The Silver Hawk 1

How much of the world would have changed if I hadn’t decided that one of the lads needed his sleep during his watch?

It seemed such a small thing at the time, a kindness, no more than that. The boy had already gone through two watches back-to-back, trying to cover for his brother who’d fallen ill from the damp. Gavin was one of those lads you could never bring yourself to scold. Young, but steady. Always did his duty, never complained, and never once cried, even when he saw things no boy should ever have to see.

The kind of boy that made you remember what innocence used to look like.

I found him half-dozing by the gunwale, his eyes glassy and his head bobbing with the rhythm of the ship. The creak of timbers and the slap of the waves were like a lullaby he couldn’t resist. I smiled in spite of myself, took him by the shoulders, and led him below deck.

He didn’t protest, just murmured something half-coherent as I sat him down on an empty berth. I pulled a rough blanket over him and for a brief moment, he looked like he could’ve been any boy, sleeping safe at home. Not one of us poor souls trapped in this floating coffin of sweat and tar.

“Let the boy rest,” I whispered, almost to myself. “He’s earned it.”

Then came the voice.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

The words were like a cannon blast in the quiet. The officer’s voice, echoed down the companionway before he appeared. A heavy man, his boots striking each step with the sound of judgment itself. His lantern cast jagged shadows against the planks as he peered about, eyes like coals in the dark.

I froze. If he saw Gavin asleep during watch, he’d have the lad flogged, twenty lashes, maybe more. Enough to scar him for life, if not kill him.

So I did the only thing I could think to do.

I jumped onto the berth and threw the blanket over us both, covering Gavin with my body. I could feel him stir beneath me, tense and terrified, but I pressed him down and whispered, “Stay quiet.”

Then I snarled up at the sound of the officer’s boots, voice thick with false irritation. “Sod off, I’m trying to—”

I didn’t get to finish.

A rough hand seized me by the neck and yanked me clean off the berth. The air left my lungs as my feet left the floor. His breath hit me next, sour with rotgut and rage.

“You blasted filth!” he spat, flecks of rum and spit striking my face as he shook me.

The lantern swung wildly, casting the scene in lurid motion. Gavin was still half-hidden in the shadows. I prayed he’d have the sense not to move.

The officer hauled me up the ladder by the collar, dragging me toward the deck. My boots scraped the rungs, my head struck the hatch edge as we emerged into the harsh daylight. The tar-smell was heavy in the air, mixed with sweat and salt and the sting of punishment waiting to happen.

The morning watch, my watch was already out, brushing the deck with their tar brooms. The heat of the sun made the mixture bubble, the smoke rising like some foul incense. The smell filled my nose, thick and choking, as I was pulled across the boards.

The work was silent, as everyone realized something was going on. Better to be silent and doing the duty that they hated, rather than allow themselves to become marred in the attention of some terrible thing.

Yes, better to be silent on this hellship, rather than try to finally stick up for one of the lads who was now about to be punished.

As I was shoved into the captain’s quarters, the room smelled of cheap wine and old tobacco, stale comforts for a man who ate well in port and starved his crew at sea. Captain Walter Graves lay half-slumped in the shadows, a snarling, half-asleep oaf whose bulk swallowed the chair he occupied. His face was puffy with indulgence, lips stained from the last bottle he’d finished, and his eyes glittered with the lazy cruelty of a man who’d been given power and never learned responsibility. His spectacles smudged and dirty like he did not care for them at all as they rested on his face.

Graves was no captain in any meaningful sense. He had the title and the bell, the ledger and the whip, but not the steel. He fattened himself on fine wines and port dinners while the crew slept hungry in their hammocks. In port he schmoozed with petty officials and merchants who tolerated him because he was “Master of a Ship.”

At sea he lorded it over men who had nothing left to give.

“What is this?” he barked, voice oily with sleep. “You brought me young Master Roberts?”

“I have, Captain,” the officer answered. He straightened, eyes cold, and I rose with him, dust on my breeches, the bandages beneath my shirt an ache against my ribs. The officer stepped back, hands steady on his belt, and explained in clipped words how he’d found one of the lads asleep during his watch. 

That lad, being me.

Graves snorted. “I didn’t take him for lazy,” he said, then laughed, a wet, unpleasant sound. For a heartbeat he let the shadows play across his face before he let himself walk into the weak morning light. His spectacles caught the lantern’s glow and flashed like two dull stars.

“He was protecting someone,” Graves observed, folding his hands as if this were a curious trifle. “Always the young Silver Hawk, protecting the little birds.” His mouth curved. The humor didn’t reach his eyes. The color drained from his face, his features falling into hard, dark planes, as if he’d been carved out of something that never knew mercy.

He leaned back, the chair groaning under him, and for a moment he was that terrible thing sailors feared: a man who could decide a life with whim. “I’ll be honest,” he said slowly. “I don’t want to flog you, boy. Tell me the name of the one you’re protecting, and I’ll make sure no harm comes to you.”

His question hung between us like a coin, an offering wrapped in poison. A choice dressed in mercy but built to trap.

I planted my feet and stood still, the bandage at my ribs a tight, constant ache. “And to the one I give up?” I asked, forcing the words past the grit in my teeth.

“The lash, of course,” Graves replied with a smile that showed too many yellow teeth. “God doesn’t abide laziness, and neither do I. Fifty lashes ought to keep him awake, a reminder for the lot of you.”

There was a bitter calculation beneath his casual cruelty. Most men barely survived twenty on this ship; the unlucky ones were cut loose and dumped into the sea, their bodies claimed by the water or worse, turned to “long pork” to feed the hungry hull we dragged with us. The thought of it made my stomach turn.

The choice, if it could be called that, was obvious. I kept my mouth shut.

“Not talking, aye?” Graves said, mock disappointment softening his voice. “Suit yourself.” He waved a hand, the motion almost bored. “Master Roberts has earned fifty lashes!” he boomed. “Bring the crew. Let them see what becomes of laziness.”

Outside, the morning was obscene in its beauty, the kind of calm the Caribbean held like a secret. The sea lay flat as a sheet of glass, the sky a pale, endless blue. It was the kind of day poets praised and drowned men cursed. The light laughed off the brass fittings and gilded the ship in gold as if to mock every wound and fear aboard.

The wood beneath my stomach was hot enough to blister flesh, and the sun had already stolen the last of my pallor, baking me into something brittle and dry. My skin cracked beneath the sweat and salt, and every breath I took was thick with the smell of tar, saltwater, and the faint sweetness of rot that lived in the hull.

A rot I would soon have to repair, soon enough.

I turned my head, squinting past the blur of sweat, to see the man who would have his pound of flesh from me, the overseer of this floating hell, Captain Walter Graves. He stood before the assembled crew like some parody of a monarch, his coat a peacock display of dyed blue silk and polished brass. His posture dripped with arrogance; his smile was a knife. Around him stood his lieutenants, officers with greasy queues and rotting souls, eager for the spectacle of punishment.

The rest of the crew,thirty broken boys and a handful of hardened tars who served as our ship’s sorry heartbeat, watched in silence. Their faces were carved in sun and shadow, eyes glassy with fear and pity. We all knew this ritual by heart. None of us were strangers to the lash.

Graves raised his voice, clear and cruel, carrying easily across the deck. “You all know the crime,” he declared, his tone as cold as the northern wind. “Laziness.”

A murmur ran through the men, barely audible. *Laziness.* The word was absurd. I had spent the night patching torn sailcloth, hauling barrels, repairing the pump that kept the ship from drowning beneath the weight of her sins. But the truth didn’t matter on the *Whispering Gale*. Not to Graves.

The only truth that mattered was his, and today it declared that I would bleed.

“Laziness,” he repeated, as though it were some grand crime against God and the Crown. “And such indolence cannot go unpunished aboard my vessel.”

My wrists twitched against the rope. I wanted to spit in his face, to call him the coward he was, the man who slept through storms while the rest of us prayed for dawn, who sold human souls in the colonies like grain. But I only drew in a breath, slow and deliberate, and waited. If he wanted his spectacle, let him have it. I would not give him fear.

Graves took a step closer, his shadow cutting across my chest. “The punishment,” he said, voice almost gleeful now, “shall be administered by my own hand. It is only fitting.”

He said it for the officers, not for me. For them, it was theater. For him, it was pleasure.

I turned my gaze toward the horizon instead, where the sea met the sky in an endless line of freedom I could never reach. Beyond that, I imagined the islands—Saint-Domingue, Tortuga, the Spanish Main. Lands where men were free, or at least freer than this. And somewhere in that dream, I imagined a ship not yet mine, but one that waited in the recesses of my future, as if fate had carved it into the waves themselves.

Graves spoke again, the words a drone beneath the sea’s slow breathing. I heard him only in fragments. How he saved our lives. Gave us purpose… chose this life.

What a joke of it all.

We were not a crew by choice. We were prisoners. Some had been pressed into service by desperate parents who’d hoped a berth at sea might save a boy from starving at home; others had been hauled from ships Graves had raided for supplies, boys whose luck had run thin and whose names had been crossed off by fortune. A few had simply been unlucky enough to dream of running to America and to be caught mid-escape. Now forced to work in a slaver’s hellhole until we died, and were unceremoniously dumped into the sea.

And me… I had no memory that felt like a beginning before the Whispering Gale. Only flashes remained: the bitter tang of tobacco, a woman’s laugh like a bell across a quay—her hand on my cheek, smelling of rum and gunpowder—a harbor at dusk that might have been home. Images that might be memory or might be the cruel inventions of a sleep-starved brain. They were all I had left of who I might once have been.

That and a name that I wasn’t even sure was my own. Henry Roberts.

We were boys, all of us in some fashion, simple, stupid, worn down until our souls felt like wet sails left to mildew. We would be damned for the choices we never made.

Graves’ shadow lengthened across my back; the deck’s planks grew hot beneath me. The boatswain loomed with the whip coiled like a sleeping snake. Then the other officer appeared… William Blackthorne, stride sure, face that belonged to a man who had kept something of himself despite the ship’s rottenness.

The only man who saw us as human, instead of another slave.

“You’re late, Blackthorne!” Graves barked, baring his teeth like a dog. “I should have you flogged for this insolence.”

Blackthorne didn’t flinch. He moved with a slow, deliberate calm that drew attention like a tide. “You won’t,” he said, voice warm but edged. There was a hand at Graves’ holster, fingers closing on the metal of a pistol, the flint snapped back with a soft, dangerous click. The crew shifted; something like hope passed along the men at Blackthorne’s presence.

“I grow tired of your defiance,” Graves said, low and dangerous. “I should put a bullet through you and be done with it.”

“Then hurry up and do it,” came my answer, more reckless than brave. I tasted salt on my tongue and something in the boat rose at Blackthorne’s side, a readiness that replaced the dull resignation. Knives were eased from sheaths; hands found grips. The ship that had been a coffin breathed like a beast waking.

“Get into line.” Graves ordered. “Pirate.”

I heard the resignation in Blackthorne’s silence as he pressed a cord of leather into my teeth. “Count them, lad,” he muttered, too low for Graves. “We’ll tally the debt in lead.”

Silence closed like a lid. The world narrowed to the creak of rigging, the cry of gulls that wheeled above like indifferent saints, and the soft rustle of ropes.

Crack.

The first lash split skin like canvas.

Crack.

The second drew blood that hissed on the hot wood.

Crack.

The third was for show, before it began and I refused to scream.

The sting made me draw breath through my teeth. For a blink the air itself seemed to flash, every nerve a chorus of voices that screamed in unison. Salt in the air tasted metallic and leathery; sweat burned in my eyes. Pain rolled through me in patient waves, a cruel rhythm that demanded a response my body refused to give… to surrender to the pain.

I felt my muscles clench, then loosen; my hands strained against the rope until the rawness bit into my skin. Around me, the men watched, some with eyes turned away, unable to witness the humiliation; others with mouths pressed to a hard, silent line. A few held their breath as if silence could change the world. Blackthorne stood apart from them all, jaw set like flint, shoulders square. His presence was a promise in the wreck: that this was not the end of us, that someone still kept a ledger of what was owed.

Whether it be God, or ourselves, I don’t know.

But for the first time in what felt like years, I felt the terrible, ridiculous comfort of being seen. Of knowing that someone, still cared enough to risk a glance my way.

 A grimace from Garth, a twitch of a hand near a holster from William, a flicker of humanity amid the spectacle from everyone who was not one of Captain Grave’s monsters. It was a small thing, almost invisible beneath the noon sun, but in that moment of sunlit cruelty it felt enormous.

Then my thoughts began to thin, unraveling like old rope. The pain dulled only to return in waves. My mind drifted, pulled between memory and fantasy. I saw home. I saw calm seas. I saw my mother’s hands on a summer morning. Then those images cracked apart, replaced by the dull gray of the deck and the heavy sound of breath and rope and blood. Somewhere between sleep and delirium, one thought burned through it all, cold and bright as a nail through my skull:

This will end.

This has to end.

I clung to that thought the way a drowning man clings to a plank in an endless ocean, half prayer, half promise, half delusion. It wasn’t courage. It wasn’t even hope. It was defiance… the last thing a man owns before it’s beaten out of him.

Graves and his butchers would not last. The sea eats men like them eventually, and I swore that if it did not, I would. Their cruelty would be paid for in steel and powder, in cunning and in flame. 

I would be Gods Wrath upon this terrible ship, and justice would be done.

The sun beat down, merciless, bright as judgment itself. The next lash came and another. Each strike blurred into the next until they became rhythm, the ship itself joining the beat: the groan of timbers, the crack of leather, the hiss of salt on fresh wounds.

But beneath it all, beneath the pain and blood and fading awareness, something colder began to grow. Not hate. Not yet. Something slower, sharper, patient, like the edge of a knife being ground in silence. A hunger for justice.

I would wait. I would heal.  I would rise.

And when I did, they would die.

The Whispering Gale would no longer be their prison, their gallows. It would become what it was meant to be.

Freedom.

And then the flogging truly began. Fifty lashes.

The whip cracked and my back burned with hot metal:

And I screamed.