he said.
“Shore leave is port watch first, this trip.”
“Aye, Captain.” He grinned at her. “And may I say the captain looks … very clean and tidy?”
She laughed. “You may.” She ran her hand over her bare head. At sea, she rarely bothered to use a razor, but in port she made a point to expose the intricate blue, red and white designs tattooed on her scalp, each hard won in her youth as an imperial privateer. Like Chetri, she’d outlined her eyes with kohl.
Chetri wore tightly fitting trousers and a silver-embroidered vest that showed his muscular form and the black tattoos on his pectorals, circles within circles within circles, to good advantage. Silver rings cascaded along his earlobes; his neck was hung with bright silver chains, one of them suspending a medallion engraved with birds, another a cluster of black pearls. Another tattoo, this of a snarling monster’s face with a tongue of flame, marked out his hard-muscled belly. He needn’t worry that advancing middle age would deter anyone’s glances. She said, “May I offer the hope that my first mate is … lucky … on his shore leave?”
“You most certainly may. Now, be off with you, Imena, and do the pretty with His Grace. And may you be lucky, too. What’s his name again? Sanji?”
Her stern glare only made him laugh. Chetri knew very well that Sanji had been her only lover for almost a year. There was a saying, that making the tide on land didn’t count. For her, that had never been true.
She was lucky the potential husbands her mother had introduced to her hadn’t permanently put her off sex. She’d never seen a more tightly laced bunch, draped in layers of fine silk robes and ballasted with necklaces and belts enough to festoon an entire fishing village, all of them eyeing her as if she were a trinket they wanted to buy, if they could only overcome their distaste at her profession.
She would have to face them again the next time she visited, or worse, she would have to confront her mother and make plain that she would not marry a man of the Horizon Empire, and forever be considered his accessory. After that, it would be almost trivial to convince her father that he could never threaten such a man into loving her. For a couple who swore they’d fallen in love at first sight, their opinions on marriage for their daughter seemed decidedly odd. Perhaps they’d finally realized the truth of the matter, as Imena had.
Her good mood was spoiling rapidly. Imena concentrated on the wooden pier beneath her bare feet, and the warmth of the sun on her scalp. Slowly, her mood improved. She missed the sea, as always when a voyage had ended, but shore had its own charms.
Here in port, the briny sea air mingled with the bite of boiling tar from the shipyard and tantalizing whiffs of sugary fried dough, overlaid with the scents of ripe fruits and steaming mint tea served hot and honeyed, of sticky rice balls and steamed fresh fish and hot spices. Her mouth watered; she would snack on a fish cake before she reported to Maxime.
Perhaps she would ask his advice on what to do about her parents’ demands. He was past forty and unmarried, though his position was much different from hers; he could pick and choose his potential spouses. She shook her head. Doubtless, he had no time for personal conversations of that nature. Or if he made time … she didn’t want his pity. She wanted … she didn’t know what she wanted from him.
She stopped at the harbormaster’s office to drop off the necessary paperwork from her last voyage. She made a brief call at the shipyard to deliver a list of supplies she and Chetri had prepared, bought a fish cake and a sugared dumpling for good measure, then waved over a donkey cart to carry her up the long hill to Maxime’s castle.
The ride was the first time she’d had entirely to herself in months. She savored each bite of her fish cake as she watched the traffic around them, mostly traders, but a few locals, as well, who divided their work between the castle and the nearby town. One day, she planned to be one of those locals. She thought the duchy would be a better home to her than the land of her birth, where her position suffered from her mixed race. Her mother might be an admiral in the empress’s navy, but even now her father was considered barely higher in rank than a concubine, despite all her mother’s efforts to the contrary.
If Imena lived in the empire, with them, she would have to endure low status. Privateers were considered far inferior to sailors in the navy, and in the company of her mother’s people, her darker skin and paler eyes marked her out to even casual view. If she married here, however, she would be a citizen. Mixed race was less of a sin here, and she would be far from the only person of foreign birth, as well.
However, her past as an imperial privateer would still be against her. It was emblazoned forever on her skin. Even here, in a coastal town that knew the difference between pirates and privateers, she was often looked at askance, and sometimes worse. After all, she hadn’t been a privateer for the duchy, but for a country that was only nominally an ally. Her motives would always be suspect.
She imagined presenting a list of her failings to a potential husband in the duchies. She could write each problem in a different color of ink: foreigner, mixed-race daughter of a not-entirely-respectable potentially-enemy naval officer and her exotic barbarian husband (acquired in dubious circumstances), and had she mentioned she was a suspected pirate?
Of course, she needn’t marry. She could bear a child to a citizen of the duchy and gain citizenship through that route, but she didn’t plan to go through the rigors of childbearing unless she was married already. Owning land in the duchy was another path to citizenship, except she was always at sea and wouldn’t be able to oversee the land properly; also, even if she met all the other legal conditions, she would need to steward the land for a period of ten years before her petition would be heard. Marriage was the most direct path, and the most appealing to her.
An ox-drawn wagon trundled by, loaded with vegetables. Two children rode on the tail, their bare legs dangling over the edge. They whooped when they saw her; she waved a casual salute and they bounced with excitement until her donkey cart passed them. She glanced at her driver. “You’d think I was the duke.”
He grinned. “His Grace they can see any day. It’s not often they get to see Captain Leung.”
Imena rubbed her hand over her scalp. “No, I suppose not.” Sometimes it still took her by surprise that people she’d never met might be impressed with her; she was more used to wariness or outright fear from those who’d heard about her past and linked her with piracy and other crimes. Being viewed with admiration had never happened in her previous postings; but then, before her employment with the duchy she’d worked for and around the empire, where she would always be her mother’s daughter, who could not inherit her mother’s position as was proper. Where her appearance would always set her apart.
She could make her own position, here.
The duke’s castle was built of local stone, green alternating with white in striped layers, the whole topped with crenellations and spiky observation towers, lending a resemblance to fish she’d seen when swimming among tropical reefs. The donkey cart crested the hill, passed the castle’s first low wall and approached the bronze gates, heavily ornamented from top to bottom with representations of octopuses and different species of fish. The gates stood open on a path made of crushed white shells leading to the castle’s ceremonial main doors, used for occasions such as when Maxime had been made duke.
Imena paid off her driver and approached a side entrance. Two guards with pikes checked her credentials and the handwritten note that allowed her to carry weapons into the castle, then a boy in livery swung open the door and waved her through. The temperature dropped inside, the deep green floor tiles cool against her bare soles. Imena was led down a corridor where oil lamps flung colored light on the
