Page 26 of Rears & Vices

“I owe you my life.” Vitaliy finished the last button, trailed a knuckle back up the neat line. He met Everard’s eyes and stepped back. “I can maybe give you a different one?”

Everard stared. “Never say you’re actually a pirate? A real one? You said you were Russian.”

The room was silent. Everyone, even Thom, looked at him. D’Arcy sighed, and flopped back into the armchair. “Only you, Ev,” he muttered from behind an arm.

“You didn’t know?” Vitaliy asked. That brow furrowed again.

“Your charges, you mean? I didn’t hear them. Well, I hear them, but don’t listen,” Everard explained. “Else they get… affixed. Stuck.” He gestured inanely to his head. “Words read aloud are too close to seeing words on a page.”

Deeper furrows. “Ah? But⁠—”

“Yes,” Everard affirmed. “I know it makes no sense at all.”

Vitaliy shrugged. “Charges aside, my flotilla steals weapons from those who shouldn’t have, gives them to those who should. For this they call me pirate.”

Everard goggled. “Your flotilla?”

Vitaliy hesitated, drew a hand through his as-yet-unbound hair. In three years it had only got longer and more subtly white-gold, not quite yet turning silver: unbraided, it reached the ties of his shirt and beyond, ends curling to mid-chest.

“I’ve missed something here,” Everard said slowly. “A flotilla. Weapons. I thought… freshwater. Furs, tea, that sort of Lakes pirate. Not…” He was at a loss. “Who the devil are you?”

“You know my name.”

Vitaliy Gray. Everard’s heart beat faster. “Yes. Yes, I’d thought so.”

“You do,” Vitaliy insisted.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” D’Arcy interrupted from across the room. “He’s Vee. He’s always been Vee.”

Vee. Vee. It didn’t sound right, didn’t look right… until Everard remembered, from his time off the Atlantic coast years past, one particular wanted advertisement. The centre focus of which had been—instead of the tiny, ugly caricature—an elaborate majuscule V.

ONE THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS REWARD. Pirate Leader V. Varfolomey of the Pirate Ship SÉVÈRE, Menace of the Coast Atlantic, Gulf of Spain and Caribbean. ONE HUNDRED for INFORMATION, REST upon DELIVERY of ABOVE MENTIONED.

Everard remembered thinking it must have been meant as a copy of the pirate’s signature, thinking what a self-important pirate captain he must have been. Not much else.

“V. Varfolomey?” Little wonder they’d black-booked him, tried to arrest him; he’d only perjured himself for the single most famous pirate on the Atlantic. “But—but the print is nothing like you,” he protested. “Nothing like you at all!”

For one thing, they’d left out the beautiful mouth. Whoever had made that print clearly did not realise its value—in identification or aesthetics.

Vitaliy grimaced, lips flattening. “It is not as though I’ve sat for portraits.”

“You ought do,” Everard replied unthinking. “Er,” he revised, “were circumstances… different.”

Vitaliy blinked, and then smiled; a slight, boyish curve of corners that seemed to completely contrast with Everard’s idea of an infamous pirate, of who Vitaliy said he was.

V. Varfolomey: the man about whom no one could say for sure what the initial had originally stood for—vicious, or victorious, or violent—because Varfolomey was known to be all of those things.

Everard looked at that smile and thought: what if V was just Vitaliy? Vitya?

He put palms over his eyes, clenched his teeth against the threat of a high, desperate-feeling laugh. No wonder he could no longer read even D’Arcy. It seemed Everard had well and truly lost his bearings when it came to other men… if he’d ever had any at all.

He groaned. “Weapons. And how many ships in your flotilla?”

He hadn’t expected an answer, but Vitaliy politely said, “That I cannot say.”

Of course not. “How long have you been a pirate?”

“Lord God above,” D’Arcy muttered. “Oh, sorry, Bell.”