Chapter 270: Mind the Second Cup

James stepped over the ash and salt without disturbing a grain, and pushed the door open with two fingers to let white light spill across his boots. Bonnet left his lantern on the doorstep as a gift while Mary came last, one hand on her pistol.

The heat inside had the scent of green wood, burnt sugar, and rum. Herbs and feathers hung from the beams, and strings of shells and teeth clicked overhead while shelves of corked gourds lined the walls, then some half-cured hog haunch hung from a hook, the old boucan trade having apparently found a simpler way to live.

On the driftwood table lay shells and little bones, beside a basin that caught a waterdrop, waited, and caught another. Three stools stood around the table, with a jug and three clay cups waiting between them, placed neatly.

At the far end, a woman watched them from a high-backed driftwood chair. The cold white lamp in the window revealed her for the merry band.

Her skin was the warm bronze of a struck bell, heat shining across her shoulders and throat, while thick lips and wide dark eyes flecked with amber weighed the three of them like a pawnbroker inspecting a tray of rings. Her hair fell to her hips in heavy locks threaded with shells, small bones, and red thread that clicked softly whenever she turned her head.

Her bodice had once been white and now ran to indigo and smoke, laced as tight as it would go across a voluptuous bosom that seemed altogether unwilling to cooperate, slipping from one shoulder as though it had lost interest in keeping it there.

A narrow waist gave way to a skirt of patched indigo and madder, hitched high at one hip to reveal a bare leg and a string of tiny bells around the ankle. She looked a ripe thirty-odd, young enough to be interesting and old enough to know better.

When she rose and crossed to a shelf, her hips and curvaceous rear moved beneath the patched skirt in a slow, lazy roll that drew the whole room’s attention without seeming to ask for it, and she knew perfectly well that it had. Bonnet’s eyes flashed above and back to her four times, Mary’s eyebrow climbed, while James took her in without hurry and grinned.

Her voice came down like it was unpacked from a sea-chest, stiff with salt and smelling faintly of camphor. The shells in her hair gave one long, delighted rattle.

"Three, the lamp told me, and three you are. Insufferable, that lamp. It is never wrong."

Her gaze slid over them like a palm across a shelf. "And the drum, ah, it swore one of you would be famous. Sit, the pressed gentleman, the guardian of the door, the one who hides beneath a hat that fools no one, not a soul at all."

The amber eyes stopped on James and stayed there.

"Scourge of the Antilles. The sibyl has waited for you on a long, long while."

She swept into a bow so deep her locks pooled across the table and the shells struck the wood like thrown dice. "Madame Zéphyrine, ma foi. Whom the hunters call la Sibylle, and whom the sea calls... no matter. Born of a hunter’s pistol and a river queen, ’tis said, or upon the Rock at low tide, depending on who is payin’. Eleven hundred years old, she is."

She came up out of the bow with a wink that travelled the whole room.

"Or thirty-four. The sibyl lets the customer choose."

James took a stool, Mary the one beside the door, while Bonnet lowered carefully. Madame Zéphyrine poured three cups of cane spirit and the gentleman pirate drained his, flustered by the bells, and reached for the jug, but James caught him by the wrist without taking his eyes from the witch.

She clapped, delighted, and out in the dark a drum struck once, like applause. "Ah-ah-ah! The first cup, chéri, is for hospitality. The second cup is a contract, and the sibyl does not hold with contracts signed in rum. Reach again, and the wind off the Exuma will come for that pretty hair of thine, and take it, and leave you bald as an egg."

Shocked, Bonnet patted the tail of hair at his collar, and his chin went up in wounded dignity.

"Madame, I do beg your pardon, but the wind has been and gone. A month ago, in a squall, and a perfectly dreadful one. I was quite out of temper for a week, I assure you, and I received no warning whatsoever."

Her hand fluttered, a brisk little shooing of fate’s paperwork. "Ah, chéri. The sight is a slow horse, a fat old mare who dawdles, who stops to graze at every hedge. But she always, always arrives. Patience, and mind your hair."

To that, Bonnet brought up the remains of his dignity, retied them like a cravat, and bowed from the stool with the whole upper half of his body.

"A warm night, madame! Most clement for the season, most clement. And how is the family? All well, I trust?"

James grinned at his pupil.

Madame Zéphyrine’s hand flew to her breast like a gull to a wreck, and her voice rose into a lament. "Her mother is in the river, and, Mon Dieu, the river is not speaking to her due a quarrel from fifty years ago! And her grandmother lives in the lamp, there, the cold white one, with grievances, chéri, on every..."

Mary’s voice cut her, dry as a biscuit. "Madame. We’ve business here, and the night’s wearin’ thin as a purser’s charity. Leave the lamp’s grievances for the mornin’."

The witch took no offense, but simply threw a handful of shells across the table, then tossed a pinch of salt at the lamp.

It hissed.

She bent over the wreckage of the cast with a look of purely injustice. Then, without raising her eyes, she dropped her voice to a scraped-down hush.

"And what does the Scourge carry across the sibyl’s floor, at the hour when Christian folk bar their doors and the dead put on their slippers?"

James leaned back on his stool with one boot hooked behind the other and let the question sit for a while, like good whiskey. "Och, old wee thing, madame, old as sin and twice as stubborn. A black stone, not bigger than the palm of my hand, carved with a feathered serpent wound around itself like it’s tryin’ to hide for its own tail."

Bonnet shuddered grandly.

"I felt it with my own two hands, and I have not slept a full night since."

"Jagged, at the one end, you know what means. A key."

Madame Zéphyrine clicked her tongue. Every shell in her hair stopped clicking while the drop in the basin fell regardless, because water has never shown much respect for dramatic moments.

Mary’s whisper slid sideways without her lips seeming to move.

"She’s heard of one afore. Look at her, gone stiff as a gibbet."

The witch came back into motion all at once, shells clashing, like a gull bursting up out of a trough, and put her smile back on like a fresh shirt.

"A key! A key, he says, and so casually, as though it were a thimble!"

Her hands spread wide.

"And where, chéri, does this key go to sleep?"

James told her about the fishhook harbor, a star-shaped fort beneath a white flag, cane smoke, a blue wall of mountains, and a fold in the hills inland that throbbed like a thumb. She listened with her head cocked.

"So tell the sibyl why the Scourge comes all this way, in the dark, for one little key."

"I owe a lady, madame."

That was all he was willing to offer.

Bonnet shot upright so fast the table lurched and the jug slopped, and he caught himself with his face lit. "James, you wicked, secretive fellow, you never said there was a lady! Well. Well! Then we are her knights, sir, hers knight, I insist upon it, and I shall wear my very best coat to the rescue."

Madame Zéphyrine let out a sigh and sank back into the driftwood chair. "Ah, chéri. A key is an old angry thing, a hungry thing, and the coast where it sleeps is a hard, hard coast, all teeth and cane smoke. And the sibyl, she is no fool. She sees no reason, none, to walk into the mouth of a serpent."

A smile crept sideways onto her face like a cat onto a warm wall, and she lifted one ringed finger and crooked it. "But the sibyl watches before she refuses. So. The hat, mon capitaine. Come, come. The lamp does not like to be kept waiting, and neither does her grandmother."

James swept off his hat, the white light found his face, and the whole hut seemed to hold its breath. Madame Zéphyrine rose, crossed the packed earth with a ring of tiny bells, and laid two fingers against his brow.

The flame leaned toward his forehead and a deep, magnificent, theatrical sigh rolled through his head, pleased with itself.

She drew her fingers back slowly, and for a heartbeat the amber eyes were looking behind his face.

"There will be a price, mon capitaine. The sibyl will ask for it..."

Her eyes narrowed.

"...when the work is half done. Not before. Not after."

"Aye? And what might it be? Say it clear."

"The heaviest thing thou carriest, mon capitaine, is the thing thou holdest lightest."

"Och, I’ll dance with a riddle all night long, madame, but I cannot pay my debts in ’em."

Bonnet cleared his throat. "A gentleman, madame, never signs a bill unread. It simply is not done. And I wish it clearly understood that my purse, my whole purse, every last shilling of it, is at James’s entire disposal."

Mary folded her arms. "Whatever it is, it’ll be carried between the three of us, an’ no mistake. Name it, madame, an’ we’ll put it on the scale together."

Madame Zéphyrine stepped back into the white light with her hands open. For the first time that night the shells in her hair hung perfectly still, and the show woman was gone.

"The price... the price can wait for the dawn, chéri. It can wait."

She held his gaze a long moment. "The sibyl has said yes already, with her fingers. Fingers cannot lie, only lips, and she cannot refuse a man who bears an ancient mark."

Mary’s eyes went to his brow. James raised a hand toward it, then stopped halfway.