Page 30 of Dauntless

“Eddie,” Joe said with a sigh.

“What?Mavis asked.“He might be a Hawthorne, but that doesn’t mean he’s an idiot.”

“Mavis gets me,” I said.“Is therepieinside?”

“Not for the likes of you,” she said.

“I knew she was going to say that!”I exclaimed.“You get me, Mavis.You get me.”

“Probably time we headed back, I think.”Joe climbed to his feed and dusted the dirt off the arse of his pants.He held a hand down for me and hauled me to my feet.“Come on, you.”

I blinked to try to clear my very blurry vision—it didn’t help—and looked around as we stepped back inside the church.There was a lot more space in here now.The food and drink up on the altar and first row of pews was mostly gone, and people were starting to drift away in dribs and drabs, hanging at the front door just long enough to finish their conversations and slip away into the night.Little kids dozed in their parents’ arms.Bigger kids hid yawns behind their hands.A burst of laughter went up as someone missed a step on the way out.

“Mind how you go, Buzzy Pete!”a woman said, and a man called back something indistinct but jovial in tone.

Joe steered me out the front door of the church, and we wandered over to the statue of Josiah Nesmith by the harbour wall.I swayed along with the waves hitting the wall, and Joe held onto the back of my jacket even though we were nowhere near the edge.

“It’s so nice here,” I said, blinking at him.“You should have taxis though.Why aren’t there any taxis?”

“Most people don’t have far to go,” Joe said.“Only to the main street or the few cottages behind it.There are a few that live further out.Round Robbie Hooper and Yellow Sarah live on the eastern tip of the island, and Young Harry Barnes has a shack up on the edge of Mayfair Bay.At least we don’t have as far to walk as them.”

“But we have to walk uphill, Joe!”

He laughed softly.“Yeah, there is that.”

Things clinked, and I realised that at some point he’d collected his casserole dish and empty flagons.

I leaned against Josiah Nesmith’s plinth.“Do you think that the mutineers picked this place to mutiny because it’s so beautiful?Like, were they thinking of making a life here, or did they just get carried away with the whole murder thing on the spur of the moment?”

“You’re the historian, not me.”

“I wonder if it reminded them of home,” I said.“It’s not tropical, is it?”

“It’s older and it’s wilder,” Joe said.“And you are very, very drunk.”

“I didn’t even get any pie.”

“Yes, that’s a real tragedy.”

Joe got me too.I smiled at him in the moonlight, and he pretended not to smile back.

“Do you know what’s amazing?”

“What?”

“That drinking song that you guys sing here?Wait, they’re mostly all drinking songs.The one about drinking Dauntless dry?It’sdifferent.”I hummed the first line.“That part, it’s supposed to go ‘For the Frenchmen are coming for a fresh supply, and they swear they’ll drink little England dry.’It’s not the English coming to drink Dauntless Island dry, the way you guys sing it.Like, two hundred years ago the mutineers took this anti-French song and turned it into an anti-Englishone, and now, here on Dauntless, it’s canon.Isn’t that amazing?”

“That’s pretty amazing, Eddie,” he agreed softly, and I got the impression he genuinely meant that, and wasn’t just humouring me like with the pie.Like maybe he wasn’t enthusiastic about it himself, but he liked that I was.It was a warm feeling.

“And when did they start thinking of themselves asnotEnglish, Joe?”

He smiled properly this time.“I don’t know, Eddie.”

“Ugh, this is all so amazing.I hope I remember it tomorrow.”

We leaned into each other, and for a moment I thought we were going to kiss, and then another knot of people stepped out of the church and untangled themselves into three women and a man.One of the women wandered over to us, holding up a jug.

“No,” Joe said, shaking his head.

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