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The trees glowed green in the afternoon. Heavy-leaved they were, and rustling. The wind had settled down again and the air lay idle and indolent beneath the canopy. He was quite sure he ought to have been worried: they would be late to meet his contact, which meant they wouldn’t get the manifests and schedules, which meant that this errand would be not much more than a bit of sight-seeing. (A sight: Edward Teach with his hair pulled back from his face, rounded beard not doing much to mask the sharpness of his cheekbones and his jaw. That’s a sight for Stede, there in the too-warm, too-still, too-perfumed jungle. He wondered if the smell that had taken over every breath would persist, if he pushed his nose behind Ed’s ear. If he bit him, there, at the side of his throat — confectionery, or sea water?)
Then: Ed coming to a sudden stop in front of him, Stede stumbling behind, fingertips on the warm leather of his hip for balance. The trees didn't part, but they pushed through a tangle of vine and branch and shrub, two men tripping over their own feet, two pirates blundering through the landscape, two lost animals following their noses and instincts home.
Stede hadn’t been much of a farmer, but he was quite sure that trees didn’t normally bear fruit and flowers all at once. These seemed to (didn’t they), or the sun was getting to him and he hadn’t noticed. The impression as they stepped into the grove was one of stars, or light off the sea: thousands of white blossoms everywhere, pointed petals and shivery-tall pistils and all, and over and under and around and through all of it, that scent like a secret unfolding. It was everywhere, heady and inexorable as their lurching path through the scrub from the shore.
It smelled like sunshine, berries; it filled and exploded in the caverns in his skull and lingered, sunset after a long, bright day. It smelled like —
— “like every fucking fruit I’ve ever tasted —”
— like the hidden pink hearts of things, cracked open.