I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
?T.S. Eliot
WHEN SILVERFIN CAME TO, it was to find himself very uncivilly shackled to a piece of biped furniture in what appeared to be someone’s residence. He could not be sure, having never been in a biped’s lair before. He could tell that they were still on land, and therefore the pirate had not dragged him back to theOrca. As for the pirate himself, he was nowhere to be found.
“That isn’t very sporting,” Silverfin muttered and decided to use this alone time to get better acquainted with his new “legs.”
He pulled his knees in, one a time, until they made undulating hills for him to marvel at. He straightened them out, followed that maneuver by splaying them open, then wider and wider until it made something else in between his legs pull painfully and caused him to slam them back shut.
“Yowza!” he squealed and shoved his unfettered hand down his breeches to see what had felt so uncomfortably yanked during his experimental acrobatics. There was his third leg, as Mara called it, lying like a dormant moray eel against his thigh, and below it something else that lay heavy and pendulous in the palm of his hand. He gently rolled the wrinkly, round objects inhis fingers, and discovered the sensation not at all unpleasant. “Huh!” he pronounced.
“Oh, for fuck’s sakes,” Hawk’s voice announced his arrival, followed by the slamming of the door. “Can’t leave you in here for ten bloody minutes without finding you doing something vile.”
“Vile? What am I doing?” Silverfin pulled his hand out of his breeches and gave Hawk what he hoped was a friendly wave. Did his Pirate King have a pair of those bouncy things in between his own legs? He had to wonder if they would have the same beautiful freckles as Hawk’s nose.
“That’s between you and your god, I’m sure,” the pirate frowned, leaning against a heavy desk. “Now, you and I are going to have a little talk, if you don’t mind.”
“Where am I?” Silverfin asked, still studying his strange surroundings.
“You don’t understand. I am the one who’s going to be askingyouquestions. And then,” Hawk pushed himself off the desk and leaned over Silverfin's crouched form, “if I don’t like your answers, I am going to kill you and feed you to the fishes.”
“You know, most fish would rather eat plankton. Well except sharks, because sharks are assholes. But it’s really the bottom dwellers who eat carcasses. Then again, they’d eat mostly anything...”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Hawk shook his head with an air of exasperation.
“Where the hell did you come from?” the pirate growled at him.
“Tortuga?”
“You don’t sound certain. Come to think of it, you don’t sound French.”
“I could sound more French if that would please you?Voulez-vous?”
The way Hawk was looking at him was not what Silverfin had anticipated when he thought he was at his most giving and charming.
“Fine,” the pirate finally dismissed whatever thoughts he had been having. “How do you know about theEstrela?”
This was becoming more difficult. Silverfin figured he had thought of everything, but he had certainly not planned for this interrogation. He couldn’t very well tell the Pirate King that all merfolk knew about the Portuguese galleons without betraying his kin. Then he’d have to worry about two people trying to kill him: HawkandMara. Not to mention, the giant tide that Mami Wata would likely have to send to drown all of Port Royal to keep their secret.
“A man had a schedule.”
“What man? Where’s the schedule?”
So many questions! Good gods! It was exhausting having to think up so many elaborate lies on the spot.
“He was a stowaway on a ship. He had stolen a schedule and I stole it from him.”
“Let me have it,” Hawk demanded again.
“I... can’t...” It looked like the pirate was rearing up to hit him again. That wasn’t the physical contact Silverfin had wanted when he had bartered his beautiful hair for a pair of dangly bits and legs. “It’s in my head!” he exclaimed in growing desperation. “I had to destroy it, so I memorized it! If you keep hitting me, it might just shake right out of my brain, and then where will we two be? Without treasure, that’s where.”
“You ass,” Hawk groused and slammed his fist against the table.
At that moment, the door slid open again, and a strangely familiar face slipped into the room.
