Not the Fighting Kind by Will Soulsby-McCreath

Author:Will Soulsby-McCreath [Will Soulsby-McCreath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nopoodles Everything Books
Published: 2024-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

12

The Pirate Lord

The bathtub was made out of green stone. Nat couldn’t begin to say what kind of stone it was, but it was green and the novelty of that was doing a fair enough job of staving off both the dysphoria and the concern about the fact that their mangled looking arm wasn’t healing as well as it probably should have.

They scrubbed the salt and dirt and blood and pain off their skin as rapidly as they could. The sooner they were clean, the sooner they could be out of this bathtub and into some clothes. Hopefully clothes that wouldn’t pull into abject focus all those aspects of their physical form that made Nat squirm.

On the other hand, perhaps they should stay in the bath until the water turned frigid because there was no way Nat was prepared for the situation that awaited them beyond the bathroom doors.

Tao had used his grip on Nat’s hand to slip an arm around theirs. Shockingly familiar. Nat had only kept their protest in because they recognised the power imbalance in the situation. This wasn’t a forward arm link, it was a capturing one. Nat’s only other option being returning to the ship they had run from, they had let it be, let Tao lead them up the steeply sloped road. The relentless humidity pressed against Nat’s ever fraying nerves. Their concentration pulled in too many directions to recognise their intended destination until they passed through the red, circular outer gates.

The palace stretched above them, gleaming in gold and the same bright red as Nat’s hair. “We match,” they had whispered.

“Indeed you do.”

They hadn’t mentioned their next thought. The wonder as to whether a Pirate Lord might enjoy that fact. Or resent it.

They hadn’t bothered to ask why they were there. Nat wasn’t a fool. Tao obviously had some connection to the Pirate Lord. A high one at that if Nat’s babysitter’s reaction to him was anything to judge by. Nat hadn’t discarded the idea that Tao, the dandy who had bought them a steamed bun filled with well-seasoned pork was, in fact, the Pirate Lord Himself. They would have expected a Pirate Lord to be more… typically piratical than Tao had presented so far, had presumed dandies in the pirate sphere would stay on the outskirts like high society dandies did. But they weren’t ruling anything out.

The dressing room matched the bathroom in its green stone stylings. Privacy screens with delicate thin paper decorated in beautiful, intricate ink paintings separated areas. Behind one, atop a stone bench, sat a pile of clothes for Nat to wear.

Once fully dressed in an outfit that only mildly didn’t fit —still too broad in the shoulder, leaving sleeves with no cuffs to slide over Nat’s hands— Nat pressed through the next set of doors and into a corridor where a woman waited. She pointed to a dark wood door. Nat gulped and pushed it open.

The room within matched the rest of the palace’s aesthetics. All green and gold and dark woods.

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