The New Lion needed all its spares and the merchantmen's, but over the afternoon and the day following the battle, the crew was able to patch it up as well as they could at sea. However, the Phantom's broadside against her starboard side had damaged beyond repair half the cannons in that battery.
Castillano ordered to throw them to the sea, to get rid of the weight and have more room for their many wounded. Only half his crew was still in shape to work on the repairs and steer the ship. Now they could only pray they wouldn't come across any more pirates before reaching Trujillo, or they'd be in big trouble.
Facing up to the English pataches would've been only routine for Castillano and his men. They were used to fight the English scavengers back whenever their route took them near Jamaica. But the Phantom's sudden intervention had completely tipped the scales.
Had it not been because of the filibusters, the New Lion would've still had all her men and all her guns. And she wouldn't have a hole up and down the works, thanks to the Phantom's bowsprit. Lucky them, the bumps were still working and they'd been able to patch the hole, in order to stay afloat and on course.
However, alone in his cabin that night, Castillano couldn't help a smile. The gash in his ship's works was a fair price to watch the child stand on the bowsprit, her raven hair floating in the wind, to jump on them like an angel of death. A vision that would feed many a man's nightmares, but that lit a spark in his eyes.
The following night, as soon as his lieutenant and his bosun left the cabin after dinner, he opened the windows to the night and the eastern horizon. The child had left that way, towing the pataches. He'd expected her to come back for the merchantmen, now that he was in no shape to protect them anymore. But the Phantom's three mast hadn't shown up in the horizon.
He rested his elbow on the wooden sill and rubbed his neck. It burned, the scratch left when the pirate had yanked the chain off. But mostly he missed to feel it there, and the ring stroking his chest with every breath.
He had nothing left of her.
Not even her respect.
Not even her resentment.
Not only had she scorned him. Castillano hadn't missed the fact that she'd fought him only to protect the English boy. Not had he missed her concern to cover him and get him away from the fight. Nor the way she'd held him up. He knew her, or had known her, enough to tell the English boy was more than just a friend or one more man in her crew. Something in the way she'd looked at him. In the way she'd said his name. In the way her arm had circled his back.
Castillano's lips refused to hold back a sigh.
He had nothing left of her.
The child hadn't only moved on with her happy, carefree life. She'd also found someone to love.
If he'd ever harbored any doubt about how true she'd been when she'd told him she hoped to never see him again, now there was no doubt left.
He didn't fight the belated regret eating him up inside.
A thousand times over the last year he'd made vows to go for her. And a thousand times he'd hadn't. Because Don Carlos needed to deliver a cargo somewhere across the Caribbean. Because Alonso and Alma brought their happy tales from Tortuga.
Because he was a bloody coward, afraid she might reject him again.
Well, there he was, reaping the fruits of his lack of guts. He would spend the rest of his life dreaming of her black eyes and her honey lips. While she was in somebody else's arms. And it was all on him.
Sunrise found him more than two-hundred miles away from Trujillo. Even with tailwind, the merchantmen being so heavy and the New Lion being so damaged, they'd be lucky to make port before the next day's sunset.
Even though he'd learned to deal with the sorrow overcoming him ever since Marina had left him in Santiago, Castillano realized it was different this time. Make a mental list of the brothels where he'd find pretty brunettes wouldn't be enough. After seeing her again in the flesh, all the women in Trujillo, whether brunette or blonde, wouldn't be enough.
Especially after seeing her protect that idiot that only seemed to know parlor fencing.
So he took his boots off, rolled up his sleeves and went down to the bilge, where his men kept the bumps working around the clock. The clash with the Phantom had cracked the boards between two ribs, just above the waterline, and the crack kept leaking water that gathered at the bottoms.
The repeated exercise of working the pump didn't require any focus, but it would exhaust him, so maybe he could sleep that night. The problem was that it left his mind to wander its own meandering ways.
An idiot who only knew parlor fencing.
But he sailed with her. He fought with her. He took risks in his inexperience only to follow her.
He dared to live for her.
The child's words from their last night in Campeche came back to haunt him like a mourning ghost.
An idiot, yes. But an idiot who did what he hadn't been willing to do. Because he hadn't believed her when she'd warned him that the danger was real and closing in on him. He'd even thought she was lying, or repeating somebody else's lies, in order to make him change his mind.
Because what he'd found in his father's journals had brought him to his knees, deprived of any certainty and any reason to keep going. All he had left was his love for his country and his love for her. And trapped in that crossroads of irreconcilable feelings, death had seemed the best out to keep from betraying his two true loves.
But his flag had forsaken him. And his own countrymen, his brothers in arms, had found his pain funny, and intended to deliver him to the worst of torments in exchange for coin or favor.
And she'd grown tired of waiting for him to believe her, to appreciate her at least as much as he appreciated that loyalty he'd never before had thought could be in question. She'd run out of honesty and good will.
So she'd forsaken him too. She'd left him to his own device to keep living without any of the two loves that had kept his heart beating. She'd left him to trade loyalty and love for loneliness and cynicism.
And in time, she'd found somebody to give her what she needed: a man who dared to live for her.
No double dealings first and useless sorrow later.
A man who wasn't ashamed to stand by her side. Who lived under her flag and fought her battles. Like her blonde behemoth friend, who refused to command his own ship just to stay with her. Or the scarred dog that had snatched the ring from him. Or all those he'd recognized when he'd been taken to deck.
He remembered them from their trip from Campeche to Santiago, and from before that too. Those who had followed her to sneak into the Trinidad's main deck. Those with her in Maracaibo's dungeon. All of them had been with her for years. Proudly. With that fierce love they felt for her. Each and every one of them willing to die for her. Because they'd already had the guts to live for and with her.
That night he was as tired as he'd expected. He took a swim to wash the sweat away, and enjoyed dinner better than over the last two days. But as soon as he was alone in his cabin, he knew he wouldn't be able to shut his eyes.
Finally, sick and tired of being restrained in his hammock, he got up, filled a glass with the wine left and sat by the open windows.
The moon had risen late and wove a broad golden path on the sea before him. An almost-straight path from the New Lion to Tortuga, where now he was positive nobody waited for him. The path that he, who men still called Lion, had never dared to take. And that nobody wanted him to take anymore.
He gulped up the wine and breathed deep, struggling to get rid of that pathetic self-pity that made him loathe himself even more. He opened his eyes to the moon's trail, the east wind on his face, letting his sight come into focus slowly. And what he saw sent a chill down his spine.
He rubbed his eyes.
No, it couldn't be. It had to be a mirage born from his longing.
He couldn't be seeing the shape of sails showing out of the horizon, starkly cut in the golden trail.
Well, yes, it was possible. Surely they weren't the only ships sailing that area at that very moment.
But, so swiftly? And sailing straight toward the New Lion?
And weren't those three, not two, masts?
The bell beating to quarters froze him where he was.