It wasn't a monster, or Wolfe, or Roinar, and for that, Mariana was grateful. She looked at Daniel.
He looked back at her and threw a severed arm onto the floor.
"This is what happens when people mess with me," he said. "This is the magician."
"Is?" Mariana was too hardened to feel shocked right now. She had simply focused on the peculiar look of the limb, like it was somehow twitching a little, just not enough that she could have said for sure that it moved.
"Do you mean he still is?" she asked. "And not that he was?"
"No, he is very much still alive, but now he will have to make do without hands."
Mariana was starting to feel bad about this. The magician had been completely innocent, just like those people her men had killed while she had been on the Good Wife…well, perhaps it was not good to think about these matters at all.
"I see," Mariana said. "You left him alive."
"Should have probably killed him. People who do things with their hands are very…particular about their hands."
Well, yes, that was the truth, albeit the dissonance between his casual flatness and the situation made Mariana feel like she wanted to vomit her innards completely out of her body.
"I am sorry," Daniel said. "I don't do these things because of stupidity. I do it because I am too jaded to care."
"I understand, but don't apologize to me. It is not me who is armless." She forced herself to smile. Fixing, breaking, they were the same movement going in different directions.
She had to think so in order to survive.
They left Neul, and Mariana had never felt this conflicted in her entire life. She was not becoming the same person she had originally been, but neither was she changing into an untold direction, which was strange and to her, unnameable.
The wet wind licked her hair, ruining her braids. The sea treated her beauty with rough hands. The men called her captain, though. It was like Daniel had told them about his time with her. He had probably done so.
It was so weird to think about him speaking of her in awe, like some very lucky husbands spoke of their wives. She gazed out towards the horizon - and then his hands surprised her, wrapping around her waist and bending her over the gunwale.
"I want to consume you," he growled into her ear.
There was something about him that reminded Mariana of the encounter with the shadow. The scent he usually had on his skin was gone right now. No cocoa, no leather or spice, nothing.
Just his raw stubble against her cheek.
She felt the need to make him work for her attention, but just how much of a facade of resistance did a pirate lady have to keep up? Was it all right to let go? She had never been taught such things, and she had no traditions to lean onto - no one in their right mind told women to fall in love with exciting and tall men. It was all sensible marriage this, sensible marriage that.
A sudden memory of her mother pierced her chest, but just before the unpleasant thought could make her pull away from Daniel, she gathered her courage and turned to face him so that she was quite elegantly arching her back over the gunwale.
They had to look so beautiful together, his masculine form supporting her so that she would catch no more of the salty spray from the waves.
"I want you to erode me," she whispered. "Daniel, my king, I want you to whisk little pieces away from me, one by one, morsel by morsel, like the patient waves erode rock and earth and make castles fall…"
"Do not speak," he whispered back to her and kissed her neck.
She gasped; he was so tender to her, so good to her.
She hugged him tightly as he continued the trail of kisses from her throat, towards her chin, placing one kiss here and another there.
Then he kissed her closed eyelids.
"I have to go now," he said. "Captain duties. I expect you to take over tomorrow."
"You have something else to attend to?"
"Kind of." He groaned. "Navigation; dull things like that."
She gave him a sly smile. "Gods, that is not my favorite part, either."
He vanished towards the rear of the ship.
It was only now that Mariana realized something about the vessel itself; this was not the ship that had suffered the attack from the monster with the nasty fingernails. Mariana was a bit ashamed of herself for not noticing this sooner, but all these pirates were so respectful towards her that she quickly learned the fate of that poor ship.
That one was still being repaired. This one was called the Dainty, a name that followed the rule of the inverse correlation of pirate ship names. The Destroyer had been one failure of a vessel with a poor crew. The Queen's Bounty had been a bit better. Then there had been the Cat's Paw, and that pirate crew had enjoyed moderate success. When a ship with a cutesy name appeared on the horizon, it was time to either run or pray and die.
As there was no running over the waves, most people picked the second option.
Captain Mariana Adams was pleasantly surprised to learn that the crew she was currently commanding hid some pretty bright minds. During her first moments as a captain the next day, she met an astronomer, two accountants, one hobbyist occultist and a lot of men who just loved to read. It was a fantasy of a pretentious high cor with a hunger for adventures, but it was also the very real present moment of a woman who was so in love that it made her sick.
Gods, even his crew was way more amazing than any group she had ever been a part of.