Part II
"Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt."
(Those who run across the sea change their Heaven and not their soul.)
—Horace
Chapter Eight – Unfettered
"Oi."
Lily's eyes snapped open, her arm flying up to shove away the person leaning over her.
A hand grabbed her arm.
"It's me," James said.
Lily's brain supplied the alluring thought that maybe he'd changed his mind, but his face, shadowed in the low light of his wand, spoke of anything but.
"Obviously," she said curtly.
"Come with me."
Lily looked past him toward the far wall of the ship, where faint light strained through the thin gaps around the gunport.
"I'll be up soon enough," she said. "You'd better have woken me up for something good."
"We're about to take port."
A ray of hope shot through Lily. "And you're letting me go?"
"The opposite."
It had seemed like maybe she was getting through to him, that he was warming to her, but clearly she had completely misread him.
"Right," she said, and she was definitely not feeling like she was going to cry because that was pathetic, even if everything seemed hopeless. "Lovely."
"Come on. I'm taking you to the magazine."
Her throat felt completely better, then, not tight at all.
He could have knocked her out with magic, or manacled her to another shipmate. But he couldn't have picked a better location than the magazine, as far as Lily was concerned.
"I'm coming," she said, letting her voice sour.
She climbed down the ladder to the orlop deck after him and, arms folded, followed him past the shelves to the magazine. He wasn't looking at her more than necessary to ensure she was in tow, and when he did, it wasn't—he'd looked at her differently before. Or she'd been deluding herself, and her seduction attempt had fully turned him against her.
The steel door beckoned her from across the long room. It should have been ominous and threatening, but Lily's heart was racing with the tantalizing thought of freedom.
"So I'm just supposed to sit tight," she said as he inserted a large metal key into the keyhole, "and be bored out of my mind."
"You didn't want to wake up? Consider this a day of sleeping."
The James of two days ago would have offered her a pillow, or a book. This brusque version of James made her miss him, an aching knot in her chest.
He twisted the key and, heaving with his weight, pulled open the door.
Lily glared at him one last time and stepped inside.
"At least give me some light?" she said.
He cast a spell to light a lone candle on the wall behind her.
Most magazines wouldn't have had candles, of course, but she assumed the barrels stacked neatly around the room were spelled against accidental ignition. They hadn't been spelled airtight, though; her nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of gunpowder.
James didn't even apologize for locking her in, just nodded and shut the door on her. She heard him twist the lock, and then there was silence, leaving Lily with gunpowder, a candle, and a stream of light through the keyhole for company.
Even the stream of light vanished soon enough.
Which meant James had climbed up to the gun deck.
Which meant Lily was alone and theoretically unarmed.
She turned to the barrels around her and smiled.
She sat with her back against a barrel, tapping her feet on the ground. The ship had stopped rocking with the waves of the ocean half an hour ago, and had stopped moving entirely not long after.
She'd have liked to sleep a bit more to be ready for a desperate run, but her body nearly vibrated with anxiety.
This was her best bet.
They'd changed direction last night, more south than west, and it had been a little over a week since she'd come on board. They had to be landing in Portugal, or possibly the northern coast of Spain.
Her mind ran through the ports: A Coruña, Vigo, Oporto. She'd have preferred Lisbon—she knew someone who owed her a favor at the Tower of Belém—but they couldn't have arrived so far south so soon. Then again, by her estimate, they were already moving quicker than Muggle ships, but Lisbon still seemed too far off.
She made herself wait a good thirty minutes past the time when she was itching to leave, pacing in the small space between barrels to work off some of her frenetic energy.
Finally she could wait no longer.
She slipped her hairpin out, fed it into the keyhole, and with one quick turn she was free.
She gently pushed the door shut behind her and tiptoed across the orlop deck. She stopped near the ladder, trying to listen for footsteps or other rustlings above. Given the chance to go on land, the crew probably wouldn't have stuck around to sleep.
Still, caution wouldn't go amiss.
She stepped lightly onto the first rung of the ladder, and then another and another, until she could just peer her head over the floor of the gun deck.
As best she could tell, none of the crew lay between the cannons.
She crept up the rest of the way and crouched on the ground, eyes sweeping the room for movement. When she saw no evidence of the crew, she stood up and snuck down the deck, past empty beds and cannons, heart hurtling itself against her chest. When she reached the ladder at the end, she paused again.
Someone was on the main deck.
A man, based on the heavy footfalls.
One man, or even two, it didn't matter. She hurried back to her bed and groped around under the thin mattress.
Lit candle balanced precariously in her mouth, she poked her head above the main deck, eyes blinking at the bright sunshine.
They were in the river in Oporto, based on the way the orange rooftops of the city sloped gently away from the river. She'd been here once before, early on in her journeys. Most pirate ships wouldn't have pulled all the way into a pier for a brief stay, but magic probably made it easier.
Sirius stood below the main mast, his head tilted back to look up at the shroud, one hand gently waving a wand to fix a fraying knot halfway up.
Only an expanse of deck lay between her and freedom.
She climbed off the ladder, mind scrambling to remember anything about Oporto, and began slinking toward the gangway to the pier.
And then she abruptly stopped.
Some of her effects were still in James's cabin, tucked safely under his bed.
Money she could get within minutes of being on land, a dagger not long after, and the mokeskin pouch she could replace, albeit with effort.
But her necklace….
She'd taken nothing else when she'd stolen away from her parents' estate in the middle of the night. It was the one thing she'd never considered selling for food. She'd protected it from thievery on the first ships she'd crewed, before she'd got her pouch, and she'd hunted down the man who'd dared to take it from her after they'd shared a perfectly nice night together. She'd stolen it back, of course, along with his moneybag and his lunch.
She couldn't leave her necklace behind.
But James and Sirius were a matched set. James had probably offered to stay behind while his crew gallivanted around, and Sirius would have insisted on staying with him.
She needed to know if James was on board and, if so, if he was in his cabin. Which was to say she needed to get him out of his cabin and properly distracted, just long enough that she could run in and out of his room without being noticed.
Her assets included her candle, a mostly empty box of matches, her hairpin, and her wits.
If only she had a weapon.
And then she remembered she did.
She awkwardly maneuvered up the ladder to the main deck again, this time a cannonball threatening to fall out from between her breasts and rip her bodice.
She liked to think that after her week and a bit on board, she'd learned something of James's character, and what would draw him out.
She didn't mean to knock Sirius out cold.
But when she heaved the cannonball against the side of his head, wincing before it even collided with his temple, he didn't cry out like she'd hoped he would. Instead he groaned and staggered forward, arms flailing to gain his balance and brushing against her chest. He slowly collapsed onto the deck, his wand rolling out of his hand.
She looked down at him, her lips pressing together. He would be fine. Probably. She wasn't that strong, and Marlene could Heal him when she got back. James might even be able to do something for him before the others returned.
But first, of course, she had to get James out on the deck.
She frowned. She had no method for luring him to his injured mate, save shouting for him.
Except she still had the cannonball. And cannonballs could be noisy.
She grabbed Sirius's wand off the deck, out of practicality rather than vengeance, and shoved it into her bodice, the effect rather like a corset. She took a few steps away and hurled the cannonball down onto the deck. It landed with a deep thud, and Lily's eyes flicked to watch the library door.
But no one came out.
She chased after the cannonball and picked it up from where it had rolled, raised it up in the air over her head with one hand, and flung it onto the deck again.
This time it landed louder, an unmistakably strange noise coming from someone who was supposed to be messing with the shrouds.
She hurled it twice more, and was debating how else to get James's attention when he finally sauntered out of the library, eyes fixed on a piece of parchment in his hand.
"Merlin's tit, Padfoot, would you mind letting a bloke—fuck!" His eyes had come up now, and found Sirius lying unconscious on the deck. He ran over to Sirius, parchment floating to the ground as he reached for his wand instead, and dropped into a crouch. "Fuck!"
Even though he'd just locked her up, Lily's gut twisted at the wrenching, wounded look she'd put on his face.
Still, she took her chance to dash through the library and into his cabin, where the gentle chiming of buoys in the harbor drifted in through his open windows. She sank to her knees next to his bed, setting the cannonball on the ground.
She yanked the drawer open, grabbed her pouch, and slammed it shut again. The noise hopefully wouldn't travel far enough to reach James on the deck, and in any case, speed was more important than subtlety. She shoved her mokeskin pouch into her bodice, hand scraping against the point of Sirius's wand, and stood up, picking up the cannonball with one hand.
She didn't want to have to use it on James, but she would for her freedom.
She spun around toward the door and had barely managed two steps when James appeared in the doorway, head ducked, eyes dark.
"Oh, sure." He was as calm and matter of fact as he'd been that night in Brest, only now there was a tinge of malice beneath the calm, like silk over steel. "I'm some innocent thief. I'd never hurt any of your crew."
Lily took two quiet steps backwards, toward the windows.
He stalked into the room, slowly, methodically, arm outstretched in front of him, wand ready to fire off a spell at a moment's notice.
Her eyes dropped to her weapons: a cannonball and a candle. Burning him wouldn't stop him, and she couldn't get around him quickly enough to bash his head from behind.
She stepped backwards again, glancing behind her to gauge the distance between her and the window.
"Accio Lily's cloak," he said, voice whip sharp.
Lily cocked her head – he hadn't found her with a cloak, and what would it matter if she had one? But she had more important things to focus on. He was muttering a long, complicated spell, casting his wand in a wide arc.
From somewhere nearby, church bells rang out, loud and clear.
Lily glanced back at the windows again.
Of course.
She took a few more silent steps backward, spared another look at James, and dropped the cannonball out of the open window.
It landed in the water with a gulping splash.
James's head snapped to face the window. He didn't waste time running over to see what had gone out, instead whipping around and grabbing the door handle to fling it open.
Lily allowed herself a silent, deep breath.
But then he stopped hard in the process of launching himself through the doorway, catching himself on the frame.
He turned back around slowly, grinning without humor.
"Very clever," he said. "But I know what a person sounds like falling off my ship, Lily. Better than you, I imagine."
She suddenly had a vivid image of him forcing someone to walk the plank at wandpoint, and she froze.
But only for a moment.
He'd started muttering again, an eerie sort of chant, his wand ebbing up and down in front of him.
She couldn't sneak up on him, and he'd easily best her in combat.
She stepped gently to the right, turned around, and swung one foot up to rest on the windowsill, her free hand gripping the frame. She had her other foot up before she could doubt herself, and then she dove, the flame of her candle burning against her hand.
The cool water of the river engulfed her, her dress tangling around her legs. She sank, deeper and deeper, until she could slow her descent. She opened her eyes, but the water was murky, only the marbled sunlight above giving any indication of direction.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the brackish water and kicked hard, powering herself up toward the surface. She found the edge of the ship and followed it up until her head broke the surface.
She sucked in a lungful of air and swung her head around to get her bearings. She could try to climb up onto the pier, but James would catch her there for sure. She could try to swim directly to land—it wasn't far—but he'd see her there, too.
He'd see her everywhere. Her candle and matches were soaked, and she wouldn't be using either for a while.
She whirled around toward the far side of the river and grinned.
Any good traveler knew and adored Oporto's main industry.
Wine.
Dozens of simple wooden sailboats floated down the river toward the ocean, all carrying stacks and stacks of wine barrels.
A bolt of red light landed on the water above her shoulder, and she cursed, ducking down again.
She dived deeper, out of view, and began swimming toward the center of the river. She allowed herself to come up for air once she couldn't stand it, but the anti-Muggle charms around the ship had to end somewhere. If she could just get past them, James wouldn't risk revealing his magic by casting at her anymore.
She resurfaced again, this time in the middle of the wide river. A wine ship nearly clipped her on the shoulder, and she launched herself away from it.
After checking that she wasn't in the line of any more boats, she turned back toward James's ship. She couldn't see him on board, or on the pier. He could probably see her, though, her red head an unmistakable sight in the middle of the water.
But he couldn't get to her, at least not right away.
She kept treading water, trying to decide whether to hitch a ride on one of the wine ships or to simply swim to the far side of the river. But a ship would require taking port somewhere, and eventually he could track her along the river, waiting for her to land.
What she needed to do was disappear into the winding, narrow streets, duck into a shop or an inn, and hide until James gave up.
So she swam, underwater as much as possible. It took longer than swimming on the surface, but he'd have to work to follow her zig-zag path across the river.
She climbed up onto the pier across the river to countless stares. She ignored them, though, and half-ran along the pier, her sopping wet dress clinging to her shaky legs.
She wiped her face off with her hand as best she could and pushed her hair out of her eyes, all the while moving, eyes on constant alert for dark-haired Englishmen.
A burly sailor stepped into her path, a sly grin on his face, but she deftly sidestepped him and continued on her path, her hurried footfalls rattling the wooden slats beneath her.
Her hand ached, and she looked down to see it clenched tight around her candle. She laughed, short and mirthless, and shoved it into her bodice with her pouch and the wand. They stuck out obviously under the wet fabric, but everyone would probably be too distracted by a dripping wet, red-headed white woman wandering the streets of Oporto to realize she had lumpy breasts on top of it.
Now on solid ground, and her legs quickly adjusting to land again, she headed directly into the city, past buildings that came in long, seamless strings. A dark-haired woman hung a wet pair of trousers over the railing in front of her door-length window and eyed Lily.
Lily shot her a smile and continued on.
Even though her body thrummed with energy from her escape, she still savored the thrill of being in a foreign city, even one she'd been in before. She never tired of hearing other languages swirling around her, or wandering down new streets. And Portuguese cities were beautiful, the exterior walls covered in intricately painted tiles.
Lily's parents had taken her to London once as a girl. London had an energy all its own, and at the time it had struck Lily as odd to be around so many strangers, even buffered as she was by the windows of the carriage. She'd pressed her face against the windows to watch endless people pass by until her father had pulled her back gently by the collar.
They'd stayed in a relative's house near Hyde Park without once stepping foot more than a block from the carriage or the house. She'd been to London, but not in London.
Her father had left cities as soon as possible to retreat to his estate, but Lily lived for cities. Every port had a flavor of its own, a pulse and a scent and a sound. Oporto moved slower than Lisbon, but the people were certainly not English. They spoke loudly and passionately, not minding if anyone overheard
She spotted a small food stall on a corner, small and dark, and ducked inside between rows of fruits and vegetables. The owner tried not to stare, and she soothed him with a wave and a smile. He nodded back, teeth showing in a hesitant smile.
She pretended to rummage through some unfamiliar fruit and then set them down, her back to the owner, angled so she could still watch for James. It was awkward, but she managed to make pulling her mokeskin pouch out of her bodice look at least somewhat natural.
The only coins she had in the Muggle side were French. She flipped the pouch and dug around, shoving Sirius's wand and the candle inside for safekeeping and pulling out a few spare bits of gold.
She reversed the pouch again and turned back to the owner, who looked perfectly perplexed at Lily's strange behavior.
But his grin turned genuine when he saw the gold in her hand.
She grabbed a loaf of bread and a handful of fruits – she hadn't eaten since dinner, and swimming to freedom took a lot out of a girl. Lily let him get a better deal than he was probably due in the interest of time. She had to move farther inland, farther from where James had last seen her.
The owner wrapped her purchases up in a cloth, and she stepped out onto the street feeling more like herself than she had in weeks. The sun was shining, she wasn't on a ship, and she was in a foreign city – it was as if her adventure on James's ship had never happened.
But she wasn't safe yet, not if James was determined.
She began a meandering path across the city, up through the sloping hills, keeping to the busy main streets. She circled back on herself, kept heading north, and then circled back once more, all the while breaking off small bites of bread.
She walked and walked, her dress and hair slowly drying off.
At long last she had a wand, but the few spells she'd learned from Sev didn't seem applicable in this situation. Mostly she would have liked a Drying Charm, given the way water still squished around her feet. She could have dried off her candle, matches, and her shoes, too, but instead Severus had taught her how to Levitate items and how to turn a beetle into a button. They'd taken their time moving through his spellbooks, confident that they had years to work together.
And then What's His Face had interfered.
A large shop window displaying maps and books caught Lily's eye. Although she'd had to leave James's treasure map behind, someone else might know of the mysterious treasure in the Azores, wherever those were.
She ducked in through the doorway and smiled, the unmistakable, welcoming musk of books washing over her. The shop reminded her of James's cabin, with books stacked in piles taller than she, spines facing every which way.
An elderly man in the corner glared at Lily, but she focused instead on a middle-aged man with long, dark hair who was speaking in rapid Portuguese with a young boy. They seemed to be negotiating over a worn book with gold lettering on the cover. After a minute the boy huffed and pulled a small coin out of his pocket.
When the owner had deposited the money in his coin purse, Lily approached him with a tentative smile.
"Buenos días," she said. She'd only picked up a little Spanish in her travels, but she'd managed to get by in Portugal with it before.
He nodded at her. "Bom dia."
"Azores Islands," she said hopefully.
He cocked his head at her and said something – she didn't understand the words, but he had clearly not taken her meaning.
She walked over to a map tacked to the wall. "Azores?" she repeated, pointing at the map.
But he frowned.
Her pronunciation must have been off. Lily's eyes flicked around the shop, and she found a parchment and quill set on a tall desk. She walked over, held her hands over the inkwell, and shot the owner a questioning look.
He joined her at the desk and waved for her to continue. She quickly wrote out Azores islands map in her best penmanship.
"Ah!" he said, and nodded. He strode over to a pile of parchments in a corner and flipped through them, the pages rustling.
He came back to the desk with a few parchments in hand and set them on top of Lily's note. He confidently said something that sounded an awful lot like Azores, with an accent Lily couldn't duplicate.
The map on top read O arquipélago dos Açores in elaborate calligraphy.
Lily grinned. The pattern of islands outlined below was unquestionably the same one on James's treasure map.
"Where?" she said.
The owner looked confused again. Lily took the map of the Azores and walked over to the larger European map on the wall. She held up the small map against the big one and moved it around slowly, then turned around and gave him a hopeful look.
He said something else in Portuguese, his tone indecipherable to Lily, and moved to stand next to her. He pointed to the Iberian peninsula, at the dot labeled Porto, and drew his finger nearly due west a short distance.
He looked down at Lily for confirmation that that was what she wanted, and she smiled at him. The word Açores sat underneath his finger, next to a tiny string of islands.
Lily probably had to get to Lisbon to find someone with enough English language skills to tell her any rumors about treasure in the Azores, but that was a surmountable barrier.
"Gracias," she told the man, offering him a small piece of gold.
She left the shop beaming. The week and a half she'd spend on James's ship wouldn't be completely wasted if she could find someone who knew anything about this mysterious treasure.
Although continuing to move seemed the wisest course of action, there was also self-defense to consider. Until she learned more spells, she would need other methods to fight off James or anyone else. So far in her profession she'd got by with only her dagger, but considering some wizards wanted to kill or capture her, she needed something more.
After another hour of wandering through the streets, basking in the occasional breeze that wound between buildings, she finally stumbled across a blacksmith. Examining swords relied on touch and grip, not language, and she soon traded a large gold nugget for a sleek cutlass.
She felt calmer the instant she strapped it to her side. She might not be able to best James with a wand, but she was willing to bet even her amateur sword skills could best his, if he had any at all.
People looked at her differently when she wore an obvious weapon. They weren't used to seeing a woman with a cutlass—the shop owner had eyed her just as curiously, and had probably overcharged her—but people gave her a slightly wider berth now. She was no longer an object of interest, but rather someone to be respected. She liked that, and wondered why she hadn't taken to wearing one earlier. It certainly kept irksome men from bothering her.
All day she'd managed to keep to the main, more crowded streets. Assuming James was capable of following her this far, he would have had to get close if he wanted to avoid casting magic in public.
But her energy was quickly fading. She'd eaten half of her bread, but her feet would need a break soon.
She had to find shelter. An inn would have been easiest, especially after she'd lifted the coinpurse off a man on the street who'd leered at her, but it also offered the least protection. She didn't want a room to herself, not when she had wizards after her.
If she was going to sell her information, she'd find a bigger market in Lisbon. Fortunately, if there was anything she had experience in, it was arranging transportation. She'd have to go close to the river again to manage it, but finding a ship to spend the night on, tucked safely among a crowd of people, was her best bet for short-term security.
She wandered the streets some more, this time allowing herself to follow the downward slope of the city to the river. Soon enough she heard the caws of seagulls and began watching for the local sailor watering hole.
Her heart skipped when she saw a pale man in the distance, but he was brunette, and too short to be James.
She started following him, slowly narrowing the gap between them, until she could see several tattoos on his arms.
Within minutes he'd led her to a dark, dingy pub half-filled with unsavory, drunk sailors.
She marched in with her head held high. She'd played the innocent for James, but sailors were a different breed than pirates. In her experience, pirates had a great deal more honor than sailors, since they relied on no laws other than their own word. Most of the time, anyway. Sailors often needed more convincing.
She made quick work of negotiating with the soberest bloke in the room, a short, cleanshaven man with a half-full glass of lager in front of him, but his ship was heading north, and she moved on to the next least-troublesome looking man in the room.
He didn't speak much English, but eventually she walked toward the river at his side. With his light-colored hair and rough English, she pegged Peder as Dutch. He was about twice her height and although he seemed decent enough—he'd agreed to talk to his captain about stopping in Lisbon en route to Africa on her behalf—she kept an eye on where they were going in case he decided to try anything.
Her heart raced faster the closer they drew to the river. She tried to engage Peder in conversation, to make it apparent to James or his crew that they couldn't snatch her without someone noticing, but the language barrier got in the way.
Even as they crossed onto the pier, she remained on watch, eyes roving as she followed Peder up the gangway.
Like a proper merchant ship, plenty of sailors hung about the main deck. They didn't intend to leave until morning, but Lily had asked for a place to sleep, and, if Peder had understood, he'd agreed.
She pleaded her case to the captain, who spoke passable English. Normally she'd have negotiated much more frugally, but desperation interfered. If James or his crew had seen her get on the ship, they'd have guessed her escape strategy, and she might not have time to find another merchant.
She followed Peder below deck, ignoring the mostly curious looks of the other crew members. Some of them nudged their friends with eyebrows raised, but most of those looks stopped when they spotted her cutlass. She'd give that to James's crew, at least; she'd never felt unsafe there.
Although some of the Dutch crew might have taken her cutlass as a challenge, she felt reasonably protected when Peder showed her to a bed. The captain had allowed her on board, after all, and there were too many of them awake for anything untoward to happen before she awoke.
Arms and feet aching, she fell asleep within moments of hitting the pillow.
An arm shook Lily awake.
"Urgh, later, Marlene," she grumbled into her pillow.
"Come," Peder said.
Lily rubbed at her eyes with one hand as Peder pulled on the other, yanking until she stood up.
"Hmm?" she said. Right. She was on a Dutch merchant ship. No James.
"Captain."
Lily let him drag her toward the ladder up to the main deck. "The captain?"
"Come," he stressed, and Lily didn't see that she had much choice.
It was still afternoon when she climbed off of the ladder – she couldn't have slept more than an hour, although it felt like it had been much longer.
Lily's palms began to sweat as she followed Peder across the deck and into the captain's cabin. Before the crew had eyed her with a bit of lust, and a bit of curiosity, but now they watched her with narrowed eyes.
Peder opened the door for her and she smiled at him in thanks, but the limited amount of warmth he'd shown earlier had vanished.
She entered with trepidation, first noticing the captain sitting behind his desk, and then another man, this one tall, standing with his back to Lily. He wore a fine navy coat with gold trim on the shoulders, and a hat unmistakably from the English Royal Navy.
Her heart stumbled.
She could handle the Navy, but she knew that line of the shoulder, that commanding posture.
James turned around, a thoroughly smug grin on his face, and two rolls of parchment in hand.