His head violently tosses as she sucks hungrily on his lower lip. Her tongue slithers into his mouth and comes out bleeding as he tears it with his teeth and throws the smug, wild-eyed madwoman a yard off. In the second I had closed my eyes, she had put him on his back and straddled him, though his sword's steel stuck like a stake through her back, shining a grotesque red sheen.
Darling lays on her side with the hilt quivering by her seizing breasts and though her back is to me, I can tell by the shaking of her shoulders and the bouncing of her curls that as this woman dies, she is laughing. Her voice does not reach the cone device, but the hollow, haunting trill of her taunting titter reverberates, imagined, through my empty skull. How? I blink, over and over.
The captain staggers to his feet, dragging his heavy sleeves desperately across his lips, spitting, hawking. He cries out and throws his fists against a wall, cracking the clay. Forgetting his crutch, his steps blunder across the square, unbalanced. He falls into the arms of Increas Langley as the officer runs out from the shadows to catch him, his so often cold features flushed and expressive. He speaks, but his accent is so thick in the rush of his words that I pick up nothing.
I grab my rifle and stand.
Two men—her men—emerge with grave faces.
I must get down there. Cobbe grabs my wrist before I can get away and holds me back. I stumble. Tears on my lenses turn everything to oil paint, swirling with every motion. The goblin gnashes his teeth at me.
"Yeu ain't had orders yet, boy."
"But, the poison!" I exclaim. "I must help. We must induce vomiting right away. He could recover before it takes effect."
He pulls on my arm to stand and raises his rifle to my chest. His fingers wrap around my stringy bow-tie and he yanks me to his height. I feel I belong here. As if my back will never straighten again, I hang with my eyes fixed at the point between his and his gun's muzzle. It is little more than a steely blur.
"What yeu must do is wait fer orders," he snarls.
I choke, swallowing.
"The antidote!" I hear the captain demand. I look over, to where his hand raises the taller of the pair of strangers by the ruffles of his blouse. "Where is it kept?"
"I do not know, sir," the man replies, fingers splayed. As if they were not enemies. As if his leader were not dead on the ground by his feet. "She beds in the Moon Spire. She drinks... She drank the poison with her coffee in the morning, with her liquor in the day, with her moonshine at night."
"Then the antidote must be close."
Increas was already searching her person, turning her body like a doll's and rifling through each and every pocket with haste.
"No, Captain," the shorter man says. He fixes his pistol into its holster and shakes his head, spreading his hands. Why are they so acquiescent? Why do they bow their heads before him, and address him as if he had always led them? Pirate codes and pasts I know not of. "We seen her drink the poison, for certain. What we ain't seen in years is her drinking the antidote."
The captain wets his lips, chest heaving, expression unfathomable. Sweat beads on his bloody brow. He points towards the center of the small village, to where a large bronze bell hangs still on stilts of wood. "Raise the signal, now, Mr. Hewitt."
The shorter man bows obediently and withdraws.
"Increas," the captain summons, "search the Moon Spire. Find the antidote."
"Aye, Captain."
He turns slowly, then sprints with his hand against the scabbard on his waist towards a distinct twisting tower with two crescents built at its point which cup the sky where the moon might hover in the night.
"COBBE!" Captain Avery bellows. The sweat is coming in sheets. It seeps through his stretched clothing, which hangs off his person in a way that makes him appear almost fragile after his unexplainable turn. His face is anything but fragile; fierce with burning gaze. "Find Dorry!"
Cobbe lifts his rifle to the sky and nods in response, catching his leader's distant eye. He starts to turn, but I grab him. I grab him despite the rifle's muzzle finding my throat in a second, and I open my mouth.
"WOODS!" I hear. With a glance, I see the captain staring at the trembling of his own hands. He does not continue.
"Please," I beg the goblin. "What is the poison? I may be able to help."
He spits and glares at my fingers wrapped around his wrist.
I release him. "Please."
"They call it Locker on the sea, for nothing sends you there more wickedly." His eyes narrow and he lowers the rifle. If his stub finger could reach the trigger, held in his dominant, damaged hand, I wonder if he would have fired. "It starts simple enough, nothin' but shakes. Then, yeur skin starts to turn, real slow, to gray, bit o' purple and blue as if yeur veins done turn out their insides. After that, yeu can't move yeur toes, then yeur hands. Soon enough, it's yeur lungs that ain't workin'. But yeur mind goes last. Yeu can see it in the eyes of those taken by it. It is the worst kind of torture. It is the worst way to die. Does that answer yeur question? Did you find it in one of yeur libraries somewhere, yeu pencil-pushing poofter? You ain't superior here. Yeu can't save him without antidote, no matter how many books yeu've read. What yeu can do is what yeur told, and yeu can let me do the same. Yeu were supposed to shoot her. YOU. Look who's the fuck-up this time."
The blunt of his rifle thrusts against my groin and I cry out. My knees drive into the ground and I fall forward with the agony, muscles standing out tense all along my neck. His sandals slap his heels as he jogs away. The tolling bell below sounds less like triumph and more like reprimand. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I meekly pull my skewed spectacles off my nose and crinkle my blind eyes to the smoky sky. Perhaps I should lie here forever. Perhaps the bullet I did not grace her with, or that werewolf with, or even my father with, should grace me. I did this, Cobbe was right. I had one job. What would Cornelius say? What would Walter think?
My head turns to the side, to the clearing below, and I dry my eyes. Over slickened grasses, men stand with their arms at their sides and their sweat-soaked bosoms swelling with the breaths they could have lost. Weapons drop to the earth. I polish my lenses and replace them on my nose, lifting my head higher. Men stand like schoolboys before the dean's door, uncertain and awaiting either good news or bad, shifting uneasily in the sudden silence. The only sound is the bell's chimes, enveloping the isle like a spell.
I cannot distinguish faces. I cannot find Elian's sweet purple scarf, or Cornelius's long coat, or Lydia's blonde braid, or Walter's ridiculous stockings. I peer down at my own socks, no less ridiculous than his, covered in yellow dots over the blue fabric like a child's painting of a night sky.
I press my hand to my head, chuckling cynically to myself, then touch my eyes once again.
"The Witch has fallen, by my hand!" I hear the captain call over the silent battlefield. I crawl to the edge of the ridge to see him, arm draped around the second man from the square. "Anyone who desires to fight further will be considered treasonous and cut to their knees. We have triumphed! I am your captain."
A mechanical clatter rings over the land and heads raise to the waterfall. The ship that had been sent for us, through the wrong cave, sinks on a lift from the white waters of the falls to the gently rippling lagoon below.
"Signal that ship!" Captain Avery orders. "The fight is over. Those unhappy with the change in leadership are free to take that vessel on the morrow and abscond from the Isles forever."
He raises his polished sword. The man at his side raises his, too. Our crew stirs with glee. Their hands raise in the air and their voices fill the clearing with triumphant warmth as they shout and holler huzzahs and "well fought." They dance, some sing. They kneel to the wounded and pat backs and throw hats. The other men, those of her command, hesitantly at first, join. The field roars with mirth, as if the fires and the bloodshed never existed. Men hug and grip elbows and ruffle each other's hair.
It means nothing to me, because I can scarcely bear to look. I watch the trembling of Captain Avery's hand, the one behind his back. The trembling of his sword arm as it, too, lowers and tucks away.
"There will be a feast tonight! There will be drinking and dancing and music!" he announces, to greater cheerful uproar. "Just for you, lads! I could have asked for no finer salts. At ease!"
While they hoot in response, he murmurs to the man next to him and lets him go.
As the rowdy crewmen share merriment on the field, I watch our great immortal captain stagger alone for the woods on quaking limbs and a scraping peg. He drags himself out of sight through the trees like a dying animal, searching for a place to slip away.