One of the finest places to sleep when a body finds itself driven beyond the brink of exhaustion, worn bone weary by the rough trade of hard days and cold nights and stretched to the dangling end of one's spiritual endurance, is the cloudlike embrace of a warm feather bed, Jagiello the Wanderer mused. He smiled - aye, with a luxurious goose down pillow, a fire crackling in the hearth and a belly filled to bursting with delicious stew fed spoon by spoon by the teasing hand of a generously built tavern girl who'd never known a hard day's labor in her short, sweet life. Truth - there existed nothing finer.
He grimaced, sitting up. On the other hand, one of the fouler places to rest said bone weary, spiritually dangled and physically exhausted body was atop a lumpy pile of grain sacks smuggled deep in the dark, dank, rat-infested belly of a pirate ship. In his defense, Jagiello hadn't bothered to ask after the weathered caravel's ownership when he scurried up a hanging line in the dead of night to make his nest belowdecks-
-a board creaked, then a meaty fist crashed into his temple, doing nothing to help shake off last night's cheap rum fuddle. The Wanderer groaned, curling up against a flurry of boots to the ribs. As his scrawny backside took its turn playing the beaten drum he realized he must have overslept.
"What's the what?" he asked, but only a hearty slap answered. His father had always chided him for wearing the long hair of a layabout rather than a working man's short cut, and as he made his way across the gritty floor dragged by a hank of it, he decided the old man had had a point.
"My good sir-"
"Shut yer yapworks or I'll give your neck another mouth to feed," a gruff female voice growled.
Jagiello winced, mourning the loss of his most potent weapon. Thus silenced, he waited as his captress brought him to a set of stairs. Up they went- thump, thump, thump, his skull knocking out a doleful dirge upon the wood.
The beefy Skathan armtwister courting the Wanderer dumped him upon the forecastle deck into a gathering of two dozen pairs of grubby bare feet. He worked his jaw, his ears still ringing. He could scarcely make out what invectives the mob shouted at him but the clubbing and spitting with which they introduced themselves told him he missed little. Finally the vulgar sea parted to admit a pair of knee-high black leather boots set with gleaming silver buckles. The height of outlaw fashion approached and, in style, proceeded to take a turn kicking some sense into his arse.
Once his punter took a breather, Jagiello sat up and cracked his neck. Swiftly becoming more bruise than man, he dared break through the ugly murmuring of low, nasty minds with a quip of his own.
"I'm listening, Mistress Teacher," he offered, paired with a crooked smile.
"Oh, ho! Not just a stowaway but we've a sassy little scoundrel scuttling around our hull, don't we now?" scoffed the boots.
The Wanderer knew he took his life in his hands as his gaze lingered upon the speaker but he couldn't help himself. He'd always been a sucker for beauty and his mortal existence was not so valuable that he feared losing it throwing his bones after this uncommon kind.
Long, sculpted legs rose from those supple boots, glorious as any royal's even clad in simple men's trousers. A set of suggestive hips whispered to Jagiello of dreams yet unborn, encircled in a pair of heavy leather belts boasting a dizzying array of exotic daggers and wickedly curved long knives. The jewel of her armory jutted a breath away from kissing her gloved palm, a silver pommel set with an emerald the size of a cat's eye.
Jagiello climbed higher, his last moments upon Mabon's back growing only sweeter. His vision became one with her forest-green tunic, billowing in the breeze around her solid torso and absolutely brimming with breasts. She had the tanned, wiry arms of a Skathan, strong enough to toss him overboard from amidships, but by her impressive stature a blending of foreign blood likely coursed in her veins. He counted it to the good, something they could share in common if she didn't end him here and now.
His passions inflamed, he dared to gaze upon the woman's most striking feature - the collection of perfections she kept above her neck. A round, expressive face loomed above him. Just now it expressed that his life's remaining moments could be numbered on one hand's fingers. Let the Minstrel count them his buggering self, he thought. He lost himself in dark, sea-green eyes awash with exacting intelligence. They pared him to the bones, searching after his purpose.
As the seconds dragged on to eternity the rabble fell silent, the only music to score their meeting the snap of canvas above and the whisper of her long black hair fighting the rawhide which tied it back as the wind blew. A lock slipped free and caressed her face, stoking the Wanderer's envy to new heights.
"So," mused his siren, running a finger over the hilt of her scimitar as if it were the small of a lover's back, "who in the Nineteen Hells are you and what business have you, stinking up my ship?"
Jagiello grimaced - aye, the last few months had afforded him precious few opportunities to bathe, let alone wash his ratty clothes.
"Madam, I offer you my most sincere apologies. I intended no offense to your most well formed nostrils. I merely sought a place to rest a stretch. As you can see I'm now quite refreshed so with your generous permission I shall take my leave from your lovely vessel at once, never again to befoul your planks with the essence of my struggling self." He did his best to bow while still on his knees.
"A fop prattles on, yet my eyes behold a drowned dog. What a strange breed indeed - a cur that speaks!"
"I, my Lady, am but a barking bard," the Wanderer grinned.
She raised an eyebrow thick as a caterpillar. "Oh? Then where, might I ask, is your instrument?"
"Ah - an interesting story. More of the Minstrel's luck, wouldn't you know it? But, I-"
"Oh do shut up," she interrupted. "Only the Fool himself could not guess the end of his tired tale. Woe is you, the noble protagonist beset by endless unjust circumstances! Poor and humble fellow, he who has never so much as swatted a fly, the bard is blameless by all accounting. It was only the twisted skeins of cruel fate which delivered you thus, meddlesome bitch that she is! Or was it Krug himself who lay his crooked finger upon the scales of justice and deprived you of your agency - and all your worldly possessions? No matter. Thankfully you are and have ever been the gods' own honest tradesman, so you've witted out your survival upon Rastak's cold, unfeeling streets. Every god be praised that, sterling trident of integrity that you are, the city's urchins and hackabouts have never found their pockets lightened by your needsome fingers - save for by a doubloon or two. Only in desperation did you pilfer, and were there not epic need worthy of song you would not have smuggled yourself aboard. Naturally you held every intention of being gone at first light with no one the wiser. Is that about the height of your tall tale, fiddler?"
She crossed her arms over her ample chest, shattering its spellbind on Jagiello's mind's eye. With great difficulty, he looked up and away into her stormy face.
"Perhaps we ought to wind the roads together. What a fine twosome my music and your divination would make! That you've rightly intuited the breadth of my woeful journey is nothing short of astonishing. Have you ever considered a career as a seer?"
"Alas, you have no strings to pluck and I have but a shorthair's length of patience left to tolerate your blather. Besides, how could I ever share company with a rat-arsed fokken thief?"
She snapped her fingers and a towering barrel-chested bloke beside her handed over a burlap sack. Recognition stirred in the Wanderer's mind as she rooted around inside. His most lovely gaoler withdrew items one by one from its accusatory depths, flinging them with growing fury. Each indictment struck his chest, damning him to the Void in which her mercy slept - a half eaten loaf of hard bread, a bundle of salted pork, an empty wineskin, a small pouch of coins scooped up from errant resting places, the wages of skulking.
"Piss on your protestations, you filthy rat," she hissed, all venom now. The pirates turned her knife's edge of a visage to her crew, not a one of whom looked any less keen to flay the Wanderer alive.
"This bugger stole from the ship. He stuck his dirty hands into my pockets, and yours. He took food from your bellies and wine from your mouths. To the aggrieved parties I offer the axehandle of justice. Whereabouts shall the blows fall, I wonder?"
"Break his teeth to the stumps," the beast who'd first roused Jagiello suggested, flashing a smile which made him think she spoke from experience.
"Bust his legs, then chum the waters with his guts and let the sharks decide," one cheery lout chuckled.
"I'll just have me one good whack at his shriveled satchel," a wizened crone said, fingering a glinting yataghan.
The captain entertained each dire threat, her smile only growing alongside the depravities. For want of anything better to do, Jagiello assumed a role he knew well and played in this dark vignette the part of his own advocate.
"Please, Mistress. There must be some way I can make restitution to you and your lovely crew that involves only minimal dismemberment. Perhaps I could sing for you? I know several seafarers' shanties that I'm sure will tickle your pert little ears."
She barked a hard laugh which echoed in the empty hole he tossed his words down like a sap to the back of the skull. "ACH! Worm! Yer tongue'll be too bloody busy scrubbin' me decks to wag a tune and ye'll beg to thank me for the privilege! This ship'll shine so's I'll be seein' me own dashing mug plank to plank or the only music yer throat's apt to be makin' is along the curve o' me thirstiest blade!"
She planted one of those magnificent boots in his sternum, finding a whole new way to take his breath away. As Jagiello lay gagging the sailors edged closer, their eagerness to join in the corporal punishment a living thing panting down his neck.
"But first, my battered bard," the captain purred, losing the harsh dockside brogue as quickly as she'd adopted it, "first, you'll show me from what sort of iron you're forged. A duel of blades now, rather than japes."
The Wanderer blinked. "But Madam - I have no sword, only my wits."
"Then truly come you to this pairing helpless as a fresh bairn babe. Fear not, for though the Black Minstrel may delight in fiddling crooked tunes, I find the notion of butchering a fool who can't fight back proper ughsome."
She gestured to a mountainous white-haired Sgliti who stood poised to fall upon the Wanderer like an avalanche. Rather than sic her, the captain disarmed her polar bear.
"Gunhild. Toss this sharkbait your headcracker. If he fails to use it, I will look aside from whatever you care to teach him about spurning our generosity while I take my lunch."
A thick chunk of oiled oak the length of Jagiello's femur clattered at his feet. He had no wish to spend so much as a moment alone with the savage Northwoman so he picked it up and stood.
"To the death, then?"
His opponent snorted. "Gala's mercy if it was, but I'm no Farm Ma no matter how long you oogle my tits. Don't worry, singer. Just tell me where it hurts."
Without another word she whipped a silver-hilted rapier from her well stocked belt, its long, narrow blade honed to a razor's edge. Jagiello worked up a sweat parrying her playful jabs and probing cuts, his clubber too unwieldy to mount much more than a cursory defense. She made no secret of her skill, holding herself back the way a cat might toy with a mouse before it grew bored and batted its prey to death.
Even without bringing her full talents to bear, after several exhausting minutes she'd lain open the Wanderer's shirt across the ribs and vertically from collar to hip. Both wounds were but scratches but they burned as sweat mixed with blood, plastering the sackcloth to his skin. Jagiello's forearms sported many new scars-to-be, his leathery flesh gathering inconsequential slices as she peeled him at her leisure.
"Had enough yet?" he panted. He struck her blade aside as it snaked towards his belly, lest he also be forced to scrub from the deck his own entrails. "Someone's trained you well in the use of your cutlery, Madam. If only you weren't so intimidated by my martial prowess, I dare say you might field a halfway decent offense." Jagiello had lost much over the course of his short life but never would he tally his sense of humor among the casualties.
She huffed, color blossoming in her cheeks. The angry little red apple of his eye locked her gaze with his.
"A true nervy bastard, aren't you just? But reckless fools always wreck in the end, whether they steer by deed or by hot puffs of air alone. You, sir, are simply rude." She flicked her wrist and a red line bloomed along Jagiello's bicep, sapping his strength. "What say you to that, pocket-pincher?"
"My mother was the first woman to name me a fool, and never since has a lass refused the chance to follow suit. I most certainly concur, for only a true fool would trespass upon a pirate ship. But truth - I am not the only lacker of wits embattled on this deck just now, since to impugn my manners only accents your own ignorance. A fool, aye, a bloody jester amongst asses, but rude? That wounds me far deeper than your rapier's tickling. Even as you've diced me to ribbons, I've been fucking delightful."
Her eyes widened, her high color rising a shade. "You buggering weasel! I'm no pirate - I'm a privateer!"
Jagiello laughed, which warranted another gash along his ribs. "So, you still rob, pillage, maim and loot, but only those the Crown Prince names foemen? How enlightened! I bow to your superior virtue, Madam Saint."
He did just that, gambling that her peculiar sense of honor would not permit her to lop off his head while so obviously vulnerable. Jagiello swore he could hear Krug's fiddle cawing at him in the distance as the captain proved him correct. Too smart for his own good, he thought as she slashed deep across his shoulders and sent blood sheeting down his back. His tatter of a shirt fell away and she paused instead of claiming her share of the acorn harvest.
Pride beating out sense as it ever had, the Wanderer forced his legs to stand. She glared at him, nostrils flaring. He smiled. She thwacked him between the eyes with her pommel, then kicked him in the side of the knee.
This time he stayed down, his vision blurred and his starving body no longer interested in the mutterings of his mind. The club rolled away from his nerveless grip and her swordpoint kissed his throat. Jagiello's smile never faltered. Of all the many who had bested him, this reading angel was the finest. He had no fight left in him, but to prolong their union a moment more he trotted out one last gambit, a standby for the most fokkorol times.
"Black Minstrel aside, it's powerfully fell luck to nip short a bard's voyage along the mortal coil."
She made no response. So be it, he thought. He closed his eyes, holding in mind that beautiful face for the long trip he would any second embark upon. Instead of skewering him, she seized the scraps of fabric stuck to his bleeding back and wrenched them away.
"Fokkol, what's this mess?" she murmured. The Wanderer had ever learned his lessons slowly, whether at home, in the ranks or abroad. He held no illusions that his back was a pretty place for an eye to visit, but he doubted a grizzled pirate captain might grant him mercy for the sake of a few old wounds.
"Oi. That's an ugly bit of latticework you're wearing, bard. Who put forth such an investment into taming you? Was it the slaver's lash that tattooed you so, or are you a criminal?"
"Truth, Madam - it's been a joint effort. I fled one to try my hand at the other."
"And what were your crimes? I'm of a mind to wager theft, since you've shown little enough competence for it thusfar."
The Wanderer chuckled. "I've confessed to all manner of endeavors befitting a scoundrel, as well as being society's own general nuisance. I suppose to the list we must append escaping the hospitality of Rastak's dungeons, though that I only achieved last night."
She walked around to face him. Staring into his eyes, she sought a scrap of worth. Jagiello offered the woman no masks, only his scroungy self. She grinned.
"Hoi, bugger. A jackass of all trades, so you are. I think you'll make a fine addition to my crew." She turned to the assembled faces, a motley collection of indifference and grim amusement. No one raised an objection. Satisfied, the captain sheathed her rapier and snapped out orders.
"Skreeva! Fetch the catgut and quit this lout from bleeding all over my decks. Grubbin! Dig up some clothes for our bard - preferably something nobody's died in, but anything clean will do. Burd! Burn these disgusting rags of his before I chuck my guts over the rail. Feleena! Draw a bath and by the Storm Maid bring the pine tar, not just the lard. Draven! Once this hoodlum's fit to ship out, haul him by my cabin. I'm for lunch."
She winked at the bard who still reeled under the abrupt shifting of his fortunes, then strolled belowdecks whistling a lively tune. The crew resumed their duties, the midday entertainment now concluded.
A lithe little woman with a short crop of fire atop her pale brow took Jagiello by the arm and led him to a stark, astringent smelling cabin. She sat him on a stool and strung a thin bone needle with thread. A Keledrian assistant cut away the last of his ruined shirt, then offered the sawbones a ceramic jar. Skreeva scooped up two fingers of noxious goop, her vermilion eyes dancing.
"Might sting a skitch, this." She slathered it into the foot long gash across his shoulders.
Jagiello had served in the Dam Derg Isles along the empire's northernmost barrier. Around the Bonewall could be found all manner of toxic plants and poisonous, stinging insects. As he stifled a scream, he wondered how many such bugs and buds had given their essence to steep this torture. She might've swaddled his back in jellyfish for all he could tell the difference.
"It purges the infectives," the ship's surgeon offered by way of apology, heaping on a second agonizing coat. "You're a ripe one, filthy as you are malnourished and hopping with lice. I mark you as the gods' own sweet whore begging corruption, but the captain won't be too pert if her new songster's swimming in gangrene now, will she? Even a deft hand like me can't amputate a back."
Jagiello conceded the logic and let her work with a minimum of groaning. Once she'd cleansed and dressed his many wounds, she smacked his cheek and smiled.
"There, good as new, eh? Now say, 'thank you, Skreeva, you're as wise as you are bloody lovely.'" Her assistant giggled, and the Wanderer recited the script.
The bonesetter had been lovely as he'd professed, but once delivered to the mate's care at the bow, Jagiello forgot all about dear Skreeva. To his hungry eye, the lanky, fair-haired Feleena would not have been out of place in one of his lustier dreams. She sized him up, standing before a large copper tub with a hunk of brownish-green soap and a scrubbing brush.
"In ya go, love," she said, thrusting both into his hands. Jagiello paused.
"Sweetness, my arms are cut to ribbons and my back's freshly quilted whole. How ever am I to scrub myself to our captain's standards by my lonesome, maimed as I am?"
Feleena leaned in, her creamy skin scented with the barest hint of rose.
Her smile white and perfect, she held her full lips near his ear and voiced a breathless whisper.
"Pretty bard, if you mean to suggest you'd prefer I bathe you, I'm happy like a babe on the tit to oblige. I'll be giving you a bath in your own gizzards, mind you, but on my honor I promise to make it memorable."
"It's the funniest thing," Jagiello said. "Now that I think on it, the cutter advised me to manage on my own, lest my muscles stiffen. Another time, perhaps."
"There's a lad. But enough with the jawing, smelly. Step bloody lively."
The Wanderer quickly shed his rags and hopped into the tub. He gasped, unprepared for but unsurprised by the shock of icy seawater. He lodged no complaints, having no desire to endanger his entrails, and rushed through a scrubbing just rough enough not to tear his stitches. By the time he climbed out, his delectable minder had been replaced by a sour puss.
Grubbin flung a towel at him and dumped an armload of clothes at Jagiello's feet. Left to his own devices, the bard dried and dressed, his new outfit not just clean but a reasonable fit even on his skeleton's frame. Perhaps the Minstrel had tired of his torments and the Wanderer's luck would now less resemble a buzzard's.
"If yer done dawdlin', the captain'll see ya sooner rather than later, rat," a stubbed out cigarro of a man sneered. The grimy boatswain Draven ushered him belowdecks without further commentary but his enduring smirk spoke volumes. Outside a stout cabin door, Jagiello faced him.
"I like a good jape as much as the next mug. Something's funny?"
"Been a stretch since we had a bard aboard, is all."
"That's a shame. The last one got his fill of your company, did he? I can't imagine how many minutes that must've taken."
Draven's mocking smile widened, displaying a dentist's nightmare. He chuckled, drawing a finger across his throat before swaggering away. A voice from within bade Jagiello enter and he did so, alone.
Every other area of the vessel he'd toured had stricken him as stark, functional in a minimalist way without a hint of frills. Jagiello supposed a hard captain must maintain her iron grip upon an equally salty crew by ensuring nobody grew too cozy. Despite his veneer, her own quarters appeared quite comfortable, more like a home than anything he'd envisioned could live in the belly of a pirate ship. A long sleeping couch occupied one wall, made up neatly and festooned with an array of pillows in bright colors. Each wall hung heavy with maps and tapestries depicting as many scenes of nature's wonders a gruesome battles. Flags, weapons, artwork and trophies cluttered the corners and a circular table held court at the center of the room.
The captain sat here, a wooden plate of stripped poultry bones before her and her black leather boots kicked up on a chair. She wiped her fingers on a green kerchief and draped it like a shroud over the carcass of her lunch. Sipping wine so dark it called to his mind sacrificial blood, she licked her lips.
"I can't say much for the face, but overall an improvement," she declared, waving a ring-studded hand at his transformation. "I'm glad you no longer reek like something that drowned in the bilge. Sit."
"A thousand thanks for your hospitality," Jagiello said with a bow. He perched on a stool across from her. "So, shall I get started on those decks? My blood should be dry by now."
"Oh stow it up your arse," she scoffed. "The planks'll be here tomorrow - there's no sense splitting your stitches on my account. And while we're on the subject of where to stuff things, go ahead and cram all that 'madam' and 'mistress' horseshit too, supposing you've got the room."
Jagiello laughed. "Full to the brim so I am, consider it stowed."
"Splendid. Now, on deck you'll address me as 'captain' and nothing more nor less for as long as you sail under my banner. Though I do wonder whose gotten the better end of that bloody bargain."
"Undoubtedly I'm the richer for our arrangement, my lady, but fear not - anything you wish, I shall do with a smile."
"I'm aware of what being in charge entails, fiddler," she said dryly. "What is your name, anyways?"
"My mother called me Jagiello, so I've always been partial to that. And you, my captain?"
"Indeed, I too have a name. You're a storyteller by trade, or was that just your tongue twisting your telling to fall lightly in my ear?"
"Truth - from the dockside to the mountaintops, I've been known to spread tale or two."
"And in your travels, does the yarn about a woman known as Skatha's Widowmaker reside within your spinning mind's bonecage?"
The Wanderer blinked. "This woman. Would she also be hailed in the ports up north as Midnight's Shadow, and her vessel, the Ebon Sunrise?"
The captain shrugged. "Folks have long been inclined to ascribe many and more names to that of which they know little and less. For example, in the erudite circle of the Genoan aristocracy I have heard her dubbed the Blade of a Thousand Edges and her ship the Minstrel's Galleon, but in the lower city where the sawdust lays thick on tavern floors they name her Stormbringer and she sails upon Black Vengeance."
"Then, dear captain, I have heard not one but countless tales of this ominous woman. If they are all to be believed, Crowburst is a fairy story's own villain made real, the essential fiend of whom all dutiful parents caution their babes."
The captain grunted. "What else hears my bard?"
"Only rumors, to be sure, since only the dead bear witness. But the mere mention of her name - any of the legion she's garnered over the years - quakes the boldest of hearts and sends shorewatchers fleeing for their lives whenever the midnight winds carry the snapping of her canvas. The Minstrel's Mistress is a piratess possessed of wicked magics said to be powered by all the souls she's delivered to the Nineteen Hells - in one of which, incidentally, she dwells."
The Collector of Screams, as the woman Jagiello faced was named across the island chain south of Skatha's coast, blew a raspberry. She kicked her buckled boots off the stool and sat up to meet his eyes.
"Stories, feh. The bread of fools, buttered by budding bards who yearn to train their pockets with copperweight. Such gossips bore me, but I admit sometimes a few doubloons is a fair price to maintain a fearsome image."
"So your crew didn't sail into Port Woolen three summers past, raze the village and leave not a single poor shepherd alive?" Jagiello wondered, settling on one tale he could verify with the memory of what his own eyes had seen.
"A matter more of semantics than bald fact," she chuckled. "Did we put in at Woolen's backwater cove three summers ago? Aye, so we did - and my lubbers most certainly put every stick of that wall's hole to the torch on my order, after liberating from it all its worldly wealth. But plague had taken every soul who'd once called Woolen home before we ever smelled them baking in the sun. We only burned the bodies to cull the sickness."
"A public servant, then," the Wanderer laughed.
"Just so. Many legends ascribed to me flow along the same veins. Others are but well spun lies dropped in the dopey ears of the widest-eyed, so they can be sure to drift on to the minstrels, who as you know possess the loosest lips of all."
"And I'd always heard such lips sank ships."
"Indeed," she winked. "But which? Night's Shade? Ebon Sunrise? Dawn's Darkling? Aboard which vessel did you sneak, I wonder?"
Jagiello considered. "An unassuming merchant sloop worse for wearing than most. Bluntly I found it more than a little derelict, not one a person of any consequence would deign to pilot, much less own."
"No blackwood masts? No flying death's heads or corpses dangling from the yardarms?"
"Not even a paltry row of skulls ringing the bow. An ingenious deception, captain, but how ply you your trade in such a tub?
I'm hard-pressed to imagine the sailor who quakes at the sight of this one's profile cutting a wake."
"Business is but business, my bard. Once we raise the flags - we do carry the death's heads, after all - it's mostly a matter of bluster. In the face of my hollering all but the thickest crews are happy to fling their cargo aboard rather than die for the bottom line of some soft-palmed coin counter. They're so grateful to escape with their lives that they give their word of silence, knowing full well what retribution I'm like to visit upon those who go ashore boasting that they've faced down the Nineteen's Landlady and lived to spin the tale. Not every story about me is a fancy, mind you."
She looked pointedly at Jagiello and for a second he saw the steel beneath her easy smile, then she went on. "On the rare occasion a crew gets their dander up, we're happy to hop a rail and rattle sabers, or bloody kick heads in. I abide not the slightest the killing of innocents, nor do I revel in wanton destruction. Privateering is transactional at its heart, but I've lost not a wink of sleep nights after gifting genuine pirates or other such sea trash to hungry fish bellies. Slavers I find particularly abominable, and I confess to a bit of self indulgence when we come across them, cooperative or not."
"I find your business model delightfully clever. You may well be the most cunning woman to ever hoist sail, captain."
"Thank you kindly, bard mine, but only on deck am I 'captain.' In my cabin, I'm but Mari, simple and plain a girl as could be. But where are my manners? While I've blathered on, here you've sat starving the rest of the way to death."
"Yet my hunger's slipped my mind entire while I've supped on your excellent company."
"Arse kissing will get you nowhere with me, but don't let that quit you of trying. Get on to the galley now and have Fox whip you up something that'll stick to your ribs. You've a powerful stretch of deck to scrub tomorrow, Jagiello."
The Wanderer turned to leave, but she stopped him. He noted the slightest flush touching her cheeks though she'd drained no more than a third of her wine bottle.
"I'm glad I didn't kill you. I think I might enjoy having you aboard my ship." She said no more but her eyes flicked to the long sleeping couch with its vivid assortment of pillows.
"Until when, my Lady Captain," Jagiello said, making to tip a hat he'd long since lost. "Mari, I mean."
He left her to whatever thoughts stirred the currents of her mind's vast depths. As he headed to the galley the Wanderer smiled, imagining when he might again call her by her given name.