Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

They’d laid claim to a bottle of Black Pomegranate brandy from one of the crates broken open amidst the revellers and taken it back to their spot by the rail.

‘Barrels. Yes.’ Jean took a sip of the stuff, dark as distilled night, with a sting like nettles beneath the sweetness. He passed the bottle back to her. ‘They never laugh, they never ridicule you and they offer no distractions.’

‘Distractions?’

‘Barrels don’t have breasts.’

‘Ah. So what have you been telling these barrels?’

‘This bottle of brandy,’ said Jean, ‘is still too full for me to begin embarrassing myself like that.’

‘Pretend I’m a barrel, then.’

‘Barrels don’t have br—’

‘So I’ve heard. Find the nerve, Valora.’

‘You want me to pretend that you’re a barrel so I can tell you what I was telling barrels back when I was pretending they were you.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Well.’ He took another long sip from the brandy bottle. ‘You have . . . you have such hoops as I have never seen in any cask on any ship, such shiny and well-fit hoops—’

‘Jerome—’

‘And your staves!’ He decided it was a good time to take another drink. ‘Your staves . . . so well planed, so tightly fit. You are as fine a cask as I have ever seen, you marvellous little barrel. To say nothing of your bung—’

‘Ahem. So you won’t share your sweet nothings?’

‘No. I am utterly emboldened in my cowardice.’

‘“Man! What a mouse he is made by conversation,”’ Ezri recited. ‘“Scorns gods, dares battle, and flinches from a maid’s rebuke! Merest laugh from merest girl is like a dagger felt, and like a dagger, makes a lodging of his breast. Turns blood to milkwater and courage to faint memory.”’

‘Ohhhhh, Lucarno, is it?’ Jean tugged at his beard thoughtfully. ‘“Woman, your heart is a mapless maze. Could I bottle confusion and drink it a thousand years, I could not confound myself so much as you do between waking and breakfast. You are grown so devious that serpents would applaud your passage, would the gods but give them hands.”’

‘I like that one,’ she said. ‘The Empire of Seven Days, right?’

‘Right. Ezri, forgive my asking, but how the hell do you—’

‘It’s no more odd than the fact that you know any of this.’ She took the bottle from him, tipped it back for a long draught and then raised her free hand. ‘I know. I’ll give you a hint. “I have held the world from meridian to meridian in my hands and at my whim. I have received the confessions of emperors, the wisdom of magi, the lamentations of generals.”’

‘You had a library? You have a library?’

‘Had,’ she said. ‘I was the sixth of six daughters. I imagine the novelty wore off. Mother and father could afford live companions for the older five. I made do with all the dead playmates in mother’s books.’ With her next drink she drained the last of the bottle, and with a grin she tossed it overboard. ‘So what’s your excuse?’

‘My education was, ah, eclectic. Did you ever . . . when you were little, do you remember a toy of wooden pegs, in various shapes, that would fit into matching holes on a wooden frame?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I got my sisters’ when they tired of it.’

‘You might say that I was trained to be a professional square peg in a round hole.’

‘Really? Is there a guild for that?’

‘We’ve been working on getting a charter for years.’

‘Did you have a library as well?’

‘After a fashion. Sometimes we’d . . . borrow someone else’s without their knowledge or cooperation. Long story. But there’s one other reason. I’ll give you a verse of your own to guess - “After dark,”’ he recited with a flourish, ‘“an ass with an audience of one is called a husband; an ass with an audience of two hundred is called a success.”’

‘You were . . . on stage,’ she said. ‘You were a player! Professionally?’

‘Temporarily,’ said Jean. ‘Very temporarily. I was . . . well . . . we . . .’ He glanced aft and instantly regretted it.

‘Ravelle,’ Ezri said, then looked at Jean curiously. ‘You and he were . . . you two are having some sort of disagreement, aren’t you?’

‘Can we not talk about him?’ Jean, feeling bold and nervous at once, put a hand on her arm. ‘Just for tonight, can he not exist?’

‘We can indeed not talk about him,’ she said, shifting herself so that her weight rested against his chest rather than the rail. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘nobody else exists.’

Jean stared down at her, suddenly acutely aware of the beat of his own heart. The rising moonlight in her eyes, the feel of her warmth against him, the smell of brandy and sweat and salt water that was uniquely hers . . . suddenly the only thing he was capable of saying was, ‘Uhhhhhh . . .’

‘Jerome Valora,’ she said, ‘you magnificent idiot, must I draw you a diagram?’

‘Of—’

‘Take me to my cabin.’ She curled the fabric of his tunic in one fist. ‘I have the privilege of walls and I intend to use it. At length.’

‘Ezri,’ Jean whispered, ‘never in a hundred, never in a thousand years would I say no, but you were cut half to ribbons today, and you can barely stand—’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s the only reason I’m confident I’m not going to break you.’

‘Oh, for that I’m going to—’

‘I certainly hope you will.’ She threw her arms wide. ‘First get me there.’

He picked her up with ease; she settled into his arms and wrapped hers around his neck. As Jean swung away from the rail and headed for the quarterdeck stairs, he found himself facing an arc of thirty or forty Merry Watch revellers. They raised their arms and began cheering wildly.

‘Put your names on a list,’ hollered Ezri, ‘so I can kill you all in the morning!’ She smiled and turned her eyes back to Jean. ‘Or maybe it’ll have to wait for the afternoon.’