Chapter 106: Just in Time for the Party
Summer had teeth in the Caribbean.
Long, lazy swells rolled beneath the Rose’s keel, the sort that could turn vicious within the hour if a man ignored the warning. Every sailor aboard kept half an eye on the sky, whether he admitted it or not.
The hurricane season never asked permission before it arrived, and James had spent enough time in these waters to trust the men who watched the weather far more than the ones who boasted they didn’t need to.
He’d left Concordia two days earlier.
The Black Fortune and her crew were left behind under Bonnet’s command, with Mary on the guns and Whitlock keeping the books as faithfully as ever. Elena and Mateo had earned enough trust that James left them beside Bonnet instead of beneath him, which seemed to suit all three.
Before sailing, he’d told Bonnet to work the nearby shipping routes and take whatever easy prizes presented themselves.
The coin was important, but keeping the crew busy was more. Pirates left sitting in port for weeks always found ways to entertain themselves, and those ways normally caused trouble. Better they found it at sea, where trouble at least had a chance of paying.
As for the Bloody Rose, it remained with James in its entire glory.
Twenty-four broadside guns and two mortars gave her more firepower than almost anything he was likely to meet this season, all crewed by eighty bloody fools that knew how to do their jobs well enough, if he ignored the eccentricity. Her sails had deepened to a rich claret, and her hull wore the color of dried blood.
Even now, James caught himself grinning whenever the sunlight struck her just right.
Somehow, he still missed the deck of his ship within a day of leaving it. Every time.
James kept one hand on the wheel and let his gaze drift across the deck.
The lads moved from one task to the next with intimate rhythm while the gun crews lingered around their stations, finding small jobs to keep themselves occupied between watches.
He spotted Anne near the mainmast when one of the newer hands fumbled a brace. Her voice rolled across the deck before James had even noticed the mistake.
"Ease that before it parts, unless you fancy explaining the gun crew’s short a hand."
The sailor lunged to fix it immediately. No one aboard dared to argue with Anne about rope work anymore.
The first few days aboard, the crew had to explain every knot twice. The next she was hanging upside down in the rigging, calling a pair of old hands blind, drunk, and somehow still too stupid to tie a proper knot. They spent ten minutes proving she was wrong before discovering she’d been right all along. Nobody volunteered for a rematch after that.
"Land ho! Nassau off the bow!"
James blinked, his thoughts back to firm reality while he looked over the horizon with a spyglass.
More ships crowded those waters than he’d seen there since the day he’d first stumbled into this life. Hulls packed the docks, with green hills behind Nassau’s rooftops while thin pillars of smoke drifted from cookfires nobody had bothered to tend properly.
His eyes found the first ship almost immediately.
The Revenge rode low and heavy in the water, as normally. Sixteen guns crowded on a deck that had never been built to carry that much iron, while her mortar remained lashed near the bow.
She looked overloaded, ugly, and somehow still afloat. Exactly the way her captain preferred her.
Beyond her rested another sloop James recognized without anyone needing to tell him.
Mid-sized, patched along the strakes. The ship was plain and efficient.
The Marianne.
He knew that name from a life three hundred years removed from this one. More importantly, he knew what it meant when history finally caught up to the ship’s fate.
Marianne was an honest little fighting sloop. About fourteen guns, average-sized by sloop standards, broad enough to carry a crew without wallowing like an overloaded pig every time someone sneezed.
She had none of the menace of the Rose or the lopsided stubbornness of the Revenge, it looked exactly like the sort of ship a sensible pirate would choose if he intended to stay alive longer than a season.
No flag flew from her stern that he could make out at this distance. Whether Hornigold still held her helm, or whether Bellamy had already taken it from him, was the one question in the island that truly mattered.
Jennings’ Barsheba lay closer to the harbor mouth, a trim little sloop built for speed instead of punishment. Average-sized, carrying perhaps a dozen guns, she looked more suited to running down fat merchants or slipping away from navies than trading broadsides with anything that could answer back.
Nearby rode a smaller sloop carrying perhaps eight guns. She sat lower in the water than Barsheba, lean enough to chase almost anything she could catch, and battered enough to prove she’d been doing exactly that.
James didn’t know the ship, but he knew her place in the docks. Tucked close behind Jennings, she nearly certainly belonged to Charles Vane. Young, ambitious, and violent enough to make ordinary pirates look like respectable tradesmen after a good night’s sleep.
Cormorant was painted across her stern. The letters still looked fresh.
The Postillion was easier to pick out. A trim French sloop carrying perhaps ten guns, neat enough to make the rest of the harbor look embarrassed by comparison.
Olivier Levasseur could sail beside a dozen English pirates living like pigs and still keep his ship looking as though she’d just left a royal dockyard. The Frenchman’s standards were either admirable or a symptom of some deeper illness.
Farther along floated the Providence, Josiah Burgess’s average-sized sloop. She had perhaps ten guns, nothing remarkable beyond looking good enough to earn her keep.
James had met men who named ships after wives, mothers, daughters, and saints. Naming one after the island where you spent your life struck him as patriotism, laziness, or proof the man had simply stared at Nassau until inspiration gave up and went home.
Beyond them floated another dozens schooners he couldn’t name at all.
Every one of them waited for whatever brewed ashore, just as patiently as the weather somewhere beyond the horizon.
James had to admit Nassau boasted a fine collection of pirate ships. Fast and handy ships, honest little killers built to frighten merchants until they made sensible financial decisions.
Then there was the Rose.
It was almost unfair, really. The other captains had brought the sort of ships a pirate needed to survive, quick enough to catch prey, fit enough to make merchants surrender, and small enough to disappear when something larger came looking.
The Rose had somehow skipped that part of the lesson.
She was twice the size of most of the sloops around her, sometimes more, and had enough guns to make their broadsides look like bloody suggestions. Twenty-four cannons already put her ahead of everything in the harbor. Add the mortars, and the discussion stopped being about who would win and became a question of how long everyone else wanted to pretend they had a chance.
James found that thought deeply satisfying.
The space shimmered in front of him before he’d quite finished admiring his advantage.
⚓ [ALLIED TERRITORY — NASSAU]
Faction : Flying Gang
Status : Pirate Republic (Divided)
Population : Approximately 2,400
Stability : Volatile
Harbor : Major, Protected by Reefs
Facilities : Taverns, Brothels, Shipwrights, Markets, Warehouses, Careening Beaches
Faction Status : Runner-up for Unofficial Governor
🏴 [JAMES CALLOWAY — STATUS]
Rank : Captain, Flying Gang
Reputation : The Next Great Scourge
Influence : A Fleet of His Own
Fate Balance : 90
Apparently you qualify as leadership by this island’s remarkably forgiving standards. I have updated the file accordingly. The section reserved for men with more rum than sense has become distressingly crowded.
"Aye, well."
James let the insult slide past him as usual. "A man takes his compliments wherever the Caribbean decides to hand them out."
He let the display settle before turning his thoughts to what actually mattered.
A harbor this crowded never happened by accident.
Men who lived one failed prize away from starvation didn’t abandon everything and sail for Nassau unless they smelled a fight worth risking their necks over, or a captaincy worth stealing while nobody was watching too closely.
Whatever had broken between Hornigold and the Flying Gang, the split had already happened in every way that counted. A man didn’t lose the loyalty of that many captains by chance and still expect to keep command simply because he wished it.
James had no intention of riding in to save him.
He’d never cared much for rescuing men who hadn’t asked for it, and Hornigold, whatever else could be said about him, had never asked James for anything.
Jennings wanted the whole conflict done before he had to draw steel himself, and James had even less interest in doing Jennings that favor.
James had come for something else entirely.
Some different game from the one either faction thought they were playing.
First things first.
Find Thatch.
The man had an uncanny talent for knowing exactly where the ground stood before anyone else had the nerve to ask. James felt he deserved to borrow that talent before he figured out where to plant his own feet.
He handed the wheel to Cudjoe without either of them needing to speak.
The Rose brought them toward Nassau’s docks.