The Buccaneer's Apprentice by V. Briceland

accusation, Maxl cocked his head. For the first time, Nic noticed that both of his earlobes sported small loops of gold. “You carry shivarsta .” Nic shook his head. “ Shivarsta ,” repeated the pirate. “To stick. Big cutting …” Maxl made gnashing motions with his teeth.
    “Sword,” Nic said. For the first time he remembered the short sword he’d been carrying before his capture. Where was it? After looking frantically around the cave, he finally saw it plunged into the sand, close to the mouth. Its blade glowed, reflecting the fire just beyond the cave’s entrance. “Pirate sword.”
    “Pirate sword, yes, but special,” Maxl agreed. “You kill big, uh, importance man. Take hair. Make pirate sword.”
    “No,” Nic said, stiff. “I kill pirate. I mean, I killed the pirate. I took his shivarsta .”
    Maxl swallowed and seemed to understand. “You kill pirate?” he asked. “Ugly pirate? Holes in mouth, yes? Much thin?”
    “That’s the one.”
    “That is Xi! I know him. Terrible man. And you kill him?”
    “All by myself.” When Nic shrugged, Maxl seemed to shrink back a little. Fine. If fear inspired the man to shut his mouth for a few minutes, he’d make him scared. “I killed many pirates last night,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “You boarded my ship. You took my friends.”
    “Not Maxl! Maxl not part of Xi and them. I leave crew before that. Men you kill, bad men. Maxl not bad!”
    “Well, I killed every single bad man I could. I made the ship go boom!” he said, mimicking the noise of the yemeni alum exploding. “So my advice, signor, would be not to anger me too greatly. Understood?”
    Whether or not Maxl grasped everything completely, he at least nodded, his eyes wide. He seemed to regard Nic with a newfound respect. “You take hair?” he asked, his voice quiet. “You take dead man hair, pirate-killer? After boom? For Xi’s shivarsta? Make it yours?”
    “Maybe later I’ll have yours,” said Nic, growling slightly. That seemed to quiet the man completely.
    Once Nic was certain Maxl had snuffed his curiosity to ask any more, he spent a few moments inching forward across the sand until he was at the side of the old man lying on the sacks. He still breathed—there had been a few moments when Nic had worried they were sharing their space with a dead man. The man’s face wore the lines of sixty or more years of everyday living. What was left of his hair was thin and dry, and his long beard was uncombed. His long robes had once perhaps been fine, but sun and sea had reduced them to a bleached mass. A track of dried blood streaked his forehead. “Are you awake?” Nic felt foolish for even asking, when it was perfectly obvious the man was dead to the world.
    Or perhaps he wasn’t. At Nic’s question, the man stirred. His hand reached for his face, landing uncertainly on the prominent nose in its center, then batting away something imaginary. His mouth worked. “You’re really awake?” Nic asked, suddenly excited.
    The old man sighed. Slowly and with great deliberation, his eyelids flickered open. “Mmm?” he asked, through cracked lips.
    “ Hallo ?” Nic spoke no language other than his own, but he’d heard the merchants calling out to their customers in other tongues before. “ Ola? ”
    “ Oi! ” Maxl spoke up. When Nic turned, startled, he found the pirate watching with interest. “That how we do in Longdoun,” he volunteered.
    The old man must have heard Maxl’s outburst. The tip of his tongue shot out to wet his lips. He murmured a few syllables, none of which were recognizable to Nic’s ears.
    “He talk in Pays tongue,” Maxl announced with authority. Nic’s mouth twitched. How was he supposed to talk to someone in Azurite? Luckily, Maxl offered a solution. “I talk to him for you. Maxl talk good Pays tongue, just like they talk in Côte Nazze.”
    “Is it as good as your Cassafortean?” Nic said with a grimace.
    Maxl seemed to take it as a