A Midsummer Night's Dream
[History]
A native of Charleston--a city renowned for its rich pirate history--Kaile grew up to the tales his grandfather told: dashing pirates and wicked Spaniards, beautiful mermaids and billowing sails. Long before he even knew his true heritage he knew to love the legends of the free-spirited, untameable marauders of the high seas, and when he dreamt at night, he dreamt he was a pirate, saving princesses from the wicked Admiral of the Spanish Armada.
When he was eleven, his
grandfather was sent to a nursing home and the blow to his psyche
cracked open a shell he had built there himself. On a
winter's Sunday, a few days after Christmas, he discovered his
dreams were more truth than fiction. Truth, that is, in the
way that imagination is true, and memories are imagined.
What he remembers of Arcadia is distorted, filtered through a mist. His memories are snatches of a song, words from a poem scattered to the wind. He remembers battles on the open oceans beneath skies of lavender and rose--but he's forgotten the players in the drama. He remembers billowing white sails and shining gold masts, ornately carven railings in rosewood and mahogany, wood so resonant the sun made it sing--but he doesn't know the name of the ship. He remembers endless adventure, love and hope and tears and joy--but not the outcome of each adventure, nor whom he loved, for what he had hoped, nor who had wept for him, and who had brought him joy. He remembers the moons of Arcadia, a thousandfold brighter and more beautiful than the moon of this mortal plane--but the stars, the constellations by which he had sailed, are lost to him.
And he remembers stepping through the opened gates, shining and glorious...but no more.
He was stranded on a world that he only recognized with half his soul, and in which he had nothing to follow but the tides of fate. And the tides would lead him three years later to the ocean--where he had always known it would lead him.
At fourteen, his parents took him to the Caribbeans on a summer cruise. Being relatively well-off and fond of traveling, the family owned their own yacht, and made the trip by sea. It was, as it turned out, a grave mistake for his parents. On the eighth day of the trip, their yacht was set upon by a band of modern-day pirates led by a powerful, brutish man the others called Cards. Revolvers replaced by Uzis, clippers replaced by speedboats, rum and brandy replaced by marijuana and cocaine--the wolfpack of the ocean set upon his family's more or less defenseless vessel, and the pirates took the yacht and everything in it, leaving Kaile's parents to their fates on an island. He never saw them again.
Kaile himself, however, was kidnapped and kept as a cabin boy. Of course, it was not exactly what he had imagined for his life as a pirate, but a pirate sailed the winds of fortune wherever they might go. He was treated harshly at first, and somewhere amidst the beatings and the abuse his courts switched. He fought back, killed a man, and bought his way out of the doghouse in blood. Though he was young, he was hedonistic, vicious and selfish, and his edgy ways nevertheless earned the respect of the crew. As time wore on he established a certain, wary truce with the others that in turn developed into an almost-friendship--though Cards always remained distant to Kaile's heart. Unseelie or not, vengeance burned strong and the debt Cards owed Kaile's parents was not something he would forget.
Yet he was also Sidhe; even in a teenager, that birthright showed. Slowly, slowly, he gained the trust of the group, and though Cards retained control of his gang, Kaile was eventually looked to as a second-in-command. This did not please Cards. He did not like any threats to his control--imagined or otherwise--and four years later the mutual dislike came to a head.
The pack had grown to well over twenty men by then, and the fleet to three speedboats and two yachts. Kaile was eighteen--a boy on the verge of manhood--and the pirates were relaxing on a tiny island in the Bahamas, waiting for the heat to die down after yet another raid. Perhaps Cards had had a little too much to drink; perhaps it was something in the alignment of the planets--or maybe it was simply fate. At any rate, an argument started over the most trivial of things (what was it, anyway? Who got the gold Rolex and who got the diamond ring?) escalated into an all-out fight in which Kaile, at last, challenged Cards.
Cards picked the
medium: a poker game. Winner takes all: money, loot,
control, even the life of the other. Kaile accepted.
There's a reason they called him Cards. He was a cardsharp, a master of the games that no other could manage to beat. He knew every trick in the book, and then some. He might've been a professional gambler, only he had killed two men after a fight broke out over his cheating and turned to a life of blatant crime instead. But Kaile had been watching him, watching and learning--and his eyes were sharp. There's a reason they called him Kestrel, too.
They played a single hand. Cards shuffled. Kaile cut. Cards dealt. The hands were turned over, and Cards was grinning with a full house: three aces, two kings.
Kaile showed his hand.
Royal flush.
Cards couldn't believe it. Livid, screaming that Kaile was a cheater, he flung the cards into the sand and reached for his gun. Yet in the searing blindness of his rage, all rationality was suspended, all disbelief momentarily cast aside. Twelve rounds from two seventeenth-century revolvers that no living mortal could bear witness to felled the pirate and repaid the debt.
Yet when morning came, the crew woke to find Kaile gone, and four of the five ships still beached in the sand. The only one he took was the yacht that had once belonged to his parents. Perhaps he had seen the light of honor again in the morning sun; perhaps his courts had switched, and he had realized his place was not with these pirates who did not see the world as he did. Or perhaps, some whispered, he had been a ghost all along, a spirit that found his vengeance in blood and faded with the night...
...but of course, he isn't. Kaile is alive and well today, and back in the port where he was born. It's been seven years since he awakened to his memories and his heritage--perhaps it's time to seek out others of his kind.
