The Filibuster 1

The port of Marseilles was a blur of heat, salt, and noise, hard to grasp as anything more than a place where the King's reach grew thin, where gold and wine flowed freer than prayers, and where a man's debts could be lost as easily as they were made. To most, it was chaos. To me, it was a possibility.

News from the colonies whispered through every tavern and alley: Saint-Domingue, fertile, lawless, untamed, a buccaneer frontier where French steel and will could yet carve a new dominion against the Spanish and English vermin that infested those waters. My chance was waiting across the sea. My chance to prove myself.

But fortune, as ever, had a cruel humor.

I saw them before they saw me: King's soldiers, their uniforms dusted with the grit of travel, holding broadsides with my name printed bold and black. A traitor's name. A dead man's name. One slip of parchment that could damn not only me, but my father as well.

My father—bless his stubborn soul, as always. That overbearing old man who thought the world too dangerous for his only son, who called my dreams of the west childish fancy, as though I were some boy building ships from driftwood and smoke. He wanted me tethered to ledgers, land, and obedience. But I was no child. My ambitions were as real as the ships I meant to command.

I dreamed of a fleet: Spanish, Dutch, English prizes all flying the fleur-de-lis once I was done with them. Merchant vessels made French again, manned by loyal crews under my banner and His Majesty's. Together, we would revive our lost trade monopolies in the Antilles, driving our enemies from the sugar islands and reaping the riches of the New World.

For France, of course.

And for myself.

But my father, in all his self-righteous caution, seemed to forget that I was not born to live in his shadow. I was made for the sun and the sea.

Drawing a slow breath, I straightened my coat and set my hat upon my head. My heart pounded, but my step was steady. I walked through the throng with the kind of confidence that demanded the world move aside, and it did. The smell of tar, salt, and roasting fish filled the air as I made my way down the cobbled streets toward the docks.

Ahead, my ship waited… my future waited.

And as I walked, people parted like the tide before me, eyes glancing up just long enough to register the look of a man who had already decided his fate.

After all, who would dare stand in the way of Philippe Lefevre?

Before I could form an order, the answer hit me, like wind tearing through my hair as a ship cleared a headland.

My father sat amid the rigging and canvas, a slow column of pipe smoke curling from his mouth. The tobacco tasted of some far-off Caribbean cove or maybe a scrub of the Americas. It hardly mattered where it came from; in his face there was the familiar mission-stare, the look of a man convinced he'd been sent by Providence to correct his son's folly.

"Father," I said, voice sharp as a cutlass. "I see you wasted no time finding me."

He let the smoke slow and watched me with a patience that felt like an accusation. "You have no imagination, Philippe. You think yourself born for storms and glory, but you throw away a promising career—"

"What career?" I spat the word like sour wine. My disgust was a live thing now, rising hot from my gut. "Managing a warehouse that you swindled from a competitor who was drunk off his ass, and bet in a card game? Being granted some sleepy captaincy that keeps me chained to a coastal fort so you can brag about propriety at dinner? You didn't pay for ten years of a world-class sailing education just to have me nest in a ledger and rot."

His brow set into a line. I crossed the deck in three long strides and stopped close enough that the heat of his pipe warmed my sleeve. I turned in front of him, feeling the salt air swell my chest, tasting the freedom I'd been aching for since I could read a chart.

"I can offer you command of one of our eastern trading vessels, to the Ottomans," he said, as if reciting a favorable contract from memory. "The King would allow you to serve as assistant to the ambassador—"

The words hit me like a slap. I laughed then, a hard sound that tasted of salt and contempt. "Assist an ambassador in Constantinople? Play envoy to a court that will never see me as anything but a useful pawn? No. I am not your courier to the Sultan's table."

"You would be representing the family to powerful men," he insisted, voice cooling to the practiced calm of a man used to being obeyed.

"I am not your slave, Father." My finger jabbed at him, steady and unforgiving. The deck felt suddenly narrow enough to be a stage. "You think small. You stitch advantage into every handshake, and call it wisdom. I'll not be hemmed in by your ledger-bound horizons."

I picked up a sword that leaned against the rail—old steel, pocked by salt, but still useful for its intended purpose—and let its weight sit right in my hand. The metal sang soft and true. "The East? The courts and the eastern bows? No. The West is where men are remaking the world. The Americas. That's where fortunes are born and kingdoms reborn. That is where France will be remade, if we have the courage. Not in the Sultan's garden, not in your polite parlors, and certainly not by thinking less than grand—that bores me to tears."

He barked a laugh that had nothing of humor in it. "What do you propose then? Wave a black flag, take to piracy, seize vessels and press them into your private fleet?"

"Yes." The single word left me like a pledge. But it wasn't rash; it was planted in a seed from so many long conversations. "We'll take prizes when they are ours to take—under letters of marque from the Admiralty, if we must. We'll buy and refit ships, hire men who know the sea better than the court knows etiquette. We'll crew them with French sailors, with anyone hungry enough to sail under our name. We'll strike at the English and Spaniards where they are weakest, and bring the spoils to ports where they will buy freedom and loyalty. We will revive our lost trade monopolies in the Antilles by force and cunning if need be."

He watched me as if I were a child pretending to be a man. I let him watch. I wanted him to see the iron under the fire in my eyes.

"You would drag our name through scandal," he snapped. "You would make us liars to the crown, thieves to the world. And start wars where there is no need to."

"Or I would make us rich enough to buy bargains with the Crown itself and end them with my rampages," I shot back. "You speak of scandal as if it is a death knell. I speak of leverage, of profit, of a future that isn't bartered away in safe, polite increments. We can win back lost islands and make new ones ours. We will take sugar, timber, men, and ships, and we will turn them into power. Power of the sea—that's what the English have, and what we must have as well."

There was silence except for the creak of the spars and the slap of water against the hull. His pipe had died down to an ember without his breath to give it life. For the first time since he'd stepped aboard, the old man did not speak like a man with the final say.

"You are reckless," he murmured at last. "A foolish boy who thinks the world can bow to him."

"And you are cowardly, an old man who is set in his ways and doesn't think of anything new, because he is too old and too stupid to see." I returned, not cruelly, but with the clarity of a man who had bared his intention. Even if he saw cruelty in it, he didn't see any lie. "One day you'll thank me for it. Or you'll curse me. Either way, this is my will."

He folded his arms and stared out at the harbor, watching the city that had once promised him everything: wealth, respectability, the slow accrual of power. We stood like two weathered masts in a gust.

"Very well," he said after a time, voice low. "If you persist in this madness, do not come crying when the King's men read you the law."

"If they come," I said, and the deck answered me with a gust that seemed to approve, "I will greet them with gunpowder and the hulls of ships we took with our own hands. And I am sure that the King very much wants to have a man like me to raise unholy hell on the heathen, the English, and whoever stands in my way."

Father rose with the slow dignity of an old lion conceding nothing but time, and the fact he could no longer control his wayward cub, grown restless against the sea. The glow of the pipe flared again as he drew in, the ember pulsing like a coal of memory, then exhaled a long, curling ribbon of smoke that drifted between us like a veil. The scent of tobacco, rich and bitter, mixed with the salt air of the harbor, and for a moment the world felt suspended between past and present.

He looked at me, and in his eyes there was the weary resignation of a man who had spent his strength fighting a tide that would not turn. His voice came low, almost thoughtful. "Le Corsaire Fantôme," he said, the name rolling from his tongue like an invocation. "A fine ship. A barque built for maneuverability, three masts packed into a small, fast frame that could outrun a man-of-war and outmaneuver a brig."

He turned his gaze toward the sea, where the wind caught at his coat and made the pipe's ember glow like a signal light. "When I was fifteen," he continued, "she saved my life. Helped me outrun Barbary corsairs flying Ottoman colors off the coast of Cyprus and make my first fortune. We were trading silk, coffee, and coral then, bound for Toulon."

The edge of his mouth twitched into a small, humorless smile. "When the captain was killed and the crew mutinied, there were only ten of us left—ten loyal to God and Crown, against thirty men who'd turned butcher and heathen. She was bleeding from her hull, her sails torn like the wings of a wounded gull. But she still flew, boy. She still flew."

He took another draw from his pipe, his gaze far away now, beyond the quays and masts and gulls. "I was a boy with salt in my veins and madness in my eyes. I took the helm and drove her through a storm that would have swallowed lesser ships whole. When we made port, we were rich, broken, and alive. This ship," he said softly, "has a soul of her own."

Then his eyes met mine again, steel meeting steel. "She'll answer to no coward, no bureaucrat, and no fool chasing glory. If you're to claim her, you'd better be ready to bleed for her, Philippe. La Corsaire Fantôme doesn't serve men… she chooses them."

He paused at the rail, then turned as if the sea itself had given him consent. "She's yours now." The words felt simple and final, the sort of sentence that closes doors and opens abysses. He stepped from the deck with the slow, deliberate gait of a man who had finally let go of a stubborn rope. In that motion was an admission: he had done all he could to tether me, and now the tide had taken me anyway.

For a heartbeat, the declaration left me steadier than I expected, and then a cold, honest fear slid through my heart, bright and sharp as a rope-burn. Responsibility landed on my shoulders not as abstract glory but as weight: hull, rigging, men, and the hunger of the sea. La Corsaire Fantôme was no toy; she was a living calculus of timbers and temper, and to command her was to keep a promise I could not break.

He came close enough to touch, one hand resting for a moment on the rail between us like a benediction. "Treat her as you would your child," he said, voice low and grave. "Care for her, know her quirks, where she leaks, where she sings in the wind. Keep her well, and she will keep you safe."

He looked past me then, toward the tangle of ropes and the squat shadow of the hull. "You know the men, the crew. They're not saints, none of them, but they're loyal to the truth. Earn that loyalty. Prove it."

And then my father accepted that I had made my choice.

And finally, I gave my first order. "Mister Jacques," I said boldly. "Make ready to sail."