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FIC: sipara, the pirate and the privateer au
He never did. Your father had let you do as you wished, and taken in everything you did with pride. On your thirteenth birthday, you lost two fingers to a gharial, and the most he’d said, when wrapping you up, was you’d have to learn to be careful.
On your sixteenth birthday, you stole one of your aunts ship, and you took to the seas.
On your nineteenth birthday, you got married to the woman you’ve spent the last two years trying to kill.
Your father never tried to dampen your spirits, but sometimes, you wish he had.
The first wedding lasts three weeks, and you hate every minute of it.
“I’ve seen the way you look at her, you know,” Pheres tells you, digging the comb into your curls. “If you can’t stand her, why did you go and marry her?”
He tugs. You whine, and he just hums in response, separating out the next chunk of curls with a ruthless efficiency. Your hair’s too short for braids: has been, ever since that first raid where one of the sailors had grabbed you by them and yanked. But that doesn’t stop Pheres from trying.
“Because I had to.”
"Did you impregnate her, Sipara? That seems a little implausible,” he says, curious, “but I suppose, if this is a case of you protecting Lady Ryalis’s dignity, I can understand. Of course, you could’ve just asked me to do it. I like her well enough. The court would think it plausible. Or Riccin. Heaven only knows they’ve got enough bastards running around already –”
“No!” you squall, furious at the images that brings to mind. (You and Quanin - Pheres and Quanin - Riccin and Quanin - each one is just worse than the last.) “Go to hell!”
He laughs, taps the hard metal of the comb against your tender scalp. "She’s not kin. She’s not even your friend. Whatever could have you so obliged to endure this suffering?”
You don’t have an answer.
Here’s what you know about Quanin Ryalis, privateer, the rightful heir of the Fenêtre à Mer:
She’s older than you.
("Old enough to be going blind,” you’d crowed, the first time she’d shot at you and the bullet had swung wide.)
She’s a better fencer than you.
(She cornered you once in the belly of a steamer you’d captured, when your crew were fighting with her people high above, and you’d thought to sneak away with the captain’s lockbox. The first sweep of her saber had knocked the claymore out of your hands. The second had cut right through the skin of your face. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of your officer, the third would’ve gone straight through your heart.)
She’s awful, and dreadful, and one day, you’re going to see her strung her up from the rigging in your steamer –
– but like hell if you’re going to let Lantis fucking Ryalis do it for you.
“You might as well kill me,” is the first thing she says when your crew brings her to you.
Chasing down Ryalis had started off as a convenience: her boat was so much larger, and the targets she took were so much better. Easier to swing in when she was neck-deep in the raid and steal the best of treasures out from under her, then risk your crew trying to take a war galleon by yourself.
But it’d turned into a sport in itself: seeing how close you could get, how much you could steal, how narrow of an escape you could make before that saber of hers caught flesh instead of cloth.
(Seeing how red her face could get from the sheer rage of seeing you where she least expected it.)
It’d turned into a game, but you’d never thought of what would happen when you won.
“Don’t be a sore loser, Q,” you sing, scrubbing at your face. There’s blood in your mouth and on your teeth, because she actually went and punched you in those last few, hectic minutes. You’d be more impressed if she wasn’t wearing fucking rings. “I’m not going to kill you. How stupid do you think I bloody am?”
“No, we’re going to ransom you.” You clap your hands together, bouncing up onto the tips of your boots. “No warrant can be issued for a ransom,” you crow. “So long as your family pays, it’s perfectly legal under the Queen’s law - it’s not even a ransom, really, it’s just a sort of finder’s fee -”
“My family isn’t going to pay.”
She looks dour. She isn’t joking, not at all, and just that quick, your elation’s trickling out like gold at a brothel. This isn’t going the way you planned! She was supposed to be witty, furious, practically frothing around each barbed comment, not - not –
- defeated.
It’s not fun if she’s given up.
“Of course they’re going to pay.” You’re not smiling anymore. “Your father is one of the richest men –”
“No. I am one of the richest women in the court, and that is through my mother’s line.” There’s that familiar, infuriating flicker of pride. She lifts her chin, stubborn, staring down at you from that sloped nose like she doesn’t have a gun to her back.
And then the light dies. “Or I was,” she says, “until that bastard stole it.”
Your family is very close-knit. There’s five different lines in it, and a sprawling tangle of bloodlines and relations too thickly woven for you to ever break through. Everyone older than you is an aunt, and everyone younger is a cousin. Blood doesn’t matter, and neither does the name; what matters is that they’re kin, and that’s freed you from disaster more times than you’d ever admit.
You forget every family isn’t like that.
“And you can get it back if you get married,” you say, dubious, and she grimaces.
Your crew’s collected in a circle around the two of you. (Her crew is down below, bound in the cells ‘til you reach a port to drop them.) Someone’s brought out the wine they found in Quanin’s private stores, and the lot of you have been taking turns passing it around.
It says something, maybe, that this time, she doesn’t protest when someone holds it to her lips.
“Archaic law,” she says when she’s taken her swig, and it’s been passed to the next. “My mother was a strong believer in the ways of the old ones, and Lantis found a justice who supported him.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s because you’re a savage and a simpleton. One cannot flout the old ways. It isn’t done.”
The first wedding is for your family, to soothe their nerves. Petitioning the queen for the right to marry in court is a process that takes months: there are papers to be signed, justices to be met. The proper courting rituals to meet, to prove this isn’t some marriage of convenience.
(When Quanin tells you this, you laugh in her face.)
But your family isn’t of the court, for all that they’re trying: you’re a brood of diplomats and ambassadors and merchants, and there’s different standards to meet there, to gain their approval for the official court registrars.
(Quanin charms your father, who is elated. She charms Pheres, who is distraught and amused in turn, and accuses you of all sorts of terrible plans afflicted on an innocent woman. She does not charm Daedal, who pulls you aside to ask you what you’re thinking, but it’s worth it for the look on Quanin’s face when your grandmother turns on her about her intentions.)
The second wedding is for the court, and the justice, and for her family, to prove your legality.
You still hate every minute of it, but it’s worth it, afterwards, for the duel -
- and to see Quanin with her sword at her cousins neck, her signet bright on her hand.
After the wedding, your rooms have been merged. As separate households in the courts, you’d been given your own suites, but a couple only needs one.
(When you’d slunk back to your rooms just to check, you’d found Pheres had already seized it. “I left you a bed,” he’d said mildly, when you’d protested. “It’s over by the cloak rack. Do you really want to sleep in here?”)
All of your things were there, neatly sorted out by some earnest maid, and so you’d collapsed on the bed, still bedecked in the frills the ceremony had demanded. “You can sleep on the rug,” you tell her.
She rolls her eyes. You take that as agreement.
(”It’s alright if you hate her, but, Sipa, dear…”)
She’s brushing out her hair at the vanity. In the low lights of the fireplace, it looks lovely. She looks lovely.
But not in the way you’d always thought someone you just married should. There’s nothing warm about it. You’ve spent all day staring at her face, pretending that the two of you share something earnest, something real, but –
“Sipara,” she says, looking back at you.
– all you want to do when you see that aristocratic face is to break it.
(”You’d best make sure she feels the same.”)
“If I see that wretched contraption near my ship again, I will shoot a hole through the hull properly this time, ceremony or no,” she tells you, and you laugh.
“I’m keeping the bed.” You kick off your shoes, just for the way she grimaces when they hit the wall. “But Pheres made up a cot for you in his closet, if the rug’s too hard.”