Sterling Brook stared at Bell across the white glare of the pans.
“All at once.” He spat the words.
“And how long does all at once take, Captain? A month? A year? I’m to sit on your ship with one arm and a ruined foot while that animal plays at building a kingdom and his fame rises more than it already is?”
“As long as it takes, my lord.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I have.” Bell turned from the pans and walked toward the dock.
His boots crunched on salt.
“A man who is running watches behind him. A man who is building watches his walls. I would rather catch him looking at his walls.”
Sterling limped after him, cane stabbing the crust.
“And while you wait, the song spreads. Every tavern from here to Port Royal sings my name in it.”
“Then let them sing.” Bell didn’t slow.
“A song is a thing people remember. I intend to give them an ending worth remembering.”
At the end of the dock, Cross stood with the whip coiled over his shoulder, watching the rakers through the gaps in their huts.
He straightened as Bell approached.
“Mr. Cross. You’ll take the cutter back to Nassau tonight.”
Cross’s face fell.
“Captain, I can be more use here, with the ring—”
“The ring is mine.” Bell didn’t raise his voice.
“You’ll go to Nassau. You’ll find every harbor pilot, every wrecker, every whore and every drunk who has ever heard the word fog. You’ll pay them. And when a ship with a sun on the compass in her flag comes within fifty miles of any port in the Bahamas, I will hear of it before her anchor touches sand.”
Cross hesitated.
Then he nodded, jaw tight.
“Aye, Captain.”
That night Bell wrote by lamplight in the great cabin of the Vigilant.
To Vice-Admiral Sir Lucius Wraythe, Commanding the Jamaica Station.
Sir.
I have the honor to report that the fugitive Brook and his vessel have gone to ground in the southern Bahamas.
I have in my possession a device of the Ironbound Company which will, in time, lead me to his shelter.
I request two additional sloops of shallow draft, forty men, and no fewer than two hundred fathoms of cold-iron chain.
I intend not to capture a ship, sir, but to take a nest.
He signed it, sanded it, folded it, and sealed it with his thumb pressed into the hot wax.
Then he set the tally ring on the desk.
It lay beside the open ledger on its black thread.
Bell lifted the thread and let the ring hang.
It swung.
Slowed.
Settled at an angle, as if a small cold hand was pulling at it from very far away.
North.
His eyes drifted to the ledger.
A folded letter stuck out from between two pages near the back.
His housekeeper’s shaking hand.
Miss Anne and Miss Mary have left the house.
He didn’t take it out.
He watched the ring until the lamp burned low.
Kofi couldn’t sleep.
He lay in a hammock strung between two posts of a driftwood house Phibba had given the crew, and listened to the Hollow breathe.
Water lapped the beach.
Somewhere a goat complained.
High above, the Boiling Hole let down a thin grey starlight, and the lagoon threw it back up in a soft blue-white glow that lit the underside of every leaf.
Phibba’s words kept circling.
Mi old.
Somebody has to keep it.
He climbed out of the hammock and walked.
The island was different at night.
Every doorway had a lamp made from a big conch shell filled with fish oil, a twist of cloth for a wick, so the path glowed orange from house to house like a string of beads.
Fishing lines ran from the doorposts down into the lagoon, each with a tiny brass bell tied to it.
When a fish took the bait, the bell rang, and somebody inside would roll out of bed, grumbling, to haul it in.
As he passed one door, a bell tinkled.
A woman came out in a nightdress, hauled in a grey snapper as long as her arm, and nodded to him as if strangers wandering at midnight were ordinary.
“Couldn’t sleep either?”
“No.”
“Nobody sleeps the first week.” She unhooked the fish.
“Too quiet. No dogs. No bell to wake you for the fields.” She smiled.
“You get used to it.”
He kept walking.
Near the top of the island, under a breadfruit tree, an old man sat beside a cold fire pit with a drum between his knees.
He was tapping it with two fingers.
Barely a sound.
A slow, soft heartbeat.
Kofi stopped.
“Sit if you sitting,” the old man said without looking up.
“Stand if you’re standing. Don’t hover. Hovering make mi nervous.”
Kofi sat.
The old man’s hands never stopped.
His knuckles were swollen, his fingertips flat and hard as horn.
“Pa Cudjoe,” he said.
“Kofi.”
“Mi know who you are. Whole island know.” Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
“Children singing your song in the goat pen.”
“Why do you drum at night?”
“So the old man below know we still here.” Pa Cudjoe nodded toward the lagoon.
“Him sleep better when him hear it. Mi sleep better when him sleep.”
“The Lusca.”
“Him have plenty name. Mi just call him neighbor.”
They sat a while in silence, the drum ticking soft between them.
“Phibba say you want to build boats,” Pa Cudjoe said.
“I want to fix hers.”
“And after?”
Kofi looked down at the lamps strung across the island.
At the glowing water.
At the dark shapes of houses where people slept without chains.
“After, more.”
Pa Cudjoe finally looked at him.
His eyes were cloudy with age, but sharp underneath.
“Good,” he said.
“More is good.” He went back to his drum.
Quashie didn’t trust him with the boats.
“She leak,” he said, standing beside the oldest of Phibba’s four boats where she lay hauled up on the white sand, her planks grey and split.
He crossed his arms.
“She always leak. Been leaking since before you born. You can’t fix her.”
“Let me look.”
“Look all you want. She still leak.”
Kofi walked her length.
He ran his palm along her strakes, pressed his thumb into the seams, crouched and peered at her keel.
She was old Spanish work, cedar and mahogany, patched a hundred times with pine and pitch and hope.
“Her garboard’s sprung on both sides,” he said.
“Her stern post is rotting where it meets the keel. And somebody replaced two of her ribs with green wood, and it warped.”
Quashie blinked.
“Him know that just from looking?”
“I built boats for sixty—” Kofi stopped.
“I’ve built boats my whole life.”
He fixed the garboards first.
Then he cut out the rot at her stern post and scarfed in new wood, shaping each joint so tight it didn’t need pitch.
He worked from dawn until the light from the Boiling Hole went orange.
On the third day, he started on the false floor.
He laid it a hand’s width above her true floor, supported on narrow cleats so nobody walking on it would feel it give.
Underneath, a crawlspace ran nearly her whole length.
Enough room for four grown people lying flat, or six children.
Quashie crouched and stared into it.
“Them lift this floor.” Kofi rapped his knuckles on the planks.
“And they find the real floor underneath, with bilgewater sloshing in it. They see water, they stop looking.” He showed Quashie a narrow channel along one side, where a thin film of seawater ran over a lip of wood.
“It’s a trap for eyes. Nobody searches a wet bilge.”
Quashie lifted the false floor.
He stared at the water gleaming on the false bottom beneath.
He put it back.
He looked at Kofi a long time.
“She still leak?” he asked finally.
“Not anymore.”
Quashie broke into a wide grin, gap-toothed and delighted.
“Do the next one.”
Bess had declared war on the Hollow’s cook by the second morning.
“She puts cinnamon in the fish.” Bess slammed a pot down on the long plank table in the open-sided cookhouse.
“Cinnamon. In fish.”
The Hollow’s cook, a broad woman named Tanty Abba with forearms like hams, didn’t look up from the pepper she was chopping.
“Everybody like it.”
“Nobody likes it. They’re just too polite to tell you.”
“You calling mi people liars?”
“I’m calling your people hungry.”
Toby stepped between them with a bowl in each hand, smiling like a man walking into a fire.
“Ladies. Ladies. Why don’t we each cook one dish tonight and let everyone decide?”
Both women turned and glared at him.
“Nobody asked you, Toby,” Bess said.
“Nobody asked you,” Tanty Abba agreed.
They looked at each other.
Something passed between them.
Tanty Abba snorted.
Bess’s mouth twitched.
That night they cooked together, arguing over every spoonful, and the fish had cinnamon in it, and everyone ate every bite.
Theo was losing his mind.
“It moved.”
He sat cross-legged at the mouth of one of the side tunnels that led off the main cavern, a lantern at his knee and three charts spread across the rock around him.
“Theo.”
“I’m telling you, Kofi, it moved.” He jabbed his pencil at the chart.
“Yesterday this tunnel ran northeast for forty paces and forked. Today it runs east for fifty and doesn’t fork at all. I paced it. Twice. With a knotted rope.”
“Maybe you counted wrong.”
“I have never counted wrong in my life.” He paused.
“Once. In Martinique. There was rum involved.” He stabbed the chart again.
“This cave is alive. It rearranges itself when nobody’s looking. It’s doing it to spite me.”
A small voice behind them.
“Pa Cudjoe says the cave shows you where it wants you to go.”
Obi and Cato stood there, each holding a coconut.
Pockets rode on Cato’s shoulder now, as if he’d decided the new boy needed a monkey more than Obi did.
“Pa Cudjoe,” Theo said darkly, “is a drummer, not a navigator.”
“He says the cave doesn’t like being drawn.”
Theo looked at his chart.
He looked at the tunnel.
He looked at the chart again.
Very slowly, he rolled all three charts up and tucked them under his arm.
“I’m not going in there anymore,” he announced, and walked away with great dignity.
Behind him, Cato laughed out loud.
It was the first time Kofi had heard him laugh since Salt Pan.
On the beach, Ezinne sat on an overturned bucket with her fiddle, and a ring of children sat in the sand around her.
“Again,” a girl demanded.
“The fish one.”
“The mermaid one,” Ezinne corrected.
“The fish one.”
Ezinne played it.
The children didn’t know all the words yet, so they made up their own and shouted them over hers, and when the chorus came, they clapped.
Not the way the crew clapped, on the beat.
They clapped between the beats, fast and sharp, a rhythm that danced around the melody like water around a rock.
Ezinne stopped playing.
She stared at them.
“Do that again.”
They did.
She laughed, set the bow back to the strings, and played it their way.
Titus came back from the far side of the lagoon at dusk with three fishermen from the Hollow, all four of them soaked to the skin and hauling a net so full it took all of them to drag it up the sand.
One of the fishermen said something Kofi didn’t catch, and Titus threw back his head and laughed.
Kofi stopped hammering.
In all the weeks since Brook’s Reach, through the escape and the mermaids and Trelawny and Salt Pan, he had never once heard Titus laugh.
Yaw didn’t go to the beach, or the cookhouse, or the fishing grounds.
He sat on the step of the driftwood house most evenings, pistols laid out on a square of oilcloth, cleaning them piece by piece.
He oiled every screw.
He polished the brass.
He ran a rag through each barrel until it came out white.
The blue head wrap lay folded on his knee.
Kofi sat down on the step beside him one evening and didn’t say anything.
After a long time, Yaw spoke without looking up.
“Phibba’s Law. Never hide a hunter in the fog.”
“I remember.”
“I think about it. Every night.” He fitted a cleaned lock back into its pistol, tested the spring.
“She asked me what I’d do if I found Cross. And I said kill him. And the fog came in so thick I couldn’t see my own hands.” He set the pistol down.
“Like it was ashamed of me.”
“You told her you weren’t hunting.”
“Not today.” Yaw smiled without humor.
“I keep saying not today. I don’t know how many todays I’ve got left before I stop meaning it.”
The brand woke on the ninth night.
Kofi heard the scream from across the island.
He was on his feet and running before he knew why, down the path of glowing shell lamps, his bare feet slapping the sand.
Sukey knelt in the doorway of the house she shared with Hetty, clutching her shoulder.
Her back arched.
Under her fingers, the iron-ring scar glowed a dull, angry red.
Hetty stood behind her in the dark, crying without a sound.
Clementine was already there, on her knees beside Sukey, one hand pressed flat to the woman’s back.
Her face had gone grey.
“It’s loud,” she breathed.
“Oh, God, it’s so loud.”
“The spirit?”
“It’s screaming. Something pulled on it. Hard.” Clementine looked up at Kofi.
“Like somebody far off yanked on a rope tied to it.”
Phibba came up the path slow, leaning on a stick, her pipe already lit.
She didn’t say anything.
She knelt with a crack of old knees beside Sukey, drew on the pipe until the bowl glowed, and blew a long, thick stream of smoke over the burning brand.
Then she began to chant.
“Sae-mora kel ashi. Sae-mora kel ashi. Dun veyo, dun veyo, lo-sai te mara.”
Low.
Rasping.
Over and over.
The words didn’t sound like any language Kofi had ever heard, not English, not French, not the Twi his mother had whispered.
They sounded like the sea sounded pulling back over pebbles.
The smoke settled into Sukey’s skin.
The red glow dimmed.
Faded to a dull rust.
Went dark.
Sukey slumped against the doorpost, gasping.
Phibba sat back on her heels.
She looked older than Kofi had ever seen her.
“Something pull,” Clementine said again.
“Something far away pulled on it.”
Phibba nodded slowly.
“The Company feel them. Every branded soul.” She tapped the dead bowl of her pipe against her knee.
Kofi’s blood went cold.
“Then they know. They could follow the brands here. To the Hollow.”
“If them pull hard enough, long enough.” Phibba met his eyes.
“Maybe.”
He looked at Sukey.
At Hetty.
At the scar, dark now, on Sukey’s shoulder.
Then down the hill at the glowing lagoon and the lamps strung door to door and the houses full of sleeping people who had run so far to be safe.
“We have to learn how to break them,” he said.
“Not dull them. Break them.”
“Mi don’t know how.”
“Then who does?”
Clementine couldn’t sleep either.
Kofi found her at dawn on the beach, standing ankle-deep in the glowing water with her skirts hitched up in one fist.
She was staring at nothing.
“Auntie.”
She held up her other hand.
It was shaking.
Under the nails, packed tight, was dark wet dirt.
The kind that came from mud, from roots, from the edges of swamps.
“Every night,” she said.
“Every night since Nassau I dream of mangroves. Roots going down into black water. And something in there calling me. And every morning I wake up with this on my hands.” She turned her palm over.
“I haven’t touched dirt in days. I’ve been on a ship and on a beach. Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something wants me.” She swallowed.
“And I’m afraid to find out what.”
Phibba had come down the beach behind them without either of them hearing.
She stood with her pipe in her teeth, watching Clementine the way she’d watched Yaw that first day in the fog.
“You fighting it, auntie.”
Clementine turned.
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Don’t matter what it is. Matter that you fighting.” Phibba puffed.
“Stop fighting. Close your eyes. And feel where it pulling from.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. Something calling you that strong, it don’t hide the road.”
Clementine looked at Kofi.
He nodded.
She closed her eyes.
For a long moment, nothing.
Water lapped her ankles.
A fishing bell rang somewhere up the beach.
Then her hand rose, slow, as if lifted on a string.
Her finger pointed out across the lagoon, past the island, toward the black cave wall on the far side.
South.
And east.
She opened her eyes and stared at her own finger.
“There,” she whispered.
“It’s there.”
Theo spread his chart across the bow of the Morning Star an hour later, weighted with two stones and a very annoyed Pockets.
“Let me be sure I understand.” He looked around at the crew.
“We have, until now, navigated by an old woman’s tobacco smoke.”
“It worked,” Kofi said.
“It did. It absolutely did. I’m not complaining.” Theo drew a pencil line from the southern Bahamas, following the angle of Clementine’s finger.
“And now, having exhausted the tobacco, we are navigating by Auntie’s ribcage and fingers.”
“Theo.”
“I’m simply documenting the evolution of our methods. For posterity.”
Clementine smacked him across the back of the head.
He didn’t even flinch.
The pencil line ran south and east across open water.
It crossed the Windward Passage.
It ran on, and on, and stopped against the long jagged coast of a big island.
Theo’s joking face went still.
“Saint-Domingue,” he said quietly.
“You’re sure?”
“There’s nothing else out there worth sailing to.” He tapped the chart.
“That’s French country. The big plantations. Thousands of people in chains, more than Jamaica.” He looked up.
“And it’s where the oldest spirits live. Everyone who knows anything says so.”
Clementine stared at the coastline under his pencil.
“The old ones in Saint-Domingue,” she said.
“Phibba said they might know how to break a brand.”
Kofi looked from the chart to Clementine to the island where Sukey sat on her doorstep in the morning light, Hetty in her lap, the dark scar on her shoulder.
“Then that’s where we go.”
Sukey wouldn’t leave.
“I’m tired.” She sat on the step with Hetty asleep against her, stroking the girl’s hair.
“I’ve been running since before this one could walk. I ran from the salt. I ran from the boat. I’m not running again.” She looked up at Kofi.
“This place has a roof and a garden and a woman who puts cinnamon in the fish. It’s enough.”
“The brand—”
“Phibba will smoke it every night. She promised.” Sukey’s jaw set.
“If it pulls, it pulls. If they come, they come. I won’t go back on the water with my girl.”
Kofi opened his mouth to argue.
“Kofi Brook.” Phibba’s voice, behind him.
Quiet.
“Her choice.”
He shut his mouth.
Sukey nodded once, satisfied, and went back to stroking Hetty’s hair.
Cato would come with them.
He’d decided before anyone asked him, and nobody tried to change his mind; he just appeared at the Morning Star’s rail the next morning with his few things tied up in a cloth, Obi standing beside him like a guard.
The twins, Mingo and Nell, came too.
They clung together and wouldn’t be separated from Cato.
The brands on all three children had gone dark and quiet under Phibba’s smoke.
But Clementine sat with them every night now, listening.
They sailed on the eleventh morning, on the lowest tide of the month.
The whole Hollow came down to the beach to see them off.
Tanty Abba pressed a whole cloth-wrapped fish into Bess’s arms.
Bess pretended it was a burden and held it like treasure.
Quashie shook Kofi’s hand twice, then a third time.
The fishermen clapped Titus on the back so hard he staggered.
Pa Cudjoe sat under his breadfruit tree and drummed, slow and steady, as the ship was warped out toward the tunnel.
Phibba came down to the waterline last, leaning on her stick.
She reached up and pressed something into Kofi’s hand.
A small cloth bag, tied shut with red thread, heavy with something that clicked inside.
It smelled of herbs and smoke and something bitter.
“Keep it on you,” she said.
“It won’t hide you from a Navy captain. But it hide you from the little things. Spirits that sniff. Spirits that follow.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank mi yet.” She held his eyes.
“When you reach Saint-Domingue, go past Léogâne. Up into the hills where the cane stop and the trees start. Ask for Grann Rose.” She tapped the gris-gris bag in his fist.
“Show her this. Tell her Phibba send you. She’ll know.”
“Who is she?”
“The oldest mambo in Saint-Domingue. Older than mi.” A dry rasp of a laugh.
“Much meaner, too. If anybody alive know how to break an iron brand, it’s her.” She squeezed his hand once and let go.
“Come back, Kofi Brook. Mi need somebody to keep this place when mi hands stop working.”
“I’ll come back.”
“Hmph. Them all say that.”
The Morning Star slid into the dark mouth of the tunnel.
Behind them, on the glowing white beach, the Hollow’s children began to sing.
They sang it their own way, with the clapping between the beats, loud enough to echo down the stone.
Ring, Bell, ring, you won’t ring long, the sea don’t carry a chain that strong—
Kofi stood at the stern until the light of the lagoon faded to a pale blue smudge behind them, and then to nothing, and the only sound left in the dark was the drum.