Burning Bright (35 page)

He fell, screaming, and she ran, tearing down the hill and away, away as fast as she could go, which wasn’t fast at all as she still had to watch her footing. The undergrowth tore at the soles of her feet and slapped her legs and face, but she heard shots being fired and knew they were following her. She had nowhere to go, no advantage but her so-narrow lead, and those men were shod and armed and larger than she. She needed somewhere to hide because as spread out as they were, she could not burn them all.

She could hear little above the sound of her feet crashing through the forest and the whistling, panting sound her breath made as she ran, but occasionally there was a gunshot, and shouts behind her and to her left, downhill toward the ocean. They had already cut her off in that direction. She turned and ran uphill. If they hadn’t seen her, if all they knew was that she was a Scorcher, she might be able to use that to her advantage and slip away somewhere they would believe she was too heavy and too wide to fit.

She left the hand-leaved trees behind for a thicker forest of evergreens, their branches all low to the ground and too thick for anyone to see through—but the shouts were closer now, and she didn’t think she could climb even one of those sturdy, many-limbed trees before they caught her. What she needed was to disappear, like a Bounder, but there was no use thinking like that.
And they certainly do not have a Bounder, or I would be captured already.

She was moving more sluggishly now, her legs burning with exertion, her feet cut and bleeding. Soon she would have to turn and fight, hoping her fire was enough to kill them all, knowing with dread certainty it was not.

She reached a ridge that looked familiar, though she had never seen it from this height; it was the one where her stream ran, the one that terminated in her beach. If only someone had seen her beacon!

She stumbled and rolled a little way, terror of being caught flooding through her, and she realized she had tripped over a crevice in the rocks, a narrow slit that was all but invisible in the late afternoon light. An idea struck her, and she scrambled back to examine the crevice. It opened up past the entrance into a tiny cave that seemed big enough for her to fit inside, a perfect hiding place. She hesitated. If she climbed into it now they would see she had suddenly disappeared, look more closely at the ground, and find her, trapped neatly for them to capture. She would have to find a way to make them believe she was still running.

She stood still for a moment, clearly silhouetted against the blue clouds filling the eastern sky, then swept her hand across the horizon. As if in reply, a row of trees between herself and the pirates blazed high and bright. Quickly, she set another line of trees burning, in the direction she would be if she had continued to run, and as quickly she struggled into the crevice, scraping her face and arms on its edges. Then she huddled in tight, and prayed they wouldn’t trip as she had.

Soon she heard cursing and shouting as men approached from two directions. They didn’t seem to be running anymore; they might be as tired as she was. Someone called out, “Go around both ends at once, but go quickly. The Scorcher might try that trick again.”

“You saw Morton! Don’t want to get caught like that, burned like a roast!”

“You’ll do as I say or by damn I’ll roast you myself! Now get moving!”

More grumbling, some of it close to Elinor’s hiding place, and she squeezed her legs more tightly to her body and tried not to breathe too loudly.

“… damn Scorchers and their damn talent…” said the man who’d complained about being burned like a roast, and then he was past, and then they were all past, and Elinor continued to hug herself tightly because she could not quite believe they weren’t simply toying with her.

Once they passed the second fire line, and didn’t see her, they might think to search this area more closely. Or they might believe she had hidden in a tree and would spend some time thrashing about trying to flush her out. In either case, she couldn’t afford to move because she had nowhere else to go that provided her so much concealment. She would spend the night there and pray fervently that the pirates would eventually give up and go home.

The crevice was damp and cold and smelled like wet stone, and it occurred to her it might have been inhabited, which sent her heart pounding again. She had been lucky all around, so lucky she hoped God would not see it as enough luck and decide not to send a ship her way. They had to come. She could not bear it much longer.

Hours passed. The sun set, and darkness filled Elinor’s crevice like damp, black wool that pressed against her throat and her eyelids. She could still hear shouting, though it was far away, and once or twice a gun fired, but then the night was silent. She dozed off, woke herself in terror that she’d snored and they had found her, dozed again, and then fell to shivering too hard to stay asleep.

When the blackness turned to grey and then to pink, it took her several minutes to realize the color meant day had come. She almost couldn’t unfold to climb out of her crevice, but once out, she ducked into the shelter of the trees and watched for a long time before she was convinced the pirates were actually gone.

She half-crawled, half-slid down the ridge until she reached the stream and put her whole face in the water to gulp it down. She was exhausted and light-headed, and her body felt as if those pirates had crushed it under their heavy-soled boots all night. The water helped clear her mind, enough that she was able to find her food store and eat several papayas, spitting out the bitter seeds, feeling too weak to break open anything with a more robust exterior.

Finally, she leaned back against the trunk of the evergreen, closed her eyes, and let despair overwhelm her. She was trapped on this island, and at some point those pirates
would
find her and that would be the end. Even if she could safely light another beacon, no one would ever see it. There was nothing else she could do. Ramsay and the rest of
Athena
’s men would go on mourning her, possibly, and then forget her, and no one would know about the pirate stronghold because Durrant was too stubborn to look for something hidden just within reach.

She struggled to her feet and stumbled back down to the beach. She was doomed; she might as well enjoy a nice wade in the warm surf. She rolled up her trouser legs, though she wasn’t sure why she bothered, since they had already been subjected to far worse than a wetting.

She remembered talking to Ramsay that day they had walked on the beach on Tenerife, the day that had seen the beginning of their friendship, and she stopped ankle-deep in the surf, her cut and bruised feet stinging from the salt water, her toes buried in the squishy wet sand, and let herself cry. It was completely self-indulgent, but she was a dead woman, and if that did not entitle her to cry, then nothing would.

Eventually her tears slowed to a trickle and she wiped her eyes, then grimaced at the sand she rubbed into them. She stooped to rinse her hands in the clear water and dabbed at her eyes, which could endure a little salt, then sighed and looked out across the water toward the empty horizon.

In the distance, like a bird settled on the water stretching its wings to fly, lay a ship, its sails billowing in the wind.

Elinor screamed, clapped her hands over her mouth, then took ten splashing steps toward the ship before sanity reasserted itself and reminded her she could not swim all the way to whatever ship that was. It would have been a true miracle if it had been
Athena
, but all she could tell was that it was one of the Navy’s frigates. She sloshed back to shore and ran along the beach, looking for the tallest tree she could find on the tree line, then set that one on fire, made it burn hot and bright against the cool green background, then extinguished it. She set it afire again, put it out, over and over again so its blinking light and drifting smoke would catch their eyes.

The ship came closer, and then, wonder of wonders, lowered its longboat. Elinor ran to the water’s edge, waving her hands and shouting, and then her memory dragged up the image of the two Navy ships lying at anchor in the pirates’ cove. No one had ever told her how many Navy ships the pirates had captured rather than destroyed. Evans was clever; he might have sent this ship to trick her, make her reveal herself so he could capture her. She had just made an enormous mistake.

She ran for the trees, then stopped with her hands on two trunks, heedless of the sap clinging to her palms. It was too late. If they were pirates and not Navy, they knew where she was and they would capture her no matter where she went. She couldn’t live in that crevice forever. Better to face whatever might come, and if that was fatalistic, it was all she could manage after what she had endured the last few days. She walked down to the water’s edge once more and bent to rinse the sap from her fingers. If they were pirates, she would kill as many of them as she could manage before they took her.

She stood, watching the boat approach, trying not to hope; most sailors wore slops, whatever was handy, so they and the pirates she’d seen were similar in appearance apart from their grooming, which was not something she could tell at this distance. The longboat came nearer, rowed by a dozen men with someone sitting in the…he was wearing a navy blue jacket with white facings, there was a single lieutenant’s epaulette on his shoulder, he even had the hat, he
was
an officer, and now Elinor waded out to meet them, unable to wait a moment longer. They reached her as she was standing waist-deep in water, swaying with the waves that rolled in to shore and reaching out to steady herself on the boat. The lieutenant doffed his hat and bowed without rising.

“Miss Pembroke?” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.”

In which Elinor returns home

he ship was
Syren
, a Colonial frigate based in Port Royal, and that was all Elinor learned before she was hustled aboard the ship, ushered to a great cabin identical to
Athena
’s, provided water for washing and a clean, slightly too large uniform (obviously they had no gown for her). She had her injured arm properly bound up and was fed a meal that did not feature any form of Caribbean flora whatsoever.

Near the end of her meal, Captain Horace joined her at the table. He was a round, red-cheeked man of about fifty, with carefully combed black hair and cheerful eyes like black currants. “I cannot believe the Navy saw my beacons,” Elinor said, then had to cover her mouth with her napkin because she had spoken with her mouth full of food. Had three days of being shipwrecked been enough to make her entirely forget her manners?

“Beacon? We saw no beacon. The Extraordinary Seer at Admiralty House found you,” Horace said, his Colonial accent doing strange things to his long vowels. “It’s unfortunate it took so long, but Sight isn’t always easy to interpret at first.”

“I don’t understand. Why would anyone have thought to look for me? Did you not all believe I was dead?”

Horace chuckled, making his cheeks wobble. “All but one. I heard Miles Ramsay made a pest of himself until he got the Seer to pay attention, and then—well, Admiralty House was in an uproar, I can tell you that.”