The rowboat nosed into the mangroves an hour before dusk, roots closing overhead like the ribs of an unfinished hull.
Bess shipped the oars and held the boat steady against a tangle of gray wood.
“This is as close as I go. Any closer, the whole shore sees us.”
“This is close enough.” Kofi stepped out into knee-deep water.
Mud sucked at his boots.
“If we’re not back by full dark, you row for the ship. Don’t wait. Don’t come looking.”
Obi gripped the gunwale.
“And if you’re only a little late?”
“Then you row anyway.”
Clementine didn’t look up from the shells she was threading between her fingers.
“Go on, then. The water’s quiet tonight.” She paused.
“Too quiet.”
Titus climbed out behind Kofi, machete across his back.
Theo followed with his cutlass at his hip and Persuasion shoved through his belt, grinning like a man headed to a dance.
“For the record, I love a covert mission. Very dramatic. Very little rowing on my part.”
“For the record, stop talking.”
Yaw came last.
He hadn’t said ten words since sunrise.
His hands kept finding the butts of his pistols and letting them go.
Kofi caught his arm at the edge of the trees.
“You’re sure about the boatman? The one at the port?”
“He remembered her. The mango scar on her chin, the way she hums when she’s scared.” Yaw’s throat moved.
“Sold to Pruitt’s place. Trelawny. Six years back. I sat on it the whole voyage. Didn’t want to hope out loud.”
“Then let’s go find out.”
Josiah Pruitt’s study smelled of mildew and cheap ink.
A ledger lay open on the desk.
Beside it sat a stack of letters, the top one sealed in gray wax stamped with a plain iron ring.
Pruitt closed the ledger before Kofi could read it.
“You’re not from around here, Mr.—”
“Samuel. Call me Samuel.”
“Samuel.” Pruitt tasted the name and didn’t like it.
He was a thin man, sweat-stained collar, eyes that kept sliding to the coin on the desk and back.
“Forty pounds for a cane girl. Generous. Suspiciously generous.”
“I pay for what I want. I don’t haggle over it.”
“And what do you want her for?”
“That’s my business.”
Pruitt laughed, a short dry sound.
“Fair enough.” He touched the coins, counted them with one finger, didn’t pick them up.
“Papers take time to draw proper. The magistrate has to seal them. Come back at moonrise.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Not in here, you won’t.” Pruitt stood and smiled too wide.
“Have a drink on the veranda. My man will bring rum.”
Kofi didn’t want the rum.
He wanted the papers, and he wanted to be gone.
But the man had counted the coin, and a man who counted coin usually wanted more of it.
He stepped out onto the veranda.
Behind him a door opened and shut at the back of the house.
Hooves struck the packed dirt of the yard and faded down the road.
Kofi didn’t turn around.
Yaw found her at the far end of the row.
She knelt in the dirt beside a cook fire, scraping a pot of rice with a flat stick.
Her hair was wrapped in faded blue cloth.
She was taller than he remembered.
Thinner.
A pale scar ran along her chin.
“Amara.”
She looked up.
Her eyes moved over his face, his pistols, his boots.
Nothing in them softened.
“Who’s asking?”
“You don’t—” He stopped.
“It’s been a long time.”
“Lots of men say that on this row.” She went back to the pot.
“Usually before they want something.”
He stood there with his mouth open.
Six years of words he’d practiced on the voyage, and none of them would come.
So he laughed instead, one helpless crooked laugh that showed his chipped front tooth.
The scraping stopped.
She stared at his mouth.
The stick hung still in her hand.
“The mango tree.”
“You dared me.”
“You climbed to the top branch to show off, and you fell and landed on your face.” Her voice shook.
“And you smiled at me with blood all down your chin like you’d won something.”
“I did win something. You laughed.”
“Yaw?”
“It’s me.”
She rose.
The pot tipped against her hip and she caught it without looking.
She stepped close and pressed her palm flat against his chest, as though testing whether he was solid.
“You were this tall.” Her other hand hovered at her own ribs.
“Skinny thing. Couldn’t lift a water bucket.”
“I build ships now. Stole one, actually.”
A laugh broke out of her, then a sob, then her fist struck his chest, hard, and struck it again.
“They told me Brook’s Reach sold everyone. I stopped counting years. I stopped thinking about your face so I wouldn’t lose my mind.”
“I never stopped thinking about yours.”
She held on to him.
He held on back.
They had ten minutes.
She showed him where a cane knife had slipped and opened her forearm the second summer.
He told her about the ship, about Toby’s cooking, about the monkey who stole buttons and hid them in a shirt pocket.
She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the overturned water trough, the pot of rice in her lap.
“A monkey,” she wheezed.
“You stole a lord’s ship and a lord’s monkey.”
“And a lord’s arm. Well. Kofi took the arm.”
” I come to find you Her laughter faded.
She looked at him a long moment.
“You’re not staying.”
“No. And neither are you. We’re leaving tonight.”
At the edge of the fields, the dogs started barking.
Kofi saw the torches before he heard the boots.
They crested the rise past the cane in a long, patient line.
Titus came running up from the boiling house.
“It’s the Navy. Twenty. Maybe more.”
Theo skidded in behind him, breathless.
Three men walked ahead of the line.
Captain Edmund Bell came first, his uniform spotless even here, his stride unhurried.
Sterling Brook limped at his shoulder, the empty right sleeve pinned flat to his coat, a pistol gripped in his left hand.
Isaiah Cross flanked them both, a coiled bullwhip at his hip, grinning.
“Kofi Brook.” Bell tested the name like a new blade.
“Shorter than I imagined.”
“You came a long way to measure me, Captain.”
“I came a long way to end you. The measuring is a courtesy.” Bell’s eyes moved across the yard.
“Mr. Pruitt tells me there’s a girl involved. Sentiment. It slows quarry down every time.”
Sterling raised the pistol.
The barrel wandered.
“He’s mine, Bell. You promised me his face.”
Cross cracked his knuckles.
“Plenty of face to go around, my lord. Pruitt told me where the girl is. I’ll fetch her.” He went toward the row.
Kofi’s blood went cold.
“Titus. Theo. Get to Yaw.”
“And leave you with—”
“GO.”
They ran.
The marines surged forward, and the yard broke into noise.
Bell drew his saber.
The blade caught the torchlight, and along its spine Kofi saw a pattern pressed into the steel.
Chain links.
“I’ve read every rumor about you, Brook. I’d like to see which ones are true.”
“Most of them are lies.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest are why you should’ve stayed in Kingston.”
They met in the dirt between the cane and the boiling house.
Kofi swung the way a man swings an adze, from the shoulder, heavy and straight.
Bell turned the blade aside with a flick of his wrist.
Kofi swung again.
Bell stepped half a pace back and let it pass, then touched Kofi’s shoulder with his point.
Blood ran warm down Kofi’s arm.
“Strong wrists. No form.” Bell circled.
“A carpenter with a sword.”
“Shipwright.”
“My apologies.”
A sound rose out of the ground.
Iron dragging across stone.
Slow.
Heavy.
It came from nowhere and everywhere, from under the dirt, from behind the cane.
Every torch in the yard leaned toward Bell.
Their flames shrank and went pale.
Kofi’s hands slowed.
His heart pounded so hard his vision pulsed.
The chain brand on Bell’s saber began to glow a dull, sick orange.
Black links burst out of the dirt at Kofi’s feet.
They lashed his wrists together, cold enough to burn, and yanked him down onto his knees.
His sword fell from fingers he couldn’t feel.
He stared at the chains.
He knew iron.
He’d worked iron his whole life, both his lives.
This iron had come out of nothing.
Sixty-seven years.
Not a rumor, not a whisper.
Nothing.
Bell laid the saber against his throat.
His eyes had gone the same dull orange as the brand.
“You didn’t know. How charming. You truly didn’t know what the world is made of.”
“ALIVE!” Sterling limped across the yard, face twisted.
“Bell, you swore it! I want him hanged in Kingston Square! I want to watch!”
Bell’s jaw tightened.
His eyes flicked toward Sterling for half a heartbeat.
Kofi’s hands were bound.
His legs weren’t.
Beside him stood the edge of the boiling house, open-sided, a row of copper vats over banked fires.
The nearest vat rested on a wooden trestle, and Kofi knew that trestle.
He’d built a hundred like it for hulls on the stocks.
The lashings were old.
The left leg sat on soft ground.
He kicked it out.
The trestle folded.
The vat tipped, and boiling cane syrup rolled out in a golden wave, hissing across the dirt toward Bell and Sterling.
Bell leaped back and dragged Sterling with him by the collar.
Sterling screamed as a splash caught his boot.
The chains on Kofi’s wrists flickered and fell away into smoke.
Bell flinched.
Pain crossed his face, sharp and sudden, and the orange light in the brand guttered to nothing.
He looked at Kofi across the steaming ground.
His voice came out very quiet.
“You’ve cost me something, Brook. I always collect.”
Kofi snatched up his sword.
“Put it on my tab.”
He ran for the row.
Yaw had Amara by the hand, the pot of rice still clutched under her other arm, when Cross stepped out of the cane ahead of them.
“Evening, cousin.” Cross’s smile widened.
“And the little cook. You two make it easy. Sentiment always leaves a trail.”
Yaw pushed Amara behind him.
“Get out of our way.”
“Can’t. Captain wants you, and I want the bonus.” He let the whip uncoil.
As it hit the dirt, the lash caught fire along its length, burning like a fuse.
“Nothing personal. I just know which side of the fence I’m on.”
Yaw drew and fired.
Cross was already moving.
The ball tore through cane stalks where his head had been.
The burning lash snapped out and wrapped Yaw’s gun arm, and Cross yanked, and Yaw hit the ground on his back hard enough to lose his breath.
Amara swung the iron pot into Cross’s ribs with both hands.
“Leave him ALONE!”
Cross staggered sideways, snarling.
He turned on her.
“Should’ve stayed in your lane.”
The knife came out of his belt and into her side before Yaw could get his feet under him.
Fast. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Dirty.
The way a man kills a hog.
Amara folded.
The pot fell with her.
Rice scattered across the dirt in a white spray.
Yaw heard someone screaming and understood it was him.
He tore the lash off his arm and came at Cross with his second pistol up.
He fired from three feet away.
Cross’s body folded like wet cloth.
Something bright tore free of it, a ball of flame no bigger than a fist, and whipped past the shot.
It circled Yaw faster than his eyes could follow, then slammed into his back and threw him face-first into the dirt.
Behind him, Cross’s body filled back out, and Cross stood in it again, laughing.
“Didn’t know I could do that, did you?”
Yaw rolled and swung the empty pistol like a club.
It cracked across Cross’s mouth and split his lip.
Cross spat blood.
Then he hit back.
A fistful of sand into Yaw’s eyes.
A boot into his ribs.
The burning lash across his chest, and his shirt smoking.
Yaw lay on his back, blind and gasping.
Cross raised the knife.
His eyes dropped to the rice at his feet.
His face changed.
His lip twitched.
His hand shook.
“No. Not now. Not now—”
He dropped to his knees in the dirt, the knife forgotten beside him.
His lips moved.
His finger touched one grain, then the next.
“One. Two. Three. Four…”
Yaw blinked the sand out of his eyes.
He didn’t understand what he was seeing.
He didn’t need to.
He crawled.
Amara lay on her side with both hands pressed to the wound.
Her dress had gone dark.
He pulled her into his lap.
“Amara. Amara, look at me.”
Her eyes found him.
Her hand came up, slow, and touched his mouth.
Her thumb found the chipped tooth.
“Still smiling.” A breath.
“Even now.”
“Don’t. Stay. Please stay.”
“Told you.” Her voice was almost nothing.
“Should’ve said it sooner. Both of us.”
Her hand slid down from his face.
“Amara?”
Her eyes stayed open.
“Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three…”
Boots pounded out of the cane.
Titus hit Yaw from the side and hauled him up bodily.
Theo stood over them with his cutlass out, staring at Cross on his knees counting rice in the dark.
“What in God’s name—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Titus dragged Yaw backward.
“Move.”
“Let me GO, Titus! He killed her! He’s right THERE!”
“And he’ll kill you the second he’s done counting. She didn’t die for that. MOVE.”
Yaw tore free, bent, and lifted Amara into his arms.
Nobody tried to stop him.
Kofi met them at the shore path.
He saw Yaw’s face, saw what he carried, and didn’t speak.
Marines crashed through the trees behind them.
Kofi ran with the others onto the old dock that jutted out toward the mangroves, planks groaning under their weight.
He’d marked it on the walk in.
The third support post from the shore was black with rot.
“Keep going. Get to the boat.”
“Kofi—”
“GO.”
They went.
Kofi waited on the planks until the first two marines pounded onto the dock behind him, bayonets leveled.
Then he threw his shoulder into the post.
It snapped.
The dock sagged, twisted, and collapsed into the water, taking both marines down with it in a crash of timber and shouting.
Kofi jumped for the shallows and ran.
Bell walked out onto what was left of the dock and stood at its broken edge.
The saber hung from his hand.
His arm still ached where the brand had gone dark.
Sterling limped up behind him, one boot scalded and blistered.
“You’re letting him go?”
“I’m letting him understand.” Bell watched the dark shape of the rowboat pull away through the roots.
“Tonight he learned the world has rules he cannot see. Next time, he’ll come to me afraid. Frightened men are easy to bind.”
Cross came last, brushing rice off his knees, lip swollen and bleeding.
He held up the end of his whip.
Yaw’s blood darkened the lash.
“Next time, Captain. I’ve got his second’s blood now. I can follow that anywhere.”
“Good.” Bell sheathed the saber.
“Then next time, we don’t chase. We wait where he’s going.”
Bess pulled the oars so hard the boat lurched with every stroke.
Obi sat pressed against Ezinne.
Nobody spoke.
Yaw sat in the stern with Amara across his knees.
Blood had soaked his shirt to the skin.
Titus reached to help lay her down and Yaw didn’t look at him, only shook his head once, and Titus drew back his hand.
Clementine sat across from them.
She had seen the chains rise out of the dirt from the mangroves.
She had seen the ball of fire.
Her fingers had closed around the charms at her throat and stayed there, knuckles pale, while she stared at the shore with eyes that knew more than her mouth would say.
Kofi sat in the bow and watched the torches of Trelawny shrink behind them.
His wrists still burned where the chains had held him.
Behind him, Yaw started to hum.
Low.
Broken.
An old tune, one a girl used to hum when she was scared.
He hummed it all the way back to the ship.