Silent Eden

Chapter Thirteen

Ruthless watched the two on the main deck as they watched the Island Paradise fade from sight. Fren was unimpressed. He didn’t like the two of them on the ship, he told Ruthless. The girl, especially. How had they been talked into this nonsense to begin with? Searching for survivors was just about the dumbest idea he’d ever heard of. It wasn’t as though they wouldn’t have been able to procure further supplies without the help of the Islanders.

Ruthless grunted a reply that Fren barely heard. Somehow, he wondered if it had been done as an act of charity, rather than desperation. Ruthless had once been a prisoner, escaping only because the previous leader of the Pirates had allowed him to stow on the ship. He might have felt that helping the girl and the pale skinned peoples was a way of paying back a deb that he somehow felt he owed.

Fren was majorly unimpressed. Risking the lives of the entire fleet for some stupid girl and her stupid people? How unlike the strong pirate captain. Snarking something in Islander that Ruthless wouldn’t have been entirely understood by the bigger man, Fren went back to work, swinging up onto a rope. He climbed the larger of the two masts, calling out to someone above him about the rest of the fleet.

Ruthless looked out over the water before him. If he understood the coordinates correctly, it would take them less than twelve hours to catch up with the fleet. He looked down at the wheel between his hands. The wood was smooth as glass. There had never been a splinter in his hands from the wood of the ship, but the skin on his palms was just as rough and as touch as any of the rope on board. He held up a hand, looking up at the skies as they headed South.

Stepping up the ladder that led to the post what Ruthless held, a woman turned her dark eyed gaze on him. He needed to give the Islander and the Islanders’ Pet something to do. Should she take the skinny girl down to the galley and make her help with the evening meal? The Islanders had given them more than enough food to allow for a fair sized meal.

Ruthless nodded his head. He could spot both the Islander and the girl easily on the desk. The two of them were trying to stay out of the way the best they could, but they were idle hands. Idle hands were, as the people sometimes said, the devils work. Put the girl to work in the galley, he said. Put the Islander to work up in the sails. He could help replace the ruined ropes with the new ones that the Islanders had provided them. He was wild, like most Islanders, wasn’t he? So he would probably be fine up there.

The woman nodded her head, but she didn’t leave right away. Instead she stepped closer to Ruthless. He had nothing to prove, she told him. There were hundreds of lives that he was putting in danger by travelling back to that little Island with the strange peoples.

Ruthless was unimpressed. It didn’t matter, he told her. They would be more than six days sail from the Mainlanders waters. Doing a favor for the Islanders in exchange for enough supplies to last them the better half of six months was worth the so called risk.

And what if the Mainlander Law enforcers were there, she demanded. Wild, curly brown hair blew in the ocean winds. They would all be arrested. Some of them would even be put to death. Fren was one of those people that would be killed without a trial. Mixed bloods were supposed to be aborted; he wasn’t even supposed to exist. Frens’ wife – his pregnant wife- would be executed for interspecies mingling. Did he really want that on his head?

It wasn’t just Fren, Ruthless told the woman. She knew that. Why bring Fren into this? Was it because of his wife? Her pregnancy? He paused, exchanging glances. Or was it because he was technically her half brother?

The woman narrowed her eyes, cursing the day she had agreed to be wed to this man, this Captain Ruthless, Pirate king. Some king, she scoffed angrily.