold is one well worth the taking.”
Quick-touched by Rusk’s implication, the man perhaps wished to say more—opened his prim mouth to, at least, baring teeth like a cat, a harbinger of equal-sharp words to come. But even as passion undid his better judgment, sheer sickness overtook the rest; those pale eyes rolled up and he fell forwards, into Rusk’s arms.
Frail, and slim, and steely. The man smelled ill after his captivity, but Rusk wondered what lay under that. His cabin had a tub, liberated from some Moghul vessel and sold in the marketplace on Veritay Island, back near where his kin had slave-holdings; to fill it with hot water would take more effort than simply sluicing the man with a bucket of brine, but it wasn’t as though Rusk had so much to do that he could entirely discard the notion of entertainment.
So: “Bo’sun,” he called back, through the open door. “Them as takes the Articles may come along; kill the rest, then scuttle her. And make ready t’ cast off sharpish, in good time, that the Bitch not grow restless.”
“Yes, Cap’n.”
With that, Rusk hoisted his newest personal possession high, and left—a bad choice, as it turned out, but he wasn’t to know. Not that such foreknowledge ever stopped him, anyhow.
For we must do as our natures dictate, seeing we cannot do otherwise, he would think, much later. And conjure up the bitter memory of a smile on lost lips, so ghostly now—so rendered down by time, along with various other complaints—that he found he only barely remembered just what such an expression should feel like.
***
Rusk had seen sorcerers aplenty in his time—they were in no short supply out here, on the very rim of all civilized things, where prejudices of both King and Church held so little popular account: not so much feared as coveted, though treated with the same caution one would accord any other exotic beast. Yet never before had he encountered one collared, which proclaimed that the main error of this man currently still insensibly a-toss in his bed had resided in trying to hide what he was in plain sight, by joining one of the primary institutions which hunted his kind out most effectively.
“Jerusalem Parry, that’s ‘is name,” one of the new recruits offered, when quizzed on particulars. “Ensign, ‘e was, mobbed in at Portsmouth. Comes from some bloody smuggler’s hole in Cornwall, set up smack in the middle of a marsh; well-learnt, too, in all manner of books and languages. ‘E’d’ve made a parson, if the local squire ‘adn’t ruled his mother be ‘ung for . . . you know.”
“Whoredom? Theft?”
A circumspect look, like the recruit expected to find Parry standing in the shadows, listening. “No, though there might’ve been some of that, too; the . . . same as ‘im, they do say.”
Rusk understood the man’s implication well enough, though from what-all he’d seen, blood seldom told quite as indubitably as most fools seemed to think, in that way. Christ knew, there’d been a scandal of the same sort ‘round old Judas Rusk, his clan’s progenitor, born fatherless in the Witch-House at Eye, in old Scotland, with his dam already Fire-bound. There were tales on how, in every generation since, some Rusk woman (or, far less frequently, man) would be able to raise storms or read minds, blast with a word and tame with a touch, dream the future—and he himself had seen it happen so, though never on the white-skinned side of things. Yet if such tricks truly lingered in his own veins, Rusk couldn’t claim a shred of proof for it; his primary skills lay in sailcraft and slaughter, qualities which had gained him his ship Bitch of Hell, amongst other things . . . young Master Parry, most lately, very much included.
The man in question stayed insensible ‘til a week on, however, when he puked blood, and the chirurgeon gave him up. “Iron-poisoned and sick with it, unto the very death: he’ll not survive without help of a sort plain human men can’t give. This wizard of yours is doomed, Captain.”
Moments after, the drunken sawbones dispatched back to his own place, Rusk stood staring down at this fever-thrashing by-blow of uncanniness he’d thought to make a pet of, cursing himself a fool. Thinking: Were this a woman, you’d’ve had her already five times over, consequences be damned; hell, put to port, nursed her healthy, and forced the bitch’s hand in marriage if you wanted, or not . . .
(The very idea of which, snake-striking him from the side—some neat spinster, hands folded prim over skirts, staring up at him under her lashes with Parry’s same moon-eyes and finding him wanting, contempt immediate as lust—was enough to stick him in some vital point, and twist.)
All right, then.
Rusk put both hands on either side of Parry’s throat, feeling for the collar’s seam with his palms spanning jaw to collarbones, one rough thumb grazing the clavicle. Parry strained that odd gaze of his open, squinted to focus, demanding: “What is’t you . . . do here, sir? What . . . are y’about?”
“Your freedom, man-witch. Now shut that pretty mouth, and let me t’my work.”
“I will thank you not to . . . use such terms with me—”