How they ever managed to carry the injured from the cove to the house, no one could remember. There were many more mysteries though– for one thing, how had they been able to cling to the house and somehow repair its collapsed roof? The winds had been intense, howling with a fury they had never heard in its roars before. Jesse, who had stubbornly ignored the fact that he numbered among the injured, remembered only being drenched to the bone with freezing rain. Anna, weary with the cries and needs of fifty patients and the responsibility of being their solitary and minimally experienced nurse, later recalled only an urgent need to be warm, to light a fire, to curl up and sleep. And Luke remembered that it had been a struggle; at least, he remembered that much.

The entire company of surviving pirates and injured men had beached the two ships on the cove, hastily dropped anchor, and prepared for an ordeal. It sapped their barely recovered reserves of strength, and the deep sleep which encompassed all was probably the culprit in their loss of memory. Exhaustion drove all thoughts away, numbed every heart and steeled every nerve. Afterwards, all who had made it through collapsed on damp floors, on ruined chairs, broken tables. All succumbed to a slumber as heavy and undeniable as gravity.

On the second morning of the storm, the Pirate King’s house was besieged by a sizeable crowd of those who had been left behind: the bar maids, the singers, bedraggled boatmen, a scanty number of pirates’ wives, plantation workers, the house’s three servants– the whole entourage of a pirate crew, except without their usual demeanor. The bar maids had lost their giggles, the singers their flirtatious songs, the servants their charges. The wives retained the ability to scream and cry, but all had lost a fraction of their dignity and a sliver of their security. The islands lived and breathed the pirates who called them their base. Now that half of those pirates were gone, half of the islands seemed to have crumbled into the sea.

On the third morning of the storm, Anna had managed to push Jesse into a makeshift bed on the floor and persuaded him to sleep. Now with the help of other hastily appointed nurses, she could hover over the injured and the dying, linger over their faces, marvel silently at what she had lost...and what she had subsequently inherited: a legion of broken bodies, a sea of men as tough as the cracked leather of their muddied boots, the reversal of roles.

On the fourth morning, just after sunrise, she woke to a strange silence. A few paces away, Jesse was standing, obviously listening to the same absence of sound. As though he sensed that his sister was awake, he answered her unspoken question. “The eye of the storm. It will be quiet today. We should get ready for the second half.” And with that, he walked away, his gait no longer carefree, his posture no longer that of a cheerful young boy who had once swung from mast to mast with a dagger in his teeth and the sun on his shoulders. Anna pondered this, for a moment. She turned it over in her mind, examined it– examined the changes that had swept over them, sweeping their lives inside-out.

The light was gray and somehow fragile, when Anna stepped out of the house at last. Outside, many trees had been ripped from the ground, and the ocean was still churning in the aftermath of the storm. Anna climbed over the debris and made her way over to where Luke and Jesse were standing, the elder leaning on the younger for support. Wordlessly, they made room for her on the rain-beaten grass.

“There might be another two or three days of this storm. Will the house last through it?”

Jesse made no motion, no gesture. “It was built to be stronger than it seems.” He turned to Anna, his blue-gray eyes full of meaning that threatened to spill but was so skillfully controlled. “We’ll be fine, Sis.” Anna thought to herself that he had always been this way, that he had always taken care of her as though she were the younger and he the elder. She nodded, and returned to the house.

All the able-bodied men, and a good number of the women, streamed in and out of the house all day, making as many repairs as they could before the storm returned. Anna did not question her brothers when they told her she should stay inside. They had grown grim and serious-eyed, and she knew that they would be this way for quite some time. Instead, she paced between the rows of injured men lining the walls. Five of them were soldiers of the King’s Army, and these she had come to know by the tattoos of seven-pointed crowns on their arms.

Their leader, she had come to know by the name on his lips.

Lee had been placed in the farthest pallet, under a window that had been boarded up against the lashing winds. In his dreams he chased ships and laughing children, frogs and giants, a tall shadow that became a young girl with swords for wings. They grew from her shoulder blades, sliced through his hands. Once, he had wrested himself from the grip of his never-ending dreams and opened his eyes. Anna had been there, sitting at his side, trying to staunch the fever with cold cloths.

“Sarah,” he had said, and then he had tumbled back into sleep, still muttering the same name over and over again. Anna had paused, an arc of water spilling onto the floor where she knelt beside him.

Now she walked to him again, having run out of excuses not to. She was avoiding the young General. He was an endless reminder of a thousand things she wanted to forget, a ceaseless chanting of a name that she wanted only to deny as ever being hers. But Anna knew she could not deny it. She knew she was not–had never been–Anna Lyon. She had never been daughter to the Pirate King. Leaning over him, she carefully pulled the sheets back up to his chin. He had kicked them away again in his fitful sleep. But this time, he opened his eyes, a surge of terror ebbing away as his nightmares subsided. He blinked up at her, momentarily lost.

“Sarah,” he said again. She did not wince; merely looked away. “Sarah.” He groaned, sitting up with agony. A hand flew to the wound in his side, and the expression on his face told her that he had been fully expecting to find her cutlass still embedded between his ribs. All this time, Lee’s eyes remained fixed on her face. Anna knelt beside him silently, made a move to straighten the bedding that he had been lying on.

“You have been asleep for many days,” she said, heavily.

“Where am I...?”

“In the house of the Pirate King.” Her eyes flashed defiance at him. He did not look away, although the words she left unsaid were as sharp and unforgiving as a dagger.

“I thought I was dead.” He buried his face in his hands, hunched over with elbows against his knees. “Maybe it would have been better, to be dead.” And he turned to her as she was wringing out a cloth, reached out to touch her shoulder. “Why? Why didn’t you leave me for dead?”

“We are pirates, not heathens.”

Her words echoed in his mind. “Sarah...you’re not a pirate–”

There was a hollow splash as the water in the bowl spilled out over the floor. She had dropped the cloth, and now she turned on him with needles in her glare. “I am a pirate, and you would do well to watch your words in this house, General.” He thought she spat out the last word as though it had been acid in her mouth.

“I apologize...”

Anna, her breathing grown ragged with sudden anger, felt it abating now. She mopped up the spill with the cloth she had been wringing and got up to leave, muttering something about getting a fresh one. He reached out again, weakly, and grasped at the tattered hem of her dress. It had grown ragged and the lines were uneven, what with all the cloth she had torn out of it for bandages.

“Sarah...you don’t remember me...but I remember you. I always remembered you.” Lee knew that he had her attention, but he also knew she would not stay. Not yet. And indeed, she gave him one quick glance, then walked away.

The storm renewed itself afresh that very evening. Jesse, insisting that he was perfectly alright, hauled himself up to the second floor to see about getting a few of the bedrooms in order. The ground floor, although certainly a large space, was crowded with the conscious and the unconscious, and he planned to move some of the less injured upstairs. Luke situated himself in the kitchen, where the cold stone floor was slowly growing warmer as a few of the women cooked a heavily rationed meal. He said very little to them as they bustled about, and thought only of the storm. It was unusual. They had never lasted so long. He had heard of the blizzards of the north–how they would howl on for days, never losing strength until the very last minute, when the winds would die down as suddenly as they had risen. But here, on the islands, the storms had never been this terrible or this endless.

Anna was doling out soup, her face somber and her bones aching from kneeling and then standing, kneeling and then standing. Lee could see her, from where he leaned against the chilly wall behind his pile of bedding. His side was aching, a dull throbbing that neither ceased nor slowed. A few times she had come to change the bandages, and he had watched her rip strips from her own tattered dress in order to bind his wound tight. He marveled at this, for he had known only a girl who had never dared to venture into the woods or splash in the pond with him, for fear of getting mud on her little dress.

But then, he reminded himself, he had known a child. This girl, this Anna, as they called her, was entirely different. He would never have imagined her to be so fierce, and he had certainly never imagined that it would be his childhood friend who would bring him so close to death.

Anna reached the General and set down the pot of soup she had been balancing. He was the last one. She picked up a bowl and filled it with soup, its fragrant steam warming the air. He reached for it gratefully, and she waited to see if he could manage his spoon. Anna could see the determination on his face as he worked to feed himself. She could sense that he did not want her to have to do it for him. She sighed quietly, filled a bowl for herself, and considered getting up. She could sit in the kitchen with Luke...at least it would be warmer there. But already she was exhausted; she felt her knees might give way if she made any attempt to stand at this point. So, somewhat reluctantly, she stayed there beside Lee’s rumpled pallet, sipping her soup and surveying the others on the floor.

“Sarah...” Lee said, before he could catch himself. “Anna, I mean. You look tired.”

Anna waited until he had finished before she asked the question that had been bothering her for nearly a week, now. “Why do you call me Sarah?” She watched him intently, gathered his now empty bowl and piled it on top of hers.

“Because that is the only name I have ever known you to have.”

“How...how do you know me?” Her voice quavered, flickered like a candle.

“I have known you since you were three years old...” Lee held her gaze, knowing he had to choose his words carefully, but completely at a loss as to how he would accomplish it. “The baker and his wife adopted a little girl, and they lived on our street.”

“Where...? Where did you....where did we live?”

“Arholt. Port Arholt.”

“And...do you remember...when they took me?” Lee thought that if it were possible to hear a heart breaking, he could hear it quite clearly just then.

“I have always remembered,” he said, for it was true. The memory of that night had propelled him to this moment, had fueled his ambitions and his every endeavor. How could he have forgotten? Lee saw her look down at her knees, and though her voice was low, he heard it when she asked him what he remembered.

“There was a storm–I ran out into the street, and I saw him carrying you away. The Pirate King, that is. You weren’t asleep, you reached out with your hand...I’ve always thought...that maybe you saw me.”

“I don’t know,” she said, a tear splashing onto her dress. Her hands were curled into fists so tightly that the knuckles burned white in the dimming lantern light. The others were going to sleep. “I only know the nightmares...the fire and the way it was shining on the water, someone screaming that same name...that name you use...Sarah.” Anna was terrified. She had been pushing the truth away, subconsciously burying the memory of her father’s words. But it was impossible, now.

“Are you...are you alright...?”

The storm was raging, catching the house in its angry embrace. They could hear the timbers creaking, feel the entire building straining to hold itself together. Anna felt that her body was trying to do the same thing: hold itself together. Every muscle and tendon seemed to be laboring for control, working to prevent her mind from flying apart.

“....all my life, I have known nothing but this.” Anna gestured slightly to the rest of the house, as though it symbolized her history, held within its beams and rafters everything she ever was. “All my life, or at least for as long as my memories go back, I have belonged to this family...all my life, I have been a pirate.”

“Did they never tell you who you were?”

Anna laughed darkly. “My father told me, a few minutes before you killed him. No– don’t apologize. My father told me that I had been taken from my true family, that he was not really my father. All this took place as the two I have always known to be my brothers were battling for their lives and the only home I have ever known was being torn apart.” There was a quiet, pent-up rage in her eyes that seemed to bring the storm inside. Lee was tempted to look away, but did not.

“You don’t understand. I am a General of the King’s Army– I could not have gone against my orders!”

“You destroyed my life,” she said, in a voice so cold that it felt like she had driven the scimitar back into his side. He thought that might have been preferable. Tears were streaming down her face, and she made no move to wipe them away. Lee reached for her, but he was too late–-in an instant, Anna had run off to the kitchens, leaving the bowls on the floor and the room even colder than it had been.