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“Hardly. There was a Wizard, some years back. He favored me with a change of costume.” She scratched at the tops of her blue wings with a lazy claw.
“Ain’t there always a Wizard, though? Bloody menace, if you ask me. No one cares for the likes of us freaks, but a whole stinking heap of us never caused the trouble of one Wizard in an ever-damned tower.”
I thumped my tail in sympathy, but Turkshead leered at her and gnashed his teeth. I stroked his bald head to calm him—just like a pup my Turkshead is, can’t stand the smell of a stranger. I traced circles on his painted pate as Turkshead moaned in pleasure. “So, pray tell, Lady Menagerie, how did you come by a ship as big as all this? A captain all by yourself and no one stabbing you in the heart in the depths of night to steal it?”
The beast-maiden swung lightly down from the upper deck and fixed her amber eyes on me. She moved faster with those mixed-up limbs than I would have thought.
“If I tell you the tale, will you buy passage on my ship, and look nowhere else? I’m hungry as a whelp without a dam, and I’d be glad of the wage.”
I gripped her hand in mine straightaway, flippers on claws—no one else would have taken us, anyhow. “Aye, that I will.”
“Well, then. Just as there is always a Wizard, there is always a hero ready to rescue a pretty girl—and some do think me pretty, strange as it seems. But that’s not important. My life didn’t begin, in truth, until I came to Muireann…”
BEING A MAIDEN, YOU SEE, IS NOT QUITE THE SAME as being alive.
It is more like being a statue. The main skill of a maiden is to stand very still and look very beautiful. Even when I was a captive, I did little more than sit on my wooden stool and try not to cry. I was nothing; I did nothing. Not until I rode on the back of a red Beast through the ramshackle gate of Muireann did I ever take a step or utter a word that was not planned out for me by folk in black robes—whether those robes were those of parents or wizards, it didn’t matter much.
But Beast, kind as he was, could do little more than leave me at the pier and suggest to the townsfolk that I might be a fair hand at sail-mending, or deck-swabbing, if one of them were to take me on. The throng of Muireanners stood stock-still in terror of the scarlet demon that had carried me to them, and a few nodded dumbly, praying only that he would leave, so that they could forget him all the sooner. Beast
nibbled my ear with affection, and trotted off back to his Marsh and his King.
When he had gone, the crowd spat on me, and knocked me to the ground. They cut the webbing between my toes and half sawed my tail from my body. They would have broken my wings if they could have managed it, but I am no little bluebird in the hands of a child. My bones are strong, and they held. I was left bleeding and broken on the docks while they went laughing into their ships’ holds for dinner, and night was coming on. What was I to do? All I knew, after all those years in my Tower, was how to stay very still so that people could look at me.
And so I lay there, utterly still, under the stars like chips of ice, until they came. I must have fallen asleep on the cold stones, for I awoke to a hand clamped over my mouth and a toothy hiss in my ear:
“Hush now, precious. Hush now.” The voice’s owner dragged me up into its arms like a cat snatching the scruff of her kitten’s neck. In a whirl of shuffling feet, foul breath, and foul murmurings, I was carried to a creaking ship and lashed to the mizzenmast.
“Well, my mixed-up girl, you wanted to serve on a ship—I promise you’ll serve now.” The voice that had hissed in my ear on the docks belonged to a high-cheeked captain in a hat festooned with threadbare blue feathers and worn velvet. He was handsome as a duke—save that when he smiled his mouth was full of rotted teeth, yellow as a decrepit old wolf’s.
“Now,” he said, “we’re going to sell you off at one southern port or another—if the mummers won’t take you and the slavers won’t take you, the fur traders will, and if they won’t the meat markets will. But in the meantime you can put those mismatched parts to work scrubbing this ship splinter by splinter.” He grinned, and tipped his hat. “And, well, it’s a long voyage south. After a few weeks, you’ll look downright fetching, and really, you’re not bad from the chin up.”
I looked up at him and my mouth watered behind my gag. I coughed politely, to let him know I wished to speak, and he obligingly removed the filthy rag. I made my voice as sweet and flutelike as a princess can. “You needn’t sell me. I can be useful, and I won’t fight you, or your men.”
The Captain shrugged and stood straight, brushing the knees of his breeches clean. “This is what piracy is. If we took you willing, what kind of pirates would we be? You can be sweet and yielding as the first cream of the season with me, but try to put on a good scream for my boys. It keeps morale up.”
I could not scrub the decks. My deer’s legs would not bend, and my frog’s feet slipped on the deck. I stumbled and fell, and a smart punch to the side would answer my clumsiness. I forgot, as the days went by, that I was a maiden, and then I forgot what a maiden was. The Captain told me each morning that he would expect me in his chamber that night; he told me each night that I was too repulsive for his taste, but “less ugly than you were yesterday, and uglier than you will be tomorrow.”
One night, the crew was drunk on their last rations of rum, and they hauled me to their quarters. I remembered to scream. They jeered like jackals and pelted me with slaps and blows, until one of them thought it would be a fine trick to cut off my hair.
“We’ll make her a real deckhand,” he said, laughing raucously, “and no one goes to sea with a head of yellow curls! Cut it off!”
He came behind me and gathered up my hair in his hands, my dragonfly wings fluttering in panic at the ends of the strands. Drawing his short blade, he sawed through the yellow locks, planting a slurping kiss on my bare neck.
I did not know what would happen, I swear I did not. He cut my hair, yes, but instead of silky curls falling to the floor, blood began to sheet from the severed ends as though he had cut into my heart, and my wings buzzed so loudly I could hardly hear the men’s cries of terror and disgust. They backed away from me, staring, as blood soaked my shirt and the secondhand trousers they had found in a dead sailor’s trunk.
I stumbled to my feet, my vision a red blur. I felt very strange, as though all the creatures that had gone into my misshapen body were waking up, clawing for purchase on my soul. The wolf and the stag and the tiger and the bear, the frog and the dragonfly and the fish—all their many-colored voices begged to be heard, who had never so much as whispered before. My flesh was filled with howling, howling and baying and croaking and crying, roaring and shrieking, so much shrieking, like broken flutes thrown against a stone floor.
The wolf leapt first, I think, and then the tiger. I clawed out the throats of three sailors, and chewed through the ear of another before cutting into his eyes. The stag kicked at prone skulls, and the bear lunged into naked bellies. The frog and the dragonfly remembered to scream.
When it was over none of them were left; the room was empty as a prison cell. I wanted to feel sick. I wanted to delicately retch in the corner or feel faint, collapse in guilt. But I was not sick or faint, and the creatures in me exulted. Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.
It was easy, once I had decided that, to slip into the captain’s quarters and into that soft bed at last. The pillow was cool on my face, the blood of my hair dried and black against the fabric. I did not wait for him to wake, and I did not need a hidden knife. The bear opened him up like a beehive.
I sailed a ghost ship back into Muireann port.
THE BEAST-MAID CARESSED THE RAIL OF HER SHIP tenderly. “No one wants this ship, just as no one wanted me. They say I use no sails, but lash the ghosts of the crew to the mast and let the moon fill them up like wind. This ship is mine. I know it like my own body, and I am not sorry for what I have done. That is what piracy is, I sup pose. I am not a maiden anymore, and I am glad to be done with that sorry state. I washed it off in blood and ocean. No one troubles me, and I do not trouble them.”
“Well, that’s a fish story and no mistake,” I guffawed. My boys snorted derision along with their mistress, clapping each other on the back. “We’ve a real red-handed villain on our hands, boys! A hundred men at one blow!”
