Looking Toward the Horizon

Chapter 1

The sunlight caressed my face as the salt from the waves chapped my lips and the seagulls cried their greeting down upon us as I sat in the crow’s nest and listened to their call. The men below me bustled about, carrying out the orders called by the man who tended to do such things. Captain Finch, he called himself. A rather boring name for such an interesting man. Once a Scottish noble, he gave up everything to sail the seas and gain back what he lost and more with looks as dark as his soul. His black eyes, reflected that soul; greed and vengeance radiated off of him like the waves in the hair that hung midway down his back. The noble intentions instilled in him since birth were the only things holding him back, like the leather thong that held back those ebony strands. A handsome man who radiated an aura of mystery and danger, I knew from experience that he drew women to him like honey drew flies.

With the grace befitting his former station, he swung up the lines to my post on top of the mast. Seating himself beside me, he held a bejeweled dagger to my throat. “Did you not hear what I said, Jasmine? I should kill you now for your insubordination.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t kill me, would you, Papa? Me being the heir to the ship and everything.”

Yes, Captain Finch was my father. I was technically a duchess of Scotland, but I grew up in the life of a sea lover. I was climbing gang lines and running across sail posts before I could walk. Born onboard, I set foot on dry land as rarely as a crocodile would. Ports bored me, and I craved the gentle rocking of the boat beneath my feet and the sweet scent of the ocean even before ennui set in.

I tossed my blonde braid over my shoulder as I grabbed a spare sail rope and tied it around a hook in the nest in a knot so tight, most sailor’s envied it. Tossing a casual salute to my captain and father, I grabbed the end of the rope not tied to the mast and threw myself out of the crow’s nest, allowing myself to arc once and let go at the top, flipping once before landing on my right knee and opposite hand, a trick that took me nearly four years to learn. My mother and I had often done such things before the sea took her so cruelly back.

“Avast, ye slackers! Secure that gangline! Port to seaboard! Prepare the anchor, we’re making port at Theinne!” I called out to the hardened and sweaty sea hands that made up my father’s crew.

Though most of them had scorned me, a woman, as first mate to their captain as they had my mother, they had watched me grow up and become as much of a bloodthirsty scourge as they were. Now, these powerful men scurried to follow my orders, ensuring that they would get warm drink and maybe a warmer bed this night.

Theinne was a harbor safe to our kind, an otherwise uncharted island where the British Royal Navy had not hope of catching us. Much debauchery occurred within their shores. Never wanting to participate in such pointless activities, I slept in my cabin on the ship those rare nights we stayed at the harbor.

Unfortunately, we had recently lost many crew mates to the sea and fatal wounds during territory fights. I would have to go ashore this time to recruit new sailors to join the crew.

Sighing, I held out one arm for William to perch on. William is the parrot my father had given me for my sixteenth birthday. Dad always did have something of a sense of humor. I pet him under the beak, and he nuzzled my finger. “Hello, Will. How are you today?”

“Get on with it, ye scurvy dogs!” He screeched. I chuckled and fed him a cracker out of the stack I always kept attached to my waist. I waited for him to finish the cracker before turning him to look at my face.

“Go bother Ben, okay? He deserves a cheering up today.” My cabin boy, Ben, was turning eight today, and was down because he didn’t think he’d get to see his family. Little did he know...

Will took off, his red plumage flashing in the sun. I sighed again. Will was a flying cliche. Pulling myself together, I entered my parent’s cabin, where my father had slipped after I flew down to give orders. With his nose buried deep in the map on his desk, he might have been any other captain. But I knew better. “Planning our next plunder?” I asked, sliding down into a leather chair, throwing my legs over one arm.

He jumped in his seat, moving a hand to clutch his heart. “Davy Jones’ Locker, Jasmine! Scare me out me bones!” He said.

“That was very good. You almost sounded like a pirate.” I grinned at him. His proper speech was a matter of deep teasing between him and I.

“I’ve been practicing.” He muttered absently. “I need you to go and bring ten men aboard tonight, Jasmine. Think you can do that?”

I looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “Have I ever managed not to do so before?”

“Good point.” He told me. “I was eight to be real seamen, a new cabin boy since Brandon fell overboard, and a quick one for you to train.”

“Me?” I asked with a squeak. “Why me?”

“You’re the fastest, more discreet, and quickest of us all. Look how you just snuck up on me. You can kill a man at twenty paces with pistol, sword, or throwing knife. Close range, you’re the deadliest fencer we have, myself excluded.” He gloated. “It’s gonna have to be you. I need a new harborboy.”

“I still don’t get why it has to be me. I have too much to do.” I muttered, slightly mollified by his praise.

“You will do it, Jazz, and that’s an order.” He said quietly, but with such authority in his timbre that I knew better than to contest.

“Can’t I just take over as harborboy?” I asked.

“No! First of all, you’re a girl, first mate, and my daughter. I can’t replace you if you get killed. Besides, you’re needed too much on the ship to play spy at the harbors.”

A harborboy is a spy for the captain who checks each harbor before the ships docks to make sure there wouldn’t be an unfriendly welcome. It was the most important job on a pirate ship (excluding captain and first mate) and the most deadly one. We had been through four this year alone, and it was only May.

I sighed. “Fine. I’ll train the rookie. But I warn you. If the boy isn’t up to my standards by the end of July, I’ll slit his throat and dump him in the ocean before he can spill any secrets. I won’t have an apprentice of mine reporting to the Marian Navy.”

Even worse than the British Royal Navy, the Marian Navy were the people who policed the seas in an attempt to stop pirating. They would gladly pay hundreds of bags of gold for this ship and our heads. The Black Duke and Shadow Duchess, as we were called, were wanted all over the seven seas, and I wasn’t going to hang because someone had a loose tongue. I’d cut it out before I had to.

“Fine. Pick them up tonight, and begin training tomorrow. In the meantime, get dressed in your wenchy best and prepare to go ashore.” He practically threw me out of his chambers, and I ran into three people eavesdropping at the door. Among them was Ben with Will perched on his shoulder.

I grabbed his arm gently and pulled him ack to my cabin. “I should cut your ear off for listening in.” I told him on a sigh to keep up my reputation. “But I won’t because then you’d bleed all over my floor. Besides, I have enough ears.”

I sat on my bed and put my head in my hands. What as I going to do? I didn’t have time enough to do this.

Pulling on the long sapphire skirt and matching corset Ben handed me, I went to my chest and pulled out my mother’s sapphire necklace, placing it so that it dangled enticingly between my breasts. My sun-kissed skin was greatly accented by the dark blue color. I strapped thin throwing daggers in the bodice of the corset alongside the whalebone and in wrist sheaths inside the balloonish sleeves of the top. A foil was strapped to the side of the skirt after I had kissed the sapphire at the top of the hilt as my mother had always done.

I added a pair of pistols at my waist and, after checking my appearance in the mirror, decided I was deadly-looking enough not to be attacked.

The ship made port an hour later, and I walked down the gangplank to the dock.

Missing the rolling of the ship immediately, I turned into the tavern, The Hangman’s Mistress. Inside, yet another brawl was taking place. Flipping a pistol out of its holster and into my hand, I fired one round into the air. The bar went silent.

“T’hell do ye bilge rats thin you’re doing.” I sneered. “Do ye want me to kill you? And I won’t be quick about it either. Ye ken?” Unlike my father, I knew how to talk to these people.

Most everyone nodded quickly. They knew who I was. I took a table in the back and waved for a spot of rum to warm myself.

“Are ye looking for crew, Mistress?” A young man, about twenty with more muscle than brain most like, turned a leather hat in his hands and looked at me with a mixture of question and respect in his eyes.

I nodded and pushed a piece of parchment at him. He took the quill I had set on the table and penned his name on the paper. I inspected it.

“Alright, mate. Be at The Silver Harpy at dawn, ye ken?”

He nodded and walked away.

The rest of the day went well, and I had all the recruits by sundown. The harborboy was quick, if a little twitchy, but eager to learn. Rather than bother to get a room at the tavern and cost myself anxiety and likely quite a bit of blood from the bedbugs, I decided to make my way back to the Harpy.

The streets looked more sinister at night, and the gentle waves of the ship called for me. I walked through them with my hand on the hilt of my mother’s sword. It’s weight was a great comfort to me and I felt myself relax. Until, that is, I felt a gentle tug on my purse. I flicked my wrists, bringing daggers stored in concealing wrist braces into my hands. Before the purse strings were even untangled from my belt, I had the little thief against the wall with one dagger at his throat and one at his temple, my right knee tucked neatly into his groin. I must admit, he wasn’t that little though. About my age, he was built like a god with delicately sculpted, lean muscled that jumped under my touch, and a wide chest that rose and fell with even breath.

I smirked at the face of my pickpocket. “Silly man. Did you mean to relieve me of me purse? Bad manners, that.” I heard footsteps behind me, and whirled the dagger at the first man’s temple back and up to the neck of the second thief, who was readying his pistol when he noticed my spin. Yeah, I was that fast.

“Shite.” He swore under his breath. A third person cocked a pistol to my right. Throwing the dagger I had pressed to the currently genitally threatened thief’s neck into the air, I brought my knee up into his groin hard while I flipped the left dagger in my palm and slit the second thief’s throat . The first groaned in unison with the second, hunching up. I caught my dagger, shoved them both into their bracers and whirled the right pistol out of the holster, fired off a shot in the direction of the cock of the pistol. The bugger’s brains were blown out the back of his skull before he could blink.

I pulled the first bandit to his feet while he still dry retched into the cobblestone. As the only one I hadn’t heard, he deserved to live for an additional moment.

“Next time ye think ter take advantage of a pretty lass walking down an alley alone, make sure it isn’t the Shadow Duchess ye’re stealing from.”

Blue eyes, widening in surprise with a hint of pain, contained no trace of the fear I usually saw when I announced who the dumb bastard’s were messing with when they collided with mine. Instead, a smile spread across the sea-chappened lips on a face tanned by the sun. A handsome face, one that was somehow familiar. Those eyes scanned me up and down appreciatingly, lingering at the sapphire at my throat and at the barest hint of cleavage revealed by the corset. “Jasmine Marie MacRieve. My, how you’ve changed. You’re more skilled than I would have thought, My Grace.” He bowed. “I applaud your acheivements.”

“How-how do you know me?” I asked. My middle and last name weren’t commonly known. Hell, my first name was barely whispered in the frightened voices of people who would never live to speak it again.

“Oh, we go way back, Jazzy. I’m insulted you don’t remember. I knew of your accomplishments of course. Can’t say I expected you to knee an old friend in the pills, though.” He grinned, and my heart skipped. What was wrong with me?

“First, I didn’t see your face. Second, I don’t know you, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Finally, be grateful you didn’t end up like your friends there.” I nodded to the two idiots, bleeding onto the street way and twitching unconsciously. They were too far gone for the muscles to be jumping on demand. “And now, I’ll be taking my leave.” I turned one booted heel and walked in the direction of the Silver Harpy, my father, and my nice warm bed.

A moment later, a warm hand clapped onto my shoulder. “Touch me again, and I’ll make sure ye don’t live to touch another thing.” I said coldly.

“Oh, resorting to pirate speak again? I thought it was so nice when we talked like nobles rather than the simple-minded.”

“In case you didn’t get the message, I am a pirate.”

“Oh, I got the message, Shadow Duchess. And to jog your memory, you’re not the only blueblood-turned-rogue on the seven seas.” With the last breathed into my hair, the mysterious man vanished in a cloud of cheeroot smoke and sandalwood.

I breathed in deep before climbing up the side of the ship, silent as a mouse even in a skirt, and fired off a shot from my left pistol into the wood beside the guard’s head. “If I were foe, ye’d be dead. Be happy ye aren’t that way now.” I said, leaping on deck.

He swallowed while the blood left his face. He peered once at the bullethole, then to the smoking pistol in my hand, and nodded. “Good. Keep yer eyes open, ken?”

“I ken.” His voice was shaky.

“Jasmine! Must ye ruin my ship?” My father’s voice bellowed from the depths of the ship.

“Aye, ‘tis my mission in life.” I muttered softly under my breath, stroking the smooth baluster. It may have been my father’s ship, but it was my baby. I’d do anything to protect her.

“Jasmine!” My father roared.

“Aye, Captain?” I asked.

“Did you get us a new harborboy?”

“Aye.” I knew my natural Scottish brogue was thick in the evidence of my pride.

“Did you get the others?” He asked with a condescending tilt of his eyebrow.

“Aye. They’ll be ready in the morn.” I told him, turning to leave.

“And Jazz?” He asked softly. “Why are you speaking totally in Pirate?”

“To remind myself, Father, that my blood is no longer blue, but seawater.” And with that, I walked out of his quarters into my own, sending the cabin boy onto shore to see his parents on his birthday.

That night, I laid in bed awake for hours, trying to solve the mystery of the other pirate with a distinctive burr that spoke of the mainland, my native Scotland.