Smoke and Teeth

Tielong's Daughter lifts from the dock and Saeko is at the port rail with my coat on her shoulders and Waraku falls away below us.

I adjust my hat. My katana is cleaned and sheathed at my hip. The morning wind fills the blood-red sails and I am at the helm of my ship with the governor's daughter watching the harbor burn and I have never been this alive.

The shōki tanks hum through the hull, a low bone-deep vibration. We're climbing, and the mooring cables snap free and the dock shrinks and the harbor becomes a bright gash on the island's cliff face. One garrison ship is still hooked half to the pier, burning through her ribs. The other has already gone over, a trail of sparks dropping into the dark below.

My crew howls, ugly and full-throated. They burned a governor's seat and took everything that wasn't nailed to the stone. Casks rolling across the main deck. Silk bales. The governor's household lined up along the port rail with their wrists bound. Katsuro is on a cargo crate with a jug in one hand, bellowing prices while the crew shouts bids. The customs seal is in my coat pocket. Not a trophy. A headstone. The Tengu are up in the rigging, armor catching the dawn, their wings half-spread in the updraft. Everyone is drunk or getting there.

I have what I came for.

I breathe in. All the way down. My chest expands against my shirt and something in there unlocks, something that has been clenched since Nanzhou, since the morning I sat at his bedside in a rented room and watched a man die of giving up. My father died looking at a ceiling that wasn't his. He had his hands on a helm for thirty years and he died looking at someone else's ceiling.

I have the helm. Tadasu gave that order and Tadasu is hanging and open sky is ahead of us.

My father is still dead. For one second the feeling is closer to grief than to winning.

I shove it aside. There's a helm under my hands and an island burning behind me and I don't have time for this.

What I feel is her eyes on me.

Saeko is on the main deck. She came up the ramp with her spine straight and her chin lifted and she hasn't stopped moving with that posture since. She's standing at the port rail, watching the crew, watching the looting as Tielong's Daughter pulls away. She watched her father die and chose not to stop it and walked onto my ship and there it is, that smile I love, the one from the ramp.

I like that smile.

I like it so much my hands are tight on the helm and my crew is celebrating and Waraku is burning and I am looking at her instead of any of it.

She turns from the rail. Finds me at the helm. The distance between us is maybe twenty feet of deck cluttered with crew and cargo and a drunk Oni. She crosses it without hurrying. The wind catches her hair, loose now, tangled from the morning, and her robe is held closed with one hand and my coat is still on her shoulders. Her chin is lifted, and she looks at nobody for permission. I want her badly enough to leave the helm.

"Captain," she says. She draws the word out and tests its weight, giving it the same slow attention she gave my name in rented rooms. She knows who I am now. All of it. And she's here.

I had an answer ready for the first time she called me that knowing what it meant. Something magnificent. I can't remember a word of it.

"Take it." The helmsman steps in as my hand leaves the helm.

I grab her waist and pull her against me and her mouth is on mine before I finish the motion. Rice wine is still on her tongue. Her tongue pushes into my mouth and her hands fist in my shirt and the crew is right there, feet away, howling and drinking and not caring because their captain kissing a woman on the helm deck is the least interesting thing happening on this ship right now.

I push her against the helm post. The wood digs into her back and she doesn't flinch. Her hands are in my hair, pulling, and my mouth drops to her neck. Her lips part. All I get is that sound I've been waiting to hear again, the low catch in her throat.

Her skin is hot under my mouth. I bite the tendon where her neck meets her shoulder and she gasps and her hips press into mine and I'm hard and she can feel it through her robe because her hand drops between us, fast, deliberate. Her fingers find me through the fabric and press and my forehead drops against her collarbone and I hold still for one second.

"Not here," she says. Her hand keeps moving.

"Below," I say. "Cabin."

"Then stop letting me do this on deck."

I let her keep going. Her hand works me through the fabric, slow, squeezing, and I've got my mouth on her throat and my hand inside her robe, her breast, the weight of it in my palm, her nipple hard under my thumb. She arches into me. The helm post creaks. A crewman passes behind us and wolf-whistles and neither of us stops and her mouth is hot and open and we're still going.

Her teeth find my neck. Bite. Not gentle. The bite lands sharp and my hand tightens on her breast and she grins against my skin and I can feel the grin, the shape of it. Teeth and heat against my skin.

"Cabin," I say again. "Now."

Her hand releases me. She steps back. Her robe is open at the throat, her chest flushed, her eyes on mine, not looking away. She looks at the cabin companionway behind me.

"Lead the way, Captain."

I take her hand and pull her toward the cabin. The crew howls behind us.