Page 56 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“If he returns—if anyone at all comes—will you promise to wake me no matter how tired I look?”

“On me mother’s grave,” he agreed solemnly, and Maggie’s heart broke just a little. Were all pirates deep down just a pack of lost, motherless boys trying to find their way home?

“D’you think them things’ll really work?” Langley asked her.

“Yes,” she said confidently, instead of the desperate I hope so she felt inside.

The leech in question, however, had swollen to about three times its original size and rolled itself onto Bash’s cheek. His ear was already beginning to swell with blood once more.

“That one’s done, I think,” she said, picking it up and dropping it into an empty jar before selecting a new one to continue draining away the awful mess.

“Always gave me the willies, leeches,” Langley said with a shiver. “But if they save Nav’s ear, I reckon they’re all right in my book. Even if it is a bit of witchy stuff.”

“It’s not sorcery, it’s science,” she said.

“You sound like him. How d’you know so much about doctoring anyway?” he asked, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“My cousin’s a physician and the smartest person I know.”

“Why not follow his footsteps, then? Be a prentice ’stead of running away to sea?”

Maggie had never once in her life thought about trying to emulate Jory or imagined she’d be any good at it if she tried. After all, she hadn’t even been able to properly care for Jeremiah when he was well. Complaining about the leaky roof made him climb up on the fool thing in a lightning storm. And come to think of it, Bash wouldn’t need her help now if she hadn’t announced to God and everybody that she’d seen the damned ship, igniting the fervor of both captain and crew.

She’d opened her big mouth like always, and now she had to make it right.

“I don’t have the temperament for it,” she told Langley honestly. “And I wanted an adventure. To prove myself away from home.”

Langley shook his head. “Reckon you got more than you bargained for, then.”

And wasn’t that the truth?

“Did you at least find what you were after over there?” she asked, hardly daring to hope.

“Christ, no,” he almost laughed. “It were naught but pigeons and one crazy old man. The ship weren’t even in good enough shape for Dutch to claim it. Shame, too,” he said dreamily. “He’d make a good skipper, him. You saw how even the Butcher listened to him. There’s not many alive’d dare cross our Dutch.”

“How long have you sailed with them?” Maggie asked.

“Five years, since I were your age. I worked on a merchant ship they took, and they gived me the choice of stay and drown or join the crew. Easy choice.” He grinned.

Easy choice indeed.

“Ain’t been all bad. Nav’s been good to me. Food’s better, too, and the rum’s endless.” He shrugged. “Used to be endless.”

Maggie smiled.

“Speaking of, I’m a bit dry. D’you want some ale?” he asked, before disappearing to the galley for two tankards.

Maggie looked down at Bash and squeezed his hand. When he awoke, he’d be glad she was drinking at least.

And he would wake, because Maggie refused to live in a world in which he didn’t. Ridiculous though it may sound, he was the best friend she’d ever had, and even if it meant becoming a real pirate and spending the rest of her days in disguise, she wanted to do whatever it would take to be near him, to continue to know him.

Maybe she had always been destined to become a pirate, seeing as how she had no real skills to recommend her as a lady. She knew, theoretically, how to do a great many things, but she always managed to bungle the execution. And though he was a rough-and-tumble sailor—with a dark past and no real prospects for the future—somehow they fit, like two halves of a coin, like a sail and the wind, as though together they were enough to take on the whole world.

It would be madness to allow a friendship like that to sail away and become nothing more than a watermark upon her history.

So yes. He would get better, even if she had to drag the whole ship to Jory back in Edinburgh, rowing the oars herself the whole way home.

Bash was floating on a cloud of pain, disconnected from space and time, trying his hardest to sever awareness from his physical self as Dutch had once taught him to do. But each time his eyes fluttered open, nothing quite made sense—not where he was, not why the world sounded muffled and underwater, not the fire burning his head and down his spine.