Xiomara

When Xiomara lost her hand, it hurt almost as much as the indignity of losing to an Evender. But only just. She stopped the bleeding, screwed a hook onto the seething stump, and decided to burn every plank that made up Even’s rickety maze of streets. Xiomara had three hands left. She would use them. 

***

There was a time when Even was the loudest, smelliest glob of civilization anywhere on the wide ocean, and travelers flocked to it like ants to amber. Xiomara was one of those, swept up inexorably in the vortex of humanity that all woke up one day on far flung islands, boarded a ship, and headed for the Great Dock.. 

When a person lands on the Great Dock, with no prospects, skills, or life story that they care to recall, they are faced with two options. They can get a nice clean respectable job as a fisherman or a carpenter or a singer, or, if they are not nice or clean or respectable and have no hope of fooling anyone into thinking that they were, they become a free-sail. Free-sails move from ship to ship as the winds take them, joining a new crew at each port and taking on whatever odd jobs their tyrannical captains require of them. It sounds swashbuckling and glamorous, but it is almost always a ticket to a gruesome end on the wrong end of another pirate’s cutlass. Most of the “odd jobs” that never seem to find permanent hires are in the storming and battling department of piratry, and it is a small wonder that when you dump a rusty dagger in the hands of a pre-tween who believes they’re a hero, it usually ends very poorly.

Xiomara learned the realities of free-sailing as soon as she set foot on The Groggy Cow, a bathtub of a vessel no more fit for seafaring than it was for barnacle collection. To say she set foot on it is only a half truth, for her first boot smashed cleanly through the rotting boards of the boat, and Xiomara had to grab on for dear life to avoid plummeting into the sloshing abyss below deck. When she looked up, she realized that she had not grabbed onto a barrel as she initially assumed, but the curled lip of a huge tortoise shell. The tortoise who owned it was not particularly pleased.

“Off off off you get!!” a sandpaper voice rasped out of the shell as two beady tan eyes glared hurtfully out from its depths. “You work ten years on this bucket of frog’s piss just to have every free-sailing lord-of-the-sea treat you like their own personal waste receptacle. And you, greener than the sea at the Twilight Marsh, I ought to push you down there myself!”  

Xiomara was taken aback, though she had never been one to care overly much about first impressions, and in her haste to escape the tortoise’s scornful words she stepped backwards and nearly fell into the hold once again. This time, a gnarled arm shot from the shell with astounding quickness and manicured claws wrapped around her belt, yanking her back from the brink. One by one, the creature’s other limbs joined the first outside the shell, until finally a flat and wizened head poked its way out and stared icily at Xiomara. “Well,” mumbled the turtle, a bit abashedly, “it wouldn’t really do us much good to drown you in filth on your first day, I suppose. I’m Granite”. In the early morning light the tortoise appeared a thousand years old, and he wiped a pair of ancient spectacles against the faded gray overcoat that Xiomara only now noticed draped around Granite’s shell. He was not a terribly imposing tortoise, but he was leathery and wise, and for most of her life he was to be Xiomara’s only friend.

 ***

Granite and Xiomara worked on the Cow for a year together, him in the lookouts nest and her the first to charge onto an enemy ship. Unlike the green new recruit he had assumed her to be, Xiomara was quick and extremely bloodthirsty, and whenever she was in combat she always found herself wanting to kill her adversary just a bit more than they ever wanted to kill her. Whenever the Cow would near another ship, just before they formed their bloody union Granite would call down to Xiomara where the dirtiest, roughest pirate was on the other boat, and so she also managed to avoid a fair number of sandwraiths and crabmen that would have undoubtedly ended her short free-sailing career. At the end of the year, the boat had all but fallen apart, and the two set off together in search of the next ship. 

On the fourth night aboard the Leaky Eagle, the third ship that Xiomara and Granite had found to free-sail, a typhoon raged across the ocean. In such moments one usually takes the sails down, sends a quick prayer up to whatever deity one hopes will be most responsive, and then settles down in the hold to at least die while tucked snuggly into bed. Captain Arch had apparently missed the memo on this bit of common sense, and Granite and Xiomara found themselves hauling lines and straining against the ropes in the middle of the night in the bruising rain. As wind lashed their faces and the rope grew vengeant and began to dig groves in their hands, they looked around at the shared misery of their crew. All around, the delirious pirates struggled fiercely with a wind that shook them off as easily as a dragon shrugs away a lizard’s bite. In their eyes, Xiomara witnessed a despair she’d seen only at the Great Dock, one she’d sworn to run from when she boarded that first pirate’s ship. She turned to Granite, and said very simply, “I am going to go kill that bastard.” 

Granite nodded, slowly, contemplating the horrifying implications of her statement, then he grunted his approval. It seemed to him that the captain’s death would not make the winds less tempestuous or the journey less brutal, but it would allow him to go back to bed. Noting his approval with what might have been surprise, Xiomara dropped the rope from her four blistered hands, and strode off to the captain’s cabin, murder on her mind. She found Arch sitting calmly at his desk, smoking a pipe and reading over his maps, and grabbed him squarely. One hand at his neck, two pinning his arms to their sides, and another to wrench that ridiculous captain’s hat from his undeserving head. She marched him out into the center of the tempest, held him up for all the crew to see, and then hurled Captain Johnathan Arch out into the depths of the raging sea. The crew looked expectantly, staring down at the captain’s hat at Xiomara’s side, then up at her unknowable face. She tossed the ornate hat to the ground, and gave it a good stompy that turned its bright red feather into a wilted puddle. “Well, if I were you I’d take down those sails and make for bed, but I’m no man’s captain” Xiomara bellowed, and then she grabbed her line again and began to haul it in.

 She and Granite left the Eagle soon after, and continued to wander. As they did so, rumors began to swirl about their feet, and it became known far and wide that Xiomara was a captain killer. Still, she was as quick with a blade as anyone on the seas, and Granite’s eyes remained as keen as all but Bill Brightfeather, so the pair continued to find work. Their captains soon began to treat them with an air of caution for the most part, and the few truly unredeemable monsters that they encountered seemed to all meet mysterious and terrible ends. 

Xiomara was lurking in a nameless tavern with an ear out for work when she first heard of Captain Briggs, and though she and Granite went on a number of free-sailing adventures before they came face to face with the man, she always hoped that their paths might one day cross. Finally, when Xiomara set foot once more on The Great Dock of Even, they did.  

Captain Briggs was a bear of a man, or rather part bear and part man, but he attempted to hide this fact with an elaborate routine of grooming and a dazzling golden coat. He stood as tall as any pirate at the Dock, and his ship towered over the others like a magnificent church, complete with bells which tolled the hours and a beautiful wooden angel that stood atop the center mast. Xiomara saw the beautiful ship from afar and shuddered, for she knew the horrors of its gilded clockwork. Briggs was known to be the cruelest of all captains, a man who believed as little in sleep as he did in proper rations. Pirates came under his service in a number of ways, through debts and delusions, but they seldom left unless it was by way of an ocean tomb. He was in equal measures greedy, heartless, and vicious.

Xiomara hated most people and all captains, but she hated Briggs worst of all, and when she saw his ship bobbing evilly in the port she hastened to find Granite and tell him of the fell omen. When she returned to the tavern he was not there, and her heart dropped out of her chest. They had traveled together for five long years, and she knew that if he were to leave her now it would not be by his own doing. 

The tavern door exploded off its hinges as four hands slammed into it with a hurricane’s anger, and Xiomara flew to the port in an anger few pirates had ever survived. As she went she kicked cobblestones loose with her thunderous steps, and windows shuddered as if subject to a sudden gale. Xiomara had learned to be a sly mutineer from her time with Granite, biding time patiently before exacting vengeance in the dead of night. She had learned how to make a thing look accidental, even if it must have been a particularly painful kind of accident. All of these thoughts of slyness and subterfuge left her mind as she stormed towards Briggs’ ship, replaced by the dead hum of red, red, red. When she reached the boat she took the gangplank at a sprint, and launched herself onto the deck with four swords raised skywards. She was just in time for tortoise stew.

The scene that met Xiomara on board Briggs’ pristine sanctum-on-the-sea was enough to curdle the saltiest of sailors. Briggs sat elegantly in a comically small wooden chair, napkin tucked daintily under his great bearish chin. A table sat before him, complete with a red checkered tablecloth, utensils fit for the mountainous creature that he was, and a gnarled old tortoise shell lying duly at its center. There was a chair opposite Briggs, with a small gray coat draped over its back.

He looked up expectantly at Xiomara, a hand clasping his soup spoon, and gestured idly at the other chair. She did not sit down, she did not look into his hateful beady eyes, she did not think about what lay on the table (or tried not to). Xiomara charged Briggs with four swords drawn, and tried very intently to end his life.

Unlike many people who are rich for no good reason at all, Captain Briggs had come into his wealth over a long and illustrious career of very hard work. He was a pirate hunter, probably the finest Even had ever seen, and when anyone got a little bit too eager to loot the local merchants or a little too willing to throw a captain overboard, he was the man to call. It was no surprise to him that his latest bounty was a skilled swordswoman or that her heart seemed almost as violent as his own, but it did come as some shock when she neatly severed his left leg from his body with the twin slices of two left hands. He howled, and yowled, and flailed in momentary panic, but Briggs was not a man who went down easily, and when Xiomara approached the thrashing captain to watch the light leave his eyes, his neck snapped forward in the blink of an eye and one of her hands disappeared into his fiendish gullet. 

Just as Briggs was readying his fanged jaws for a second feral bite, a cloaked figure vaulted jaggedly onto the deck, cloaked in a billowing black robe that almost hid a very famous figure. He screamed a warning to Xiomara, threw her a rope, and then leapt off the boat as fast as he had arrived, just before the neat blue uniforms of Even’s Port Guard mobbed the ship. When they arrived, there was no sign of Xiomara or the hooded figure, just a very irate and very partial bear man, cursing pirates in all their horrible wiliness.