Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [69]
Crake looked at him, searching for a sign of mockery.
“I mean it,” he said. “I could really use your help, Crake. Thade will be there, and if he’s working with someone else, it’s our best chance of finding out what he’s up to.”
Crake was still watching him narrowly, indecision in his eyes.
“Look,” said Frey. “I know I have no right to ask. You’re a passenger. That’s what you signed on for. You don’t owe me anything.” He shrugged. “But, I mean, you and Bess …”
Bess shifted at the sound of her name, a quizzical coo coming from deep within her. Crake patted her back.
Frey coughed into his fist, looked away into the distance, and scratched his thigh. He was never very good with honesty. “You and Bess, the both of you saved our lives back in Tarlock Cove. I’ve kind of got to thinking that, well …” He shrugged again. Crake just kept on looking at him. The daemonist wasn’t making it easy. “What I’m saying—badly—is that I’ve started to think of you more as part of the crew, instead of just dead weight. I’m saying, well … Look, I don’t know what business you’re really on, or why you took up with me in the first place, but it’s getting to be pretty bloody handy having the two of you around. Especially if you’re gonna start making more little trinkets like those ear things.”
“That’s very kind of you, Frey,” said Crake. “Are you offering me a job?”
Frey hadn’t really thought about that. He only knew that he needed Crake to help him out. “Would you take one if I offered it?” he heard himself saying. “Part of the crew? Just ’til … well, until we get this whole mess sorted out. Then you could decide.”
“Do I get my cutlass back?”
“No!” Frey said quickly. “But I’ll cut you in on a share of what we make.”
“We don’t seem to make a great deal of anything.”
Frey made a face, conceding the point.
“What would I have to do in return?” Crake asked. He returned to scrubbing Bess’s massive back. A deep, echoing groan of pleasure came from the golem’s depths.
“Just … well, stick around. Help us out.”
“I thought I was doing that already.”
“You are! I mean …” Frey was getting frustrated. He was a supremely eloquent liar, but he struggled when he had to talk about things that he actually felt. It made him vulnerable, and that made him angry at himself. “I mean, you and Bess could just up and walk, right? It’s like you said back in Yortland: they’d never come looking for you. It’s me they’re after. And I’m sure you’ve other business you want to be getting on with, something to do with all that daemonism stuff you picked up.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’d like us to stay around?” Crake prompted.
“Yes.”
“And that you … well, that you need us.”
Frey didn’t like the triumphant tone creeping into Crake’s voice. “Yes,” he said warily.
“And what are you going to do next time someone puts a gun to my head and spins the barrel?”
Frey gritted his teeth. “Give them the ignition code to the Ketty Jay,” he said, glaring malevolently at the grass between his feet. “Probably.”
Crake grinned and gave Bess a quick buff on the hump. “You hear that, Bess? We’re pirates now!” Bess sang happily, a ghostly, off-key nursery rhyme.
“So you’ll go to the ball?” Frey asked.
“Alright,” he said. “Yes, I’ll go.”
Frey felt a flood of relief. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been counting on Crake’s cooperation until this moment.
“I have a question, though,” Crake said. There was something suspiciously casual in his voice, and Frey knew what he was about to ask. The sense of relief drained away, replaced by an unexpectedly awful sense of shame.
“Yes?” he asked, in the forlorn hope that Crake was thinking of something else.
He wasn’t. “The bullet,” said Crake. “When you let Macarde pull the trigger. Twice. You didn’t know which chamber the bullet was in, did you?”
Frey’s instincts told him to lie. This time, he ignored them. “No,” he said. Then, lamely: “Sorry about that.”
Crake nodded to himself. “Thought so.”
Frey opened his mouth to say something more, but he was interrupted by a cry from