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Chapter Text

[Bligh’s] language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the king’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating 3600 miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the Bounty, was still a prodigy. 

— Tongues of Serpents

Captain Tom Riley has never been a man who relishes the idea of violence for its own sake, nor murder for the sake of convenience, but after less than a day and a night sitting cramped up in two inches of water, sharing space with seven other men in a jolly boat built for five at most, he finds himself trying only to shake off the dreadful, unending fantasy of cutting the throats of all the sailors and throwing every single one of them over the side and into the inky depths below. 

It is their fault, a desperate voice snarls at him from out of the dark, while three of the men bicker at each other at the stern, fighting over scraps. They are all dead men anyway. It would be justice. It would be mercy. 

“Captain Riley?” The speaker is midshipman Boyne, a boy only fourteen years of age, and the only other officer aboard. Boyne, who like the rest of them had been thrown inconceivably far from the wreck by the explosion, had nevertheless somehow managed to right the boat and drag himself aboard once the sun came up, after hours of darkness clinging to its capsized side in freezing water, and then floated around for hours more, howling for survivors and pulling them aboard by turns. Riley had been the last he had found, half senseless and partially hidden by charred flotsam, and with no boots or coat to speak of. The sharks had started circling then, and they had cut their losses - oh, so many, many losses. 

Every man aboard owes Oliver Boyne their lives, not that any of them have the grace to show it. 

“Yes?” Riley forces open his salt-crusted eyes. 

“The sun is coming up, sir.” 

Riley turns his face towards it. The promise of some warmth is more welcome than the pale orange light, which reveals only an endless stretch of water in every direction. It is a sight that once would have given him every joy, and now induces only black dread; they are floating alone in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world. Riley does not even know if any of the dragons survived. He hopes, oh he hopes —but he is sure Laurence would have searched, if he and Temeraire both still lived. Perhaps they had, but in the dark and the smoke, and with no supplies themselves, how long could they reasonably have stayed? 

There is no use imagining. 

There is no use doing much of anything, especially fighting over what little food they managed to drag aboard, which is next to nothing. They will starve in any event. The only question remaining is how long it will take. 

“At least we have a direction, sir?” Boyne says, with enough hope to break Riley’s heart, if it had not already shattered with the sinking of the Allegiance . It is one thing to know which way is East—it would be quite another to navigate perhaps three thousand nautical miles in the direction of South America, with no maps, no navigational tools, not even pen and paper. Riley is a good sailor, but he is no Bligh, and Bligh had had a compass. Not to mention a launch, with two sails, big enough to fit twenty men and their supplies. And two pairs of oars. 

They have a total of one oar in the boat, which one of the more forward-thinking fellows must have dragged out of the water before they drifted free of the wreck entirely. They have some driftwood, and whatever food the sailors have on them—none of them are inclined to share, and Riley dares not try to insist they do. He might not be at the point of wanton murder, but he can hardly make the same assumption in the case of the six sailors, who have made it perfectly clear that his rank has no currency aboard this boat.  

“Captain,” Boyne whispers, and huddles close. They are packed in so tightly that each man’s every limb must by necessity be crammed up against another; privacy is impossible, but the boy uses the din of the argument above them to cover his voice. “I have some biscuit sir. It is not much, and it was soaked… but it is something. Will you take it?” 

Riley frowns at him. “No, Oliver. Eat it yourself, before these scoundrels rob you of it.” 

“But sir…” Boyne looks at him with wide eyes, the eyes of a boy who wants to go home, who wants to see his family, and Riley knows the young midshipman somehow believes that he, Captain Thomas Riley, can save him from certain death.

He remembers the feeling; he has been wrecked before, and in this same ocean. The Normandy had been captained by incompetents and come up on the reef; someone had had to go for help. Laurence was not that much older than he was, and had only been second lieutenant at the time, but after traversing seven hundred miles under him with only a handful of other officers in a cutter which had been falling apart at the seams by the time they landed, Riley genuinely thought he would have slit his own throat if the man had told him to. It was a deepness of trust that could not be adequately described.

Of course, the circumstances were wildly different. He had volunteered for that duty, for one, and they had had a sail, and at least some supplies. Laurence had had maps, and a sextant, and they had had more than a single old rum cask with which to collect water. The fishing had not been bad, for all they had had to eat it raw with their fingers; they had been uncomfortable, but no one had died. Their chances on that occasion had been, at worst, ten to one. At the moment, they are astronomical. He has a total of one officer, whose voice is still breaking, and six sailors, men who may well have been the very arbiters of their destruction. He knows all their names, as he does all the men on his crew, but he can trust them less far than he can throw them. 

The pervading dampness is somehow worse than being submerged in icy water. He is cold to his core. But the boy looks at him still, and he can’t take it anymore. 

He rouses himself enough to sit upright. “Gentlemen,” he says, and then again, louder, until the squabbling sailors turn to look in his direction. “I will not pretend we are not in dire straits,” he says, his throat already sore from shouting. “Our chances of survival are slim. But they are not none.” He takes a breath, hating himself for the lie. “Our best hope is another ship, so we must keep constant watch. Our biggest need is food and water, so we will fashion some fishing lines and pray for rain. But if we wish to live, we must not quarrel amongst ourselves.” He gives them all a sharp look in turn. The younger ones cannot meet his gaze for long, but the two oldest, grizzled men with rope-like sinew showing through the bare skin of their arms only glare straight back into his face. “Men, we are now the key to each other’s survival. We must share any spoils equally, and so divide our labour.” 

“Ye’ll be takin’ watch with us then, will ye?” demands one of the older men. “And equal rations?” 

“I will, Mr North, and I thank you for the clarification.” Riley looks around at all the others. The men, used to supplementing their salt pork with grog, are lean as hunting dogs already. He perhaps has a slight advantage in weight over each of them, including poor Boyne, which also means he would likely be top of the list if they decide fishing is too much work after all. Somehow he doubts they would be reasonable enough about it to draw straws, if such a thing could ever be called reasonable. But he is thinking ahead of himself. 

“We must set things out to dry, as much we can,” he says. “And see what else we can fashion to catch rainwater. And then let us see about those lines.” 

They catch nothing that day, or the next. But the third night, the drizzle which has been coming in and out since the storm abated, never enough to do more than wet their lips and dampen their clothes, finally flourishes into a proper shower. They lift their faces to drink as much as they can, and scramble to catch more in their makeshift receptacles. It is not much, but the next morning the water around them starts teeming with fish. The makeshift lines are all a shambles and catch nothing, but Riley holds onto Boyne’s legs while he reaches down and takes two of the fish in a hastily-assembled net made of Riley’s shirt. The men let up a roar and pat the boy on the back, although when the fish are gutted and apportioned equally between eight of them, it does not seem like much at all. 

Riley eats his own portion and tries to savour it. They have been drifting steadily north, which bodes badly for them, but he knows he will achieve nothing by ordering the men to help steer them eastward with one oar and some sticks of driftwood, except tiring them all to no purpose. It is a course more likely to get them all killed than the reverse, so he puts their direction in the hands of God. Instead they break up the wood to give each man a cudgel; he remembers vaguely from Bligh’s book, which he had read on its publication some two decades ago, that the men of the Bounty’s launch had been able to catch birds when they landed on the boat. 

They all keep their weapons close to hand. Riley sleeps only in snatches, expecting at any moment to feel a spar from his own ship crunching into his skull. 

Two weeks pass in this way. The sun burns their skin during the day, only to leave them damp and shivering at night, as ocean waves burst over the gunwales of a tiny boat that was only ever intended for short journeys between ship and shore, forcing the night watchmen to spend most of their time bailing them out. There are no signs of any ships. What birds they see remain far aloft. On still days they will occasionally catch fish, but neither do they progress in any direction; Riley cannot be sure if this is a disadvantage or not. The men all grow thin rapidly, and Boyne even more so. Riley’s own hunger is a constant but distant ache; his grief is still much sharper and nearer. His losses fill his waking and his sleeping mind; his ship, his shipmates, his friends. The aviators and their crews. Even the dragons. All of them, his responsibility. His losses. He thinks about his family, his father and mother and his brother Richard, who may never learn what has become of him. More than anything, he pictures his own little boy, who will never even know him, now. He wonders if Catherine will weep. If she will ever remarry. 

The darkest voice inside him wonders bitterly if she will even care. 

One of the younger sailors, Bill Upton, throws himself overboard one night. Riley is asleep; he wakes too late to do anything, even if there was anything that could be done. The man sinks like a stone and does not come up. Whether it was a genuine suicide or merely madness is impossible to say, but when Mr North then clubs a small shark that had begun to circle them and they drag it aboard, there is a small morsel more each to go around, and it is so very hard not to be glad for it. 

If it was madness, it is catching. More than one of the remaining men start mumbling nonsense by the end of the third week, and eyeing each other with suspicion as though anyone could have found and secreted anything drinkable or edible in such tight quarters. Anything anyone had saved from the wreck has long since been consumed. Riley prays aloud for more rain, and hears Boyne and some of the others echo him, hands clasped tightly together. Their mouths are dry; their lips bleed and they suck on them hungrily for relief. When rain comes, their improvised catchments barely hold enough to last them an extra day. 

In the fourth week, they start to die. 

“It’s a bloody waste,” North argues, as Riley had feared he would, as they prepare to cast the first poor sailor into the deep. There will be more space and more food without him, and Riley had hoped they would all be content with that. 

“Enough of that, sir,” he says. His voice barely registers above a whisper, all the moisture gone from his throat. His limbs feel like they are made of wet paper; he knows he will be no good if it comes to a fight. He draws himself up, anyway, as though his bare, bony chest and bare feet might have any power to intimidate. “We will have none of that talk. We are not savages.” 

North settles back, to Riley’s relief—likely he is just as weak and unwilling to put up a fight—but Riley is almost sure he hears the muttered words ‘speak for yourself’, as the body floats away. They have nothing with which they could have weighed it down. 

“Maybe it’ll attract more  sharks?” Boyne suggests, and shrinks a little at Riley’s censorious look, but the previously dead-eyed men rouse a little at his words and pick up their clubs with eyes locked on the ocean around them. Before long, Riley finds himself watching too, but nothing happens. 

There are no fish for three more days, and three more men die; two go quietly in the night, the other has to be held down as he screams and cries out for his mother before the end. Boyne wipes tears from his face as they send the man off, and takes a layer of skin away with them, leaving his face raw and bleeding. 

They are all shirtless by now, and covered in weeping sores. Struck by some dark inspiration, Riley sends around a rag to collect the blood and they try use it as a lure, but perhaps they have left the sharks’ territory now. Sailors’ tales say that there are stretches of ocean that are so deep that nothing can live, and Riley feels as though they balance on top of one now, three men and a boy in a tiny boat floating, drifting above endless fathoms of water. He imagines sinking forever, down and down and down, never finding the bottom.  

He loses count of the days. He fears for poor Boyne, who lies curled up in less than his allotted quarter of the space and shivers endlessly. The men yet remaining are the unamiable Mr North and Mr McBarnes. The young Scotsman is their best fisher, and the rest agree to relieve him of his night watch so he has more daylight hours. Aside from fishing, no one has energy to do much more than stare out into the distance. Riley sees sails on the horizon more than once, but after the first time he starts them all yelling at clouds, he waits to be sure he is not hallucinating. He always is. He can feel his bones sticking to the inside of his skin.

On a night after he has not eaten so much as a morsel for three days, Riley is on watch when he sees a tiny dot of light to the north. He waits for it to vanish, but it only hovers in the dark, unmoving. He splashes his face with saltwater and digs a sharp thumbnail into the flesh of his elbow, and yet it persists. 

He does not set up a yell. He wakes Boyne quietly. “Do you see it?” he asks, in a whisper. The boy rubs his peeling, bleeding face and squints. 

“I think so,” he says, in his reedy unbroken voice. “What is it?” 

“Too high to be a ship,” Riley says. 

“Land?” Oliver breathes. “Captain—” 

“Be still. We must not set up a panic; let me think.” 

They stay awake, watching the light until the sun starts to rise, at which point it can no longer be seen, nor any speck of land in its place, but that does not signify. A big fire might carry further than the human eye could make out land on the horizon at dawn. Riley fixes their position by the sun. When the others wake, he informs them of what he has seen, and announces they are going to row. 

“With what, pray?” North demands, in a mocking voice. He may be just as weak and starving as the rest of them, but the man has not lost his malicious edge. Well, he will not like the only solution Riley has managed to dream up. 

“I propose we knock off one of the gunwales,” Riley says, feeling the tension rise around him. “Lash the widest piece of driftwood we have to it. It will not be very effective, but it may serve.” 

“Ye want to start takin’ apart the boat?” North spits in disbelief. “The only thing keepin’ us alive? We do this an’ one good blow is all it takes to sink us.” 

“I know,” Riley says. “But consider; a few more days like this and we die, anyway. We may now have a chance; however small. We make one last effort. If it is not enough, it is not.” 

“How do we even know you saw anything?” McBarnes demands in a dry, hoarse voice. “For all we know you’re seeing ghost ships again.” 

“I saw it too,” Boyne pipes up, and North scoffs. 

“Of course you did. You’d lick his feet if they were dirty an’ thank him for the privilege.” 

Ordinarily Riley would have had the man flogged for so much insult to an officer, but he has no recourse in the middle of the ocean. He bites his tongue and puts his hand on Boyne’s stick-like arm. “I cannot do this without you both,” he says instead, looking between the two sailors. “And I cannot promise you a miracle. But surely anything must be better than drifting aimlessly to our deaths. Please, gentlemen, help me fight for our lives.” 

That is as much of a speech as he has strength to make; he coughs a dry cough and waits for the verdict. 

North and McBarnes exchange dark looks. Eventually McBarnes shrugs. He had once been quite a big man but is now a shadow of his former self; a dark beard runs down long past his chin. “Some chance is better than none,” he mutters. North says nothing, but neither does he argue further. 

The boat is well-made. It is not easy to rip apart one of the boards; they have to hack at it with their clubs all at once, a manoeuvre which nearly sends them all tumbling into the sea. When it finally cracks, they use all their remaining strength to tear it off, at which point the taller waves straightaway begin flooding the boat. They would all like some time to recover from the effort, but they can take none. “Two men rowing, two bailing,” Riley announces, while they lash the biggest club they have to the board they have made. He hands Boyne the rum cask. “Mr McBarnes, will you help bail? And Mr North, are you agreeable to take a shift with me?” 

North grumbles but takes the good oar, leaving Riley with the improvised effort. It is hardly ideal, but he would rather deal with North himself than leave him in a pair with Boyne. 

It is hard going. There is barely enough strength in his arms to lift the plank, let alone drag it through the water. For the first hour he makes perhaps one stroke to each of North’s three, which means they turn themselves around more often than not. Eventually he works out the trick of it, though every stroke sends a line of aching pain along his shoulders and down his spine; he keeps on. They begin to inch towards their heading with slowness that is even more agonising. They swap places after perhaps an hour, and then rotate, until they are all exhausted. Poor Boyne nearly drops the good oar in the water until Riley lunges forward and saves it. 

When night falls and they can no longer maintain their heading, they pull the oars in. Boyne collapses right away, his chest rising and falling with worrying slowness, but Riley cannot sleep, and he can feel the others waiting also. 

“There,” McBarnes says at last, his shaking hand lit by enough moonlight to make out the way his finger points. “There, I see it!” 

“Lord above,” North whispers. 

“We live after all!” McBarnes exclaims in a trembling voice, and slaps a wincing North on the back. Neither of them can know what leaves Riley with a hollow, horrified feeling that goes beyond the aching hunger. The light is no closer now than it was last night.

He lets Boyne sleep while he and the others take turns on the oars, dragging themselves by inches through the dark towards the distant glimmer that represents all their hopes. North would have woken the boy to take his turn, but Riley shakes his head and takes the double shift. McBarnes surprises him by doing the same; the two of them together seem to make more progress, even with an occasional rest to catch their breath. When the sun rises, Riley puts North on fishing duty instead and Boyne to the rum cask. There is still no sign of land. 

“That light is the damn devil calling us home,” North mutters to himself when the sun goes down again and the light reappears. “There is nothing there.” 

“Quiet your fat mouth,” Riley hears McBarnes snap back. “It might just as well be angels.” 

North only spits into the sea. 

Riley knows they must rest; he orders McBarnes to sleep and puts Boyne on watch. Exhaustion overcomes him. 

He wakes groggily to a violent argument taking place practically over his head. He hears Oliver shout “No!” and then a sound like meat being tenderised. The boy lands on him; Riley smells the blood. 

When he scrambles up, North and McBarnes are struggling, the darkness and Riley’s increasingly blurred vision making it hard to know who is the aggressor, but Riley can guess. He scrambles to his knees and snatches up his own club only to bring it down with as much force as he can manage on Mr North’s head. The man comes up bloody and scratches at Riley’s face, going for his eyes; McBarnes pulls him down. 

“You bastard,” Riley finds himself crying, and hits the man again, and again, and long after he has already gone still. Saltwater spray sends blood and tears running in streaks down his face. 

He isn’t sure how much time passes then; enough that when he is back to himself, the sun is rising. He drags himself by the arms to midshipman Boyne’s side—his legs seem to no longer be working— and puts his bloody fingers to the boy’s throat, where he finds the very faintest pulse. 

“North was trying to kill you sir,” McBarnes says. His rake-thin chest is covered in blood. “Said he couldn’t take another day of being ordered about.” 

After a long while, Riley replies. “He may have killed all of us.” He turns and takes hold of what remains of North’s clothing. McBarnes helps him, and between them they toss the man overboard. The body floats away, face-down. 

“Sir?” McBarnes says, and points. Riley looks up. By the light of the sunrise, he can just make out a dot of brown and green on the northwestern horizon. 

Poor Oliver Boyne takes hours to die. After he takes his last, rattling breath, Riley cannot bring himself to send him down; instead he wraps what remains of the boy’s shirt around his face and tucks the body into the stern. McBarnes does not say anything. Instead, they row together, their arms trembling with every stroke. They stop when it begins to rain, and while McBarnes collapses into the bilges and opens his mouth to the heavens, Riley does his best to fill the emptied cask. He manages enough for a few swallows each. 

They lie in silence for a while. “Cap’n?” McBarnes says at last, in a voice so hoarse it is barely audible. 

“Aye.” Riley answers without opening his eyes. 

“You think… there’s any chance for us, now?” 

It feels like there’s a lead weight resting on his chest. “Of course there’s a chance,” he says. He has to will himself to believe his own words. “As long as there’s air in our lungs, there’s a chance.” 

“If not… mebbe… those angels what made the light… will come for us.” 

“Angels.” Riley sighs. “Mr McBarnes… I am afraid I misjudged you when we began this course. I imagined you a man like North, and I… I apologise. You are a good man, and a brave one.” 

There is silence for a while, so that Riley imagines the man has fallen asleep. “Thank you for saying’ that, Cap’n,” comes a low voice out of the dark. “An’ I’m with you… to the end.” 

Riley falls unconscious with drizzle tapping a slow uneven rhythm on his back. 

When he wakes again, he tries to rouse McBarnes, but he cannot. The man is dead and already rotting.

Despair overcomes him all at once. He picks up the cobbled oar, now almost too heavy for him to lift, and heaves it into the ocean where it splashes and sinks. He tries to scream a furious curse to the sky, but even that effort fails; his voice entirely gone. Angels, he thinks, almost laughing to himself at the absurdity. He lets himself fall back into the bottom of the boat between the bodies. So take me, he thinks, and closes his eyes. Whether Angel or devil you may be. Take me, and let this be the end. 

When he at last becomes aware again, there is a softness around him, and a grassy smell, and voices, muffled at first but gradually distinguishable. 

“—make yourself useful, haere tatou and fetch water.” 

“But Father said stay, in case ino danger…” 

“What ino danger? Are you afraid he will go kill up pigs and take women, when he is half-dead himself? Clod-head, go! I can win taputō on any drowned pohe man.”  

Drowned , thinks Riley. A fitting end for a Captain of His Majesty’s navy. At least there will be no court martial. He would like to slip away again, but his mouth is so dry it is painful; he strains open his eyes instead.  

A brown face swims toward him out of the gloom. “Are you awake?” it asks, in slower more careful tones, leaning over him with an expression of great interest. “And are you going to die? Only now is hard digging ground, so you might have to wait.” 

“Water,” Riley begs, the word rasping out in a voice he doesn’t even recognise as his own. 

A mug is raised to his lips; chipped ceramic; he tastes cool, clean water. He swallows eagerly, tries to sit up so that he might take more; some of the precious stuff spills around his mouth. 

“Slow,” murmurs the voice, a cool hand bracing the back of his neck to help him up. Riley drains the cup and looks for more; the man holding him turns and after a splash comes back with the mug full again as though by magic. Riley drinks it down, more slowly this time. The sores on his lips crack and bleed when he opens his mouth even a little, but the pain is worth the effort; every drop on his tongue is more delicious than wine.

“Thank you,” he gasps out at last, only now willing to take in any details of his surroundings. It is a house, made of wood, and the ceiling so low that he could touch it if he stood. He is lying on a bed, on a mattress stuffed with something dry; it crackles faintly when he moves. He has no clothes anymore at all, but someone has covered him to the waist with a large square of papery cloth.

He turns his attention to his nursemaid. The man beside him is tall and lithe; Riley can feel the strength through his steadying arms, see the outline of muscles in his chest. He is mostly naked except for a kind of cloth skirt that wraps his thighs. The man is perhaps in his early twenties, with the nut-brown skin of a Pacific island native and strangely pale eyes, thick lips and long dark hair hanging freely around his face. It is all a peculiar combination of familiar and unfamiliar, and Riley cannot make any sense of any of it. “Who are you, sir?” he asks. “And what is this place?” 

“My name is Thursday October Christian,” the man replies, in perfectly understandable if oddly accented English. “And you are on Pitcairn’s Island.” 

Chapter Text

…once they get closer, it is clear: it is a beautiful green island - with the clear dome of a volcanic peak, trusting over a thousand feet from the sea - on exactly the latitude Captain Carteret had recorded, but with three and one quarter degrees further east in longitude, which is to say about 210 miles! In any case, it is perfect… an obscure, tiny dot on the map, barely known by anyone and even that dot has been put in the wrong place on the Royal Navy charts. It is the 15th day of January 1790. 

— Mutiny on the Bounty, Peter FitzSimons

They have buried poor Oliver Boyne and Mr McBarnes already, in a graveyard which is little more than a patch of earth separated by nothing but a pig fence. There are perhaps two dozen other graves, Riley notices, all of them with names scratched roughly into slabs of driftwood or stone. His men yet have no marker, but Riley vows to make some for them even as he kneels on trembling legs, places his hand on the mound of freshly-turned earth and murmurs the Lord’s Prayer. 

“Father prayed for them at midday service,” Thursday assures him after helping him back to his feet. “Their souls are safe in paradise.” 

Riley wishes he could be more comforted. He can feel the stares of the other native people, coming out of their low huts to look. Most of them seem to be women and children. Their dark eyes follow him as Thursday helps him limp back to the house. There is something strange about them all, more than can be accounted for by saltwater fever, but he is not quite sensible enough yet to puzzle it out. Pigs grunt from the yard nearby, and in the centre of the square formed by less than a dozen houses there are chickens and goats coming to the edge of the fence to see what the fuss is about. 

Rather than take him inside again, Thursday nudges him gently into a large chair which has been set outside the door. At least he is now wearing trousers, although they are made of the same painted barkcloth they all wear; they lie uncomfortably against his sunburned and salt-raw skin.  

“Here is cooshoo pape,” says another young native man, approaching; he is tall enough that he can simply step over the low fence. He slings a long stick off of his shoulders and hands a bucket from one end to Thursday, who fills Riley another cup. The newcomer bends down to observe Riley as though he were some new and interesting form of wildlife. 

“Captain Thomas Riley, at your service” says Riley, if only to sever the strange tension, and the boy pulls back from him and laughs as though he has heard a great joke. 

“That is Edward Young,” says Thursday. “He saw your boat, from the highcliff this morning.” 

“It was afa undersea,” Edward says. “We had to fetch you prettydamn oi’oi . And carry you up the hill then, hoof. Like two, three pigs in a sack.” 

“Thank you,” Riley says, once he has made sense of the strange accent and queer English with hybrid words dotted about. “I am indebted to you beyond what I could ever repay.” 

He sips the water carefully from the coffee mug, only realising now how strange it is that something so clearly manmade could be found on an island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. For a moment he wonders if it could have washed up from the Allegiance , but another look dispels that notion; it looks old. Tiny flowers have been painted along the bottom edge and then faded. 

Pitcairn. If he closes his eyes he can almost picture it on his maps; nothing more than a dot and a label halfway between the Cook islands and the South American continent. As far as he knows, it is uninhabited. It ought to be uninhabited. 

Three older women appear as if from nowhere with cooked food on plates and set it down for him; and they too speak English, although both have thicker accents than Thursday, so that it takes Riley a moment to puzzle out what they are saying. 

“Eat, stranger from the water.”

“It is a fast day,” Edward complains. One of the women makes a harsh noise and taps him on the back of the head, speaking to him in a low tone too fast in their dialect for Riley to understand.

The pork is hot and cooked well; he is not about to refuse it. He has to concentrate on chewing slowly so that he does not overexert his loose teeth or shrunken stomach; it is almost impossible. Suddenly his hunger is ravishing, and nothing he can do will satisfy it; he finishes the meat and scrapes up what remains; some leafy green vegetable and some other roasted, starchy cubes that taste a little like potato. His aching stomach protests the effort. 

When he looks up, more people have approached from all directions, coming closer to get a proper look at the scarecrow who has been dragged half-dead from the sea. There are what seems like dozens of little children, girls and boys, and only now does he realise what is strange. Riley is a well-travelled sailor; he has been to Fiji and the Cook islands and Tahiti also, for supply rather than to stay, but he has been among the young men who gathered to watch from the gunwales as the native women came to wave to them from the beach, and in some cases make the attempt to board the ship to get to them. They did not have any understanding of Christian modesty; they were bare-breasted and unashamed. But here, while the boys and young men wear mostly loincloths, the girls and women are covered from neck to knee in barkcloth wraps or patched woollen trousers cut to fit.

Thursday’s words echo in his mind. Their souls are safe in paradise. 

Before he can think much further, Thursday begins introducing the newcomers; Riley can hardly keep pace. One of the older women, very beautiful, is his mother Mauatua, the other his wife, incongruously named Susan, although she looks much older than he is. Three of the children he says are his, the oldest being a boy perhaps seven years old, the youngest a little girl who comes to cling to his feet. There is a boy called George who is Thursday’s younger brother, who has three young children also, and their sister Mary, who is even more delicate of face and as dark of complexion as her mother. After that, Riley loses track entirely and has to beg to be allowed to sleep some more so that his head might stop pounding. 

He feels a little more human when he awakes, having slept the rest of the day and most of the night. It is cool and dark in the house. Someone has left water by the bedside; he picks it up and sips it gratefully. He can just make out dark shapes around him, people sleeping on beds lined up; he is sleeping in the children’s room, and one of them is curled up on a rush mat on the floor. He gets up, feeling the texture of the rough-hewn wood under his bare feet. His legs tremble a little, but hold his weight. He has never felt so weak in his life, but he takes small, careful steps, making his way around the sleeping figures to the door. Opening it, he emerges into the silent moonlit village. He is not sure what he is looking for. Some sign, perhaps, some reason why he should be the only man to survive a wreck that killed perhaps five hundred men and as many as three heavyweight dragons. It was not how it was supposed to be. A good captain, who has failed in his duty so far as to lose his ship through disaster or misfortune, ought to have gone down to the deep with it. 

He looks up at the full, bright moon and remembers the look in the face of poor Oliver Boyne. Misplaced belief. For a moment Riley considers how he will write to Boyne’s parents to tell them of his fate, and then checks himself; should he write five hundred letters? Should he write to the mother of the lowliest sailor all the way up to Lord and Lady Allendale? And how and when should those letters ever be sent? For a moment he cannot breathe; the nightmare so all-encompassing, his trembling limbs seem to seize all over and he has to grasp onto the fence to keep from falling. 

Something brushes his leg and he jerks away, shocked, but it is only Thursday’s little daughter Mary, scarcely old enough to walk, herself. She offers him a tiny brown hand. With a final, heavy breath, he takes it, and lets her lead him back inside the house.

“Father would like to talk to you,” Thursday says when Riley has breakfasted on more of the potato-like stuff, which turns out to be cooked breadfruit, and some small pieces of actual fruit which are much sweeter but painfully acidic on his withered gums and the open sores on the inside of his mouth. 

It occurs to Riley that he has seen no older men yet. There are plenty of boys in their teenage years, but he thinks Thursday might be the oldest of these; certainly he seems to hold some kind of authority over the rest, who otherwise would have descended on Riley the moment the sun came up with their chattering questions. Thursday directs them instead to other work; he speaks quickly and in what seems to be only half English and half some other language, so that Riley cannot quite follow. When he speaks to Riley, however, his tone could be called almost cultured.

“I would be glad to speak to him,” Riley says. 

“We have missed morning service,” Thursday says somewhat thoughtfully. “We will visit before the midday service. He likes to sleep, after that.” 

“Your father is a Christian man, I take it?” Riley asks, and Thursday's teeth flash in a smile. 

“Father is our teacher in Christ,” he says. “But you have understood all wrong; he is not my father. My father is dead longtime.” 

“I am sorry,” Riley says, but he is even more baffled than before. A missionary, he thinks. That is all that makes sense. Some Englishman, who has taken it upon himself to convert a previously undiscovered island nation in the interest of saving their souls. It would explain their ease with the language, and what passes for modesty among them. It does not explain how on earth the man had come to be here, however. Curiosity, which henceforth has been dampened entire by weariness and starvation, begins to stir.

At his request, Thursday leads him to a stream of freshwater just outside of the village. Riley practically falls into it, but the cool freshness is a balm against his burned and broken skin, and he washes as much salt as he can out of his hair, so that it is no longer stiff and matted. When he grows afraid that if he stays any longer he will fall asleep and drown himself in the shallow water, Thursday helps him out and he puts the barkcloth trousers back on; they are not anything like respectable, but since it seems to be the accepted norm here, perhaps the missionary will not mind. He ties back his wet hair into a makeshift queue with some bark string. He would have liked to shave, but even if he could find a razor, he fears his hands will not hold steady enough to do the work without making a bloody mess of his face. He decides to go as he is, and beg forgiveness for any impropriety in his appearance.

They go to a large house on the other side of the village. It is built all out of wood, like the others, with what must have been painstakingly slow handcraft. This one is surrounded by a kind of open portico, and two blankets of the barkcloth Thursday calls ‘ahu are hanging out on the fences to dry. Two women are working in a vegetable garden to the eastern side; when Thursday speaks to them they smile at Riley and wave both of them in. 

This house appears to have several rooms; at least there are doorways, with rushy curtains hanging up for privacy. To one side a small but intricately carved table has been arranged as though in a place of honour, and what appears to be a ship’s bible sitting reverently upon it. A grey-haired man is seated at a long table piled with plates of roasted chicken, fish and fruits; the smell makes Riley’s mouth water. The man looks up as they come in and jumps to his feet, abandoning his meal. 

“Come in, come in,” he says, beaming wide and beckoning. Riley comes close enough to accept a firm handshake from a tanned and hairy hand. “John Adams,” says the man, in a recognisable London accent. He is unmistakably a white man, with balding pate and pox-marked face. He has not the look of a missionary, however; he wears an old shirt cut off above the elbows hanging open, and there are blue and black tattoos marking both his arms and wrinkled chest. Some appear to be of native design, including a ring of dark fang-shaped marks around his neck, like an ornament, but the others were such as Riley would not have been surprised to see in any European shipyard.

“Tom Riley,” says Riley, some instinct telling him to leave off his rank—if it would even be believed, in his current state. “A pleasure to meet you, sir.” 

The man grins a toothy grin. “Never thought I’d live to see another Englishman,” he says. “Welcome to Adamstown, Tom. Are you hungry? You look as though you ain’t eaten in a sixmonth. Come, help yourself, and Vahi and Dinah can bring aught else you need.” 

“I do very well, sir, under the circumstances,” Riley says, although he does sit at the table and accept a plate when the man passes it to him. The chicken smells enticing, even though he has only just eaten an hour or so ago. The fish, less so; he thinks he might now avoid it for the rest of his life. Thursday does not sit, but waits like a sentry at the door.

“Shipwrecked, were you?” Adams asks, and shakes his head somberly when Riley confirms it. “Bloody shame. I saw the boat; surprised you lasted more than a week in that thing, with three men.” 

“Eight,” Riley says, staring down at his plate. He has all of a sudden lost his appetite. “We started with eight.” He clears his throat. “Thank you for burying the others.” 

“It were none too soon,” Adams replies, sympathetic but direct. “Poor fellows. I am sorry you have been so forsaken, but God must have had His own hands on you, to bring you here. Our little island may not look like much at first, but I count myself as the very richest man on earth.” He gestures around. “You are safe here, so long as you follow our ways, and do naught to start a quarrel, or try to take a woman who is not yours, not,” he adds, “that I think you will need to; our girls tend to take fascination with anything new, or different.... I think rather you will be beating them off; let me know if they become bothersome and I will do my best to preach restraint, although you would do best to marry one of them as soon as you can, to discourage jealousy.” 

Riley stares at him, all his carefully planned questions quite forgotten in the face of this appalling suggestion. 

“Sir,” he says, with as much composure as he can manage, “I had it that this was a Christian community.” 

“It is, Tom, it is.” Adams takes up a pork rib and gnaws upon it with evident pleasure. “There are only fifty or so of us; I am teacher and master, father and priest to them all, and we live by the word of the Lord, Tom, so we do. Did not Abraham have many wives, and many children by them? Did not Adam and Eve conceive, with no one but God to call them wed?” He smiles. “I learned to read with the Bible on this very island, Tom. It is the only book I have ever read, and I have read it many times: I assure you, there is nothing whatsoever ungodly about our way of life. We are the better for it. No one here has had anything to complain of for many years.” 

“Sir,” Riley says, in growing desperation. “I hope you will forgive my frankness; I can see this is no ordinary place. But I have no intention of staying; I must find a way to return home to England. I had hoped that having come so far yourself, you might have some way to help me return… a boat, or even some regular visitors, for supply…” 

Adams’ expression is still smiling, almost pitying. “Came by ship we did,” he says. “And many more of us there were, back then. I am the only one left, you see, of the men who came ashore. Most of the women and girls still live, thank God, or I would have thrown myself off the highcliff a decade ago.” 

“But then…” Riley’s heart lifts, just for a moment. “Your ship…” 

“We burned it,” Adams says, as though he were describing the swift death of an insect and not the destruction of Riley’s last hope for salvation. 

Riley stares at him. “Whatever for, man?” 

Adams smile is a little stiff, perhaps. “Thursday,” he calls. “Bring the cooshoo book over here for me, will you? Careful, mind.” 

Thursday goes over to the table where the Bible rests, and picks it up to put it in front of Riley. It is dogeared and waterstained, printed small in the manner of most ship’s bibles. Unremarkable. Riley does not understand. 

“Open it,” Adams says. “Your questions will be answered.” 

Riley opens the book to the frontispiece and stares for a long while at the inscription there. It reads, quite simply, in a neat hand, 

Property of Lt. William Bligh
of His Majesty’s Navy
Cmdr of the HMS Bounty

Slowly, as pieces of the incredible puzzle begin slotting themselves into place, he realises his mistake. 

Adams is not a missionary at all. He is a mutineer. 

“You have heard our story, I can see,” Adams says, while Riley continues to stare down at Bligh’s handwriting. “We did meet with a ship, some years ago now, an American; they did not stay for long, but I heard the captain’s tale from them. We all knew he would make it, of course; the man was as stubborn as a cliff face. No ocean could kill him. It seems the world has heard the very worst of us, who were only trying to protect ourselves from the dominion of a right tyrant. But there have been no ships since, and there ain’t likely to be any more. The maps are incorrect, see; our little island is marked quite wrong on all of them.” 

To prove it, he has Thursday fetch a small chest which turns out to be full of old papers including a roll of maps; when he unfurls one for Riley to see, there is a hand-drawn annotation between where Pitcairn is marked and what he presumes to be the correction location, and the latitude noted in. The annotation is initialled F.C. 

“Do not be so unhappy, Tom,” Thursday says. Riley feels wooden all over and cannot adjust his face; weary despair has settled over him once more as the finality of his position begins to at last sink in. 

There is no escape. Barring some more incredible chance than what has kept him alive thus far, he is doomed to live out the rest of his days on this island. An island peopled entirely by some especially adventurous Tahitian women and their children, and all of those are the direct descendants of William Bligh’s former crewmates, whose bloodlines can hardly be recommended under the circumstances. Even the smiling Adams had not been able to censor the story entirely; it seemed that the mutineers and the few Tahitian men they had been able to convince to accompany them away from their homeland had eventually murdered one another by turns until John Adams was the only survivor. The man had not been overt about their motives, but Riley had the strong suspicion it had to do with the aforementioned dangers of sharing women around as though they were horses.

“There is nothing to be sad about,” Thursday insists, as they sit together beside the great fire which has been lit for warmth and cooking atop the cliff. It is McBarnes’ angel light at last, but it has ceased to give Riley any peace, even when they are supposedly having a feast in his honour. “There is everything you could need here.” 

“I… have a wife and son, at home,” Riley says, in an attempt to explain. “I am only considering that I will never see them again.” 

“Ah.” Thursday shrugs, as though this represents a minor inconvenience. “You must have more children, then. Mine give me… we would say mono’o. Big happy?” 

“Joy.”

“Yes.” Thursday beams.  

Riley finds himself looking at his companion anew as they eat. The man had given his name, he recalls with effort, as Thursday October Christian, and Riley had not been sensible enough to consider the strangeness of it at the time. “What was your true father’s name?” he asks, although he already knows the answer. 

“His name was Fletcher Christian,” says Thursday, and Riley nods, in wonderment.

Reading the story of the Bounty as a boy he had been more interested in Bligh’s swashbuckling journey and feat of survival, rather than the fate of the evil mutineers, but everyone had heard of Fletcher Christian, a man of good name and good family, a family whose reputation had been quite disgraced by the events across a distant sea, and by a man who by all accounts had disappeared without trace with the Bounty herself somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. He had been very young, too, possibly no older than Thursday was now, himself.

By Bligh’s account, the man was an utter rascal who had gone mad and turned the rest of his crew against their captain for no good reason, but now having met Bligh, Riley could see how that account may not be entirely reliable. “The man is enough to drive anyone to mutiny,” he had said to Laurence in some frustration before they had even arrived in Sydney with Bligh aboard. Laurence had only smiled in his taciturn way, but then, he was a traitor as well. 

Some of the mutineers had been found by the navy, he remembers vaguely, and brought back to England for court-martial; most of those who survived had been hanged, in the end. He did not think anyone could have imagined that any of the remainder still lived anywhere, and certainly not in such a prospect as this. He supposes it is a kind of paradise, to them, and it is all very well for them to say they are happy, when they have never known anything else, and certainly Adams would not tell them anything that would entice them to leave. The man is sitting practically enthroned now on the other side of the fire, being attended to by at least three women, although whether these are his wives or his daughters it is hard to tell. The richest man on earth, indeed. 

One of the young women appears at this moment to pass Riley a mug; it is Thursday’s sister Mary. She smiles a pretty smile and dashes away, her grass skirt blowing up above her knees. Eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, Riley thinks, about the same age Catherine had been when he met her first. 

He looks away, and swallows the grief that rises unbidden in his throat. It will not do. He must not let himself succumb to misery, not when Oliver Boyne and Mr McBarnes and so many others died in pain and misery so that he might make it so far. Not when a higher power had clearly seen fit to spare his life, while so many others slept the endless sleep beneath the waves. To lose his will to live would be an insult to the memory of them all. He knows what Laurence would do, and although they are no longer as close as they once were, he finds he values that certainty a great deal. 

A song begins around him, unintelligible in its language which seems to be little more than extended and undulating vowel sounds, soft at first but then it picks up and carries all the way around the fire, gaining in volume even as the flames go higher and higher. Even the children clap along, keeping a steady and joyful rhythm. Some of the girls get up to dance, their skirts swirling and rustling around them as they form long, twisting shadows on the ground. Riley watches until he becomes quite mesmerised; his exhaustion coupled with the strangeness of his circumstances serves to leave him feeling utterly untethered, as though he has wandered somehow into a dream. 

Perhaps it is only a dream, he thinks, as Mary Christian dances towards him with her mane of jet-black hair and nubile hips swaying to the beat, and offers him her hand. Or some form of afterlife, which no theologian from the self-taught Father Adams to the very Bishop of Canterbury could conceive. Either way, it appears that some higher power, be it God, or fate, or some mischievous fiend of the underworld, has other plans for him, after all.

Chapter Text

With no such island marked on his map, Pipon is curious to take a closer look - at least such islands should be marked… And so, at dawn, after dropping anchor in the closest to a safe harbour he can find - it is a rocky cove - he sees two Natives paddling a canoe towards his vessel. That is not the shock. Many such tiny islands have natives. But look what happens now. For as they get close, one of them calls up in English, ‘Won’t you heave us a rope now?’

- Mutiny on the Bounty, by Peter Fitzsimmons

It is not a very pretty fence, having been planned and marked out with excruciating care only to then have been forced to divert, during the building, around several inconvenient tree roots of awesome size and one underground boulder which could not be dug out. Still, Riley maintains a feeling of satisfaction to look at it now that it encircles his own two sows, at least one of whom is sure to fallow in two months or less. He scoops water from the rain barrel into his mouth and pours some over his headband to keep it damp. It is especially hot and dry today and has been for a week; he has worked only in the early morning hours, since there is little sense in persisting through the oppressive afternoons only to make himself ill to no purpose. On the island, there is no shortage of time. 

“Well,” he says, crossing his arms over his bare, sun-dark chest, water dripping off the ends of his hair and beard. “What do you think of that?” 

“Cooshoo.” The boy beside him looks up at him and grins. 

Riley smiles. “I thought so too.”

“How many iti-pigs will there be?” asks the girl on his other side, her dark head barely high enough to see over the top of the fence.

“We won’t know until they are born,” Riley explains patiently. “Polly’s sow had twelve, the last time. But two of them died not long after.” 

“Why?” the girl asks. 

“That happens sometimes, with animals. With people too, although not as often, thank God.” 

The boy nods solemnly. He is only nine years old, but the children of Pitcairn’s are hardy and generally well-informed about the facts of life. He has already witnessed more human births in his short years than Riley has, ever. “Is it time for midday?” he asks instead, the ready chant of a boy whose stomach is growing faster than the rest of him. 

“Yes, almost,” Riley smiles. “Go and see if your mother or Hutia need help.” 

“Aeae,” the boy says, and salutes with enthusiasm before starting his run toward the village. The girl exclaims a protest at the threat of being left behind, and almost trips over in her attempts to follow him.

“Tom, Tom!” a voice comes hailing up from the path. Riley looks to see one of the Young brothers, a son of Ned Young who was former midshipman of the Bounty. The man is approaching at speed and waving furiously. Both the children pause in their flight, watching and listening with interest at the prospect of some excitement. 

“What is it, George?” Riley calls back. 

“Shep!” Young calls as he comes skidding to a halt at the edge of the yard. “Shep, off the highcliff! Thursday said to bring you.” 

“Papa?” the boy says, looking up at him with uncharacteristic alarm. “Is it them, again?” 

Riley turns to him and grips his shoulder. 

“Go to the village and spread the word,” he says, low. “Tell them: battlestations.” 

Lying on the top edge of the sheer drop at the peak of the island they call the highcliff, Thursday October Christian passes Riley the glass. 

“Tyo, they are coming toward us,” he says. His face is grim. The sightings, which once were less than one a year, have become more frequent. 

Pirates. They are usually small ships, with no more than perhaps twelve working guns, although only Adams and Riley truly know the damage even one or two cannon could do if they got off a lucky shot near the village. They have been saved, Riley knows, only by the very great difficulty there must be in making a landing anywhere near their island, which is encircled by dangerous reefs he himself would not have liked to navigate with anything bigger than a canoe. But twice the ships have sent a jolly boat in the hope of supply. Twice, the Pitcairners have managed a show of force, with slings and spears and bombs made of burning vegetation and pig excrement. The last time, only a year ago, the pirates had fired into the bay as they retreated, and killed two young men and one girl of twelve, whose poor mother had later died of self-imposed starvation brought on by grief. The incident is still sharp in the memories of all the islanders, and has made them appropriately wary. At least Riley no longer has to argue with anyone about letting them get close enough to land.

Once, he would have been overjoyed to see any ship at all. But no ship with black sails can be convinced to carry away a man to a destination of his choice without payment, which Riley does not have: more than likely they would make him a slave instead, and leave the island in burning ruins behind them. The island has become his home—he will defend it to his last breath. 

He looks through the Bounty’s glass for a long while, watching as the uncertain edges come more clearly into view. 

“Well?” Thursday says, when he cannot wait any longer. 

“It is not a pirate,” Riley says, in a voice that he has to make the effort to keep steady. “They are flying British colours.” 

It is Thursday who paddles out, after all; Riley is not sure which of the two of them will cause more confusion to the officers on board, but Thursday is a more certain representative of the island, having lived there all his life, and now in his thirties he is a true leader of their community in all but spiritual matters. John Adams, that self-imposed spiritual leader, waits back on the shore with Riley and some of the women, while Thursday takes Edward and George Young, and his own son Joseph and some of the other young men, all wearing their best feathered hats and flying a British flag. Of course they have no masts to their canoes, so the flag cannot actually fly, as such, but Joey stands up in the stern on steady legs and holds the flag up wide as they approach. Riley can see the crew staring down at them from the gunwales. 

“Bet you’re glad you had Mary make that thing now, eh?” Adams says as they stand on the shore of Bounty bay and watch Thursday and George being helped up the ladders. Riley nods. He had once entertained the idea that he could use it to signal the next ship that passed—British, Spanish or French, he had not much cared at the time—but that had been ten years ago, and the ‘ahu flag, carefully cut and stitched and painted blue red and white at his instruction, had stayed folded away and unused. “I hope you know what you’re about,” Adams goes on, without taking his eyes off the ships. There are two of them, their names emblazoned on their sides: HMS Briton and HMS Tagus, both fifth rates, with thirty-eight guns apiece. He cannot quite name the emotion that seeing them has awoken in him; certainly it is nothing like the elation he has often felt before in dreams. It feels unexpectedly hollow.

His wife, Mary, takes his hand from where she stands beside him, her steady smiling face a balm to his soul. He allows himself a faint smile in return, nodding his reassurance. He would have much preferred she stay in the house with the children until he is sure nothing will go wrong, but he knows better than to expect her to mind either his preference or his direction; she would not hear of being left behind. “If I may be said to have a vice,” he had said to Thursday once, after a particularly unpleasant argument which had resulted in his being banished from the house for the night, “it must be an attraction to especially headstrong women, who do not like to hear an opinion from anybody except their own.” 

“I believe you, tyo,” Thursday had said. The Tahitian word tyo means something like friend, or brother, or both; someone bonded for life by shared respect and genuine feeling. Riley wears it with gratitude and honour, for all the man is some ten years his junior. “My sister is all those things, after all. But since these are the things you love her for, you cannot also complain of them; tell her so and it will be well.” And so he had done, along with a lengthy and somewhat grovelling apology, and not been foolish enough to quarrel so with her again.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later, after some discussion on deck, some of the ship’s boats are lowered from the Briton. Thursday and the others scramble easily over her sides and hop into their canoes to speed off, laughing and calling to each other in Pitkairn, the more convoluted hybrid form of the language, as they leave the navy men with their heavy oars easily dragging behind them. Bounty Bay is almost always beset by crashing waves, and the reef and the rocks which serve as their best defence prove a real obstacle even for the well-practised sailors: the canoes have to go back and around to either side to lead them in. 

The one-armed captain himself comes ashore in the launch, wearing boots in an attempt to keep his feet dry, and looking around in bewildered but keen interest. A marine lieutenant and two midshipmen come behind him carrying two pistols apiece, the other sailors letting the boat drift out a little in case they need to make a hasty retreat. It is just what Riley would have done; he tries not to be offended on the part of the Pitcairners at being treated like the greater danger, when they are totally unarmed. 

Four of the girls go up and set flower-wreaths around the necks of the officers; one of the mids looks rather overcome and goes quite pink, while the captain seems almost not to have noticed, he is so intent on staring at both Adams and Riley, who as the only white men in the congregation are easy to fixate upon. “Is it true?” he asks, after having introduced himself briefly as Captain Sir Thomas Staines. “This island is what became of the Bounty?” 

Adams comes forward; he gives no bows. “True sir,” he says, a little stiffly; he has good reason to be wary of a Captain of the Royal Navy, considering his past crimes, although he has the dubious comfort of knowing that every man woman and child on the island who call him Father—all of them, perhaps, but Riley—would fight to the death to keep him from being taken off in irons. “I am John Adams, once known by the name Alec Smith, and these are my children.” 

“What, all of them?” Sir Thomas looks around with a doubtful air at the twenty-odd assembled. 

“Only four of my body, sir, but all are my children in Christ,” says Adams, inclining his head only very slightly and indicating Riley with one hand as he adds, “and one good friend.” 

“Sir.” Riley makes an appropriate leg, though he is quite aware he must look a savage farce; dressed in his barkcloth trowsers, cut longer than most of the islanders but still leaving him bare from knee to sand-covered, callused feet, and the tunic-like shirt he wears on Sundays. He has kept his hair as short as can be reasonably managed, with the sharp edge of a knife, but there are no razors on the island; his beard is overgrown and reddish, sticking out from his chin in all the wrong directions. “I am Thomas Riley, former Captain of the Allegiance. I was wrecked in 1811, and found my way here by providence.” 

“The Allegiance?” Sir Thomas’s eyes widen, if possible, even further, “I remember it—some sodden halfwits started a fire that spread to the magazine, yes? God, if that didn’t change the way I ordered watches after a storm from then on! And I am sure I was not the only one; what a terrible business. I once served with Lieutenant Burrough; I heard he survived long enough to command one of the boats, but never made it back, poor man.” 

Riley is overcome; the fact that anyone but his own meagre party had lived to man the boats at all is news to him, for all it is ten years old, and more importantly— “Sir, if so much news survived to reach you, may I take it that there were some survivors?” he asks hungrily. 

“Oh, yes; I think so,” Sir Thomas says, turning to the lieutenant, “it had something to do with dragons, do you recall, John?” 

The marine commander looks rather less impressed than Staines at their discovery; the look he gives Riley now is rather more censorious than anything. “Only that one of them was Temeraire, sir,” he says—Riley’s heart lifts immeasurably— “and that they took off two hundred-odd crew, and none of the officers.” 

His words are clearly meant as a rebuke, but Riley can feel ten years of guilt lift even so slightly off his shoulders. It is relief more than real surprise—he has never quite been able to make himself believe that Laurence is dead. The man has an undeniable gift for survival of the most unlikely sort. 

Seeing Riley unable to answer, Adams steps forward. “May we offer you rest, Captain?” he asks. “We have some fresh meat, and plenty of fruit to spare. ” 

The children are asleep by the time Riley comes to bed, his mind alive and racing despite the late hour. His wife puts her arm across him and presses her lips to his face. “What did the Captain say?” she asks, very low. 

“He said they will take us, if we wish it,” Riley says. Sir Thomas in fact has been everything generous, despite Lieutenant Shillibeer’s obvious preference to bring him aboard in chains, rather than as an honoured guest. The Captain of the Tagus, a Philip Pipon, is just as interested and polite, though he had been quick to warn Riley that they are not bound immediately back to Britain; their duty in fact is to hunt down the very pirates the islanders have seen in the surrounding waters, although the navy ships have so far not seen so much as a scrap of black sail. 

“Hiding away, I have no doubt,” Sir Thomas had said with some bluster as he ate his fill of the spit-roasted hog which had been slaughtered for their feast.  “No qualms at all about attacking a sealer, or a merchantman, but they turn tail and run the minute they get a sniff of the Navy—of course it is gratifying, in that respect, but it does make it damned hard to smoke them out. We may as well be at your service, since we have done little else but sail around in circles for the last six months and more.” 

"To Pritainie?" Mary asks, the island word for Britain. 

 “They can take us as far as the nearest port city in the Incas,” Riley explains now, “from where we must find our own way. If you… that is… if you do not object to going.” 

She is quiet for a short while; he knows she has been thinking on it all the day, but one day is not near enough time to make such a decision, and he cannot blame her for hesitating in the least. Still, there is a tightness in his chest that began the moment he made out the ships’ colours, and has only been growing since, in anticipation of what she might say now.

“I should like to see the rest of the world,” she says. “To see great houses, and big open lands, and all different sorts of people, such as you have told me of.”

Riley waits. He cannot see much of her face in the dark, but he knows it so well that he can imagine. She has large dark eyes and thick, expressive eyebrows. Her skin is the colour of coffee, her chin round, her lips round and pink. Her thick dark hair goes down to her waist; she always wears it hanging loose, but he still remembers the day they were wed, when the other village women had brought hundreds of flowers to braid into an elegant crown. She has cared for him these last ten years, but more than that, she is quick-witted, and clever, and bold, and does not take no for an answer. In some ways she is the match he had always wished for, and in other ways, the most opposite imaginable. 

She is the daughter of a Tahitian princess, the granddaughter of a Tahitian king, and the daughter of Fletcher Christian, the most famous mutineer in Britain. And she is everything to him.

“But we will have to leave a’lien,” she says, meaning the island. “My brothers. My mother. Our Father, and our life… the house we built with our own hands… will we ever come back again?” 

He turns into her body, his hand stroking across her naked side. “I will not ever lie to you,” he says. “If we reach England, God willing, I will do everything that is in my power to one day bring you and the children home again to see your family. To even bring more of them back with us, if they wish to come. But there is no guarantee, not when I have no ship of my own, and no money to buy us passage, and there is every possibility that on my coming home they will put me on trial for losing the Allegiance. I think I can say that you will have some support—” he hesitates just a little, since he cannot be altogether sure, “—but I will not say there will not be risks. Neither will the journey be very comfortable, however we manage to contrive it.”

He listens to her breathing, a little louder than he is used to in the dead of night, her fingers digging a little into his arm. “If I do not go,” she says. “Would you leave?”

This question, he has dreaded, but he does not pretend he does not already have an answer. “No, my love,” he says, his heart pounding hard against his ribs. “I will not go anywhere if I must leave you behind; it would be the end of me.” 

“But you would not be content to stay,” she says, with an air of decision. “This life… is not a life you chose.” 

“I chose you,” he says, with conviction. “I would rather live out my days here with you, with no hope of ever seeing Britain again, than to live a hundred years in more opulence than the king of England.” 

“But since there is hope, now,” she says, discerning as ever, “it is different than having no choice.” She reaches up to trace the side of his face with her fingers in the dark. “You were born for a bigger life than this, Tom Riley,” she whispers. “And so were your children. We will come with you, for you will need us.” 

“You cannot know how much,” he says, his heart much lifted, and kisses her.  “Ua here vau ia oe.” I love you. 

“When do we go?” she asks. 

“Morla,” he says. Tomorrow.

“Oliver!” 

The ships have been ready to depart for half an hour. Riley has the distinct feeling that he is already stretching the limits of the patience of the officers; even if Sir Thomas is determined to be amiable, Captain Pipon has been quite clear that the Tagus will not wait past noon, and Riley does not want to be the cause of a quarrel on the first day of their voyage. “Come down from there at once,” he demands, in a tone of voice he had once used to address his junior officers, but has never had cause to use on his own children until now.

It is a small, smooth tree without even any low-hanging branches; only the very best of the island’s climbers would be able to follow the boy up, even if he would not just jump to the next one when pursued. The Pitcairn children start climbing almost before they can walk; it would be a useful skill in the event of a pirate attack, but Riley can only resent it when it is used against him. “Ai ent gwen!” Oliver calls back. He is so high up he is scarcely visible between the great wide leaves. 

“You are going, and you will speak English.” Riley sighs. “Your mother and sister are already prepared to leave; you will oblige me by not keeping them or our hosts waiting on us any longer.” 

A tearstained brown face appears. “I do not want to leave!” the boy cries. “Mama says we will not come home for years, and maybe ever! What about māmā rūʻau, and Charlie, and Sarah, and Fletcher and George—” 

“Your grandmother and cousins are waiting down the bay to wish you well,” Riley says. He is painfully aware that he would never have spoken so to his own father, at the same age, but then he was not raised half-wild on an island where the concepts of rules and manners were almost foreign. Riley had spent most of his childhood doing all he could to please his father; his own children have no cause to fear more than a light reproach, and Oliver does not possess that dread of disapproval which might have dissuaded him from protesting so dramatically even the sudden and unexpected upturn of the only life he has ever known. Riley does not mean to inspire that dread now, nor ever, but there is only so much negotiation to be had with a nine-year-old boy. “Oliver,” he calls again, softening his voice. “You have my word I will not drag you anywhere, at least come down so I can speak to you properly.” 

A long hesitation, then there is the sound of leaves rustling, and the boy comes sliding down the long stretch of bark to land easily on his feet, without looking his father in the face. 

Riley goes to one knee beside him. “Listen to me,” he says. “I know it seems unfair, to take you away from a’lien when you have never known anything else. But consider: it will be a grand adventure. You will see more of the world, I expect, than most people ever get to see. You will see new animals—Thursday tells me they have a dog aboard the Briton, and I know you have always wanted to see one—and eat good foods you have never tried, you can climb new trees in new lands, and when we get to England you will meet your other grandparents, and your uncle Richard and his daughters, who are your cousins also. And,” he adds, aware that he is running out of incentives, “there are a great many dragons in Britain, some of whom I know personally and I am sure would oblige you if you wanted to fly with them. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing? To fly miles high in the air?” 

Oliver’s red-rimmed eyes come up slowly. Dragons are a fairytale to him, something he has only ever heard described in stories. He nods slowly.

Riley puts a hand on the boy’s bare, skinny shoulder. “It will be a hard journey,” he says, “and I will need your help to protect Mama and Joy. Will you help me?” 

Oliver blinks, his brow wrinkles a little. “I will be your lieutenant?” he says, perhaps imagining himself a place in one of his favourite of Riley’s tales. 

“My first,” Riley agrees. “For always. Now wipe your eyes; we had better hurry down to the ships before they go without us.” 

Thursday also weeps, unashamedly, though he does not try to convince Riley to stay. While the island women cling one at a time to Mary and press gifts upon her—a necklace of polished shells, a comb made of pig bone, and great rolls of ‘ahu— the son of Fletcher Christian kisses Riley on the forehead and bids him goodbye.

“Your servant, tyo,” Riley says, barely able to contain his own emotions. 

“God keep you and your family, Tom.” Thursday puts the hilt of his best knife into Riley’s hand. It is initialled F.C. on the hilt just below where it meets the blade. “Take it,” he says, when Riley tries to refuse. “We have better steel now, anyway.” The British have exchanged some weapons and other useful necessities for supplies of fresh food and two milch goats. “And keep my sister safe.” 

“I will,” Riley promises, and embraces him again.

John Adams, perhaps, is the least downhearted to see them go. Riley has always suspected that the man sees him as a threat to his own authority, and may well be glad to see the back of him. They have never really quarrelled, at least not outwardly, but Adams has not much liked Riley’s interference into their defences, no matter how many lives it is likely to have saved, nor his quiet refusal to participate in the twice-weekly fasts and all the twice-daily church services (if they can be given the name) which he has implemented out of some overzealous interpretation of certain Bible passages and no other Christian education whatsoever. Riley also suspects that Adams might have preferred being the only human being on the island with lived experience of the outside world. Curiosity of life beyond this tiny spit of rock in the middle of the Pacific ocean is, in the old man’s opinion, the greatest of enemies.

“Fare you well, Tom,” he says. “God willing, we will see each other again.” 

Riley shakes his hand; although he rather doubts the intensity of the sentiment, he can at least agree with it. “God willing,” he agrees. He gathers little Joy into his arms: she is tearful, but too young to truly understand why Mary’s mother Mauatua weeps and covers her face with kisses as Riley carries the child away and into the launch. Oliver holds tight for one more moment to his cousin Fletcher, named for their infamous grandfather: the two boys are of an age and very close, but Oliver’s face, when he comes aboard without even using his hands, is dry and determined. Mary comes last, speaking soft and encouraging words to her family. They cling to her arms, her dress, her hair, even as the sailors push the boat off and unship their oars; when they can no longer touch her they wade in up to their shoulders and swim after the boat as far as they can go, while Mary calls back with love and assurances, and waves and waves. She does not weep, either.

He would have make polite refusals at the invitation to dinner at Sir Thomas’s table, for lack of any suitable clothing, except someone has managed to rustle up a spare uniform courtesy of some unlucky marine who had keeled over in an apoplexy earlier on in their voyage, and by some miracle not already claimed by some other enterprising fellow. It is not the uniform of Riley’s own service, and would have been oversized even at his most well-fed; as it is, he is swimming in it, but it is better than nothing. 

Mary is not invited, but that only means he does not need to beg her off; there is nothing at all suitable on board for her to wear, and he does not like to leave the children alone in any case. “You must promise you will not leave the cabin,” he says to her and the children both, “unless I am with you, and never go anywhere alone.” He has respect already for Sir Thomas and the way his ship is run, which appears in perfect order, but the sailors on the Briton are unknown to him; he will not risk his family so. Oliver gives him a solemn nod, and takes Thursday’s knife when Riley gives it to him. “Someone will bring you dinner,” Riley says, “so you can open the door to take it, but do not let anyone in.” 

“Yes, Papa.” 

Riley pats him on the shoulder in thanks, kisses his wife on the cheek, and goes in search of a razor; he cannot go to dinner without a shave. 

“Why, I barely recognise you sir,” says Sir Thomas on welcoming him in; there are eleven of them, which makes it difficult for the steward to manoeuvre around their chairs in the crowded cabin. “I trust your accommodation suits?” 

“Very well sir, I thank you,” Riley says, “I do hope we have not put anyone out.” 

“No trouble; the cabin belonged to poor old Lieutenant Vance” —the man whose uniform Riley had borrowed— “and Mr Harrod” — the surgeon—  “had took it over, but he did not mind going back to a smaller berth in your favour, sir, not when your family should need the space.” 

That man, who is even fatter than the coat’s previous owner must have been and red-faced with drink, raises a glass in Riley’s direction. Riley bows. “My gratitude.” 

The wine is poured into his glass almost the instant Riley takes his seat; he stares at it.

“Are you quite well, sir?” Harrod asks, in a gruff voice; his breath smells like rotten fish. 

“He has forgotten what to do with it,” Shillibeer says, a mocking smile upon his lips. 

“John.” Sir Thomas frowns a warning. 

“No, the lieutenant is not wrong,” Riley says, taking an experimental sip; it tastes unexpectedly sour, and it is an effort not to let his sudden distaste show on his face. “I had forgotten to expect wine, that is all; there was none on the island, and no spirits.” 

“What, none at all?” exclaims Mr Lord, a young man perhaps eighteen years who is Captain Staines’ third lieutenant. 

“There used to be,” Riley explains, putting his glass down with care. “Some of the mutineers fashioned a still of some kind, as men will, not long after their landing, and wanton drunkenness was all the rage for a time, until the last of them before Adams threw himself off the highcliff in a sodden fugue. Adams told me that he banned drinking, after, although I do not know if he had the method himself, so perhaps it was further out of his control than he likes to admit.” 

He looks up, and realises he has not at all followed the customary order of conversation. Of course he is a guest of Captain Staines, but as a navy man and a former captain he ought to have waited, and as a man who may rightly be facing a court-martial upon his return, he perhaps ought not to have spoken at all—no one is quite clear on whether he was found at fault or not, even in a posthumous fashion. But the custom is something else he has not had to consider for ten years; now that he does consider it, it seems foreign and rather absurd. 

“I beg your pardon,” he says, and resolves to do better from now on, but it is difficult when he has so many questions to ask. 

He has heard already that the war with France is long over, but it is more than an hour until he can beg for details, after having answered the many questions of the officers regarding his own tale; probes into his unlikely story of survival after the shipwreck come first —and he has to be careful not to say anything that might spoil their dinner— followed by enthusiastic inquiries into his life on Pitcairn’s. His meal goes quite cool by the time he can bring the subject around, although he is not sorry to have an excuse to ignore his wine. 

Even then, the company are not much inclined to linger on the subject of a war seven years old, other than Sir Thomas waxing lyrical about the sea battle at Naples that had led to his losing an arm. This explanation takes up more than fifteen minutes, with the other officers giving the impression they have already heard it many times; their nods and amused smiles somewhat forced. The details Riley manages to parse out— Bonaparte made alliance through marriage with the Incan empire, and Britain, having managed to secure their own ally in China (details are sparse, but Riley can well guess how this remarkable bit of diplomacy had been achieved) had captured him eventually in his person, and France being now ostensibly ruled by a boy younger even than Oliver and regented by his mother the Empress and General Tallyrand —are both stirring in their extraordinariness and maddening in their lack of particulars. 

In some desperation, he addresses Shillibeer, who if not the only one of their company who considers him the worst kind of criminal, is certainly the most overt. “You mentioned the dragon Temeraire, sir,” he says, with care, considering the context in which the mention had been made. “I wonder where you might have heard the name?” He cannot help but be curious, since to the best of his knowledge most naval men couldn’t name any dragon at all, any more than most aviators could name a single ship. 

Shillibeer’s face sours, but Sir Thomas’s first lieutenant Warner leans forward instead. “We can hardly escape the name,” he says, in a gruff voice; he is easily the oldest of their company, the sort of seafaring veteran who rises to the rank by longevity but has no ambition to make post. “He is remarkably prolific, for a dragon.” 

“Remarkably tiresome, you mean,” Shillibeer puts in. “It is bad enough only to see a newspaper once every six months, but when every one is half full to bursting with draconic propaganda—” 

“Now, you can’t say there aren’t some good ideas,” grunts Mr Harrod, and Lieutenant Lord nods agreement, along with a number of the other younger officers. “Electoral reform, for example; I should like to see the end of rotten boroughs, personally.” 

“And you would give every peasant, beggar and fishwife the right to vote,” Warner says, shaking his head. “In ten years we shall have a government full of halfwits.” 

“You mean more than we have already?” Harrod says, chuckling into his third glass of wine. “Besides, dragons have had the vote for eight years, do you really believe that beasts should have more votes than men?” 

“Men, perhaps,” puts in one of the other officers. “But women?” 

“Female dragons have a vote,” says Lord, rather daringly, while Riley is still catching up to this startling and unlikely bit of news. “Besides, if women can legally fight, they ought to be—” 

Shillibeer snorts rudely. “You want to extend a slim exception still under debate to every corny-faced blowse or muddleheaded chit who has not a thought in her head for anything but embroidery and matchmaking, to give them the power to decide government —not to mention the damn bluestockings —” 

“Enough, let us have less politics before we spoil our food,” Staines exclaims, putting paid to the discussion which Riley would have very much liked to have continued, if only because of the unexpected societal changes it illuminated. “A toast instead, to our guest. Captain Riley.” Sir Thomas raises a glass. The others follow somewhat belatedly, and Shillibeer is scowling. Feeling somewhat lightheaded already, and wincing inwardly somewhat at the near-forgotten sound of a title he feels he no longer deserves, Riley nods his head in thanks and sips again from his own glass. He finds it does not taste so terrible, the second time. 

—--

It is dark on deck, except for the ship’s lights. Riley turns his face into the spray and breathes deep; the wind is good and they are already making excellent time. He ought to be overjoyed to be going home. Instead, his mind is troubled, and not only because the buckled shoes chafe his feet and the red coat feels heavy and awkward on his shoulders.

It is clear that the secret about female officers in the aerial corps has come out some time in the intervening years since his supposed death. It is not really a surprise; it was always impossible to him that the admiralty had managed to keep it quiet for so long. 

It is a long time since he has thought of Catherine. It had not seemed like disloyalty or abandonment when he had no other choice, nor had he seen any harm in marrying again, when no one from his former life would ever know otherwise, and it was so essential to his own happiness. But now he is willingly sailing back towards that life, a life where he is already married and has a son. Of course,he could always argue that his second marriage is not legally binding, given it had been performed by a former mutineer who only fancied himself a priest, and no official papers have been signed, but the thought feels foreign and somehow separate from himself, as though it comes from an echo of the Captain Riley of ten years ago; he does not want to denounce Mary in such a way. 

He had married Captain Harcourt because of her pregnancy, for the sake of his reputation and hers, even in the face of her protests, and because not doing so would have put his family’s estate at risk of being passed off to a distant relation. He does not doubt that Catherine had once had some affection for him, but it was nothing more than that, even if he had tried to convince himself of more at the time. She had not even deigned to take his name, and since their marriage they had spent no more than a few hours together at a time. Even her dragon hadn’t liked him, despite his best efforts. When he finally allows himself to think of her now, there is a little fondness, perhaps, and something more like respect, for the commitment to her service, but it is not love. 

He does love Mary. He loves her more than he has ever loved anyone or anything in life, and the idea of reducing her to a mistress chosen for convenience for the sake of those who know nothing of their circumstances is too much to bear. And it would make his children illegitimate—children he has seen every day of their lives, whom he has raised himself in a more active capacity than either of his parents ever had with him —every inch of him screams against it. 

He tells himself that he is thinking too far ahead, and besides, there will be a scandal no matter what he does. He can well imagine his mother’s reaction to Riley rising from the dead with a half-Tahitian woman and two dark-skinned children in tow. He can practically hear her shrill voice in his head, thick with disappointment and distaste. He tries to imagine what he would say in reply, and cannot. Something like regret begins to rise in the back of his throat; there are so many things he has not considered, and perhaps it would have been best to let things lie. To let the ships sail away again, and let Captain Tom Riley die after all. 

“Are you well, sir?” calls a high voice from behind him, and when he turns— 

“Boyne?” he breathes. 

The boy comes closer, into the light; of course it is no ghost, and Riley is embarrassed to have had the thought. “I am Isaac, sir,” the boy says; he is not even an officer, only a barefoot lad not much older than Oliver, his shirt perfectly white and spotless in the manner of most of Captain Staines’ men. “Isaac Alder. Can I help you w’aught, sir?” 

Riley catches his breath, shakes his head. “No, thank you Isaac,” he says, low. “I think it is time I went below.” 

—

He knocks on the cabin door and whispers the Tahitian passphrase they have agreed upon, and after a moment Oliver opens the door with his grandfather's knife in his hand. His eyes widen, and then, to Riley’s surprise, he laughs. 

Mary has taken a step towards him, but before he can ask what is so very amusing, she shrieks and covers her eyes. “You are not my husband!” she protests. “Oh, what have you done?” 

Riley puts a hand to his smooth cheek, not sure whether to be amused or offended. Joy stirs in one of the hammocks and blinks to stare blearily at him as well. “Papa?” 

“Yes, it is only me,” Riley sighs, and goes to stroke her hair. “Go back to sleep. You too, Oliver; it is late already. Tomorrow we will explore the ship properly, and I will show you how it runs.” He holds out a hand for the knife and the boy, rather reluctantly, hands it over before climbing easily into the hammock with Joy, barely swinging it at all as they nestle down together. 

“I hate it,” Mary says, when Riley comes up behind her, keeping her hands over her eyes. At his request she has put on a spare white shirt and blue flannel trowsers, which, while more modest than her regular dress, do rather less than might be desired to hide her figure.

“My face?” Riley asks. “I must endeavour not to take offence.” She is trembling, a little; he puts his arms around her waist. “I know you have never seen me clean-shaven, but I did not think it would upset you so very much. Surely it is just surprise —will you not look again? If you truly hate it, I will grow it back; at least now I can keep it trimmed properly.” 

Slowly, she turns around within the circle of his arms. Her fingers come away one by one and she stares at him up and down with wide, dark eyes, not just his face, but the oversized coat, the silver buttons, the white stockings and polished shoes. “You are so different,” she says, whispering low enough that the children might not hear. 

“In appearance only,” he assures her. He draws a lock of her waist-length hair between his fingers. “I am still your Tom.” 

“You even smell strange,” she says, sniffing at him suspiciously. 

“I had a little wine,” he admits; not only Adams but the older women of Pitcairn’s are prone to preaching the evils of drink, based understandably on their adverse experiences. Mary is less stringent about such things, thanks to his own influence, but he is unsure how forgiving she might be in her present mood. “But only a little; I can promise I am not at all likely to murder anyone, much less myself.”

She does not laugh; he can see there are tears brewing in her eyes, and at the same time he realises that she has not wept, all this while, since she decided she would go. Perhaps it is not just his appearance that distresses her, after all. “You are brave,” he says, and kisses her salt-wet cheek. “So brave, to do this. I admire you very much for it; and I am sorry. I hope you do not now regret your choice of husband.” 

Her fingers tighten on the lapels of his coat. “I do not regret either choice,” she says, with a decided manner, as though trying to convince herself, “to marry you, or to come away with you now, and I am not afraid, but…” 

“It is all right,” he says, though it feels like an empty promise; he can make no real assurances after he has already made the reality of the dangers so clear, nor the chance of their ever returning so unlikely. The cabin has one small bunk, and when they lie down together it sags a little in the middle where the slats have cracked. “Sleep,” he tells Mary, while she weeps silently into his shoulder. “Moe, moe now. It will all seem brighter in the morning.” 

Chapter Text

They have been at sea on the Briton for three perfectly uneventful weeks and almost within sighting distance of Talcahuano when the lookout calls sail ho; after another hour the officers are near certain that they have found some of their quarry at last, and closer by rights to the mainland than they ever expected them to be. “Infamous,” Riley hears Shillibeer mutter before he turns away to call his red-coated marines to their stations. 

“Two of them,” Sir Thomas says with enthusiasm, while a ship’s boy brings him a sharpened hook and helps strap it to the stump of his arm, so that he begins to look rather piratical himself. “One of them a heavy frigate; an old French prize, perhaps, or maybe one of ours—the blasted Americans have been seizing every ship of ours for each we can take of theirs for the last six years—of course we are not technically at war, but it is very well for their so-called President to sit back and say he knows nothing of these ruffians determined to get in the way of our shipping, when it serves him just as well. Thank you, Ofsted.” He takes a glass from the boy and goes to the railing on the forecastle to look for himself. “You are of course welcome if you like to join us, Captain Riley,” he says, while the distance between the ships rapidly diminishes. He has insisted throughout the voyage on using that address, while most of the other officers are punctilious in their avoidance of it. Riley believes he would actually prefer the demotion, rather than be so inconveniently caught between the two circles of opinion. 

“I would be honoured, if someone would lend me a weapon,” he says, feeling that he can hardly refuse even if he did not already feel the urge to avenge the attack on Pitcairn’s Island. Of course the chance that any pirates will be able to board is slim; there can be little danger in it. 

He looks around for his family, who prefer to take the air on deck during the day rather than stay in the cramped cabin; Mary, in her billowing shirt and trowsers, is standing not far away at the rail, watching the approaching ships with a vicious look on her usually serene face. Just beside he is little Joy, her dark hair hanging loose to her waist just as her mother’s, and dressed similarly in old sailor’s things which they have cut or rolled to fit. Neither of them have shoes, but they have never worn any, and there would be none to fit them in any case. Riley does not much like the eyes of the men that linger around them while on deck, but he can hardly insist on their staying confined like prisoners at all times. He makes sure only to keep his own eyes on them, and hope that the officers can be trusted to keep their men under control - as he himself had not. 

“You had better go below, my love,” he says to Mary, going up beside her. “And take the children. There will be fighting, soon enough.” He accepts a sword from one of the marines: since he has no belt to hold it, he has to keep it in his hand. She looks as though she would like to argue, but perhaps his own expression is enough to dissuade her from trying. 

She looks around instead. “Oliver, wharra way? ” she asks, exasperation in her voice. At home, the children had free run of the island: she is unused to having to keep such a close eye. 

Riley tilts his head back to squint against the sun into the rigging. Two small dark figures can just be made out on the crosstrees of the mainmast: impossible to get higher unless they were to shimmy all the way up to the flag. “I will get him down,” he promises. “Take Joy below, please; I would rather she did not see battle until she at least turns seven.” 

“Do not be hurt,” she says, and makes him promise, before taking the girl’s hand and leading her away through the frenzied activity of the deck to the ladders.

Riley catches one of the young sailors on his way past and begs a favour. He turns the sword over in his hand as he waits, practising forms that he hasn’t tried in over a decade, testing the weight of it, while the man climbs just high enough to call up at a reasonable volume. The two boys begin to make their way down at breakneck speed—racing, Riley realises too late and with a sigh. Oliver reaches the deck first, jumping the last four feet and landing like a cat. Young Isaac Alder follows with his feet barely touching the ropes. The boys were introduced on the second day of their voyage and have taken quickly to each other. Oliver outstripped Alder on the ropes after a week, and the ship’s boy is already using snatches of Pitkairn when the two of them speak in low, private voices. Riley does not mind the friendship; he approves of it, if it means it reconciles Oliver to the voyage. He only hopes it is not making Alder neglect his work; he would not like the boy to be pulled up by the officers for shirking his duty only to entertain a nine year old guest. 

“Papa, Isaac says they are pirate ships,” Oliver says, with extra colour in his cheeks, as the dog comes up to wind enthusiastically around his legs. 

“Yes: we are going to try and take them.” Riley gives Alder a pointed look, and the boy hurries off to some heretofore forgotten task. The marines are mustering around them; Riley takes Oliver by the arm and pulls him out of the way. 

“Are they the ones that killed Kitty and Tefo and George?” 

Riley shakes his head; he had a good look at both ships, and they are not alike. “No, I think not, but they are of the same breed. It is dangerous to be on deck: you must go to the cabin.” 

“But I - ” 

“It is unlikely they will board us, very unlikely, but I need you with Mama and Joy in case they should. You know where the knife is?” Oliver swallows the objection he had been about to make and nods reluctantly. “Good boy. Guard that door with your life.” 

The boy’s face is solemn and determined as he agrees. 

Riley watches him go, feeling a lump in his throat. He does not allow himself to picture what will happen if any pirate makes it so far; it will not happen. It must not happen. It would be unheard of anyway, against two ships of the line. Certainly the marines are not afraid: some of them near Riley are laughing and jostling each other as they ready their pistols, while the sailors see to the ship’s guns. Before long he hears Lieutenant Shillibeer shouting along the line of red-coats: “That is enough, there will be no more of that on the eve of battle, damn you! The navy is not a humorous institution!” 

The fear is strange and new. Not for himself, but fear for his family, and for what will happen to them if he is lost. He shakes his head, trying to brush away the feelings like heavy cobwebs, and turns the sword over his hand again. 

“They see us,” the young Lieutenant Lord says from behind him. “We may have a real fight, at last.” The pirates are not making all sail in the other direction, as they ought, but coming about towards them. As Riley watches, a queer shape at the bow of the farthest vessel catches his eye. He leans over the rail, trying to get a better view, 

“Looks like they’ve butchered her,” Lord says. “I wonder what on earth for; no wonder they won’t run, they wouldn’t stand a chance in that.” 

Riley does not reply. He is too occupied with the growing feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, which he cannot quite place. He looks around for the captain, but he has gone out of sight; the most senior officer anywhere near is Shillibeer. “Do you have a glass, Lieutenant?” he asks Lord. 

“No sir. What do you see?” 

“I don’t like the look of that ship. Something…” Riley turns sharply. “Pepper,” he snaps. 

“Sir?” 

“You have pepper guns, do you not? Bring them on deck.” Poor Lord looks rather nonplussed, but after a moment’s brief hesitation, his body seems to shift about as though to obey out of habit more than real understanding.

“Here,” Shillibeer comes striding up with a face like thunder, stopping Lord in his tracks. “That is enough, Mister Riley, you are not an appointed officer here, and have no authority to be giving orders—” 

“They have built a dragondeck on that ship,” Riley interrupts in frustration. “If you like to be caught unawares from aloft, by all means do not listen to me.” He sees Lord glance up nervously into the empty air, but Shillibeer does not even look around. His eyes narrow instead as he observes the approaching ships over Riley’s shoulder. 

“Nothing of the sort,” he says dismissively. 

“With respect, Lieutenant, you are not a sailor, and I captained a dragon transport for five years: I know what I speak of.” 

Shillibeer’s cheeks are tinged with pink. “With respect, Mr Riley, you have not been at sea for ten years; given your particular circumstances, you will forgive me if I take your recommendations with a pinch of salt. Besides, I see no dragon, unless you are suggesting that a clumsy platform construction off the stern is a threat in and of itself.” 

The former Lieutenant Riley of the Reliant would have stepped back under the pressure of this argument, not to mention the assertion of rank, but Lieutenant Riley had never had a wife and two children on board. “Just because you do not see it does not mean it does not exist,” he says, fighting down a wave of rising anger. “They often fly out of sight if they are hunting, and a beast small enough to fit on that ship could fly quite far in a short time.” 

“And could not be much of a threat to two fifth-rates on its own, one would imagine, even if it were made of more than fairy dust. Sir, you are under no obligation to fight with us; you are most welcome to go below if you have reservations. But kindly do not get in the way of my men.” 

Riley’s grip tightens on the sword hilt, but the marine turns on his heel before he can reply, and stalks off across the deck.

“Captain, would you join the boarding guard?” Lord puts in, before Riley can make another vain attempt. When Riley looks at him, he takes a step closer and adds in an undertone, “I will warn the weapons master, sir.” 

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” says Riley, only a little relieved. The boy nods.

“I have never seen a pirateer with a dragon,,” Lord says, perhaps in an attempt to be comforting. “More likely they have done something to increase their cargo space.”

Riley turns his head. The strange protuberance at the stern of the bigger pirate ship is clearer than ever as they begin to turn broadside. “I hope I am wrong,” he says. 

The dragon seems to come out of nowhere. Not out of the sky, but from below, with no splash or spray to warn of its coming. “Guns!” comes the shout, but it is too late to bring the cannon around. The beast flies a low and lethal pass over the Tagus, taking off men with its jaws and claws as it goes, while the crew of the Briton can only look on in horror. Around Riley, the officers are shouting orders, but there is nothing he can do in his assigned role but stand and watch. 

The dragon is of a shape Riley has not seen before, squat and lizardlike, with short legs and wide brown wings, and what appear to be large, curving claws on the edge of each wing joint. Riley is not a great judge of dragon size, but he guesses it somewhere between light and middle weight, bigger than he had expected; the space built for it on the enemy ship ought to have been too small for it. In any case, it seems to have no qualms about snapping men in half between its jaws and letting their bloody limbs fall onto their shipmates below before going about for another pass. Riley hears the command; the Briton’s guns sound with a noise like thunder. 

Up becomes down, dark becomes light, blazing heat becomes ice cold. Weightlessness. Breathlessness. The choke of salt in his mouth, his eyes, his ears. 

He shuts his eyes tight against the sudden flood of dreadful, impossible sensation, and opens them again. The dragon has twisted expertly in the air and avoided every ball; meanwhile the pirate ships, which have been manoeuvring almost expertly to avoid a full broadside until the moment the beast attacked, finally turn to launch their own guns. The vessel with the makeshift dragondeck has bizarre gouges along its side near the stern; there is only enough time to take this in before the first ball hits. It impacts somewhere belowdecks, and Riley’s stomach drops; it is all he can do to keep his sword in his hand, despite the officer’s call of “Hold, hold! Swords ready!” 

Mary and the children are down there. He shakes his head; sweat flies from the end of his nose. He can hear the shout of “Pepper, pepper!” and is momentarily relieved to see the gun already being loaded; his warning has at least bought some time.

Numbness. Deafness. Water dragging through his fingers, he tries to reach for the surface, but there is no direction in the dark. 

The dragon is wreaking havoc aboard the Tagus while the Briton is forced to turn its guns back towards the ships as they advance; they are close enough now to make out human figures on deck in weathered, mismatched garments and roughspun coats, shouting, jeering, shaking cutlasses in their direction. “Prepare for boarders!” comes the call, and Riley does not see, because surely the ships are too far away, still, but then the dragon comes about, makes a pass over the enemy ships, and comes back carrying men in their dozens hanging one-handed and unsecured from scraps of rope slung over its back. When the men let go to land catlike on the deck, the ropes come loose with them to let the beast fly off again without even a scratch, and resume its deadly attack on the Tagus. The pepper gun goes off too late, bursting harmlessly into the air over the water.

“Swords!” comes the call, and Riley surges forward with the marines, a cry of England coming from around him, and then he is caught in a crush of men and blades and sweat under a blazing sun. Pistols fire in his ears as he fights for space. 

Cold air in his lungs, lifegiving, for the briefest of moments and then gone again. His boots drag him back; he tries to kick them off. The chill goes all the way down to his heart. Drowning. 

A demonic face with blackened teeth appears in front of him, a man with a blade in each hand. He thrusts at Riley; Riley knocks one blade aside and catches the hilt of the other on his wrist. The man kicks him in the shin and tries to knock him down. Riley ducks, teeth gritted, and elbows the man just under the ribs; a fist lands on his jaw, his knee crashes down against the deck and he manages only just in time to bring his sword back up to meet a downward blow of hard steel. The impact sends a shudder all the way up his arm.

It continues like this for what feels like hours, his whole world reduced to only the arm’s length of space around him, barely enough to make a proper swing. The blade is heavier than he remembers, more awkward, almost a hindrance to his movement rather than a really effective weapon. The pirates fight tooth and nail with fists and feet as much as with blades; blows land, but there is no time to assess either his own injuries or those he gives out. Above the chaotic din, every gun-roar is like a blow to his mind, sending him reeling and leaving him open, for a moment, to attacks of deadly opportunity. 

There is a furious roar from overhead—he hopes against hope one of the pepper balls has hit home. There is no way to know. 

He has forgotten what this was like. Just fighting for his own life, with no concept of what is going around him, no vision of the larger battle, no one to command, no responsibility for anything in each moment but his own skin. He gets just one moment to breathe; then, a stab of pain, hot and brief, in the flesh of his thigh; he slips in blood and cannot keep his feet. His back hits the deck. A blade flashes in front of his eyes — and is knocked aside. 

“Press! Press!” It is Lieutenant Lord who has saved him, standing over him and bellowing in a voice that carries. The battle is shifting; all the legs around him are white-stockinged, bloodstained and moving away, pushing the pirates back towards the port quarter. 

Lord reaches down and drags him up; Riley struggles to stand on his own and the boy takes most of his weight. “You need a surgeon,” Lord says. 

A rattle of guns goes off, so loud and close that Riley expects at any moment to be riddled with lead, but it is only the marines advancing, red coats swarming around and past them, and the pirates are falling back at last as the strangely misshapen dragon roars overhead and starts to wing itself away, away, away. 

—

The crew of the HMS Tagus has been reduced by more than half. Captain Pipon is dead. Riley hears the news from the mutterings among the other injured men while Mr Harrod stitches the gash in his leg. The surgeon’s foul breath is like insult to injury, and said injury has been waiting on the man’s attention for hours, but Riley cannot complain when there are men whose limbs are missing entirely, and others who have not stayed breathing long enough to be treated. Dozens of them have been carried out already, many of them Tagus men. One of them had been their own surgeon. Harrod, left to deal alone with the seemingly endless injuries of two ship’s crews, is blood-soaked and sweating. 

Lying on his front, Riley winces and clenches his teeth as the needle punches through his flesh. He has refused rum, the only alleviative available, and he feels every biting stab like a fresh knife wound. The needle is not very sharp, and Harrod’s hand is not exactly steady; the man is trembling with exhaustion. He is too old to be at sea, Riley thinks. Old and unwell. 

“Should’ve had the rum,” grunts the seaman in the bed beside him. 

Riley agrees, but he cannot be left insensate; he has to go to Mary and the children as soon as the wound is dressed. He has been assured that their cabin is intact, but Mary must be worried, and no one can be spared to send them a message. He muffles his next cry into the back of his sleeve as the stitches are pulled tight and tied off. 

“You’ll live,” says Harrod, wiping his forehead with a bloody rag that does nothing to clean his face. “One of the lucky ones.” He lets Riley go with instructions to come back every three days to have the dressing changed, since that is as many bandages as can currently be spared. 

He means to go straight down, but Sir Thomas catches him before he can get that far. The man is looking remarkably brutish, with blood streaked across his face and staining his coat, and his fighting hook—Riley tries not to stare—still dripping onto the boards. “Well fought sir,” Riley congratulates him, and receives only a half-hearted grunt in reply. 

“I will take congratulations when I have brought us limping into port,” the Captain says, when he has brought Riley to his cabin for privacy. Riley has come to know him as a smiling, good-natured sort of fellow, somewhat unusual but not a poor quality for his rank, and has never seen such an expression on his face as he is wearing now; a deep frown creasing his heavy brow, deep concern overlain with weariness. “I may have to abandon the Tagus as it is.” 

“Sir.” Riley feels an echo of the pain it must cause him to admit, but he can see the sense in it; without Pipon, and with only a skeleton crew, the other ship would only slow the Briton down, leaving them vulnerable to another attack they were ill-equipped to fight off.

Sir Thomas slams his hooked fist against the bulkhead; the wood splinters a little. “I’ll be damned if I let those blackguards take it now,” he snarls. “And Philip would haunt me the rest of my days if I sank his ship only to keep it off them, when he gave his damn life to save it. But Warner is dead too, and Mr Ottery will be lucky if he makes it back to England with his last three limbs,” he goes on, naming his own first and second lieutenants. “I will need young Lord to keep things running aboard here.” 

Riley realises the direction the conversation is taking, and feels his heart sink. “And the Tagus’ officers?” he asked, without much hope. 

“Phillip’s first has lost an eye,” Sir Thomas says. “And won’t be fit for command for a week or two yet, if that; I am sure we will lose a handful to infection before we even sight the coast. His second is a drunken sot not fit for the service; Philip would not have taken him on, but we lost his predecessor in a gale on our way past Bermuda. There are no serving officers aboard fit to captain a fishing boat.” 

Riley attempts a protest, but if the man asks him outright there is little he can do; Captain Staines has seniority, even if Riley’s own position was not such a sad muddle. “Sir,” he says, “I see your meaning, but it has been a long time since I held a command—” 

“Nonsense.” Sir Thomas waves his words away with his good hand and falls heavily into the chair. “You kept the pirates off your island, did you not? You cannot tell me that mutineering old man had ought to do with it; a old deckhand who thinks Jack is as good as his master would have given the place up for a mouthful of rum the first chance he got.” 

Riley, who has never been one to sing the praises of John Adams, does not think that entirely fair, but thinks better of saying so; now is not the time to make arguments for a man he is unlikely to ever see alive again. He sighs. “Sir, you have done my family a service, to take us so far,” he says instead, resigning himself. “I would be honoured to help you bring the Tagus home.” 

Sir Thomas gives him a handful of men to help round out the crew, and he requests Isaac Alder as well. He has met some of the Tagus officers, but none of the men, and he needs someone he can trust to help guard his family. Sir Thomas is happy to grant this one request, and Isaac listens seriously when Riley gives him his new duties. 

“You ought to have an officer, sir,” the boy says, overwhelmed and uncertain. “Someone who can use a sword.” 

“You shall have a pistol,” Riley says. 

They are a week from port, even further away than they had been before the battle and the resulting chaos had blown them back and off their course. Riley takes one look at the state of the deck and starts giving orders before he even has time to consider whether or not he will be obeyed—the salvageable wood to be packed up and taken below, the rest of the debris to be thrown overboard, and the deck to be scrubbed down; he consults with the carpenters and determines the best course for shipboard repair; there are a couple of very bad places where they can do little but patch the damage and hope the pumps are enough to keep them afloat. He meets with the remaining officers, a sadly reduced group of defeated-looking men, and organises a rotation of watches to ensure the risk is well overseen. As a balm, he speaks to the cooks and has them double the meal rations for everyone. There is, after all, plenty to go around. 

“And the lighter we are, the more chance we have,” he explains to Mary, when he has finally set enough things in motion that he can retire for the evening. “We may as well eat the pigs, or we would soon have to throw them overboard as well.” 

He lays with his head in her lap, on poor Captain Pipon’s bed, in his cabin. Oliver and Joy are curled up together in a cot on the other side, and Isaac is keeping guard on the other side of the door. It is the first Riley has seen of them since before the battle, barring the swift and confusing transfer from Briton to Tagus . Mary has spent the last day consoling poor Joy, who had been quite badly shocked by the noise of the guns, the screaming, the dragon roaring overhead; she has not said a word since and refuses all food. She eventually cried herself to sleep, and they are speaking now in low whispers to ensure she does not wake again.

“And when we get there?” Mary asks, as though this were a given and not the one overriding concern going around and around in his mind and making his stomach feel like it is weighted with lead. “Will we find another ship to go to Pretanie?” 

“I hope so,” he says, because he does not yet know; the only certain thing is that the Tagus will not set sail again without significant repairs, and the Briton is not really in much better case, even if Sir Thomas does decide to change their course to return to England after all. “But at least one to Rio ought to be managed, and there will be more ships from there.” His eyes close, despite his best efforts. His leg hurts, but the guilt is worse; he ought to have known that leaving Pitcairn’s would not be so simple as it ought to have been. The island had been a mostly blissful interruption from a life that had been getting more chaotic every year since he had made post. It was almost reasonable that having returned to the real world, the violent instability would only begin again where it had left off. And he has dragged Mary and the children into it with him. He cannot even guarantee that the life they will find in England will be at all better, or even comparable, to that they had known. 

Mary does not admonish him, though she has every right. “Moe,” she whispers to him instead. Sleep. And she sings a rocking song, the one her mother had once sung to her as a babe, the words all in Tahitian so that he can only half understand, but the words themselves do not really matter. He lets the song carry him down, as though on the tide, and just in the moment before sleeping he tastes again the salt choking his lungs, and sees the blinding light as the magazine goes up, and the endless stretch of dark water that no man ever should have sailed out of alive. 

They come into sight of Talcuahano on the sixth day, having made better time than many would have credited, and without any further disaster. Riley goes to consult with Captain Staines on their approach, but no sooner has he come aboard the Briton than a panicked cry goes up from the men: “Wing! Wing!” 

Sir Thomas roars them down. “It’s coming from the port, you fools, it is not a pirate. Lord! Get the men in line, will you, and clear a space.” 

The beast is small and rather delicate, by British standards, of a breed totally unknown to Riley—not that he is by any means an expert—and carrying no rider. Instead she streams flags away from both sides, one the tricolor of France, the other a white banner with two snake-like creatures encircling a yellow sun. She circles around above until the hands can reluctantly clear the deck enough for her to land; she is not much more than courier weight, by Riley’s estimation, but some of the sailors still keep a fretful distance. 

“What is your business, please?” the beast demands, in thickly-accented French. There is an official-looking chain made of thick golden links around her neck, and after Sir Thomas has given his name and explained his orders, she soothes a little and more politely gives her own name as Uitaca, and her role that of some kind of local authority seemingly equivalent to a port admiral. Riley has been warned to expect this, that there are nearly more dragons than men in the region by most reports, but it is still difficult to credit. 

“Well, I am glad you are doing something about the pirates,” she says, “but I am afraid you cannot anchor here; there have been raids, and the governor has forbidden any foreign ships coming into port at present.” 

The captain’s French is not much better than Riley’s own, and it is a tongue Riley has not himself heard in a decade; he has to strain to follow the conversation. “With the greatest respect, you can see that we are in quite desperate need of repairs,” Sir Thomas says, “The HMS Tagus,” he indicates the other ship, “must spend at least a month in drydock; she will not sail much longer, otherwise.” 

Uitaca peers over at the ship where she sits low and unhappy in the water. Many of her crew—including, Riley is made anxious to see, Isaac and Oliver—are standing on the deck, looking back over at her in turn. Their faces are more fearful than they are friendly, which is understandable to anyone who knows what they have lately experienced; to her it may well seem like abject rudeness, particularly the way some of them have hands on their guns already. “I do see,” she says, thoughtfully. “Well, I cannot go against the governor’s orders, but if you like I will take you to speak with him yourselves. He is not unreasonable,” she says. “For a man. I can carry three of you, or perhaps four, if you do not bring any baggage.” 

She sits back, waiting, and Riley realises belatedly that she means she will take them right this moment. Sir Thomas is taken aback, but rallies himself, and orders his best coat and a fresh hook brought out. “Tom,” he says, turning to Riley while they wait, “it is a devil of a business, will you come with me? I would have asked Philip, of course.” 

“But sir, surely Lieutenant Shillibeer…” 

“I will need the marines to guard the ships,” the captain says, quite reasonably, and Riley has to recognise that with only one navy lieutenant left himself, Staines will make a poor showing otherwise, unless he means to deputise some of the midshipmen. “Lieutenant Lord! You shall come as well, and will you find Mr Renou; we had better have someone with decent French…” 

Riley is left without the opportunity to either accept or argue against his inclusion; not that he really has any choice. He glances back over at the Tagus —he hates to leave his family behind, but if the delegation fails to persuade the governor, they will be in even more danger still; likely they would have to abandon the Tagus in that case, and squeeze the remaining men aboard the Briton long enough to make it to Rio, which in the ship’s current state could take months if they make it at all.

He asks the men who had rowed him over to take word of their plans back to Isaac, to give to Mary. And then he prepares to go aboard the dragon. 

He had served on the Allegiance for five years, which had made it his duty to ferry dragons across the world, and in all that time he had never gone aloft, himself; there was no reason to do so, and he had never been tempted, not even when Lily would mutter about it in what passed in her draconic rumble for an undertone— “Catherine, you cannot think of marrying someone who doesn’t even want to fly, not that I would take him up if he did ask, since I am sure he is likely to do something foolish, like fall off, or be sick, like a new runner on their first pass—” 

If he had the choice now, he much would have preferred his first flight experience to be aboard an English beast, with trained aviators, and harness, not to be deposited aboard by a foreign dragon who wears no such thing, with nothing to hold to but the lightweight framework that keeps the flags flying. He clings on with grim determination as Lieutenant Lord and the pale-looking seaman Mr Renou climb up beside him, and the three of them together help Captain Staines aboard so that his hook will not accidentally pierce the dragon’s hide; then, almost without warning, Uitaca launches herself up and off the deck, and it falls away beneath them. Riley shuts his eyes quickly; there is a sudden roaring in his ears, the sensation of air pressure around and below him, the heat, the heat , followed by the cold icy impact as his body hits the water—

“Are you all right sir?” 

He forces his eyes open, half expecting to see one of Laurence’s men— Temeraire, Temeraire will come, he will find us —but it is only Lord, frowning at him with concern. 

Unable to speak, Riley nods. He grits his teeth and holds on where there are holds to be had, and tries to at least pretend to bear the flight. He had been to the top of St Paul’s once, as a boy, and his father had held onto him tightly and let him lean out to look at the town where it seemed to go on and on, forever; that was as high as he had ever been, and he had not been at all afraid, although his brother Richard had gone a little green and insisted on going back down before Riley was ready. That experience is hardly comparable to this, to soaring over green-blue waves at speed, with the great flags beating loudly over his head, the wind whipping at his hair and making his eyes stream, and the port city coming more and more into focus with every wingbeat. He can hear Renou groaning. He would have enjoyed this as a boy, Riley thinks, or even as a young man; he is far too old to be carried across the sea at a height of three first-rates set one atop the other, and it makes him think that little Oliver would enjoy this very much, to the point where he can’t help but feel a little sorry that his grey-bearded father should have the experience instead. 

Fortunately, perhaps, it does not take very long—only the better part of an hour, where it would have taken at least a day, if not two, on the floundering Tagus. Uitaca flies over the docks, some parts of which look freshly built, and Riley observes some small, local boats, their hulls bobbing gently with the tide, and of these only a handful big enough for travel; most must surely only be used for fishing. There is only one proper ship, with two masts, and it is flying French colours. Riley has to remind himself—again—not to feel threatened. The war is over, no matter how much his instincts tell him otherwise, no matter how much it feels as though he is stepping into enemy territory. Still, he feels his hopes of an alternative route home begin to dwindle. It seems unlikely that the French vessel would be willing to ferry a former British captain and his family, entirely unknown to them, even as far as Rio, if they even had any intention of leaving the port anytime soon, or travelling in that direction. He will have to wait for the British ships, after all; months of repair, perhaps half a year before they could reach Rio, most of that spent in a city where they did not speak the language… he does not like to think of the effect this will have on Mary and Joy in particular, with no other female company, no friends, and the constant threat of another pirate attack. 

Once over the city itself, they can see into the countryside beyond—great open stretches of rich farmland, dotted thereabouts with thatched huts and vast stone storehouses, and here and there the distant shape of a dragon, either in the air or on the ground, with no more alarm to the local populace than they would have caused in China. The city is mostly composed of squat, low buildings, their rooftops a patchwork of sunbaked clay tiles. The exception is the great pyramid at its center, rising up like an anthill; its four sides are stepped, high and wide enough for a middling-sized dragon to rest upon, as proven by those who are already there, watching UItaca with interest as she approaches. On its shaded side, a broad open courtyard sprawls beneath them. As Uitaca begins a gentle dive, Riley catches sight of two dozen or so children playing a ball game, their laughter rising faintly on the cool breeze. They wear little more than what is necessary to preserve the absolute minimum of modesty, their brown limbs flashing as they run. 

At last, they land at the entrance to the great pyramid. Lord lets out a heavy, exuberant breath, grinning with his hair mussed all over by the wind of their passage. Uitaca does not pause, striding forward through the great square tunnel without letting them down from her back. As they cross the threshold, Riley hears Renou mutter under his breath: “God above.” The walls are made of gold.

The place was clearly built large enough even for a heavyweight dragon to move easily; the ceilings seem miles overhead and the corridor far too wide for just one small one to walk through. Uitaca splits off from the main thoroughfare after a minute, and brings them out into a great hall lit brightly with many torches. There are several men in here, conversing on thick wooden chairs around a circular table, and they all look up as Uitaca comes in. One man stands up, made taller than the others by a magnificent gold and grass headdress. This, Riley has to assume, is the governor they have come to meet, although he is not heartened much by the suspicious look on the man’s face as he approaches them. Here, Uitaca tells them to disembark, and they make polite bows, or as much as is possible with legs still shaking from the flight. Lord gives Sir Thomas his arm to help him down. 

The governor, who is bare-chested except for a heavy neck chain of gold that comes down almost as far as his navel, speaks to Uitaca in a language Riley cannot comprehend a word of. Uitaca replies, launching, Riley can only hope, into an explanation of their visit. He takes advantage of his ignorance of the language, and of standing slightly behind the taller Captain Staines, to take a proper look around the hall. 

It is like nothing he has ever seen. Brightly-coloured mosaics spread across every part of the walls and floor that is not simply covered in gold. Many of them look new, interspersed with faded and worn places, as though the older ones are in the process of being replaced. The ones on the floor are, for the most part, fantastic geometric patterns, perfect in every aspect; it makes him want to kneel to look closer at how they are achieved. Instead, he looks around the walls; here the images are even more dramatic, depicting what he can only imagine are either historical moments or fantastical stories. Many of them feature dragons with strange, feather-like scale patterns, either posing with human attendants or, more commonly, mid-flight, or even mid-battle, with jaws wide and claws outstretched as they take on their equally fierce counterparts, frozen in time. 

Uitaca is repeating the governor’s words in French, and then Mr Renou—no longer sickly but looking otherwise overwhelmed at the unlooked for promotion to official translator—again into English, for Sir Thomas’s benefit and for Riley’s. It is a muddled process, but it is clear that the local authority is not willing to host so many foreigners for as much time as it will take to properly repair the ships. “If it were a matter of shelter from the pirates,” he says, “we would of course have sympathy, but you have come here to seek them out. You cannot expect to seek that kind of trouble, and then beg difficulties afterwards.” 

Sir Thomas, to his credit, does not begin an argument, only repeats in the most persuasive terms the very great difficulty of their continuing in the current circumstances, and makes some suggestions of what they might give the locals in return for their hospitality. The translations continue, making the conversation last three times as long as it ought. The governor is not swayed by offers of goods, even what little steel or guns might be spared—France could provide such things easily, Riley thinks, if they were wanted, and he does not see that they are. A decade ago he might have called this foolishness, but he is an islander now, and there has never been a need for modern weapons on Pitcairn’s, not until very lately. It is no doubt hard to see the value in something you had never needed before now. Not to be dissuaded, the captain makes offers of labour instead. Not all the men will be useful in repairing the ships, and some might be spared for farm work, or to instruct the locals in some European seacraft, although Riley thinks this also will be refused, since those resources might also just as well be offered by France.

Since he can offer nothing at all that would be helpful, he returns to examining the mosaics. One of the newest additions, the tiles brightly polished and shining, is positioned on the far side of the room, and takes up most of the space on that wall; a great battle between two dragons, of similar size. Riley finds himself drawn to them; one silver and green monster with dripping black fangs is roaring defiance in the face of the other, which, while smaller for sheer weight, is very long and lithe-looking, red and purple and dotted here and there with green in a leopardine pattern, and covered in spines. She is coiling herself about in a most dramatic fashion, and—Riley cannot help but take a step forward to see better, and then another—there is a ball of orange flame just beginning to emerge from her jaws. 

The governor snaps out some sharp words, which barely manage to bring Riley out of his reverie, until Staines barks “Captain Riley!” and Uitaca says, uncertainly, “He would like to know what you are staring at.” 

Riley looks around, and realises he has walked half the length of the room. The others are all staring at him, and some of the other Incan men at the table have started to rise from their chairs, glaring in his direction as though he might be about to start a pitched battle all on his own. 

“I do beg your pardon.” Riley cannot quite understand what has happened, only that some explanation is owed, and he cannot think of any to make, other than to point at the mosaic and say, “Only, I believe I know that dragon. Her name is Iskierka.” 

“Any friend of the great Iskierka must be welcome in Talcahuano,” says Governor Hualpa, the governor of dragons, to whom they have been hurriedly exchanged. The manner of their reception is markedly different already; some women have brought them platters of food to eat, and chairs have been brought out so that they might converse more comfortably. Riley feels a bit of a scrub, but it was not as though he had made any claims to being anything like a friend , the assumption had simply been made, quite unfounded, when he had explained that he had commanded Iskierka’s ship, and also knew her captain. In truth that is about as far as his memory will allow; he does not even remember the name of the third dragon who had come aboard the Allegiance on the doomed voyage to Brazil, over ten years ago. Fortunately, Iskierka had left more of an impression, and now he only has not to dissuade the governor of the imagined depth of the acquaintance, while being just as careful not to get caught in a lie. 

The new room is much larger, a great ceremonial hall, big enough for Hualpa to stand and move around in comfort, and several others of his size besides. The walls are all lined with beaten gold. Hualpa has some French, himself, which means Uitaca does not have to stay, but it does leave Mr Renou to translate directly for a dragon, a task for which Riley can not envy him much. “Of course you must stay as long as is necessary,” Hualpa says, much to everyone’s relief. Sir Thomas expresses very real gratitude, without showing more than a little tremor in his good hand to show how unused he is to having a diplomatic meeting with a beast who could eat all four of them easily and still have room for dessert. “I am sure the Empress would approve,” the dragon goes on, “as I know she herself is a great admirer.” 

It takes Riley a minute to understand that the governor is referring to the Queen Regent of France, who is also the Empress of the Incas in her own right. It is one thing to have it explained to him by the ship’s officers, to whom the news is so old it is practically tired, and quite another to have it benefit him so directly now, in such an unexpected quarter. He is still confused as to how they came to be here, but fortunately Hualpa is quite pleased to explain. “Iskierka defeated Manca Copacati in single combat,” he says. “It was all people could talk about for many months, afterwards, and when the old wall needed to be retiled, it was the consensus that we should depict a most satisfying challenge. Of course, Manca Copacati was not very pleased, but then he ought to have won.” 

“Sir, were there other dragons with her?” Riley asks, unable to help himself, and a significant weight lifts off his shoulders when he hears the affirmative. Laurence was here, he thinks, looking around the hall. It feels as though he is walking in the footsteps of a ghost. “Where did they go from here?” 

“I gave them safe passage to Titicaca, and they were intending to go on to Cusco from there,” Hualpa replies, which might have been a great comfort, if Riley had any notion of where either of those places might be. “You will go South though, I think?” 

“Aye, sir,” Sir Thomas agrees. “I cannot carry out my current orders with the men I have left; I shall have to report my failure to the Admiralty.” 

“We have heard that these American pirates have some dragons, now,” Hualpa says, after listening to their brief explanation. “But this report is most concerning. If they can carry beasts bigger than their ships would ordinarily allow…” he rumbles somewhere deep in his chest, great golden hoops set with emeralds jangling where they had been woven through piercings in his wings. “I will send word to the Empress, and perhaps she will send some French ships, with cannon. The alliance must have some advantages for the sun kingdom, occasionally.” 

Riley and Sir Thomas exchange meaningful looks. The Admiralty would not much like the idea of French sailors taking the pirate ships, which were for the most part stolen property of the British Empire, but there is little they can do about it themselves, other than take their own reports back to England as soon as possible. 

“I will give you some attendants,” Hualpa goes on, in a tone that suggests he is speaking his thoughts aloud as he makes the decision. “They will make sure you have the supply you need. Will you need accommodation?” 

“While the ships are careened, it would be appreciated,” Sir Thomas says. “You are most generous, sir; I will ensure that anything we take will be repaid by our government.” 

Hualpa looks less than convinced by this, but then, he does not seem to expect payment. He stands up, so that his head is suddenly very high above them, and Riley can feel poor Renou go stiff with fear beside him. “Steady,” Lord mutters quietly to the seaman. It does not bother Riley much; the beast is perhaps equal to Temeraire’s size, or a little smaller, and a lot smaller than the third great beast that had been harnessed by one of Laurence’s African boys. The size makes little difference; Hualpa might be more dangerous than Uitaca, but it is not as though a man could reasonably defend himself against either of them, so there is no use being more afraid of one over the other. “I will go to write to the Empress,” Hulapa says now. “If there is nothing else I can do for you.” 

“Sir.” Riley stands. He does not like his chances, but he may as well try his luck while there is so much good will. He speaks French as best as he can, partly to give Renou the chance to collect himself and partly in an attempt to make a direct connection. “I wonder—the French ship in the port, is it due to sail presently?” 

Hualpa considers him for a moment. “If it does, it will only go back up to the coast to Limaq. Why do you ask?” 

Riley sighs. “You see, I am not strictly one of Captain Staines’ company,” he explains, “although he has shown me every kindness. I have my wife and two children on board the Tagus as we speak. I had hoped to find some alternative transport that would return us to England sooner, if possible—I am sure you would agree that a naval vessel is not a suitable environment for young children.” 

“No, indeed,” says the dragon. He taps one great talon against the stone floor thoughtfully. “I may have a solution,” he says at last, “which would not do for many people, but for four or five, perhaps. There is a guide who sometimes takes goods or people overland to the east coast. He can be hard to find, but I will put the word out. Do not get your hopes up; there is every chance he has gotten himself killed since last I heard of him.” 

But as Uitaca takes off again in the direction of the British ships, Riley’s heart is considerably lighter than it had been. He had not even considered an overland route. Of course, it would still take several months, but it would still get them to Rio quicker than waiting for the Tagus, and without the twin dangers of the crew and the pirates. 

“Well, I hope you will not think me a selfish bastard for saying so, but I hope they do not find this fellow,” Sir Thomas says, over their celebratory dinner on board that night, as the ships begin dragging their way towards the port at last. “You have been uncommonly helpful, Tom, and I have not the faintest idea who I would put on the Tagus in your place.” 

“Sir, I hope you will consider Lieutenant Lord,” Riley says. He has had perhaps a mouthful of wine; he has mostly lost the taste for it, and Mary will not like him coming to bed with it on his breath, but the day they have had seems to warrant at least a brief indulgence, and it does a little to numb the intermittent pain in his leg. “I know he is young, but I would be proud to have him as an officer, myself, and I am sure there are some mids you could raise up in his place, at least temporarily.” 

“Well, perhaps,” the man grunts, draining his glass. “But I still hope you will reconsider leaving. After all, there might be pirates out there,” he stabs with his hook towards the stern, “but think what dangers there are in the Incan interior. Crocodiles, great snakes…” He pauses, trying to think of what other man-eating beasts might be in a country he knows little about. “Feral dragons, probably, and who knows what else.”

It is enough to give Riley a little pause, but he has not reckoned with Mary’s even-less-informed opinion. “Oh, let us go,” she says, with enthusiasm, when he explains only the possibility of the idea. “I won’t stay on this stinking shep one more minute, not when you must constantly be gone and we cannot even go on deck for air. I cannot breathe, Tom, and Joy… it is not good for her to be shut up so.” 

“There is no certainty,” Riley says, wishing he had not told her. “The governor did not seem at all sure that this guide would even be available for us, and even if he is, I have no notion what I should pay him—I doubt he will do it out of the goodness of his heart. I think it most likely we will never hear about him again.” 

But Uitaca does come back, some three days after they have made landfall and the ships have been hauled onto land, the poor old Tagus groaning complaints at every haul on the ropes until she had been thoroughly careened. “Monsieur Robinson is waiting to meet you,” she says, giving Riley even more hope. This Robinson was an American, perhaps, with a name like that. It would at least mean that there would be no language barrier. 

At her insistence she takes him up right away, and carries him to a hut perhaps a mile out of the city where, to his surprise, there is another dragon waiting. It does not look to be in the local style, from what little Riley has seen; it is lithe, with muscular hind limbs, patterned green, yellow and brown. In size it matches up to Dulcia, the lightweight he vaguely recalls from Catherine’s formation. It is stretched out in the warmth of the sun, looking at Riley with heavy-lidded amber eyes. “Is this our guide?” Riley asks, realising his mistake with a sinking heart and a rush of irritation at his own foolishness. He has been to China, after all, and seen how the dragons there are treated as citizens, and he has seen the great hall of Talcahuano, and met the governor of dragons, and still he has not made the reasonable assumption—

“No,” says Uitaca, “that is Agunti, but he does not speak your language, or mine, so it is no use talking to him. That is Monsieur Robinson, behind you.” 

And Riley turns to meet an unsmiling black face, a tall man in a loose shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing clearly the pink scars encircling his throat and both wrists. “I can take you to Rio,” says the man, in perfectly understandable if strangely accented English, and Riley’s first thought is that he would rather have faced the dragon.