Steel

Read spotted her before Jill was ready to be spotted. She’d hoped to sneak up on her, come obliquely along the wall, maybe clear her throat to startle her, or tap her shoulder—though that might have gotten her punched, in hindsight. Instead, Read looked over, as if she spotted Jill from the corner of her eye. As if she’d been waiting.

“Hey now, what have we got here?” Read announced, drawing the attention of the ragged, drunken bunch of pirates around her. Jill glanced at them, daring them to laugh at her, which they did. She glared.

“You’re Marjory’s new little pet, ain’t you?” Read said. Her accent was thick, some brand of English Jill couldn’t identify. “Has she sent you on some errand then?”

“No,” Jill said. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

Read raised a brow, as if surprised—maybe even impressed. Jill could hope. Read waved to a man, who handed over his mug of beer, and she passed it to Jill. Jill didn’t want to drink; she didn’t want to get muzzy headed. But she took it to be polite.

Here it went, then.

“I’m looking for Edmund Blane,” she said.

“You and everyone else,” Read said, looking away, taking a drink.

“I want to meet him.”

“Why would you want to do that? Do you know what he’s like?”

“No, not really. Just that Captain Cooper hates him. But he may be the only one who can help me.”

“And why do you need help? Other than the fact that you’re a wee lass who’s fallen in with pirates. And how did that happen?”

It would take too long to explain, and Read wouldn’t believe her anyway, so Jill just shook her head.

“Ah yes, that’s what I thought. Too complicated, it always is. Which ought to make it simple but it doesn’t.”

“How did you fall in with pirates?” Jill asked, wary, ready to run if the question made Read angry and she drew the short, stout cutlass at her belt, or one of the three pistols slung in a brace across her chest. Not that Jill was getting paranoid.

Read smiled into her beer. “It starts with putting on breeches and cutting your hair. Then you run away and join the army in secret. Then you think maybe you’ll try a normal life—get married, find a respectable trade. And then your husband dies on you, so you go back to what you know best. You sign on to a ship and get captured by pirates and decide you like that best of all. Pirates are more forgiving than fathers, ain’t they?”

Not her father, Jill thought with a pang, sure that he thought that she’d drowned long ago. Her parents and siblings surely thought her long gone. And there were all those times she’d been so wrapped up in the rest of her life she’d barely paid attention to them. She shouldn’t have argued about going to the beach.

Jill couldn’t tell if Read was drunk or not. She smelled of beer, but that may have been the rest of the room. The pirate studied her surroundings with a wary gaze, ready for action in a moment.

“But look at you,” Read said. “You can’t be all that green. You’ve seen action, eh?” She pointed to the bandage, still damp and stained from her swim, wrapped around Jill’s bicep.

“It’s just a cut.”

“A battle scar’s good enough to get you respect in this crowd,” Read said. “Ah, but lose a leg, that’ll really put folks in awe of you.”

“I’d rather not.”

Read chuckled.

Jill looked around, she hoped without seeming like she was, which probably didn’t help at all with the attitude that she was supposed to be projecting. She tried to follow Henry’s advice, to carry herself like she deserved to hold a rapier, but she was afraid she only appeared awkward.

Some of the crowd she recognized from the afternoon, which meant they’d been here most of the day. There were new faces as well. It was hard to keep them all straight.

“Where are your friends?” Jill asked Read.

“Who, Jack and Anne? Don’t tell me I have to explain that to you?” Read said.

“Ah. No,” Jill said quickly.

“You didn’t actually think you’d find Blane here, did you?” Read asked.

“No,” Jill said, frowning. “But I don’t know where else to start looking for him.”