The Buccaneer's Apprentice (28 page)

We all grow old, my dear. It is nature’s way of preparing us, ever so gently, for the reality that a younger generation will replace us in time’s mad rush.

—King Nivolo of Cassaforte, to Allyria Cassamagi,
in a private letter in the Cassamagi archives

A
lmost nothing remained of the comte’s finery. The coat of blue velvet was a shredded mess, its trim torn or missing entirely. The stylish tricorne he once had boasted was nowhere to be seen, nor were his shiny boots. He stood before them in his stocking feet, snarling like a mad dog. His periwig was askew enough to reveal the speckled and bald head beneath. “Stand back,” he warned Nic. “The girl should have died long before this. We all know it.” At that moment, Maxl came running up from the
Allyria
’s fore, as did Urso and Qiandro. They scudded to a halt when the comte jerked Darcy around in their direction and pressed the knife’s blade to her throat. They held up their hands. Urso dropped the sword he’d been holding.

“People don’t live or die according to your timetable, Dumond.” Nic rose slowly to his feet, hands out and plainly on display to keep the crazed man at ease.

“Oh, they do,” the comte assured him. He was deranged, Nic realized. The certainty of his defeat had unhinged him. “I assure you, they do.”

The motion he made with his shoulder and arm made everyone within distance shout out. Out of instinct, Milo Sorranto reached for his weapon. Darcy shrieked. Just at that moment, Knave wandered into the crowd, unaware of anything out of the ordinary happening. “Captain,” he called out to Nic. “I just now found a curious rope hooked around the forward railing. When I looked down, there was a little boat floating … oh.” He saw the comte and Darcy struggling close to the door of the captain’s quarters, and stopped talking.

“Unsurprising, that you’d resort to your Cassafortean witchcraft rather than fighting a real battle,” spat the comte. “Do you call that just?”

“Is it less just than hiring the lawless to do an army’s work?” Nic wanted to know. “Is it less just than leading a sneak attack on a nation that has done nothing to you?”

It was no good reasoning with the comte. He was beyond reason. “Captain,” said Milo, with warning in his voice, “a man with nothing else to lose is the most dangerous of all.” Nic knew it, too, from hard experience.

“Yes, listen to your friend,” hissed the comte. His eyes were wide and wild. “You never know what a man with nothing to lose might do. Starting with the death of M’selle Colombo.” His grip around Darcy’s neck tightened. Her face was already red. The color began to deepen.

“Your grudge is against her father, the nuncio,” Nic reminded him. His voice taunted the man. “He’s not even here. He’s on his way to Vereinigtelände. She’s just his daughter. A nobody.”

“She’ll do.”

“Let her go and we can talk about this.” Nic took a step forward.

The comte, in turn, backed against the cabin door. “Talk with a pirate? What is the honor in that? I’d as soon talk to my hounds. I should have gutted you all in Gallina. Talk to me after I’ve cut her throat and we’ve both bathed in her blood.”

“Look at you. All this talk of honor. Is it honorable, what you’ve done this night? How many young men and women perished tonight? How many of their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, are in their homes right now not knowing their loved ones’ blood stains the waves?” Nic snarled. “If that is honor, I want none of it. For shame, sir.” The rebuke seemed to have some kind of effect on the comte. He looked startled. Nic pressed it to his advantage. “What would the court say if they could see you now? Is this truly the Comte Dumond, the man the king hand-picked to lead his invasion?”

“Niccolo,” growled Milo in warning.

Nic pouted, mocking the man. “Is this honor, Dumond? A grown man, picking on a helpless little girl?”

The comte opened his mouth to speak, but Darcy was one step ahead of them. Some of the redness had drained from her face and now she could breathe again. She inhaled deeply, and with a swift motion lifted her boot and slammed it down as hard as she could upon the top of the pirate’s stockinged instep. The comte screamed in pain. Darcy took advantage of the moment to draw her arm forward, and then drive her elbow under his rib cage. The knife clattered to the ground.

“I am
far
from helpless,” she snarled.

Nic should have run to retrieve her then, but he and everyone else were too shocked to respond. The comte reached out, grabbed Darcy by the hair, and before anyone could have stopped him, disappeared into the captain’s quarters, slamming the door behind him.

It was then that Nic sprinted forward, hearing something being dragged on the floor within. He grasped the handle and yanked it down. The door wouldn’t budge. “Open, damn you!” Nic shouted. He stood back several steps and lunged, nearly dislocating his shoulder when he collided with the wood. “Ow,” he complained, tears in his eyes.

Milo rattled the latch. “He’s jammed the door somehow.”

From where she’d collapsed near the rail, Risa struggled to her feet. “The king—!”

Nic froze. He and everyone around him had the same thing in mind. Comte Dumond was alone with the king. “Beat down the door!” Maxl called. “We are ramming it!”

“This ship is built to withstand that,” Risa reminded them, panic in her voice. “It won’t work.”

Nic refused to stand down without a fight. “I need something,” he said. The spyglass was still in his pocket. He ran to the little porthole window set next to the captain’s door and began to attack the panes with it. The ship itself might have been built to resist assault, but the little window had not. It cracked, then burst with a shatter. The spyglass was ruined. Nic threw it down and pressed his face to the hole, smelling the familiar smoky aroma of his quarters. A shard remaining in its pane dug into the side of his face, drawing blood. He didn’t care. “Darcy!” he called out.

She was kicking and grunting with pain as the comte dragged her toward the room’s center. King Alessandro remained in Nic’s chair. His eyes were closed. His head had settled gently to one side, and his hands were in his lap. He’d fallen asleep gently, as infants and the very old do. The comte saw the king at the same moment. Nic let out a strangled cry and pulled out his head and thrust his arm through the porthole, though what he grabbed for, he had no idea. By the time he had his face repositioned, the comte had stopped. “Sssh, sssh, little girl,” he said, a finger to his lips. “Let us not waken the old man.”

“Dumond!” Nic’s voice was strangled and strange. He was conscious that to his left, the crew was still attempting to batter down the door.

“Sssh!” The comte let go of Darcy’s thick hair. While she struggled, he picked her up by the shoulders and shoved her brusquely against the fireplace, where she crumpled against the wall. He then crept around behind Alessandro, who still slumbered soundly. “We do not want to wake him. It would be frightening for a man of his age to rouse so suddenly.”

“Stop!” Nic ordered the crew. Breathless, they stood back from the door. Nic pressed his face against the glass once more. “The old man is nobody, comte. Come out and surrender.”

“Fool.” The comte had completely lost his periwig in the struggle. With his hard eyes and shorn head, he looked serpent-like. Breathing heavily, he licked blood from his lips. “Fool to think I don’t recognize the King of Cassaforte—Alessandro the Wise, bearer of the Olive Crown and the Scepter of whatever-it-is!”

“He’s not,” Nic said, bluffing wildly. “He looks like him. He’s my uncle.”

“Fool!” the comte repeated. “Or should I say, how very
prescient
of you to tell me to leave the girl alone. You were right, Captain. Killing her would have been of no honor. Killing
him
, though!”

“Leave him alone!” Milo shouted in Nic’s ear. He had been struggling for a peep through the window the entire time.

“Oh, no … no, my pretty.” Darcy had risen to her feet and clutched the back of the wood chair closest to her. Her face was hard and focused. Nic recognized that expression—she had worn it often enough, the first days they had met. The comte knelt beside the captain’s seat and slipped his hands around the sleeping man’s neck. “One step closer and he dies.”

“All right,” she said. Both Nic and the comte turned their attention from her back to the king. That was their mistake. Both of them failed to see, before it was too late, Darcy wrenching the chair into the air. With all her might, she swung it around and behind the comte. Wood met bone with a sickening crack, and the comte splayed forward, half onto the table, half off. After a moment, his body slumped down into an unconscious ball on the floor. “You can’t kill a man who’s already dead. Fool.”

It took but a moment for Darcy to remove the high-backed bench with which the Comte Dumond had jammed the door. When she opened it at last, Risa and Milo were the first to rush in. Both ran to the king’s side. Maxl was next, springing forward to check on the comte. “Is the cad alive?” Nic asked.

“I hope so,” said Darcy. Her jaw was set and she swaggered with a victor’s triumph, but Nic could tell that she was badly shaken. “I want to see him pay.”

Maxl nodded. His fingers ran along the side of the comte’s neck. “He is pulsing.”

Darcy sniffled. A thin trickle of blood dribbled from her nose. She staunched it with her thumb. She faced both Maxl and Nic as if challenging them to defy her. “I trust that the bonking on the noggin was the best way to solve that particular problem?”

Maxl backed away. Urso and Knave had collected the comte from the floor and were taking him out the door, to be locked down below. “You are not getting the objection from me,” he said, both hands in the air.

Darcy’s eyebrows rose when she faced Nic. “Nor from me, Thorntongue,” he swore. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to hold her in his arms, to make sure that she was still whole. Fortunately, given Nic’s natural reticence, she seemed to be feeling the same way. The pair clung to each other as they had never clung to anyone before, rocking back and forth as if afraid to let go. “Gods,” Nic finally said. “I was so frightened.”

“Because my father would have skinned you alive if you’d let anything happen to me?”

“That too,” Nic murmured into her hair. “Don’t ever make me worry again.”

“Do you really think that’s likely?” Darcy wanted to know.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

Only when he turned his head did he remember the king. He pulled away from Darcy to see Milo leaning against the table, lifeless and seeming sick to his stomach. Risa had tears streaking her face. She stroked Alessandro’s white locks as if he really were sleeping. “Oh, Dom,” she sighed.

“Is he really … ?” Nic whispered to Darcy.

She nodded, and sniffed again. “I could tell, when he brought me in here. Nic—I think he
knew
. I think he died the way he wanted. At battle, not in bed.”

Nic had to swallow several times before he found his voice. The last words he’d heard the man speak had been of thanks to him. “Clear the room,” he said to his crew. “Allow the heir and the cazarrina their chance to mourn.”

Darcy helped escort out the Arturos and the others, for now forestalling questions about her well-being. Once the door was latched and the cabin quiet, both he and Darcy approached. “Are you all right?” Darcy asked, touching Risa’s arm.

“It’s fine. It’s not as if we didn’t expect it,” said Risa. With the ball of her thumb, she dabbed away the last of her tears. “He was a very old man.”