Under his plumed hat, the eye-holes of the pirate's bone-white masquerade mask are featureless black, no eyes living behind them. Beneath the mask, gore-stiffened hair juts.
Bloodbeard. Flayed-Face. None-Standing John.
He watches his crew dig into the island's soil, beside the dark square marker cut from foreign stone, deeply carved ×, and Penelope watches them and him both with dreadful foreboding.
"What awful thing are you seeking here?" she says finally, sounding stiff and mortifyingly frightened, and he turns his mask to her.
"Not a box of pretty gold coins," he says, his own voice rich and cruelly amused. "No, in the bottom of that hole will be a casket with a man in it. Did you ever hear of Father Teeth? They tell stories, still, in the eastern islands."
She shakes her head, lips pressed tight together in case they tremble.
"A priest, in a land far away," the pirate says. "He cooked seven infants into a stew and ate them. They found him out and took him to the Shining City, before the Hierophant; because in the way of the Shining Church, they prefer to stop the crimes of their priests, when they hear of them, but in a quiet way that doesn't get back to the flock. They found that his cannibal ritual had made him impervious to mens' punishment, so instead they bricked him in a cellar there, where it took a decade of subsisting on incautious rats and the worms of the earth for him to stop knocking on the walls, and then they brought him here and buried him in secret. But he didn't die, Miss Penelope; he's just swooned from hunger."
She shudders. "What does the likes of you want with a priest?"
"Every wedding needs one."
Her heart seizes for a moment within her chest, her legs unsteady beneath her. "Sir," she says, distant and cold, "you disappoint me. A boorish entitlement to a woman's flesh? That's all this is?"
"You're a blood descendant of van Helsing, he who took my face," Bloodbeard says.
"Boorish entitlement, a childish refusal to relinquish a grduge against a man generations dead, and hobby genealogy." She straightens her cuffs, refusing to linger over the wrist stained with manacle-bruises. "You, sir, are the lowest creature."
He nods judiciously. "Aye," he says. "Let the Seelie on their thrones of gorgeous lies play lawyers' games with words, and pretend we're not alike; I am the lowest creature, and my crew are the salt-stained scum of the Land of Milk and Honey, faerie thieves and murderers all, Miss Penelope. And I shall feed the priest to fatness, and we shall be married, and I shall have your flesh regardless, for the flesh van Helsing took."
"This will not stand," Penelope says through lips stiff and cold with fear.
"Your popinjay turned aside from pursuing me," the pirate says. "Who else do you imagine will come for you, Miss Penelope?" and reaches out to trail a fingertip across her cheek.
She holds herself still, white-knuckled, knowing nobody has abandoned her through choice, knowing Marcie will still try; but in this moment, very alone, and angry, and very much afraid.
