“I’ll be honest,” Theo said after they’d taken a drink. “I can’t believe all of us are still alive. Did your man here tell you he nearly blew himself up before hanging off the side of a moving ship for an hour in the dark?”
Ace whipped her head toward Zander, a surprised smile on her face.
“He didn’t. In fact, I know very little of this adventure you three had without me.” She slammed her mug on the table authoritatively. “Spill.”
Over the next several hours, they told Ace everything. The four companions took the threads of their lives over those past few days and braided them together again, laughing, gasping, crying together. They cried particularly over the loss of their fellow pirates, both to death and to capture. And in the end, they shared a bitter celebration over the story of Ignacio Sanz’s long-awaited defeat.
After they’d cheered over the death of the fake husband/pirate and drained their cups, Zander asked Yarrow what happened after they parted ways near the storehouses.
“When I got to the stables and realized half of the pens were filled with sleeping men, I guessed the two of you would have your hands full as well. I snuck past the men, quietly unlocking the pens of the horses as I did, and took a single horse for myself. After I mounted, I screamed like a banshee to wake the men up, dared them to come catch me, and bolted out of there. Once they’d all mounted their own steeds and they came streaming out, I lit the grenadier and tossed it to the stables.”
Zander let out a sharp breath, and Yarrow looked at him questioningly.
“I was afraid you’d killed the horses.”
Theo laughed, but Yarrow looked affronted. “Of course not. The beasts did nothing wrong. I couldn’t get them all out on my own without waking the men though, and then I would have been shot. So, I let them release the horses for me, and then I led them away from the estate and toward Almogia. There’s a sharp turn about a kilometer from the Sanz estate that leads behind a hill. You remember it, right?” Yarrow looked to Theo, who shrugged. “Anyway, I lost them there, then I backtracked while they continued looking for me. It bought a little time.”
“And then Theo found you?” Zander asked, looking back and forth between them.
“I ran for the storehouses after I left you,” Theo explained, jutting his chin toward Zander. “I thought maybe Yarrow had gone there straight away. I was on my way back to the stables when I saw them riding up the main road.”
“It was around that time men started spilling out of the Sanz estate like ants.” Yarrow emphasized the final word as if they could crush the ants using their voice. “I heard Theo whistle and I went to him, and we intercepted the group of men sent to the storehouses with the second grenadier. We didn’t know Ignacio was among the group. If we had, I would have presented his head to you when you emerged from that tunnel.”
Yarrow looked pointedly at Ace. Ace wore a touched smile at the kind gesture.
“It was shortly after that I saw you both,” Yarrow said, spreading their hands as if to indicate their presence together was the next and final piece of the story.
Zander sat back in his chair. He felt light, not just from the wine, but from unburdening himself of the previous week’s experiences.
“I guess that’s it then,” he said. “That’s the whole adventure.”
He looked at Ace and smiled, then looked back at his friends, who were smiling at each other, and a piece of him knew that no matter how long the four of them lived, it would never be the end of their adventure. And he was right.
“What now, Captain?” Theo asked, wrapping his arm around Yarrow’s shoulder.
“Well, it would seem we have another rescue to conduct,” Ace said, placing her elbows on the table. “I heard word about the men who paid Sanz a bounty for our crewmates while I was there. They were fellow privateers.”
Theo scowled, silently mouthing the words “fake pirates.”
“Word has it, they brought our friends right here to Malaga.” Ace tapped her pointer finger on the table in emphasis. “They plan to sail up the coast toward Barcelona, paying as many bounties for pirates as they can along the way. A mass execution is planned for next month in Madrid.”
“Next month?” Zander said. “That sounds like plenty of time to me.”
Theo snapped his fingers excitedly. “Yes!” he said. “Let’s rescue more of our fucking friends. And some other guys, too, I guess.”
“Right,” Ace said. “Now, where did you say my boat is?”
Theo grimaced, as if he’d forgotten all about the damaged sloop they left stranded off the coast of Portugal. Yarrow looked at Zander, and he looked at Yarrow, each expecting the other to describe the location of the empty, fog-covered beach where they’d last seen The Valerian. Seeing each other at a loss, both of them burst into laughter. Theo soon joined suit, and eventually Ace laughed as well, shaking her head at them.
“You drunk fools couldn’t pinpoint your own asses on a map,” she said, waving her hand. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
Ace placed her hand on top of Zander’s, and their eyes met. As Theo and Yarrow continued to laugh, peppering each other with kisses, Ace and Zander simply stared at each other. The world narrowed, for each of them, to one blaringly bright and beautiful point.
Two souls—one hopelessly wandering, the other running for her life—yet they’d somehow met in the middle and become each other’s solid ground in which to grow roots. Their lives until that point had been but a series of fractal paths leading ever inward, toward each other.
“Tomorrow,” Zander echoed, squeezing Ace’s hand in a promise.
“And the next day, and the day after that,” Ace said.
Forever.
And indeed, they did—figure it out, that is.
Ace, Zander, Theo, and Yarrow retrieved their abandoned sloop and saved what remained of their pirate crew, plus a few more. It was their first pirate mission in the Mediterranean, a new frontier that opened to them immediately upon the death of Ignacio Sanz and the shadow he cast over Ace’s life.
Ace visited her Uncle Hugo as soon as she’d saved her crew and finished repairs on The Valerian, leaving Theo and Yarrow in charge of the sloop and the resting crew. It would not be their last visit to Uncle Hugo and Cristian, who continued living in Almogia for the rest of their lives, happy and in love.
The Valerian crew continued to sail the Mediterranean after that, staying in the region over half the year and spending the remaining months in the Caribbean. They retained their strict moral code, taking only what they needed to remain free and alive, and prolonging their lives far beyond the most ambitious of pirates. And they remained wild and free, with none but the ocean and their love for each other as their master.
Some of the original crew stayed for the rest of their lives, including Bagu, who took up the role of Boatswain when Theo decided to dedicate himself more fervently to his writing. Saila stayed as well, mostly to be near Bagu, as did Sean, George, and Amir. Others found new paths to tread, like Santiago, who met a woman at one of their stops in Portugal and gave up his life at sea to stay with her. Douglas retired shortly after being rescued, and Echo left several years later.
Zander met more of Ace’s family—cousins, aunts, uncles—in Spain and Jamaica. He even met her last living grandparent, Chandace’s father. He eventually took Ace to England, where she met most of his brothers and sisters. Martha insisted they stay with her for a few days, and doted on her baby brother, whom she told her husband was a “sea merchant—just a particularly flamboyant one.” By the time they visited, Zander had been a pirate for nearly a decade, and his parents, he found, had died. The loss simply became another pain shared by Zander and Ace, as they shared all things.
Zander and Ace had many more adventures together. They would go on to rescue each other many more times before the end. Theo and Yarrow remained by their sides as well, unfailingly devoted to one another and to their friends. Together, the four of them lived so fully, with such reckless love and abandon, Theo would eventually fill four handwritten books with tales of their adventures.
By the time this particular life had been wrung dry, both A and Z had found what their hearts longed for, what their souls required. For Ace, it was freedom—and the courage to keep it. Never again was she asked to sacrifice the life her heart desired for the sake of her propriety, nor that of a man’s, and never again did she say “yes” when her heart knew she must say “no.”
For Zander, the dreams he had as a little boy of a life filled with love and adventure came true, and they were far better than he could ever have imagined. The warmth and belonging he’d missed as a child, the community he longed for as an adult, and the adventure he was always too scared to ask for all fell in his lap that day in the jungle, ushered in with a kiss. And in the end, he became a rather remarkable pirate.
