Page 30 of The Pirate Queen of Ruin
Something rattles, and I have to tear my eyes away from her. In her hands is an old looking jar and a new bottle of ibuprofen. Her stare has hardened in a blink, her brows deepening and the scowl on her face returning as strong as ever. Anger isn’t a look I enjoy on most people, but when I see it on the captain’s face, even directed at me, I find that I enjoy it quite a bit.
“Did someone spill their drink on you?” She asks, walking over to me.
For a moment, she stands there. The bed is low to the ground, so I am looking up at the captain for the first time since I woke up in the room. There is no firelight to halo her form, but there is an unmistakable softness about her up close. If my hands were at all steady, I would reach out and smooth the furore from her brow, trace my thumb across her lip. The storm around the captain breaks when we are this close and I wonder if it is some sort of magic soulmate thing that I can utilise to my benefit.
“No, too much caffeine from coffee and not enough sleep are fucking with me,” I finally answer. “What is that?”
The jar she opens reeks like old gym socks and bad sushi. Whatever that mess is, I don’t want it anywhere near me. She uses three fingers to dig out a scoop of the nasty Vaseline-like mess, and my empty stomach rolls. My breakfast is ruined no matter what happens now.
“It’ll fix the burn on your hand and anywhere else you’ve got one.” She pointedly only looks at my face as she explains this, but I am too disgusted by the balm in her hand to care about the fact that she might be insinuating touching my chest.
“That isn’t going anywhere near me. My body is a temple.” I can’t smell like that for the rest of the day. A girl can only take so much.
The captain scoffs some irritated sound of dismissal and then her hand is slapped over mine before I can stop her. There is a flare of pain, the sensitive skin reacting more to the action than the balm. The burning heat recedes too fast to be normal medicine. When she realises I’m not going to resist, she carefully takes my hand in both of hers and works the foul mess into my hand. Her body relaxes into the role like she is more comfortable healing than hurting. The tingling, bubbling tightness of my skin evaporates and all I am left feeling is relaxed, like I am getting a luxury hand massage before a manicure.
A telling sigh leaves my lips as I watch her hands flex around mine.
“All temples require priestesses to care for them,” she murmurs. “Do not think I would let anyone here suffer pain when I can easily fix it.”
“You could have fooled me,” I smirk a little. A comforting warmth is pulsing through me now, threatening to lull me to sleep and bring about wet dreams. It’s a dangerous kind of feeling to have when it’s just me and my hand.
“Orthia.”
“What?” I sit up a bit straighter and look at the captain.
“I am called Orthia, after…”
“The goddess,” we both say at the same time.
“Orthia,” I whisper her name again as if the addictive heat of her touch has turned my brain soft.
“How do you know that?” she asks.
Her hands are still working mine, turning tendons into noodles and the muscles into jelly. My wrist has gone limp. The only thing keeping it off the bed and ruining her duvet is her.
“Myyiayia.” It’s all I can think of to explain that without dumping an ocean’s worth of sadness between us. She doesn’t know what happened, and the thought of her only knowing what the paper will have reported has a pit forming in my chest. Is she trying to call me back? Has she seen the news?
Orthia nods but doesn’t say anything more. I clear my throat, unable to take a big enough breath and she drops my hand. The balm is all dried up. The warmth from her touch is gone. The captain is back in place.
“Get your breakfast and get changed before Aoife puts you to work,” she says, leaving before I can even thank her.
I can’t breathe without the scent of industrial strength cleaner clearing my sinuses.
The blisters on my right hand ache with every brush of this mop across the cleared floors of the bath, while my left hand still smells bad. I bust through a marble fucking wall with my fists, and there isn’t a scratch on me. But a bit of manual labour? Absolute breakdown of my epidermis.
Said wall has now been reformed with some stone stuff that I don’t understand and is drying before Hamako can work on the new mosaic feature.
“Not as bad as a rush week,” I mutter, dipping the mop in the bucket once again. “Not as bad as Chelsea putting toothpaste in everyone’s yoghurt.”
With each swipe across the floor, I am getting more aggravated. I didn’t know manual labour could even make a person this angry. I thought cleaning was one of those things people do to relax?
The closer to the sliding doors I get with my mop the louder the real action outside becomes. That’s what I really want to be a part of today. The grunting and cheering keep me moving faster because I know when I am done, Aoife won’t have anything else for me to do until the washing machine is done in forty-five minutes.
With three more swipes, there is a loud cheer. With two more swipes, someone groans so loud even I wince. One more swipe, the screech of metal on metal sets my teeth on edge, and I’m hustling through the bathroom doors and towards the training room.
The facilities are top quality. I don’t know who designed them, but they are genuinely impressive. My mom would turn up her nose at the idea of having to share a bath and the lack of Pilates classes, but standing with the twenty or so other women on the crew in this training room watching Orthia and Lagulla train is like watching professional athletes.
The training room is enormous, the equipment a mix of fitness machines and medieval weapons. There are no mirrors either, which is weird and comforting. It also means that I only get one angle of the captain as she deflects a balestra, a complex move in fencing, from Lagulla. The gorgon woman is fast, her footwork is crisp, but her lunge is hesitant. They move to circle one another and I squeeze between people to get nearer the front. Nargol sees me, a large grin spreading across her cheeks as she cocks an eyebrow towards the fight.
