Page 47 of Rears & Vices

Everard yawned. “Halfway to Florida. Should we have kept her hove to instead?”

“No, no. I agreed to run her.” Vitaliy gestured to León, the bo’sun, straight-backed at his side. “Heave to, but keep a full watch after the first rest,” he ordered. “Everyone is to keep a sharp eye. The sharpest,” he emphasised.

“Señor.” León nodded, and Everard could tell he approved. Time to come out of hiding.

Not just well liked, Everard realised then. A true captain, Varfolomey hardly ever had to say any order twice.

Now Vitaliy looked up to the topsail. “Hoist the Spanish, while we’re at it?”

The Spanish flag; an almost impenetrable alias, given that the meregildo was Spanish-built.

“It may be advisable, so close to Florida,” Everard said. “Unless she is too well known for subterfuge?”

Vitaliy shook his head. “Eh, no. Not if we don’t raise the black. There are six of her, identical. One with the British, too, I believe? I will nail the disguise myself.”

The disguise in question was a thin, curved, and cleverly painted piece of hull, meant to attach to the quarter gallery and rename the Sévère as her sister-meregildo doppelganger, the Reina Luisa.

“Yourself?” Everard said. “Have the carpenters do it, for God’s sake; they weren’t abovedecks all night, in the spray. You’re so tired, you’ll kick through a window, like as not.” He thought of Vitaliy with lead and glass shards stuck in his ankle, his calf, his thigh, slicing through the femoral—they’d got through the storm intact and now this⁠—

Vitaliy’s eyebrows rose a fraction, increasing the depths of the hollows around his dark, dusk-lit eyes. “Am I?” he said mildly.

“Well, I was about that tired myself, anyway.”

Vitaliy shrugged.

“Look,” Everard said, “I’ll leave you the cot, if that’s the issue. I can bunk with Preston, wherever he is. But you should re⁠—”

“Sail!” came a cry.

Vitaliy swung himself down to the deck. No longer than a second with a glass to his eye—produced from apparently nowhere—and he had relaxed.

“It is Milly, and the Birch.”

Everard startled. The Birch was meant to have come from Belize; to already intercept the Sévère when she had been thrown by the storm was an impressive feat. “So soon, and with the storm?”

“The Birch makes six knots,” Vitaliy said, climbing the ladder to the quarterdeck two steps at a time. “We’re back on trajectory, and there’s nobody better at a dead reckon than Romilly. Especially the Sévère’s.” Everard followed, trying not to stare. Vitaliy’s shoulders gleamed moon-white in the slanting sunlight. There was not a single scar upon his back—the tell of having been beneath a good former captain, or perhaps only that Vitaliy had kept a low profile during his time with the Marines—but he did have a spread of densely packed freckles, twin wings across the shoulder blades. Fascinating.

“She must know the ship quite well.”

“Very,” Vitaliy said bluntly. He called to León with cupped hands. “Signal her to fall back—to come alongside at dawn!”

“Oh, indeed?” Everard said.

Vitaliy nodded. “We took her together. She named her.”

And then you made me your matelot, and gave half of her to me?

Romilly René was a close and faithful second; that much was clear. She’d kept the flotilla afloat and intact and crewed the entirety of Vitaliy’s absence, no small thing. But to what precise degree of close and faithful, Everard was afraid to ask, for fear of what he’d find. Had she been expecting what he had given to Everard? Partnership? Inheritance?

Women are more than lovers or wives, he reminded himself. They’re ruthless, too. This one was second-in-command to a pirate fleet.

“But in the end she preferred the Birch. All-women crew, you see,” Vitaliy added.

“The Birch?” Everard startled. A select crew. “I didn’t know. How odd.”

“Is it?” Vitaliy murmured. He put the glass back to his eye and cursed. “Ah, damn. She has Louis-Michel with her.”

Louis-Michel. Very informal, that.