O Captain, My Captor Read online

  It’s only a moment before I have an idea, though. The way Vine grins as she wraps her fingers around it, the way the guard stiffens at her touch and the look of anxious longing that suffuses his face, I realize this part holds much the same appeal for him as my new mouth does for me. Her other hand rests on his shoulder, and she grins mischievously as she leans in closer, stretching to meet his level. “Mmm … big boy,” she groans, then plants her lips on his, stroking his rigid shaft as he groans against her and wraps his arms tight around her body, crushing her to him. For the span of several seconds, as my Captain and our jailer cling to one another and groan into each other’s mouth, my worry and panic is replaced by another, hotter feeling. I feel a rising blush of anger from somewhere within me, and it takes me a moment to place the emotion.

  Envy, I finally realize. Watching this man groping my Captain is making me jealous.

  I don’t have time to puzzle over the sensation, though. No sooner do my thoughts threaten to take this new path than Vine suddenly tightens her grip on the man’s nether appendage, squeezing tight enough to turn the tip purple and making the guard yelp in surprise. The next second her knee flies up between his legs, crushing his shaft and the fleshy sack beneath to his groin. The second after that, the guard doubles over, eyes wide and watering, hands clutching at the strange assemblage between his legs as Vine’s hands, clenched together into one fist, swing down to club him with a muted thud on the back of his head. He crumples to the floor chest-first and sprawls across the stones, unconscious and bare-butted, making me scramble to my feet to avoid the weight of his outstretched arm as it flops across the ground with the impact, then holds still.

  I look in surprise at my naked Captain and find her grinning back at me. “So what d’you think?” she asks me. “Did I give the secret gesture right?”

  Slowly, and with the wall’s help, I gain my feet, still staring between Vine and the prone, unmoving jailer. “Is he …?”

  “He’ll be fine,” my Captain assures me, kneeling beside him and rummaging through the garb around his ankles. “Poor guy didn’t really deserve that, but we need a few minutes without an audience. He’ll wake up again in — ow!” She yanks her hands away as if they’d been burned, shaking out the fingers on one of them and nodding down at the guard’s puddled trousers, her gaze catching mine. “Be a dear and grab those, will you?” she asks me, standing again and swiftly collecting her clothes from the corner of our cell. “I can’t touch them, but they’ll do you no harm.”

  I kneel where she had been and reach my hand into where hers had been searching, finding a thick bunch of metal rods looped at the top through a metal ring inside a pocket of the guard’s pants. “These?” I ask, standing again with the objects in my hand.

  There is a moment of sudden sightlessness as another bunch of cloth is brought down over my head before Vine tugs it down further, straightening it over the rest of my body. My dress, I realize, and slip my arms through the top hole in the fabric, adjusting the fit over my chest. In front of me, my Captain flinches away from the objects in my grip while glancing down at them. “Yep,” she says, then places the sunhat in her hands firmly on my head, herself already redressed in her knee-length pants and chest wrap. The cloth that wrapped her hair and ears from sight is still conspicuously missing, but there is nothing to be done for that — like as not it still sits on the pier next to her ship, being trampled underfoot by dock workers.

  The thought raises a concern in me. “How are we to get to the ship unnoticed?” I ask her. “Or reclaim your possessions?”

  She smiles grimly and sighs, looking away. “We’re not getting my cargo back,” she says quietly. “Our food, my other clothes, your scales, it’s all halfway across the city by now. It’s lost.” She looks back to me then with a resolute sadness in her eyes. “We’re going to get my sword back from confiscation, then we’re getting the hell out of here. We’ll deal with the rest after we’re free and clear. Come on,” she finishes, grabbing my wrist and tugging me toward the still-open cell door. Halfway through, she stops again and looks at me strangely. “Sorry for all that, by the way,” she says. “But you played along remarkably well.”

  I think about it. “You told me to trust you,” I say after a moment. “So I did.”

  She blinks at me, her expression unreadable. “Just because I told you to?” she asks after a pause.

  I have to think about it again a moment. “No,” I decide aloud at last. “Not just that.”

  There is yet another pause where neither of us says anything, but I can feel something in the moment, an undercurrent of strange emotion passing between us. Of possibility. Then, slowly and in unison, we smile at one another, and for my own part I cannot say that I know why exactly. “C’mon,” my Captain says again, and I scurry along behind her as she hurries through the door of our cell and down the corridor beyond.

  ***

  The hall through which we run slopes gently downward and is uniform with that outside our cell, gray and brown stone lit in intervals by bushels of fire affixed to the walls, and every thirty feet or so another barred room breaks the uniform rock face. We pass the occasional small wooden tables like our guard had been using, but no other guards until we come to an intersection, our path continuing in front of us while a second branches off to our right. Low voices can be heard murmuring to one another a short ways down the hall in the direction we’d been heading, and I can almost make out two flickering, man-shaped shadows drawing closer.

  “This way!” Vine hisses in my ear, dragging me along with her down the right-hand branch. We run only a few feet before she ducks against the wall behind a nearby table, pulling me down almost onto her lap. “We need that hallway,” she whispers to me as we huddle together behind our impromptu camouflage.

  “How do you know?” I ask back just as quietly.

  “I’ve been here before,” she tells me. “They didn’t know I wasn’t human last time, though, so I didn’t need to make my own exit.” She catches my startled gaze and quirks a single eyebrow. “What? Life is hard for a fae on her own out here, and you gotta use trial and error sometimes. Don’t judge. I’ve got stories.”

  I don’t have time to reply before the two voices grow louder along with the muffled sound of footsteps on stone. Vine risks peering around the leg of the table in front of us to track the men’s progress as they pass by our hall, heading back the way we’d come. I dare not make a sound, however quiet, until the sounds of their casual conversation fade away again, taking the footsteps with them.

  Then my Captain is up and pulling me to my feet. “They’re either gonna turn around here soon or keep going and find our empty cell,” she says, pulling me along back to the intersection. “We gotta hurry.”

  “We’ve been hurrying,” I say as we both dart glances down the hallway at the retreating backs of the guards, already starting to vanish in the flickering gloom between fires.

  “Hurry faster,” she says, and then we’re on the run again.

  This time we only cover half of the distance that we did from cell to intersection before stopping in front of a large metal door set into the stone on one side of the corridor. A metal box as thick as my fist hangs from a metal loop around the metal handle of the metal door. These humans and their metal — everything is made of it up here that can be, it seems. It’s a wonder my Captain can function at all amongst these people if she really is as averse to the material as she lets on.

  Sure enough, she takes one look at the whole contrivance and swears viciously under her breath. Not long ago, I realize, such language would have made me blush at the audacity of the speaker; now I privately share her sentiment, if not her vocabulary. She glares at the dull, hanging metal box in thought for several seconds, but before I can think of anything useful to say, she points to it and looks at me. “Hold that up for me, will you?” she asks.

  I nod and lift the device for her as far as it will go, revealing a small hole in the bottom almost big enough t
o admit one of my fingers. Vine, meanwhile, kneels down and reaches into a seam of her boots, her fingers emerging with a thin sliver of gleaming metal that doesn’t seem to bother her like the rest of this metal does. I ask her why this is.

  “Silver,” she says, straightening and putting the sliver between her lips. She holds it with her teeth and talks around it as her hands slip behind her back. “Silver’s fine. Most materials are, really, including most metals.” The cloth wrapping her breasts slips off again, and she sets to wrapping it around one of her hands. “It’s iron I gotta worry about, and anything made from it. Unfortunately, iron seems to be the go-to crafting material in this part of the world.” Hand wrapped, she takes the metal pick from her mouth and kneels in front of the door, her bare hand resting lightly on the back of my own to help hold the box steady. “This is gonna be tricky,” she informs me, peering into the box while her cloth-wrapped fingers slide the thin metal pick inside.

  “What are you doing?” I ask as her brow scrunches in concentration and her nose wrinkles in disgust at a smell I can’t detect.

  “Picking the lock,” she says. “Quicker and easier at the moment than hunting down the key to this door.” The sliver turns slowly in her hand and wiggles back and forth, making small clicking noises somewhere inside the box.

  I reach into a pocket of my sundress with my free hand and pull out the bunch of metal rods I had taken from the prone guard in our cell. Vine flinches as they rattle free and looks over at them, startled.

  “Is this a key?” I ask. “I’ve seen the guards use these rods open doors in this prison a few times before.”

  “Oh.” She looks from me to the rods to the box in our hands to the rods again. “Right. Yeah. I, uh ...” She laughs and shakes her head, tucking the sliver of silver away into her boot again. “I forgot we had these,” she says with a self-deprecating smile, holding out her cloth-bound hand to me. “They're not usually an option for me when I do this alone.”

  “You do this sort of thing often, then?” I ask, gently placing the keys in her wrapped hand.

  She jingles them softly in her palm for a moment, then turns back to the metal box, sliding one of the rods in the hole seemingly at random. “Sometimes,” she says, frowning when the metal clanks but the box doesn't open. “I try not to make a habit of it.” Another rod slides in the box, jiggles more frantically this time, then slips out again with a muffled curse from my Captain, impotent. “Ugh. Mab's tits, but this is unpleasant,” she grumbles, then suddenly drops the keys with a loud clatter that makes me flinch. She shakes her head at me as she shakes her hand out, the cloth falling away. “Sorry, Lei. Starts to seep through the cloth after a while. Can you try?”

  I kneel and retrieve the ring of rods as she brings the cloth up to her nose, covering her face from the eyes down. “Sorry,” I say myself. “I don't smell anything, though.” I mimic her method, slipping a rod into the box and twisting a few times. There is a clank, then nothing. I remove it and try the next.

  “You probably don't if it doesn’t burn your nose going in,” she says through the cloth, voice low and muffled. “And anyway, I wouldn't trust your sense of smell on the matter too much. You're a mermaid.”

  I frown and twist the rod. Clank, nothing. “So?” I demand, moving on down the ring.

  “So how much is there to smell underwater?”

  “Plenty,” I say, twisting the key. Clank, nothing.

  “Like what?”

  “Like … salt and algae and sunlight,” I continue, inserting the next key. “Schools of fish. Sulfur from the vents beneath the floors.” Clank, nothing. Onto the next. “Um ... the tang of blood near the shark kennels, sometimes, but I try not to go there. Other people. Sand. Uh … I don’t know, a lot of stuff.”

  “Alright,” Vine concedes, “I believe you. But still, how much did you use your nose before instead of your gills?”

  Clank, nothing. “Well ... not much, admittedly. But I did poke my head up now and then, you know.”

  “Okay. So how many things do you smell right now?” she asks with a smile.

  Clank, nothing. I sniff. “Right now? Nothing.”

  “Exactly. There’s plenty to grimace at if you’re attuned to it, trust me.” She watches me fumble with another dud key as I start to wonder if this is really the fastest method. “We should probably shut up,” she says in a whisper.

  “I'm surprised, actually,” I whisper back. “I thought there would be more guards here if this is some sort of armory.” Clank, click, thunk. The box slides down its loop, revealing a gap in one side of the metal.

  My Captain smiles and quickly twists the box outward with the cloth, then slips it up over the loop of the door handle and drops it into my empty hand, shaking her fingers out again afterward. “There really oughtta be,” she says quietly, standing to refasten the cloth around her bare chest. “Thank the Mother someone's doing a lax job tonight. The door, if you please, m'lady?” she says with a smirk and a mocking bow after she's covered herself again. “I'd get it for you normally, but, y'know.”

  Despite the uncertainty of our situation, I smile at her as I pocket the keys and pull the door open. The room beyond is dark until Vine steps past me into it, one of the bundles of fire from the wall in her hand and splaying her shadow in a wide puddle behind her. She isn’t more than three steps into it before she makes a choked, uncomfortable noise and fumbles at her chest wrapping with her free hand, hurriedly tearing it loose and clamping it over her mouth and nose again.

  I step in behind her and see the reason. The room is small, and the walls are lined with rack upon rack of strange weaponry, the firelight flickering off of a myriad of blades, clubs, spikes, and chains. Metal chests, wooden crates, and cloth sacks cover most of the floor space, and here and there one is spilling its contents: clothing of various colors and textures, coins of gold and silver in small piles or scattered loose, gleaming jewelry and gemstones, and even more weapons.

  My Captain groans behind her mask, looking around at the contents of the room with a pained, sad gaze. “I really wish we weren’t escaping prison right now,” she whines, turning to me. “Look at it, Lorelei,” she adds, waving her portable fire in an arc at the room. “What a perfect haul!”

  I step gingerly into the room over the scattered containers, careful not to step on any of the loose weaponry with my bare feet. “What do we need from here?” I ask, trying to keep her on task.

  “Need?” she repeats, taking a deep breath and sighing into her crumpled chest cloth. I see her eyes crinkle in a grimace as she does, no doubt from the smell again. “All we really need is my sword, maybe a handful of gold last us to a safe haven once we’re out of here. Don’t go trying to carry out any of these chests or sacks, valuable as they are. They’ll just slow us down and get us caught.”

  “I wasn’t planning on taking any of them,” I tell her.

  “I know,” she says with another sigh. “I was talking to myself.”

  Once she steels herself against distraction, though, we make quick work of finding her sword — it’s the only weapon in the room that isn’t made of iron, apparently, and the shine of it is markedly different in the firelight than that of its many neighbors. Whoever put it here had stabbed it into a thick heap of gold and silver jewelry, the hilt protruding amidst a rainbow of gleaming gemstones. I think I hear my Captain stifle a sob as she pulls the blade free of the treasure and then turns away from it, eyes shut tight.

  “You don’t need it, Vine,” she says quietly to herself. “You can’t spend it in jail, and you can’t spend it dead.” She does, however, stoop to scoop up a few handfuls of coin after attaching her sword to her belt, and instructs me to do the same. We fill our pockets near to bulging with the metal disks, then exit the room and slip the door quietly shut. I reattach the metal box to the metal handle with a thick click as Vine replaces the fire on the wall and her wrapping on her breasts, and then we’re padding as quickly as we dare down the stony corridors again.


  “There’s a back door somewhere further in,” my Captain whispers to me as we go. “Opens on a small wharf on the other side of the cliff, where prisoners can be shipped off on galleys without having to be herded through the public docks. We’ll come out there and call the ship around.”

  “But the ship is still sitting on the big dock,” I argue. “How do we get it to this one?”

  She smiles as we pause at another intersection of corridors, pressing tight against the wall near the edge. Vine glances around the side down the offshoot hallway, then waves for me to follow her as she darts down it. “There’s a way,” she assures me. “Don’t worry, that’s not the hard part.”

  “What’s the hard part?” I ask.

  Suddenly she skids to a stop and grabs my arm, pulling me with her to flatten ourselves against the wall between two small fires where the light is thinnest. I hear it then as we fall silent, the soft thump of booted feet on stone further down the hall. “That’s the hard part,” my Captain whispers in my ear. “Guards that are actually doing their job.”

  “What do we do?” I ask, trying to fight my rising panic. We’ve been lucky so far in our escape, but I knew we couldn’t be the only ones in this dungeon. I realize then that the cells nearest us that I can see are all inhabited, but the prisoners inside are lying down and paying us no mind. Asleep, I figure. It must be growing late outside.

  “You stay here,” she says, unfastening the cloth around her breasts yet again. “I’m gonna try and get us an opening. If it doesn’t work, though, run like hell in the other direction.” She folds the cloth over itself and then wraps it around the top of her head, hiding her ears and all but the back curtain of her hair. “If someone stops you, throw yourself on their mercy and tell them you were kidnapped and held hostage by an escaping prisoner, and you only just managed to get away. You’re not armed, and you don’t look dangerous. They might believe you.” She ties the cloth off, then suddenly chuckles. “Hell, they oughtta believe you, since it’s the exact truth.”