Toby sewed the shroud at first light.
He sat cross-legged on the deck with Amara’s body wrapped in the cleanest sailcloth left aboard, a sailmaker’s needle in his big fingers, drawing the thread through in small, even stitches.
He hummed as he worked.
An old field tune with no words.
He didn’t seem to know he was doing it.
Kofi watched from the rail.
His shoulder throbbed where Bell’s point had opened it.
Clementine had packed the cut with something green that smelled of crushed leaves and burned like salt.
Yaw hadn’t moved since they’d laid her down.
He sat at her head with his back against the mainmast and his knees drawn up.
His shirt was still stiff with her blood.
Nobody had asked him to change it.
“Last stitch,” Toby said, low.
“The one over the face. You want to see her once more before I close it?”
Yaw didn’t answer.
“Son.”
“I saw her.” Yaw’s voice came out cracked and dry.
“I’ll see her every night for the rest of my life. Close it.”
Toby closed it.
Clementine called them together at midday.
She stood at the head of the shroud with her charms rattling at her throat, a small clay bowl of rum in one hand and a tin plate of cornbread in the other.
“On land we’d keep nine nights for her. Sing her across. Feed her. Tell her stories so she knows she’s remembered and doesn’t wander looking for us.” She set the plate at Amara’s feet and poured a thread of rum onto the deck boards.
“The sea won’t wait nine nights. So we keep the first one here, and we keep the other eight wherever we are when they come. You hear me?”
“We hear you,” Bess said.
“Then somebody tell her something true.”
Nobody moved.
Then Obi stepped forward, small and serious.
“I only met her one time. For a minute. In the boat.” He swallowed.
“She was already gone. But Yaw hums her song now. So I know she was nice.”
Ezinne began to sing.
She didn’t use her fiddle.
Just her voice, low at first, finding the tune Yaw had hummed all the way back from Trelawny.
She gave it words as she went.
A girl on a cook fire row.
A boy who fell out of a mango tree.
A ship that came too late and a ship that came anyway.
Titus sang the second verse with her, rough and off-key.
Then Toby.
Then all of them.
Yaw didn’t sing.
He sat with his head down and his hands open on his knees.
Pockets climbed down from the rigging, slow, the way he never moved.
He crept across the deck and into Yaw’s lap.
He pulled a brass button from the crooked pocket of his shirt and pressed it into Yaw’s palm.
Yaw looked at the button.
His fingers closed around it.
Then he cried.
Great, heaving, silent sobs that shook the monkey on his knees.
Pockets stayed.
So did everyone else.
When the song ended, Titus and Toby lifted the shroud onto a plank at the rail.
Yaw stood.
He untied the faded blue cloth from Amara’s hair before Toby had stitched it under, and now he wound it twice around the grip of his pistol and knotted it tight.
“Go on,” he whispered.
They tipped the plank.
The sea took her without a sound.
The argument broke that evening, as it had to.
Titus started it.
He stood in the middle of the deck with his arms folded, the lamplight carving deep lines across his face.
“We need to talk about it. What we saw.”
“Titus,” Ezinne warned.
“No. We buried her. That’s done. Now we talk.” He looked around the circle.
“Chains came out of the ground. Out of the dirt. A man turned into fire and flew around like a hornet. And the one who killed her got down on his knees and counted rice while we walked away.” His voice rose.
“Somebody explain that to me.”
“I can explain the counting,” Theo offered.
“Partially. By which I mean not at all.”
“This isn’t a joke, Marchand.”
“I know it’s not a joke!” Theo’s grin cracked.
For a moment he looked young and sick.
Then he rubbed his face, and the grin came back, thinner.
“My official navigational assessment is that we are extremely out of our depth. I have no chart for this. Nobody has a chart for this.” Get faster updates on g.com.
Obi sat pressed against Ezinne’s side.
“Can they do it to us anytime they want? The chains?”
The question landed on the deck like a dropped anchor.
Everyone looked at Kofi.
He had no answer.
He had sixty-seven years of storms and sales and faces behind his eyes, and none of it held a single chain rising out of the dirt.
He couldn’t say that to them.
Only Yaw knew what he carried.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kofi said.
“Not once. Not ever.”
Across the circle, Yaw lifted his head.
He understood exactly how much that sentence held.
Nobody else did.
“Then we’re dead,” Titus said.
“Next time they catch us, we’re dead.”
“It was a spirit.”
Clementine hadn’t spoken all evening.
She sat on an upturned bucket with her hands folded in her lap.
“The rice.” She looked at Yaw.
“You saw him drop to his knees.”
“I saw.”
“My grandmother told a story when I was small. Ol’ Higue. An old woman who takes off her skin at night, hangs it on a peg, and goes flying as a ball of fire to drink blood.” Her fingers found a shell on her necklace.
“Spill rice in front of her, and she has to stop and count every grain. Can’t help it. And if you find her skin while she’s gone and rub it with salt, she can’t climb back in.”
“A children’s story,” Titus said.
“A story is how old people keep true things alive when they’re not allowed to write them down.” Clementine’s eyes didn’t move from his.
“That wasn’t a man with a trick. That man is carrying something old inside him. Something he made a bargain with.”
Theo sat forward.
“And the chains?”
“I don’t know that one. But I’d wager it’s the same kind of thing.”
“A bargain.” Kofi turned the word over.
“With what?”
“With whatever answers when a man goes asking.” Clementine shook her head.
“I’ve heard whispers my whole life. Folk who bind themselves to spirits for power. Always in the dark, always some cousin’s cousin who knew a man. I never believed any of it was walking around in a Navy coat.”
The deck went quiet.
Bess stood up abruptly and went below.
Kofi heard sacks shifting, jars clinking.
She came back with her arms full of small cloth bags, each tied off with twine, and dropped one into every lap on the deck.
Obi opened his.
Rice and coarse salt.
“Carry it,” Bess said.
“All the time. On your belt, in your shirt, I don’t care. If that man comes at any of you, you throw it in his face and run.”
Toby stared at the bags.
“Bess. That’s a week of rice.”
“I know how much rice it is.” Her jaw was tight.
“I counted it. Twice. I’ll feed us on fish if I have to. I’m not burying anybody else because I was stingy with the rice.”
Nobody argued with her.
“It’s not enough,” Kofi said.
“Rice won’t stop the chains. We need to know what we’re fighting. Who knows about these bargains? Where do people go to get it?”
Theo cleared his throat.
“Nassau.”
Titus snorted.
“Nassau’s a mud hole.”
“Nassau’s a mud hole with no governor worth the name and every pirate in the Caribbean drinking in it.” Theo spread his hands.
“The Crown’s lost its grip there. Nobody asks where you came from. If anyone trades in knowledge of spirits and bargains, it’ll be some drunk old sea dog in a Nassau tavern who’s seen more than he should have.”
“And also every pirate in the Caribbean,” Ezinne said, “who’d sell us for five hundred pounds.”
“Six hundred and change now, probably. Bounties grow.” Theo shrugged.
“I didn’t say it was safe. I said it’s where the answers are.”
Kofi looked around the circle.
Titus scowling.
Obi clutching his bag of rice.
Clementine unreadable.
Toby watching Yaw.
“Nassau,” Kofi said.
“Set the course.”
Near midnight, Kofi found Yaw at the stern rail.
The blue cloth on his pistol grip stirred in the wind.
“You should sleep.”
“Can’t.” Yaw didn’t turn.
Kofi leaned on the rail beside him.
The wake stretched pale behind them into the dark.
“You knew everything.” Yaw’s voice was flat.
“Every storm. Every sale. Every face on that row. You knew about her fever before it happened. How didn’t you know this?”
“I never left the fence, Yaw.” Kofi looked at his own hands.
“Sixty-seven years, and I never saw past Brook’s Reach. I built ships that went out into this. I never once went with them.” He shook his head.
“Whatever the world is out here, I’m as blind to it as you.”
“Then we stop being blind.”
Yaw unholstered the pistol and turned it in the lamplight so the blue cloth caught the glow.
“Whatever Cross has, I want it. I want enough of it to put him in the ground. And then I want to count every grain of dirt I throw on him.”
Kofi heard the hunger in it.
He’d heard that same hunger in Titus, in himself, in every man on the row who’d ever dreamed about the overseer’s throat.
He said nothing.
He didn’t trust anything he could say.
The letter reached the Vigilant by fast cutter two days out from Trelawny.
Bell read it at his desk.
His saber lay across the ledger beside him.
The chain brand along its spine still hadn’t returned to full color.
When he touched the steel, it felt only cold, the way plain steel feels cold.
He’d written in the ledger that morning.
Law broken to pursue the girl.
Recoil paid.
The shipwright is cleverer than the reports.
The letter came from his housekeeper in Kingston.
Her hand shook across the page.
Captain.
I must tell you that Miss Anne and Miss Mary have left the house.
They took no clothes and left no word.
Their beds were not slept in.
I have made inquiries and found nothing.
I am so very sorry, sir.
Bell read it twice.
His face didn’t move.
He folded the letter into thirds and slid it between the pages of the ledger, behind his notes on Kofi Brook.
A knock.
Cross came in without waiting.
His lip had swollen purple where Yaw’s pistol butt had split it.
He held the coiled whip in one hand.
“Captain.”
“Report.”
Cross unwound the end of the lash.
A dark crust of Yaw’s blood still clung to the braided leather.
He touched it to his tongue and closed his eyes.
His breath slowed.
His head turned, slow as a weathervane, toward the chart pinned on the bulkhead.
He opened his eyes and pressed a finger to the paper, north and west, toward the scattered islands of the Bahamas.
“That way. Steady. They’re not running scared. They’re going somewhere.”
The door banged open again.
Sterling limped in on a cane, his scalded foot bound thick with linen.
“Why aren’t we chasing? Every hour, he’s further off.”
“Because I already know where he’s going, my lord.” Bell didn’t look up from the chart.
“Frightened men go looking for answers. There’s only one place in these waters where a runaway can ask questions and not be hanged for it.”
“Nassau.” Cross grinned, wincing at his split lip.
“Nassau.” Bell closed the ledger over the letter.
“Set a heading. And send word ahead to our friends ashore. I want to know the moment the Morning Star drops anchor.”
Clementine walked the rails at midnight.
She carried a small sack of coarse salt and let it trickle from her fist in a thin white line along the top of the gunwale, all the way around the ship, murmuring words in a language Kofi didn’t know.
Her charms clicked as she walked.
Kofi watched from the helm.
She reached the bow, finished the line, and stood looking out at the black water ahead.
“Will that keep him out?” Kofi asked.
“No.” She tucked the empty sack into her apron.
“But it’ll tell me if he comes.”
She went below.
Kofi stood alone at the wheel.
The Morning Star cut north through the dark.
Far behind her, over a horizon he couldn’t see, a Navy ship turned her bow to match.