Chapter 122: A Duel Beneath Her Notice
The wall of sand behind the shattered sloop let way at once, and the battle beyond stood exposed as suddenly as a wound when the bandage is ripped free.
Bodies covered the beach in every direction, English sailors and pirates lay tangled together across the sand, some still trying to drag themselves upright, most already stiff. One sailor floated face down where the tide rolled in and out, the water rocking him gently as though it could not decide whether to claim him or return him.
Around him, the surf had turned the hue of watered wine.
Off to the left, another man screamed while his arm hung by little more than torn flesh and cloth. The cries stopped only when a blade found him.
Farther down the shore, a merchant guard had been split from belly to chest, his entrails spilling into the wet sand while the men still fighting stepped over him without a glance.
Near a stove-in longboat, a knot of pirates had trapped a cluster of sailors against the wreckage, cutting them down two and three at a time until the sand beneath them looked more like a slaughterhouse than a beach.
Mary Read cut her own path through the fighting near the wreck with a cutlass, both arms slick with blood to the elbow.
James caught only a glimpse of her.
A sailor’s head snapped backward beneath one savage blow before the fellow had even finished raising his sword. Then she was gone into the crush again, already turning toward the next fool who thought standing in her way was wise.
Above the clash of steel and the roar of battle, one voice rose clear. It was hard with fury, though not with fear.
"Hold that line, damn your eyes! I’ll not have His Majesty’s own men run from sea trash and rabble!"
James did not know the voice, but he knew the sort of man behind it. The kind who still believed orders alone could force the world to obey, even while everything around him collapsed.
A sailor came tearing past them at a full sprint. Half his coat had been ripped away, and blood streamed from a gash across his scalp, staining one side of his face crimson. He did not even look toward James and the others, panic had swallowed everything else.
"Lieutenant Grantham!"
The sailor shouted over his shoulder. "Lieutenant Grantham, sir! We cannot hold! They’re everywhere!
James spotted the officer near the broken stern of the third wreck. Grantham’s uniform hung in tatters, soaked through with blood, one shoulder ripped open.
Even so, he held his sword high, rallying the shrinking knot of sailors around him with stern conviction.
"Form up, you dogs!"
Grantham roared, his voice cracking. "I shall NOT entertain surrender terms proposed by sea riff-raff and common criminals! We are King George’s own men, and we shall conduct ourselves as such until the last!"
"Christ, listen to him. Man’s drownin’, and he’s still frettin’ over his manners."
"That’s our man."
Anne was already walking toward him, her blade still wet.
The four of them cut straight through the fighting, leaving the wider battle to sort itself out behind them.
A sailor charged Bert with a boarding axe raised overhead. Bert took the blow across the ribs without so much as a grunt, lurched inside the man’s reach with that drunken grin of his, and smashed a fist into his face hard enough to drive his nose back into his skull before the axe had finished its swing.
"Bert win."
He declared it to nobody at all as he stepped over the twitching body.
Another sailor rushed him from the side and Bert answered with one heavy kick that shattered the man’s knee with a wet crack. He then kept walking, muttering something about his mother that only he seemed to understand.
Beside him, Tomás moved with precision. He brushed aside a wild slash, answered with a single thrust through the throat, and blood burst from both sides of the sailor’s neck before the man even realized he had been struck.
Tomás murmured a prayer over the falling body, crossed himself once, and went on as though the moment had already passed.
James had [Counterargument] in hand as he moved up with the others, just off Anne’s shoulder and a step behind the nearest struggle. He had no clear path through the press of bodies at first, only flashes of steel and men fighting for space on the shifting sand.
Then one sailor broke free of the knot ahead, his flintlock giving a useless click in the wet.
James fired once.
The shot punched through the man and dropped him before his swing could finish.
Another came into view an instant later, half turned toward Bert with a cutlass still raised. James did not stop. He brought [Counterargument] back on target and fired a second time.
That man staggered backward, blood spilling dark through his coat, and went down into the churn of feet and blades.
A third sailor tried to make use of the opportunity, lunging in hard from the side.
James answered with a third shot.
The man folded where he stood, struck clean through before he could close the distance.
[Counterargument] clicked empty in his hand a moment later, the last charge spent. Storm or no storm, the pistol had never seemed to care what weather raged around it.
They broke through the last knot of fighting together. Grantham waited beyond it, sword still raised, three of his own men already lying dead around his boots.
His eyes stopped on Anne first.
Disgust twisted across his face.
"You."
He spoke the word as if it tasted rotten. "I did not sail three thousand miles across His Majesty’s own ocean to be cut down by some common trollop waving a blade she likely stole from a real soldier’s corpse. Stand aside, woman, and fetch me a man worthy of crossing steel with me."
"Real soldier’s already dead behind you, boy."
Anne’s smile spread slow and sharp. "Reckon I’ll suit well enough."
She attacked before he could answer.
Grantham met her with genuine skill. His first three parries turned her strikes aside with crisp precision born from years of drilling. On the fourth exchange, he pressed the advantage and drew his blade across her forearm before she slipped free. Blood welled dark against her skin.
"There."
Satisfaction filled his voice.
"A woman’s place is beneath a man’s notice, and there she shall remain."
Anne answered with steel instead of words.
She came in low and fast, forcing him backward for the first time. Their blades rang together, bright sparks jumping into the fading light.
James watched with [Verdict] resting loosely in his hand.
He already knew better.
Grantham could fight. He met blow after blow with clean footwork despite the shifting sand beneath his boots. Yet.
Anne took another cut across her cheek. Blood ran down her face and dripped from her chin, but she never slowed.
Then Grantham made the only mistake that mattered.
Anne stumbled.
Or seemed to.
Her boot caught on a length of half-buried rope, and she dropped hard to one knee. Her blade sagged in her grip.
Grantham stepped back instead of striking.
His sword remained poised above her.
"Yield."
His voice had all the formal satisfaction of a Royal Navy lieutenant. "I’ll not have it said that Percival Grantham struck down a fallen woman like some back-alley cutthroat, whatever else these savages might claim. This is entirely irregular, and I shall have it noted that I conducted myself with proper..."
He never finished.
Anne’s blade shot up from the sand and buried itself in his belly.
The rest of the sentence died behind his teeth.
His eyes widened with honest disbelief while his mouth worked soundlessly as Anne twisted the blade once, hard, before pulling it free.
Grantham folded over the wound with a harsh gasp that emptied every bit of air from his lungs, then collapsed onto the sand he had been so determined to defend.
All around them, the remaining resistance broke apart. The sailors who were still standing threw down their weapons now that the voice that urged them onward had finally gone silent.
Anne stood over Grantham’s body, breathing hard. Blood that was not hers ran down forearms and dripped from her chin, mixing with the fresh line of red flowing from the cut across her cheek. Her eyes burned with an emotion that had long since outgrown fear.
James walked toward her, already grinning. A warm, teasing remark sat on the tip of his tongue about how she let him believe he’d won before gutting him proper.
"Bit theatrical, lass, don’t ye..."
He didn’t get further than that.
Anne closed the distance herself, one hand fisting hard in the front of his shirt and hauling him down to meet her. She kissed him like she meant to take him by force.
Her lips hit his with blood and salt and rain all tangled together, her teeth catching his bottom lip hard enough to sting before she softened into it. The kiss lingered there, fierce without losing an ounce of its urgency, their tongues meeting and intertwining for a fleeting moment before crashing together again.
James’s hand found the small of her back and pulled her in tighter until there was scarcely any space left between them, the soft warmth of her chest pressed against his through rain-soaked clothes, [Verdict] slipping loose from his fingers and into the sand.
She kissed like she fought, with no patience left for anything gentle. One hand stayed knotted in his shirt while the other clawed into his hair. James gave as good as he got, his lips hard against hers, both of them breathing as if they had run the length of the whole sandbar instead of simply standing on it.
The kiss tasted of copper, gunpowder, and beneath both there was only her. In that moment, James could not have said whether the pounding in his chest belonged to the fight or to the woman currently doing her best to bruise his mouth from the inside out.
It didn’t matter which.