Pearl Before Swine ch 22: Pirate

~THE PEARL~

I pull back as a chilled tightness seeps through my body. I am a pool of shame glazed over by the ice of regret. I did this to Sal. His exhausted glare lacks sharpness like an ember lacks flame. Ashes form his skin, the faintest celadon lurking about his lips, while his eyes reflect the gold of the grass. Beauty hides in that glitter, yet instinct knows they would not do that if he were not in great pain.

Only villains find art in pain.

The barest excuse slips away with my voice. “I only meant to take a little.”

“You didn’t ask at all.”

More excuses line up to spill. “I had nothing left.”

“Jun would have healed on his own.” His gaze returns to his book, but his whisper is twice as fierce. “Remember that next time.”

My nails sink into the soil. Land. If only I were a Creature of the Land, none of this would have happened. Mare would not want me, and I would be a golem—Terra has nothing more complex. I would live in blissful ignorance.

My voice is softer than the tear of grass beneath my fingers. “I could not stand to see Jun in pain. I want him to like me.”

Sal’s eyes leap back to me, narrowed and pale like the white peaks of rough seas. “Because of your bet with Mare?”

“No.”

Yet, the words to describe why I want Jun to like me will not come, as do any that would define my feelings toward Sal. With him, it is like looking at a circle, then realizing it is a square with all the corners in shadow. The longer I stare, the more I notice, every shape contained within the first in some trick of the light. He does not find me worthy, and I want him to. I want Sal to raise his brows and smile at me accomplishing the impossible. I want him to tell me I have done well.

Instead, he looks at me like I possess a Swine’s tusks and threaten to devour him.

I lower my face to the ground. “My regret is as fierce as fire from the sun, and I apologize. I should have waited for you to realize what I needed and allowed you to give it.”

He sighs. “It’s fine.”

But it is not. As I lift my head, a bruise stands out on the underside of his jaw, a dark, grayish-greenish stain against his tan skin. Halcyon said Sal refused to share his energy with me. Did he fight my hold, and did I force him to stay?

“Sal—”

“I said it’s fine.” He rubs a gloved hand down his face.

“Then why are you still angry?”

“You’re not the only one I’m mad at.”

“Sal!” Professor Baker calls. “Your turn.”

A tree grows faster than he gets to his feet, every movement evicting a wince. His step wobbles, and I catch him. He flinches away with a hiss.

“Hurry it up, Slowpoke! If you’re still moping because Jun kicked your butt in the warmup spar, you’ve got to be more resilient than that.”

Pike arrives at the ring just in time to hear the professor’s shout. He crosses his arms and scowls. “There are actual monsters around here, and you’re hurting each other?”

Wiping his brow with a towel, Jun sits on the log closest to Pike. “I’d rather learn at the end of a friend’s blade than have an enemy skewer me before I figured out what to do.”

With a huff, Pike plops alongside Jun, and a spark sprints along my spine. My attention slides to Sal, expecting him to say something about the Swine sitting so close to the islander, but he steps onto the sand in silence. A hardness captures his eyes, a distance, like an island blurred through a haze, as if he sees nothing beyond the weapons the teacher hands him.

I should insinuate myself between Jun and Pike just as I should have been between Jun and Halcyon. Instead, I am caught in Sal’s riptide. As he takes a ready stance, the blade of his throwing knife flashes with his trembles.

“The monsters probably come because of your violence out here anyway.” Pike unpockets his flute.

“Do not play that,” Jun growls.

Pike sticks out his tongue.

The first target flies—a disc striped black and red—and Sal’s breaths pause. His gaze jumps from blade to disc, then back. His arm coils, readying the throw, then pitches forward, but the knife stays as if glued in his grip. His hand shakes even more visibly now, his wide eyes reflecting the pines and sky, almost as aqua-emerald as Pike’s.

“What’s wrong?” Professor Baker barks as she releases more targets.

Sal swallows hard and lowers his stance. As his eyes count the new discs, he reaches for a second knife sheathed at his belt. He drops it.

I wrap my arms around him from behind. After a jolt, his tremors still, and he looks over his shoulder at me, one brow curled.

“When I was afraid, you held me. This seems fair,” I explain.

“Except, you had reason to be afraid.” He faces forward, colors climbing his cheeks.

Barely loosening my grip, I slide around him and look up beseechingly. “Teach me to move like Jun?”

Every line of his face flattens. “Maybe you should ask him.”

I shake my head. “I have seen you move when you had to, and I want to see you do this now. Maybe you are better than him.”

Murmurs race between the spectating students, but I do not bother to catch any of them. Sal commands my full attention, leaning down to whisper in my ear. “Did you see him? Like a shower of shooting stars? That quickness was because of you, because of the energy you gave him. Without that, I am better than him.” In the same exhale, he turns to the professor. “She wants me to teach her?”

“As long as it gets you to throw something.”

Sal spins me around, and everywhere the heat of his fingers seeps through my clothes, my skin tingles.

“They’re flying targets,” he says, breath fanning across the side of my neck. “They can move in any direction, so watch their shape, how it cuts the air, how it directs their course.”

I nod, chewing the inside of my lip as the knife drops from his hand to mine. It is warm, even warmer than him, with a sizzle of its own like a frantic heartbeat.

It distracts me, and I pull it closer for inspection. Gears spin within the skeletal handle, mirroring the row of dials where it meets the blade. “This is not simply metal.”

“Pay attention.” Sal takes my wrists and straightens my arm as the first target launches.

We flow together. I obey his whispers, hands curling or releasing as he instructs while limbs bend at his silent orders. With the sound of shattering clay, a disc explodes into dust, then the next. Another, then three at once. A laugh bubbles through my throat, a smile in its wake. We dance like light and shadow, wind and trees, sky and sea. Our footsteps make no sound, nor do the straightening of knees and elbows or our gazes as they capture the next target, yet they all form a pulse, unheard but just as real as the patter of rain.

Between the beats, a high, clear tone strings the moments together, leading one to its successor. Several measures pass before I realize it exists beyond my own mind.

“Pike, I told you not to play that thing,” Jun snaps.

As the flute lowers from Pike’s lips and the music stops, so do we. So does everything.

“Sal and Pearl did much better once I started playing,” Pike excuses.

“I’m used to music—to dance—in the mountains.” Open wonder scrawls in every angle of Sal’s expression. He has met Mare, but has he ever heard a song performed by a Creature of the Sea? Does it hook into his heart like it does mine? “Jun is right, though. Don’t play that song.”

“I’ll play whatever I want.”

Sal’s gaze flicks to Jun, and he abandons the ring, eyes a shadow beneath his lowered brows. As I follow, Professor Baker calls for the next student.

“I told you what that song is.” Toe to toe with the sitting Pike, Sal towers over him. Targets shatter as a backdrop to his words. “I wouldn’t want you to accidently summon anybody.”

“It’s just a lullaby my mother used to sing to me.” The flute returns to Pike’s lips.

Jun pushes it down. “Music belongs to Mare, and if you take what belongs to her, she’ll make you pay for it.”

Behind Sal, I swallow. I belong to Mare, she thinks, but not for long. If Sal or Jun knew they could help me break free, would they?

Pike rips the pipe loose, but before he can lift it again, Sal grabs it.

“He told you not to. Respect that.”

Pike’s glare is a tempest coiling his every muscle. Art, or at least the promise of it, lurks there, too, just as it did in the glitter of Sal’s pain. Music—sound—is the chosen art of the Sea, yet curiosity slithers between the stories told to me. Do Creatures of the Sea dance? What beautiful masterpiece would result if the Land, Sea, and Sky combined their arts?

With the eyes of my fancy, I picture Pike playing his flute. Sal whistles, and Issoria twirls alongside him. Jun claps along, adding his laughter to the melody.

Movement yanks me back from the imagined scene. Pike retreats, flute set at his mouth. It produces a single note before Sal again jerks it away. As if tied to it with invisible string, Pike follows and leaps on him. Sal throws an arm as a shield, but Pike is a stream flowing around all obstacles. They fall, exchanging swift blows. They still, and Sal lies flat, chest against the ground, both arms wrenched behind him and Pike’s knee on his spine.

“I don’t approve of violence, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to fight.” Pike releases Sal’s arms, pulls the flute from his crushing grip, and stands.

Sal’s eyes are wide yet hard at the edges, his mouth ajar, corners downturned.

I go to him.

“He’s not hurt,” Pike assures me.

Sal turns away, limbs too rigid as he rolls and sits facing the trees.

Professor Baker slinks up behind us. “Nice moves, Science Blue. You want to take Sal’s place in my class?”

“He resents me enough already.” After a facetious bow, Pike places a hand on my arm. “Pearl, please, let’s go inside.”

Though the warmth on my skin is comforting and persuasive, I do not move. The sun still hangs high, but the shadows of the trees stretch toward us like jagged teeth. Sal sits on that line, pale hair ruffling in the cold breeze. Leaves swirl around him, dotting the gray ground with droplets of crimson and gold like human and Essence blood.

“I will stay.”

“Pearl, please, this place is—”

Jun pushes him back. “Go inside yourself, Pike.”

“And leave her here with you crazies? What kind of gentleman do you think I am? Pearl, let’s go to the café. My less weird roommate is the manager there, and I’ll play any song you want.”

Slowly, Sal turns and pins Pike with a stare of steel gray. His frown sinks deeper than a stone dropped into the sea. “Where exactly are you from, Pike?”

“Where is a bit of a misnomer. I’m a sea nomad.”

“A pirate?” Stepping back, Jun looks at his hands as if invisible dirt now coats them.

Pike rubs the back of his head. “We prefer to think of it as charging for safe passage through our territory.”

As Jun continues to retreat, he flips a throwing knife from his belt and holds it, blade down and out, in front of his chest.

“Oh, seriously, Jun? You know I’m a passivist. I’ve never killed anyone.”

Jun shakes his head. A lock of hair has escaped its tie and hangs in his face.

I jump between them, the Swine and my islander, a lump in my throat too large to speak around. Pike grabs me, and Jun lunges, but Sal is faster. While not taller than Jun, he may be stronger, and seeing him pull Jun down, I believe what he whispered in the ring. He holds my blue-eyed human in a headlock, blade buried in the dirt, both their faces snarled.

“Drop it.”

Jun shakes his head, sightline locked on Pike with his arms around me. “I have four more knives.”

“And you’ll leave them sheathed.” Sal’s expression relaxes, and his voice softens. “Jun, please. I don’t want—”

If he finishes the sentence, I cannot hear it over Professor Baker’s shouts as she and the class surround us.

Jun tears free and darts into the shadows between the trees.

Calling after him, I twist away from Pike, but Sal catches me around the middle. My feet cannot reach the ground, and my kicks have no effect.

“Let me go, Sal! Let me follow him, please. Not like last night.”

“I know.” Perhaps he does feel my blows. Tears spill over his lashes, but his hold does not loosen.

“Pike,” I appeal, but the Swine will not look at me. Of course not, but at least he does not follow Jun either.

As always, it is Sal who explains, a whisper meant only for me. “Some consider the pirates brave to live on the sea, but the understanding they have with Mare was bought with Koa blood.” His voice snags, but it is my heart that rips. “The sea nomads have killed more of Jun’s family than anyone.”

Continued in chapter 23

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