Shore Leave: The Faire
Crownsville, Maryland, November 1996
The Shop
The sign at the gate was hand-painted on a board nailed to two posts. It said HUZZAH, and under that, in smaller letters, LARP WEEK: NO DAY PASSES, CHECK IN AT LOGISTICS, and under that, smaller again and newer, someone had added in marker: NO REALLY, CHECK IN AT LOGISTICS, DEB IS SERIOUS.
Hazel rode under it at nine on Sunday night and stopped the bike in a gravel lot full of station wagons and pickups and one school bus painted black with skulls on it.
From the lot she could see the faire. It sat on a long rise of ground in the trees, a whole small town of wooden buildings with steep roofs and painted signs, half-timbered, crooked on purpose, with lanterns hanging off the eaves and smoke going up from three or four places at once. There were people walking between the buildings in cloaks. Somewhere a drum was going, and a fiddle over the drum, badly, and somebody was laughing in a big round voice that carried all the way down to the lot.
"Oh," said Hazel.
Sophie climbed off the bike and stood beside her and took her helmet off.
"Oh," said Hazel again. "Soph. Soph, look at it."
"I'm looking."
"It's a town."
"It's a fake town."
"It's the best fake town I've ever seen in my life."
Logistics was a folding table in a tent at the bottom of the hill, run by a woman of about fifty in a fleece vest with an orange sash over it and a whistle around her neck. She had a clipboard, a coffee, and the face of someone who had heard every excuse in the world and then a few more. A hand-lettered card on the table said DEB.
"You're late," said Deb.
"We're so sorry," said Sophie.
"Event started Friday."
"We got held up," said Hazel. "In Atlantic City."
Deb looked at her for a long moment over the clipboard. "Names."
They gave her names. Deb found them on a list in pencil, under a heading that said LATE / WALK-IN / CABIN 9, and checked them off.
"Cabin nine's on the end. By the woods. Bathhouse is up the path. Rules are in here." She pushed two photocopied booklets across the table. "Read them. Combat is light touch only. No head shots, no groin shots, no grappling. Weapons get checked at this table before you use them, or you don't use them, period. 'Hold' means everybody stops, you stop, you get down on one knee. If I blow this," she held up the whistle, "you stop being a pirate or a wizard or whatever you are and you start being a person standing very still. Got it?"
"Got it," said Hazel.
"What are you?"
Hazel looked at Sophie. Sophie looked at Hazel.
"We don't know yet," said Sophie.
Deb sighed through her nose. "Shop's still open," she said. "Top of the hill. Ask for Marguerite."
Marguerite's shop was a long low building with a sign shaped like a needle and thread, and inside it was the most wonderful thing Hazel had seen since the flag.
Racks of clothes ran all the way to the back wall, under lanterns. Long coats and short coats and capes. Bodices laced up on dress forms. Shirts with sleeves so full they looked like clouds. Hats on pegs all along one wall, every kind of hat, a hundred hats. Belts hung in bunches like dead snakes. Boots stood in pairs along the floor, and in a glass case by the counter there were rings and earrings and little silver crosses and coins on chains.
Marguerite was about sixty, small, round, in a bodice of her own and a lace cap, with a measuring tape around her neck and pins in her mouth, and she looked up from her sewing when they came in and took them both in from head to foot in one look, the way Hazel had once looked at a rifle.
"Late walk-ins," she said around the pins. "You'll want to be something by morning."
"We want to be pirates," said Hazel.
"Both of you?"
"Her," said Sophie. "I'll be something else."
Marguerite took the pins out of her mouth. "What else?"
Sophie looked down the racks. She walked along them slowly with her hands behind her back, the way she walked through other people's cemeteries, and stopped in front of a dress form near the back. It wore a cream blouse with big soft sleeves, a dark brown bodice laced up the front, and over the skirts an apron, pale and plain, with a border of little embroidered leaves and berries running around the hem.
"That," said Sophie.
"Tavern girl," said Marguerite approvingly. "Good choice. Everybody needs a tavern girl." She looked at Hazel. "And you're her captain."
"Oh, I'm not a captain," said Hazel. "Not yet."
"Not yet," said Marguerite, and went to find a coat.
It took an hour and a half. Hazel would remember every minute of it. Marguerite pulled things off racks and held them up against her and shook her head and threw them over a chair, and pulled other things off and held them up and nodded, and the pile on the chair grew. A shirt, cream, with ruffles at the throat and wrists. A long coat, brown, heavy, the cloth worked all over with some faded pattern like old wallpaper, with gold trim along every edge and a row of brass buttons as big as quarters. A vest of dark red brocade to go under it. A belt, and then another belt, and then a third belt across her chest for a sword she didn't have yet. Brown breeches. A red sash, wide, fringed, which Marguerite tied around her waist and then untied and tied again, differently, three times. Boots.
And then the hat.
It was on a peg near the top of the wall, and Marguerite had to get a stepladder for it. A tricorne of soft dark leather, the brim turned up on three sides, worn at the edges, with a band of tarnished coins hanging off the front of it on little chains. Tucked into the band at the side, falling back over the brim, was a plume. A big one. Deep red, nearly the color of Hazel's hair, so long it curled down past her shoulder when Marguerite set the hat on her head.
Marguerite stepped back. She tilted her head.
"Well," she said. "There you are."
Hazel turned around to the long mirror by the door.
A woman looked back at her. Red hair everywhere, down past her shoulders, coming out from under a leather hat with coins and a red plume, a heavy brown coat with gold all over it, brass buttons, a red sash, belts, boots. She looked like she'd come off a ship. She looked like she'd come off a ship she'd stolen.
She grinned. The coins swung. Her fangs showed.
In the mirror behind her, Marguerite's eyes went to them, and stayed there for a moment.
"Those are good," said Marguerite. "The teeth. Those are very good. Where'd you get those done?"
"They came with the hat," said Hazel.
Marguerite laughed, a short surprised laugh. She went to her glass case and came back with a pair of earrings, long silver crosses on little hoops, and held one up beside Hazel's face in the mirror.
"These too," she said. "For a pirate with those teeth. It's funny."
Behind them a curtain rattled back, and Sophie came out of the little changing corner at the back of the shop.
She'd done her own braids again, two long thick ones over her shoulders. The bodice was laced tight up her front with a leather thong, the cream blouse puffed out above it and the sleeves fell soft to her elbows, and the apron with its border of leaves and berries hung down over a skirt of several layers, brown and purple and faded red. Marguerite had found her a red shawl, fringed, to knot around her hips, and a little pouch on a cord with a bundle of dried herbs sticking out of the top. Sophie had found, somewhere in the glass case, a silver cross on a chain, and put it on, and it lay on the cream ruffles at the neck of her blouse.
She looked like a girl who poured ale in a tavern by a harbor. She looked like a girl you'd tell secrets to by accident. She looked, Hazel thought, exactly like herself, and also like somebody Hazel had never seen.
"Oh," said Hazel.
Sophie came and stood beside her in the mirror. The two of them looked at the two of them for a while.
"We look so stupid," said Hazel.
"We look so good," said Sophie.
"We look so good," Hazel agreed.
Marguerite rang them up. It came to an amount that made Hazel's eyebrows go up and then come down again, because she remembered the plastic bag with the gold crest. She paid in hundreds and didn't wait for change, and Marguerite looked at the money and then at her and said, "Well. Now you can be captain."
The Drowned Rat
The pirates owned the tavern. That was the first thing anyone told them.
It sat at the bottom end of the faire town where the ground fell away toward a pond, a long building with a porch out front and a sign over the porch of a rat with its eyes crossed out, floating on its back. Inside there was a fire in a big stone hearth at one end and a bar at the other and long tables and benches in between, and every table was full of people in costume shouting at each other. There were wizards and knights and elves with rubber ears and a man in a full suit of plastic armor eating a turkey leg. And at the long table nearest the fire, under a black flag nailed to the wall with a skull and two crossed bones on it, there were the pirates.
There were fifteen or twenty of them. Coats and sashes and bandanas, eye patches, a parrot made of felt on one shoulder, a wooden leg strapped over a real leg. At the head of the table sat a broad old man with a gray beard that came down to his belt and a coat even heavier than Hazel's, a black one, with gold braid at the cuffs. He had a tankard in one fist and he was talking, and the whole table was laughing.
Hazel walked straight up to the table.
The old man stopped talking. Everyone at the table turned around to look at her. She stood there in the firelight in the hat and the plume and the coat, with her hands on her hips.
"I hear," she said, in a voice she'd never used before but found she had, a big one, from the bottom of her chest, "that this is a pirate tavern."
"It is," said the old man.
"I hear you're short on crew."
The old man looked her up and down. He took his time about it. He looked at the hat and the plume and the coins, and at the coat, and at the sash, and at the boots, and at her empty belt, and then at her face, and at her teeth.
"We're always short on crew," he said. "What's your name, girl?"
Hazel opened her mouth and realized she hadn't thought of one.
"Red," said Sophie, from behind her.
The old man looked past Hazel at Sophie, in her bodice and her apron and her braids.
"And who are you?"
"I'm with her," said Sophie.
The old man looked back at Hazel. Something in his face had moved.
"Red," he said. "Well, Red. I'm Captain Grimsby, of the Salt Widow. Sit down. Somebody give the girl a drink."
Hazel sat at the far end of the bench, the end nobody wanted, with her back to the wall and the whole length of the table between her and the hearth. It was a good fire, a big one, and it was a long way off, and from down there it was just warm light on a lot of happy faces. She could live with that. She'd lived with worse.
His real name was Walt. He'd retired from the post office in Glen Burnie in 1989. He'd been running the Salt Widow since 1976, when there had been four pirates, all of them him and his brothers, in a field behind a church. Now there were nineteen, and a waiting list, and the Salt Widow owned the Drowned Rat, which meant that every night at the LARP the pirates sat closest to the fire and got the first round, and everyone else had to come in and pay them a toll in fake gold to drink. Walt explained all this to Hazel with his tankard in his fist and his beard in his lap, and she listened to every word.
The first mate was a big man named Dutch. He was in his thirties, with a shaved head and a black beard and arms like a stevedore, and he sat at Walt's right hand and kept the crew in order, which mostly meant shouting at them when they got too loud and then getting louder than any of them. His real name was Kevin and he taught high school chemistry in Annapolis. He'd been first mate for six years. When Walt introduced him he took Hazel's hand and shook it, his whole hand around hers, and said, "Red. Welcome aboard. You any good with a sword?"
"I'm good with a lot of things," said Hazel.
Dutch grinned, and laughed, and said, "We'll see."
The cabin boy was a skinny kid called Pip, who was sixteen and in his first real game, and who had a felt eye patch and a plastic dagger and the expression, the moment Hazel sat down, of somebody who has just seen the coolest thing in the world. He sat across the table from her for the rest of the night with his chin on his hands and didn't say anything at all until about one in the morning, when he asked her where she'd gotten the teeth.
"They came with the hat," said Hazel.
"Whoa," said Pip.
Sophie worked the tavern.
Nobody asked her to. Nobody had to. She went behind the bar about an hour after they got there and came back out with a tray, and from then on she was the tavern girl of the Drowned Rat. She went from table to table with pitchers of ginger ale and cider and root beer, which was what the Drowned Rat served in fake ale mugs, and she poured, and she took the fake gold coins people paid her and dropped them down the front of her bodice, and she leaned on the end of the tables and listened to people's stories. They told her everything. Hazel watched it happen. A wizard told her about his divorce. A knight told her about the girl he liked who was across the room in a green dress being an elf. Sophie leaned on the table with her braids hanging down and her chin on her hand and listened with her whole face, and nodded, and every so often said something too quiet for Hazel to hear, and the knight went red to his ears and laughed and got up and went across the room.
"She's good," said Walt, watching.
"She's the best," said Hazel.
Sophie came by their table with a pitcher. She came around behind Hazel to fill her mug, leaning over her shoulder, close, the cross on its chain swinging down over Hazel's ear.
Hazel reached up and back, took hold of her arm by the wrist, and pulled.
Sophie came down sideways into her lap with a shriek and a slosh of cider, the pitcher held up high over both of them to save it, her braids flying, her skirts everywhere.
"Unhand me, you brute," Sophie said, in a voice like a lady in a play.
"Never," said Hazel, in a voice like a pirate in a worse play, and put both arms around her waist.
"I am a respectable girl!"
"Not anymore you're not."
The whole table howled. Dutch hammered the table with his fist. Walt laughed so hard his beard shook. Pip, across the table, went the color of a tomato and looked at the ceiling. And Sophie lay back against Hazel's shoulder with the pitcher held up in the air and started laughing, really laughing, the giggles coming up out of her in hiccups until she couldn't stop, and Hazel couldn't either, and the two of them sat there in the firelight shaking against each other like a couple of girls at a slumber party who had just been told off for being too loud and couldn't help it.
When she finally got her breath, Sophie twisted round in Hazel's lap and poured her a drink, very carefully, filling the mug to the brim, and set the pitcher down.
"That's one gold," she said, in her own voice. "For the drink."
"What about for the rest?"
"The rest's free," said Sophie, and kissed her on the cheek, and got up and went back to work.
Under the Door
They found the note on Monday night when they woke.
Cabin nine was on the end of the row, by the woods, as Deb had said. It was a single room of rough plank walls with two bunks, a table, a chair, and a window, which they'd covered with a blanket from the top bunk and a whole roll of gaffer tape Hazel had bought from Marguerite. They slept on the bottom bunk, in a heap, under the other blanket. Hazel woke up the way she always did now, all at once, and lay there for a minute listening to the woods outside, owls and wind and someone a long way off playing a tin whistle.
Then she saw it. A square of white on the floor by the door, in the gray light that came in under it.
It was a sheet of paper folded in half. On the outside, in pencil, it said RED. Inside, in two different hands, there were two messages.
The first was in blue ballpoint, in square capital letters, very neat:
RED. You and Tavern Girl did not come to weapons check at Logistics today. NO SWORD WITHOUT WEAPONS CHECK. Come to the table tonight before you do anything. I am not kidding. D.
The second was underneath, in pencil, in handwriting that went downhill:
Capt says your on first watch on the bridge tonite. Also he says dont let Deb catch you without a sword checked. Also we knocked like twice. Are you guys ok? Pip
Hazel read it twice and then gave it to Sophie.
"They knocked," said Sophie.
"Twice."
"We didn't hear."
"We didn't hear." Hazel looked at the door. She thought about Pip standing on the step out there in the afternoon light in his felt eye patch, knocking, and then knocking again, and frowning at the taped-up window, and going away. She thought about the man in the boots in the slot machine room. She found she had nothing to say about either of them.
Sophie folded the note back up and put it in the pouch on her belt, with the herbs.
"Weapons check," she said.
"I don't even have a weapon."
"Then we'd better go get you one before Deb comes and finds us," said Sophie, "because I think Deb might be the scariest thing in Maryland."
Hazel's cutlass came from Marguerite's neighbor, a man in a leather apron who made foam swords in the back of a stall that smelled of glue. It was a curved one, with a basket hilt of gray foam painted to look like steel, and a blade of the same, wrapped in gray tape over a core of something stiff and light. It weighed nothing. When she swung it, it made a soft whuff in the air. She took it down to Logistics and Deb bent it, and twisted it, and poked the tip with her thumb, and hit her own arm with it hard, twice, and then tied a tiny strip of orange tape around the hilt and handed it back.
"Light touch," said Deb.
"Light touch," said Hazel.
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
Deb looked at her for a moment longer than she needed to. "You've done this before," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Never," said Hazel, honestly.
"Huh," said Deb, and went back to her clipboard.
Watch
The Salt Widow was a ship painted on a wall.
It stood at the edge of the pond behind the Drowned Rat: a wooden platform, a stage really, with a front cut and painted to look like the side of a ship, with gun ports and a carved figurehead of a woman with her hands over her face. A mast went up out of the middle of it with a black flag on top. On the platform there was a ship's wheel bolted to a post, and a barrel, and a bell. The bridge. You climbed up to it by a ladder at the back.
First watch meant standing on the bridge from dark till midnight, ringing the bell if anyone came, and shouting the challenge.
"What's the challenge?" said Hazel.
"WHO GOES THERE," said Pip, who had come with her, "and then they have to say the password, and if they don't know the password you get to chase them off."
"What's the password?"
Pip leaned in very close and whispered, as if the whole faire might be listening, "Rum."
Hazel stood on the bridge for four hours. She loved every one of them.
The faire town was laid out up the hill behind her, every window lit, smoke going up from every chimney, and from the bridge she could see all of it. People went up and down the lanes between the buildings in their cloaks and costumes with lanterns in their hands. Somewhere up the hill, two knights were fighting with foam swords in a ring of torches, and every few minutes a cheer went up. Somewhere else, someone was singing a sea shanty she half knew. Below the bridge the pond lay black, with the lights of the town floating in it, and over the pond the sky was clear and full of stars, more of them than she'd seen since she couldn't remember when, the way you only get them out past the cities.
Twice someone came along the path by the pond, and she rang the bell and shouted "WHO GOES THERE," and the first time it was a pair of elves who didn't know the password and ran away shrieking when she came down the ladder after them with her cutlass, and the second time it was Sophie with a mug of cider she couldn't drink, who said "Rum," very dryly, and climbed up and sat on the barrel.
They stayed up there together till midnight, Sophie on the barrel, Hazel at the wheel, looking out over the black water like it went all the way to somewhere.
"Captain Grimsby likes you," said Sophie after a while.
"He's nice."
"Dutch likes you."
"He's nice too."
"Pip loves you."
"Pip's sixteen."
"Pip's sixteen and he's going to remember you for the rest of his life," said Sophie. "You're his first pirate."
Hazel turned the wheel a little to the left, steering nowhere. "I could be first mate," she said.
Sophie looked at her.
"Dutch is first mate. He's been first mate six years."
"I could beat him, though." Hazel turned the wheel back to the right. "Walt said there's a challenge. Any crew member can challenge the mate at the fire on the last night, crew tradition, first to three touches. Nobody's done it in three years." She leaned on the wheel. "I could beat him easy, Soph."
"You don't need to be first mate."
"I know I don't need to." Hazel looked out at the pond. "I want to."
Sophie didn't say anything to that. She looked at Hazel for a while, the way she'd looked at the Polaroid in the slot machine room, and then she looked out at the pond too, and after a while she said, "Okay, Girlie Pop," and that was all.
The Countess
On Wednesday Hazel got hungry.
She'd known it was coming. It had been coming since Washington, slowly, under everything else, and she'd pushed it down under the bike and the casino and the coat and the bridge and the bell. On Wednesday night it came up. It came up while she was sitting at the long table in the Drowned Rat with her tankard in her fist, and Dutch was telling a story about a raid the year before on the Elves of the Silver Wood, and everyone was laughing, and Hazel was laughing, and somewhere under the laughter there was the warmth coming off nineteen people packed together on benches, and the sound of all of their hearts.
Not loud. It was never loud. It was under everything, like the hum of the building in Atlantic City. Nineteen hearts, and the people at the next table, and the next. It was the only thing she could hear.
She put the tankard down and pushed it away from her a little.
Across the room Sophie was pouring cider for a table of wizards. She looked up, the way she sometimes did, and caught Hazel's eye across the room, and held it a moment, and looked at the door. Hazel nodded very slightly. Sophie went back to pouring.
That was when the countess sat down next to her.
She'd been in the tavern every night. Hazel had noticed her. Everybody had noticed her. She was in her twenties, tall and very pale, with black hair down past her waist and a black velvet gown with long trailing sleeves, and a choker of black lace around her throat with a red stone hanging from it. Her lips were painted dark red, almost black. She was part of a group called the Court of Ash, who sat at a table in the corner and spoke in low voices and were all, as far as Hazel could tell, vampires. Their noble vampire countess. Lady Morwenna.
"Captain Red," said Lady Morwenna. She had a low, careful voice she must have practiced.
"Just Red," said Hazel. "I'm not captain yet."
"Yet." Morwenna smiled. She had very good teeth. She had, Hazel noticed, little white plastic fangs, the kind that came in a kit and clipped on. She reached out and touched one of the coins hanging off the brim of Hazel's hat with one finger and set it swinging. "I've been watching you."
"Everyone's been watching me. I've got a big hat."
"Not the hat." Morwenna's eyes went down to Hazel's mouth. "Your teeth."
"They came with the hat."
"No they didn't." Morwenna leaned in close, close enough that Hazel could smell her. Patchouli. Clove cigarettes. And under all of it, the warm, salt, ordinary smell of a living woman, very near. "They're better than ours. All of ours. Look at them." She glanced across the room at the Court of Ash, who were looking back. "They're jealous. I can tell."
"Of my teeth?"
"Of whoever you are." Morwenna put her chin in her hand. "Do you bite, Red?"
Hazel looked at her for a long time.
The hearts were going under everything. Dutch was still telling his story. Somebody was laughing, the big round laugh she'd heard from the parking lot on Sunday. Under the black velvet of Morwenna's high collar, in the long pale curve of her throat, just above the lace, something was moving, slow, steady, regular as a pendulum.
"Only on my ship," said Hazel.
Morwenna's eyes went wide. Then they went very bright. She was in character, Hazel saw; she was delighted. Her pirate had said a great pirate line, a line she'd tell the Court of Ash about later. It was going to be a good scene.
"Show me your ship," said Morwenna.
Hazel didn't take her to the ship. She took her down past it, along the path by the pond, past the end of the faire town where the lantern light gave out, into the trees.
It was very dark under the trees. Hazel walked ahead, holding Morwenna's hand, and Morwenna came behind her stumbling a little in her long skirts and laughing under her breath, out of breath, holding on. When they'd gone far enough that the shouting from the tavern was only a faint noise through the trunks, and the lights of the faire were just a glow, Hazel stopped beside a big old oak with a trunk wider than both of them and turned around.
Morwenna stood in front of her, a pale face in the dark, breathing hard.
"This is the ship?" she said.
"This is the ship."
"Okay," said Morwenna, and laughed again, nervously, and then stopped laughing. "So what happens now, Captain?"
Hazel took her hat off and hung it on a low branch of the oak by its brim. She put her hands on Morwenna's waist. Morwenna's breath caught. Hazel walked her backward the two steps to the tree, gently, until the velvet of her back was against the bark, and stood very close in front of her, and looked up at her. Morwenna was taller. That was fine.
"Now," said Hazel softly, "you have to hold very still."
"In character?"
"In character."
Morwenna swallowed. She tilted her head back against the trunk, to the side, and lifted her chin, the way she must have seen it done in a dozen movies, and closed her eyes. With one hand she pulled the lace choker down an inch, so that it lay on her collarbone, and her throat was bare.
Hazel looked at it.
She didn't hurry. She'd always been told she should hurry, and she never had. She put one hand behind Morwenna's head, in her long hair, fingers spread, holding it, the way someone had once held hers on a cold floor in a basement in 1966. She leaned in. She let her breath, which she didn't need, which she took only so she could let it go, touch the skin first. Morwenna shivered all over from her scalp to her heels. Hazel laid her lips on the place where it beat.
Then she bit.
Morwenna gasped. It was a small sharp sound, a start, and her whole body went tight against the tree, and her hands came up and caught at the front of Hazel's coat, and held on. And then the tightness went out of her all at once, the way it always did, as if someone had cut the strings. She made another sound. It wasn't a gasp. It was long and low and it came from somewhere deep down in her, and her head fell back against the bark, and her hands in Hazel's coat stopped holding on and started pulling.
The blood came into Hazel's mouth. Warm, and then hot, and then everything.
It was always like this, and it was always the first time. The warmth came into her and went down through her and out to the ends of her fingers and her toes, into every place that had been cold since the casino and the bridge and the slot machines and Washington, and lit them up, one by one, like someone going through a dark house turning on the lights. She tasted cloves and wine and the dark sweet edge of someone who'd been up for days, laughing and drinking and staying up too late in the woods with her friends. She held Morwenna up against the tree with her whole body. Morwenna was making small sounds now, one after another, little helpless ones, on every breath, and her fingers were in Hazel's hair, and her hips had come away from the bark and pressed forward against Hazel's, and her knee had come up, and her long velvet skirt was riding up her leg, and Hazel let her. Hazel pressed back. Hazel slid her free hand down the velvet of Morwenna's back to the small of it and pulled her in, closer, and drank, and Morwenna said something that wasn't a word, and then said "oh," and then said "oh, God," into the dark, and her whole body shook against Hazel's, long and hard, and went on shaking.
Hazel drank.
There was a moment, there always was, where she could have kept going. It was very quiet and very simple and it sat in the middle of the warmth like a stone at the bottom of a pool, and she knew exactly where it was. She had always known. She didn't go near it. She took one more long swallow, and felt the heart under her mouth go just a little slower, a little heavier, the way a runner's does at the end of a long hill, and she stopped.
She lifted her head.
Morwenna sagged against the tree with her eyes closed and her mouth open. Her hands were still in Hazel's coat. Hazel held her up. She bent her head again and touched her tongue to the two small marks on that pale throat, one and then the other, slowly, and felt them close under it, and when she lifted her head again there was nothing there but a smear of red that might have been lipstick, and the long beat of the pulse going on under the skin, slower than before but steady.
She pulled the lace choker back up over it.
Morwenna opened her eyes.
They were huge, unfocused, swimming. She looked at Hazel's face for a long time as if she didn't know whose it was.
"What," she said, very faintly. "What was that."
"That was the ship," said Hazel.
Morwenna laughed. It came out weak and wet and wonderful. She put her hand up to her own throat and felt it with her fingertips, and then looked at her fingertips in the dark, and laughed again.
"You," she said. "You're... are you a method actor? Is that what you are?"
"Something like that."
"Oh my God." Morwenna let her head fall back against the oak. "Oh my God. I can't feel my legs. I can't feel my face. The Court is going to... they're going to die."
"Don't tell them everything," said Hazel. She reached up for her hat and put it back on. The coins swung. "Pirates don't kiss and tell."
"Was that a kiss?"
"That was a pirate kiss."
Morwenna looked at her, and something went across her face, a little wondering, a little afraid, and then went away again under the giddiness, and she grinned, with her plastic fangs.
"Can I have another one tomorrow?"
"Pirates don't do repeats," said Hazel, and gave her an arm.
She walked her back out of the trees slowly, with Morwenna leaning heavily on her the whole way and laughing to herself about nothing, and sat her down at the end of the Court of Ash's table, and the Court of Ash looked up at their countess, flushed and smiling and disheveled, with her hair full of oak bark and her eyes swimming, and then at Hazel, and nobody said a word. Hazel touched the brim of her hat to them. She walked back across the tavern to the pirate table, through the warmth and the noise and the hearts, which had gone back to being a sound in the background, nothing more, and sat down at her end of the bench and picked up her tankard.
Sophie came by with the pitcher and filled it.
She leaned down by Hazel's ear while she poured. She smelled the air very delicately, twice.
"You smell like cloves," she whispered.
"Shut up."
"You smell like cloves and velvet."
"Go away."
"Was she good?" said Sophie innocently, and Hazel put a hand over her face, and Sophie laughed, and filled the tankard to the brim, and went off to the next table with her braids swinging.
At the corner table, Lady Morwenna of the Court of Ash sat with both hands around a mug of cider and stared into the fire with a small, dazed smile, and every few minutes touched the lace at her throat.
The Challenge
On Friday night the crew of the Salt Widow made a fire on the beach by the pond.
It wasn't a real beach. It was a strip of sand someone had trucked in and spread along the edge of the water below the ship, and every year on the last full night of the event, Walt said, the pirates built a fire on it as big as they could make it and stood around it and told lies until the sun came up. It was crew tradition. Nobody else came. The rest of the LARP had a bonfire of its own up on the hill, a huge one, and the faint noise of it came down to them through the trees, but this one was the crew's.
The fire was enormous. Dutch had built it. It went up higher than the ship, roaring, throwing sparks into the black sky, so hot that everybody stood back from it in a big ring with their faces red and their backs cold. Hazel stood back further than anyone. She stood at the very edge of the ring, where the sand went wet and the pond lapped at her boot heels, with the dark water behind her and the cold of it coming up through her soles, and she kept her hands tucked in her sash so nobody would see what they wanted to do. Every part of her that was old and careful knew exactly where the fire was, all the time, without looking, like a man with a gun in the corner of a room. Somebody had brought a drum. Pip was in charge of the drum. Sophie sat on an upturned crate at the edge of the circle near her, with her shawl around her shoulders and her knees together, and every so often looked at Hazel instead of the fire.
When the fire was at its highest, Walt stood up and hit his tankard on a rock until everybody was quiet.
"Crew of the Salt Widow," he said. "It's the last fire. You know what that means."
"Rum!" yelled somebody.
"After," said Walt. "First, it means anyone who wants Dutch's job can try and take it from him. Crew law. First to three touches. Anybody?" He looked around the ring. Nobody moved. He looked at Hazel.
Hazel stepped out of the ring.
A cheer went up. Somebody whistled. Pip beat the drum, very fast, until somebody took the stick off him. Dutch, across the fire, put down his mug and stood up and took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves over his enormous forearms and grinned at her.
"Red," he said. "I was hoping."
"You were?"
"Nobody's challenged me in three years. I was getting bored." He picked up his sword, a big foam broadsword with a cross-guard, orange tape tied around the hilt. "Light touch. No heads."
"No heads," said Hazel.
They met in the open space between the fire and the water. Hazel took the water side without asking. Dutch didn't notice. Nobody noticed.
He was good. Hazel saw that at once. He was big, and heavy, and he'd been doing this every weekend for six years, and he moved like a man who knew exactly where his feet were. He came in fast with the broadsword high and she stepped back and let it go past her, and he recovered faster than she'd thought he would and came again from the other side, and she caught it on the cutlass, whuff, foam on foam, and turned it.
The crew yelled.
She went around him. She was holding back, all of it, the way she'd been holding back all week: swinging from her elbow instead of her shoulder, letting him see her coming, stepping when she could have slid. She didn't need any of the rest. She saw an opening on his left side, the side his sword was away from, and tapped him across the ribs with the flat of the cutlass, light as a slap.
"Touch!" yelled Walt. "One to Red!"
Dutch laughed out loud. He came back at her harder. He feinted high and went low, which was good, which was very good, and she was nearly too slow for it on purpose and turned it away at the last second, and spun out of the way, and the crew went ohhh. He pressed. He was strong; even foam on foam she could feel the weight behind it. He drove her back toward the water, and she let him, two steps, three, until her heels were in the wet sand, and then she went under the broadsword and past him and tapped him on the back of the shoulder.
"Two to Red!"
"Come on, Dutch!" yelled somebody.
Dutch turned around, breathing hard, laughing. His bald head was shining in the firelight. "Okay," he said. "Okay, Red. Okay."
He came in again, and this time he was serious.
He'd been watching her. She saw that too late. Two times she'd beaten him by going toward the water, and he was a teacher, he learned, and this time he didn't drive her back. He circled. He came round her wide and quick on the landward side with the broadsword low, and she turned to keep him in front of her, and turned again, and on the third step she felt it on the back of her neck.
The fire.
It was behind her now. It was ten feet away, roaring, and the heat of it lay on her neck and her shoulders and the back of her coat like a hand, and everything in her that was dead and old and frightened stood up all at once and screamed. Not out loud. Inside, all the way down, the way a horse screams in a barn. Get away. Get away. Get away from it. Her whole body wanted to run straight forward, over the sand, into the pond, anywhere, and the only thing in front of her was Dutch.
He came in fast and low and close, the broadsword coming across at her waist in a long flat arc, and it was a good attack, a real one. She saw it coming. She saw it coming the way she'd seen a man step out of a doorway on Delancey Street in 1969, without any time in between seeing it and moving. She stepped to the side, away from the heat, toward the dark. The broadsword went past her. Her right hand had the cutlass out wide. And her left hand, her empty hand, the one that wasn't holding anything...
Hit with what's free.
It went before she knew it was going. It came up out of thirty years of a roof and a scope and a dead drop and a man in a cellar teaching her where a body was soft. Short. No windup at all. The heel of her open hand came up into the middle of Dutch's face as he went past her, going the other way, with all of his own weight carrying him onto it.
She heard it before she felt it. A small, wet crack.
Dutch's head went back. His feet kept going. He sat down in the sand with the broadsword still in his hand and his other hand coming up to his face, and between his fingers, black in the firelight, the blood came out of his nose in a sheet and ran down over his mouth and his beard and onto his shirt.
The drum stopped.
Hazel stood over him with the cutlass in one hand and her left hand out in front of her, palm open, and looked at it. Nobody said anything. The fire roared. Up on the hill, very faint, the other bonfire cheered at something.
Then a whistle went off, long and shrill, and Deb came down the path from the ship at a run with her orange sash flying.
"HOLD!" Deb was yelling. "Hold, hold, everybody hold!"
Everybody went down on one knee in the sand. Everybody except Hazel. She stood where she was, with her hand out, until Deb got there and looked at Dutch on the ground and the blood and then at her. Then she went down on one knee too.
The smell of it was everywhere.
Deb knelt by Dutch. "Kevin. Kevin, look at me. Can you hear me?"
"I'm fine," said Dutch thickly, through his hand. "I'm fine. I'm fine. Jesus."
"Let me see."
He took his hand away. It was bad. His nose was the wrong shape. The blood was still coming, black and shining in the firelight, and the smell came off it in a warm wave, rich and red and only three feet away, and Hazel knelt in the sand with her hands flat on her thighs and her face very still, and found out that Wednesday under the oak tree had been just enough and not one swallow more.
She didn't move. She didn't breathe. She couldn't look at the fire and she couldn't look at the blood, so she looked at Walt's coat across the circle and counted the brass buttons on it, ten of them, one at a time, again, and again.
"That's broken," Deb was saying. "Kevin, that's broken. Somebody get the medic. Somebody get Gail from the medic tent." One of the crew got up and ran. Deb turned around on her knees and looked at Hazel. Her face had gone hard and flat. "What was that?"
"I'm sorry," said Hazel.
"What was that? That was a strike. That was a hand strike to the head."
"I know. It was an accident. I'm so sorry."
"It didn't look like an accident. It looked like you knew exactly what you were doing."
Hazel didn't say anything to that, because there wasn't anything true she could say.
"Deb," said Dutch, through the blood. "Deb, she didn't mean it. I walked into it. I ran right into it."
"She put her hand in your face, Kevin."
"Because I ran into it."
"Kevin, shut up and lie down." Deb stood up. She looked at Hazel for a long time, still on one knee in the sand in the coat and the hat and the plume. The look wasn't angry. Hazel almost wished it was. It was the look of someone recalculating.
"You're done," said Deb. "Combat, I mean. You're out of combat for the rest of the event. You don't touch a sword. You don't go in the battle tomorrow. You can stay, you can play, you can sit in the tavern and be a pirate all you want, but if I see you with a sword in your hand again I'll put you in your car and drive you home myself. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Hazel.
"I'm writing it up."
"I understand."
Deb looked at her a moment longer. "Good," she said, and turned around and knelt back down beside Dutch.
The medic was a nurse from Baltimore called Gail who played a druid, and she came down the path in a green cloak with a real first aid kit, and packed Dutch's nose with gauze, and said he'd need to go to the hospital in Annapolis in the morning and have it set. Dutch said that was fine. Dutch said it was the best fight he'd had in years. Dutch, sitting in the sand with gauze sticking out of both nostrils and blood down the front of his shirt, said it so loudly and so often that eventually Walt had to tell him to stop, and two of the crew helped him up the path toward the cabins.
As he went past Hazel, he stopped. He held out his hand. Hazel looked at it, and then took it, and he shook hers, his whole hand around it.
"Next year," he said thickly. "Rematch. No hands."
"No hands," said Hazel.
He went away up the path. Walt came over and stood next to her, with his back to the fire, and looked at the water with his hands behind his back.
"He's still first mate," said Walt. "You know that."
"I know."
"Crew law. Strike to the head's a forfeit."
"I know, Walt."
Walt didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, without looking at her, "Where'd you learn that?"
Hazel looked at the water. Out in the middle of the pond the fire lay on it in long red streaks, broken up by the ripples.
"From someone," she said, "who had me watching his back."
Walt nodded slowly, as if that answered something, and patted her twice on the shoulder, the way Mr. Corcoran used to pat the counter, only it wasn't like that at all. Then he went back to the far side of the fire, and after a while Pip found the drumstick again, and somebody started singing, and the crew of the Salt Widow went back to telling lies, a little quieter than before.
Benched
Hazel walked away from the fire along the edge of the water until the noise of it was behind her and the dark was all around.
She stopped at the end of the sand, where the reeds started, and stood there looking at her left hand. It looked like a hand. The palm was clean. There was nothing on it. She closed it and opened it again.
She didn't hear Sophie come. She never did, unless Sophie wanted her to. One moment she was alone and the next moment there was a small warm weight against her side, and an arm through hers, and a head on her shoulder, and the smell of herbs.
They stood like that for a while.
"I went up to the cabins," said Sophie eventually.
"Is he okay?"
"Gail gave him something for the pain. He's lying on his bunk with the gauze in, holding an ice pack on his face. He's got his whole cabin around him." Sophie paused. "He's telling the story."
"Which story?"
"How Red broke his nose." Sophie's voice was very even. "He's doing all the voices. He does you really well. He does your hat."
Hazel laughed. It hurt a little.
"He says you're the fastest person he's ever seen," said Sophie. "He says he's been doing this six years and he's never seen anybody move like that. He says next year he's going to train all year and come back and kick your butt. He's very excited." She lifted her head off Hazel's shoulder and looked at her. "Pip's in there too. Pip's writing it all down. In a notebook. For the crew history."
"Oh God."
"Page one."
Hazel put her free hand over her face.
"Soph," she said through it. "I didn't even think. I didn't think at all. It was just there. Like on the roof. He got me turned around, Soph. He got the fire on my back, and he came at me, and it was just there."
"I know."
"He taught me that. Thirty years he taught me. Use what's free. Never fight fair. If there's a hand and nobody's watching it, use the hand." She took her hand off her face and looked at it again. "Thirty years, and I'm at a fake beach in Maryland with a foam sword, and he's still in there."
Sophie didn't say anything to that. She slid her hand down Hazel's arm, and took the left hand, the one that had done it, and laced her fingers through it, and held on.
They stood there by the reeds for a long time, holding hands, looking at the pond with the lights of the faire floating in it, and behind them the crew of the Salt Widow sang a song about a girl in a harbor town who waited for her sailor and he never came home, all of them together, badly, loud.
They watched the battle the next night from the porch of the Drowned Rat.
The whole LARP fought in it, every faction, a hundred people or more, up and down the hill in the torchlight with foam swords and foam axes and foam arrows, shouting and charging and falling down dead and getting up again and charging back. The Salt Widow fought on the side of the Court of Ash, because Lady Morwenna had come to Walt that afternoon and asked, very politely, with a lace choker around her throat, and Walt had said yes before she finished the question. Dutch fought with gauze still in his nose and a bandage across his face, and shouted louder than anyone. Pip fought and died eleven times.
Hazel sat on the porch rail with her boots up and the cutlass across her knees, unchecked, untouched. Sophie sat in her lap with a pitcher of cider. From up there they could see the whole thing, the torches and the charges and the fallen getting up and the lines breaking and forming again, like a painting of a battle that someone had decided to let move.
"You okay?" said Sophie.
"I'm okay."
"You wanted to be down there."
"I wanted to be down there," said Hazel. She watched Pip go charging up the hill alone with his plastic dagger at a line of knights and die immediately, very dramatically, in a heap. "This is good too."
When it was over, the pirates and the Court of Ash had lost, badly, and nobody cared at all. They all came back down to the tavern in a big muddy shouting crowd, and Walt bought the first round, in fake gold, and Dutch made Hazel tell the story of breaking his nose so he could correct her, and Pip read the whole thing out of his notebook standing on a bench, and Lady Morwenna kissed Hazel on the cheek on her way past and whispered "pirates don't do repeats" into her ear, and laughed, and went off to her own table with her hand at her throat.
At four in the morning they went back to cabin nine and lay down on the bottom bunk in their costumes, in a heap, because neither of them could be bothered to take them off, and Hazel lay there in the dark with her hat on her chest and Sophie's braids across her face and the coins on the brim clinking very faintly every time Sophie breathed, which she did, sometimes, out of habit, when she was happy.
North
They left on Sunday night, after the faire had mostly emptied out.
They said goodbye in the gravel lot. Walt shook Hazel's hand and told her the Salt Widow would be at the spring event in April, at a campground in Pennsylvania, and there'd be a place at the fire if she wanted it. Dutch hugged her with his bandaged face, carefully. Pip didn't say anything at all. He stood next to his mother's station wagon with his felt eye patch pushed up on his forehead and his notebook under his arm and looked at Hazel as if he were trying to memorize her, and when she put her hand on his head and messed up his hair, he turned bright red and got in the car.
Marguerite had packed up her shop. Deb was taking down the Logistics tent. When she saw them crossing the lot toward the bike, she stopped with a tent pole in each hand.
"Red," she said.
"Deb."
Deb looked at her for a moment. "Spring event's in April," she said.
"So I hear."
"You come, you check that sword with me first."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And keep your hands to yourself."
"Yes, ma'am."
Deb nodded once, and went back to her tent.
The bike started on the second kick. The engine filled up the dark. Sophie climbed on behind her and put her arms around Hazel's waist and her cheek against the back of her jacket, the leather one, the plain one, and held on tighter than she needed to, and Hazel didn't say anything about it.
They went out through the gate under the board that said HUZZAH and up the county road through the woods to the highway, and then north.
It was a long way. The bike went up I-95 in the dark through Baltimore and over the Susquehanna, through the corner of Delaware with the refineries burning their little flames on the horizon, and into Pennsylvania. Hazel didn't point at anything. She kept both hands on the grips for once. Somewhere past Wilmington she started humming something, off-key, a shanty from the fire on the beach, the one about the girl in the harbor town, and felt Sophie start humming it too, behind her, against her back, and neither of them knew all the words.
The sky over the river was still black. They had hours.
The lights came up out of the dark ahead of them, a long low line of them along the water, and then the bridges, and then, beside the road, in the headlight, a green sign with white letters.
PHILADELPHIA.
Hazel read it going past. She felt Sophie lift her head off her back to read it too, and then put her cheek down again, and hold on.
The coat and the hat and the cutlass and the bodice and the apron with the little embroidered leaves were somewhere, the way things are somewhere when you've stopped needing to think about them. The money was somewhere too. In Sophie's inside pocket, buttoned shut, there was a Polaroid in a paper folder with a gold crest on the front, and in Sophie's pouch on her belt, with the herbs, there was a note folded in half that said RED on the outside. And in Hazel's left hand, on the grip, there was nothing at all, and she held it there and kept it steady all the way down off the interstate and into the city, and didn't once let go.