Chapter 168: Vent Your Temper
James went through the door first. Before the rest of them had got halfway across the doorway, the girl had a wooden ladle in her hand and was standing between them and Jim, looking more ready to bite than frightened.
"No, no, espera, espera!"
Jim sprang up from the storeroom bench, hands in the air, waving first at her and then at the others. His face broke into a grin so broad it seemed almost indecent under the circumstances.
"Cap’n! Christ, I thought I’d lost the lot of ye!"
Then he turned back to the girl, lowered his voice, and put one hand lightly over the ladle.
He nodded so earnestly that he looked as though he meant to nod his head clean off. Little by little, her shoulders came down, and at last the ladle sagged toward the floor.
Milagros put both hands on her hips and stared at him. "How in God’s green earth did you manage that? A Spanish girl hiding you in her own kitchen, inside the fort?"
Sam looked at Jim with much the disbelief. "After every story I’ve heard about your luck with women, this is the one that finally pays off?"
James grinned. He was delighted, and not a bit surprised. "There’s never been a lie too mad for Jim to talk his way through, lads. Now we’ve got proof."
Jim let it pass. For once, he did not make the tale bigger, no four-word mystery, no shark, no widow from some coast nobody could ever find on a map. His hands kept twisting at nothing, and when he spoke again, the humor had gone out of his voice.
"Cap’n, it’s Kit."
The words came tumbling out. "They dragged him off with me inside the fort. Lad mouthed off to the wrong men, one time too many, took a swing at one of ’em when he oughtn’t, and a handful of the bastards decided he needed a lesson, hauled him somewhere hidden to do it."
The room went cold. Just like that, every scrap of warmth seemed to have found a door and left through it. Their thoughts immediately went from tease and merry to conduct a desperate research through the fort before it was too late.
James looked Jim over. He wore his previous outfit, now extremely filthy.
"Right then. No time to dress ye proper, so we won’t bother."
He seized Jim by the arm and gave it a firm shake. "We’ll walk you through as some captured pirate under escort. That’s what four soldiers marching a prisoner in chains ought to look like to anybody foolish enough to stare."
There was no time for more words.
James and Sam each held him by one arm and dragged him out of the kitchen, while Tomás and Milagros stood near like a nice little formation.
The servant girl shouted after them from the doorway, urgent and clear enough to carry down the corridor.
Nobody had enough breath left to answer her.
After that, there was nothing to say. The five of them went through the fort’s working quarters at a pace just shy of a run, which is about the speed to use when one very much wants to run but would rather not explain why.
The crew went through the farrier’s forge with sparks flying from a half-finished shoe, then open storerooms piled with shot and powder kegs. James watched every turn and doorway as they went, but nobody wasted breath on conversation.
Twice they came within a few strides of other soldiers. To their fortune, Tomás was ready to call out some tale about orders from the capitán, sharp enough and confident enough that the soldiers stepped aside without thinking to question it.
Apparently, sounding as though you belonged was sometimes all the authority a man needed.
The corridor they found at last was narrower and darker than the rest, buried in a part of the fort where daylight had apparently given up years ago.
An iron-reinforced door waited ahead, with two guards before it. Neither paid much attention to the five men coming toward them, more interested in whatever entertainment happened behind that door.
Tomás stepped out ahead of the others.
One of the guards grinned. He waved them through without a second thought.
That confidence was the last mistake either guard got to make.
James drew his cutlass and stepped forward before the man had any chance to understand what was happening. The blade swept across his throat in a single brutal stroke, cutting it from one side to the other. The blood came out in a hot sheet, splashing the stone as the guard reeled backward, hands flying to his neck as though he might somehow hold himself together by force.
He struck the wall hard enough to rattle his teeth, then slid down it with his fingers leaving red streaks across the stone.
Sam was on the second man almost at once, driving his blade up beneath the guard’s ribs and twisting it deep. The man’s whole body jerked, a wet choking cry escaping him as blood flooded his mouth. The blade was ripped free and the guard crumpled against the ground.
Neither James nor Sam said a word before they struck. Neither said one afterward.
They hauled both bodies through the door. Milagros came behind them, pulled it shut, and dropped the bar into place just as the last of them crossed the doorway.
The room beyond told them that Jim had not exaggerated a thing.
If anything, he had been too kind.
Kit lay in the middle of the floor, beaten badly enough that one had to make sure he was still breathing. One eye was swollen shut and his lip was split open, while dark bruises were already spreading along his ribs, and the boots that made them had clearly visited more than once.
There were eight soldiers around him. They had cups in their hands and laughter in their mouths, taking turns kicking him while the others drank and waited for their time, as cheerful as men around a cockfight.
Kit still had some fight left in him.
He raised his head an inch from the stone and spat out a broken scrap of a word through his split lips. It was too mangled to mean much by itself, but the defiance in it needed no translation.
One soldier kicked him again.
The boot struck hard against his side, and his whole body jerked and folded around it.
James didn’t hesitate to rush forward.
He had stood on a deck while enemy broadsides smashed into the ship around him, cannon fire shaking the timbers beneath his boots and splinters flying through the air, and never once felt fear take hold.
He had ridden through storms that could turn a calm sea into a graveyard, watched men lose their nerve when the guns began roaring, and somehow remained steady through all of it.
He had stood in chains before a governor promising to hang him within the week and still found a funny remark to make about the whole affair.
There were few things in this world, or the one before it, that had ever managed to put a hand on his emotions.
His fingers closed harder around the cutlass.
James had gone cold with fury.