The new deck plank dropped into place with a clean knock.
Kofi pressed it flat with both palms and felt it seat against the beam below.
Good oak.
Theo’s mermaid money had bought it off a Spanish wreck on the beach, still smelling of salt and old varnish.
Around him lanterns hung from the rigging, and the whole crew worked in their light.
Toby sawed the cracked rail free in long, patient strokes.
Bess sorted nails into piles by size and snapped at anyone who touched them.
Clementine hung bundles of herbs upside down from a line strung across the stern.
Along the waist of the ship, Obi knelt beside the long soil boxes Kofi had built into the deck back at Brook’s Reach.
They had sat empty since the escape.
Now Obi pushed his fingers into fresh dirt and dropped seeds in, one by one, counting under his breath.
“Callaloo here. Peas there. Peppers at the end, so Pockets can’t reach them.”
Pockets sat on the rail above him and watched the pepper seeds with deep, personal hatred.
“Plantains go in the big box,” Toby called.
“They’ll want room.”
“How long before they grow?”
“Months.”
Obi looked at the tiny green suckers, then out at the dark sea.
“Will we still be here in months?”
Nobody answered him.
The goat bleated from its pen near the mainmast.
Bess had won it off a trader for half the price he’d asked, then named it Ration so nobody would get attached.
Obi had already gotten attached.
Yaw found Kofi near the bow, fitting the last plank.
“The old man. Quaco.” He crouched and held the board steady while Kofi drove the nails.
“He told me everything.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s called a Binding. You make a bargain with a spirit. It gives you power. You keep one rule for it until you die.” Yaw’s hands tightened on the plank.
“But the spirit has to want you. You can know the whole ritual and still get turned away.”
Kofi drove the last nail.
“What else?”
“The spirits don’t travel. You go to their island to find them. The old ones, the strongest, those are in Saint-Domingue.” Yaw hesitated.
“And if the Navy catches you with one, they put you in cold iron. It cuts you off.”
“Cold iron.” Kofi thought of Theo shouting at the mermaids, throwing nails across the deck.
“It all comes back to iron.”
“There’s more.” Yaw looked down at the blue cloth on his pistol grip.
“I told him I want power to kill Cross. He said a spirit hears murder in your mouth and runs from it.”
Kofi said nothing.
“He said there’s an old woman. Mother Phibba. Runs people through the fog in the out islands. If anyone can help us, it’s her.”
“Then we find her.”
“He said if he knew where she was, she wouldn’t be very good at hiding.”
Kofi sat back on his heels and wiped sweat off his face.
“Then we find her the hard way.”
Ezinne and Titus should have been back an hour ago.
Kofi noticed it the way a sailor notices wind dropping.
He looked up from the rail and counted heads.
Toby.
Bess.
Clementine.
Obi.
Theo, bent over his charts.
Yaw.
“Where’s Titus?”
Theo didn’t look up.
“Collecting his purse from the pit man. Ezinne went with him. Said they’d be quick.”
“When was that?”
Theo looked up.
Then he looked at the sky.
His face changed.
“A while ago.”
Kofi was already moving for the boat.
Yaw followed without a word.
They heard the fight before they saw it.
Shouts echoed off the burned walls near the old fort.
Something heavy crashed into a barrel.
A woman cried out.
Ezinne.
Kofi ran.
The alley was narrow and stinking, hemmed in by shacks on both sides.
Titus stood with his back against a wall, bleeding from the mouth, swinging a broken board at three men at once.
Ezinne crouched behind him with her fiddle case held up like a shield.
A fourth man lay groaning in the mud.
Barabbas Knowles stood at the mouth of the alley.
His nose was swollen and crooked and purple.
Six more men stood behind him.
“There he is!” Knowles pointed at Titus.
“Take the purse. Break his hands so he never fights again.”
“Try it,” Kofi said from behind him.
Knowles turned.
His eyes moved from Kofi to Yaw and back.
He laughed.
“Two more. Good. We’ll make it a party.”
Yaw drew.
His pistol came up fast, the blue cloth swinging from the grip.
A man leaped at him from the side before he could fire.
They went down together in the mud.
The shot went into the sky.
Then it was chaos.
He swung his cutlass and cut a man across the shoulder.
Two more came at him.
He gave ground, hit a wall, ducked a fist that cracked the planks by his head.
Beside him Titus roared and drove his board into a man’s stomach.
There were too many.
Every time one went down, another stepped over him.
Knowles stayed at the back and pointed and shouted.
A blade opened Kofi’s sleeve and the skin under it.
He staggered.
Titus went down to one knee under three men.
Ezinne screamed his name.
Something dropped off the roof.
It landed in the middle of Knowles’s crew in a crouch, cloak flaring.
A cutlass flashed in the torchlight.
One of Knowles’s men went down clutching his arm.
Another spun away holding his face.
A second shape dropped beside the first.
It rose in one smooth motion.
Its arm snapped out, twice.
Two slim blades whistled past Kofi’s ear.
One pinned a man’s sleeve to the wall.
The other struck the club out of a fist and sent it spinning into the mud.
The two figures fought back to back.
They were hooded, their faces wrapped to the eyes in dark cloth.
One was taller and moved like a storm, cutting and shoving and kicking, never still.
The other was smaller and quiet, wasting no motion.
Every time she moved, a man stopped fighting.
The first one’s cutlass came up close to Kofi’s face as she turned.
For a heartbeat the torchlight caught the hilt.
A black rooster was etched into the metal.
Then the hilt was gone again, slashing.
Knowles’s crew broke.
Two men dragged a third away.
The rest ran.
Knowles stood alone at the mouth of the alley, staring at the two hooded shapes.
The taller one pointed her cutlass at him.
Knowles turned and ran.
Silence fell.
Somewhere a dog barked.
Titus coughed blood into the mud.
Kofi straightened, breathing hard.
“Thank you. Who—”
The smaller one bent and pulled her two blades free of the wall.
She didn’t look at him.
The taller one looked.
Just for a moment.
Her eyes above the dark cloth were bright and hard, and she studied Kofi’s face as if she was trying to remember it.
Then they both ran for the end of the alley, climbed a stack of barrels onto the roof, and were gone.
“Who were they?” Ezinne whispered.
“Don’t know.” Kofi stared at the empty roofline.
“But they knew how to fight.”
Yaw pulled himself out of the mud.
Titus leaned on the wall and spat.
He held up the purse.
It was still full.
“Worth it,” he croaked.
“You’re an idiot,” Ezinne said.
“Worth it,” Titus said again, and grinned with bloody teeth.
Obi was on watch at dawn.
He sat high in the crow’s nest with Pockets curled against his chest, eyes gritty from no sleep.
The sky had just started to gray over the eastern sea.
The harbor lay flat and quiet below him.
Something white moved at the harbor mouth.
He squinted.
A sail.
Then another above it.
Then a third.
Square sails, stacked tall, catching the first light.
A long pennant streamed from the top of the mainmast.
Obi’s stomach dropped.
“NAVY!”
He screamed it down to the deck.
“NAVY SHIP! AT THE HARBOR MOUTH!”
Below him, the whole ship woke at once.
Kofi was at the rail in seconds.
He saw her.
A frigate, tall and heavy, standing in toward the harbor with the morning breeze behind her.
He knew her lines.
He’d seen her in the reports Sterling used to read aloud on the veranda.
The Vigilant.
“How did they find us so fast?” Bess shouted.
Nobody had time to answer.
“Anchor up!” Kofi roared.
“Everyone! Now!”
Toby and Titus threw themselves on the capstan bars.
Yaw went up the rigging.
Ezinne and Clementine hauled on sheets.
Bess ran below to lash down the stores.
“The rail isn’t finished,” Toby panted.
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“The garden—”
“Leave it!”
Obi scrambled down from the mast.
He looked at the soil boxes, half of them still empty, a sack of pepper seeds spilled in the dirt.
He shoved the sack under a box and ran for a line.
The anchor came up dripping.
Sails dropped and filled.
The Morning Star swung slow and heavy toward the harbor mouth.
Toward the Vigilant.
“We can’t go out that way!” Titus shouted.
“She’ll blow us to pieces!”
“We’re not going out that way.” Theo shoved his way to the wheel with a chart clutched in one fist.
“East. There’s a gap in the reef. Too shallow for anything that size.”
“How shallow?” Kofi asked.
“Very.”
“How shallow for us?”
Theo grinned.
It looked sick.
“Also very.”
Kofi took the wheel.
“Show me.”
Theo pointed.
Kofi turned her.
The Morning Star swung east, away from the frigate, toward a line of pale green water where the reef rose close to the surface.
Kofi could see coral heads through the clear water, brown and jagged, reaching up.
“Left of the dark patch,” Theo said.
“Then hard right past the white sand.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve done it once. In a smaller boat. At high tide.”
“What’s the tide now?”
Theo didn’t answer.
Behind them, a cannon boomed.
The Vigilant had seen them.
The shot fell short and threw up a white column of spray.
“Now!” Theo shouted.
Kofi threw the wheel left.
The ship heeled.
The reef slid past close enough to touch.
The keel scraped something.
The whole hull shuddered and groaned, a long grinding moan that Kofi felt in his teeth.
“She’ll hold,” he muttered.
“She’ll hold. I built her. She’ll hold.”
“Hard right!”
He turned her.
The scraping stopped.
The water beneath them went from pale green to deep blue.
They were through.
Behind them, the Vigilant came up short at the edge of the reef, sails backing, too big and too deep to follow.
Another cannon fired.
The shot fell far behind.
Nobody cheered.
They were too tired to cheer.
Titus sat down on the deck and laughed until he coughed.
Theo let out a breath that seemed to go on forever.
“High tide,” he said.
“It was high tide. I think.”
Kofi kept both hands on the wheel.
They were shaking.
The Vigilant dropped anchor where the Morning Star had been an hour before.
The water was still churned from her leaving.
A small skiff rowed out to meet her.
Cuffee stood up in it and tipped his hat toward the quarterdeck.
“Captain Bell! You missed them by the space of a prayer, sir. They took the eastern channel over the reef.”
Bell stood at the rail.
He said nothing.
Sterling limped up the deck on his cane, his bandaged foot slapping the planks.
His face was crimson.
“Twice!” His voice cracked across the whole ship.
“Twice now he’s slipped through your fingers! In Trelawny you had him on his knees in chains and let him go!”
“I let nothing go, my lord.”
“Then what do you call this?” Sterling jabbed his cane toward the empty harbor.
“He stole my ship. He stole my arm. And now he’s making a fool of the Royal Navy in front of every pirate in the Bahamas! They’ll sing about this too, Bell. They’ll put you in the song!”
Sailors stopped working.
Heads turned.
Bell turned and looked at Sterling.
He didn’t raise his voice.
“My lord, you’re on my ship, and you’re missing an arm, and you have no command on this ship as you do on Brook Reach. I have all three. You will lower your voice on my deck, or I will have you put ashore in Nassau, and you can hunt him with a rowboat.”
Sterling’s mouth worked.
No sound came out.
Cross came up the ladder from below, brushing past them both.
He held the coiled whip in one hand.
He touched the end of the lash to his tongue and closed his eyes.
His head turned.
Slow.
South and east.
“Still got him, Captain.” He opened his eyes and grinned.
“Blood runs true. They’re heading for the outer islands.”
Bell took one last look at the reef, at the pale green gap the Morning Star had threaded, a gap no officer in his squadron would have dared.
“Clever,” he said.
Then: “Weigh anchor. We go around.”