The cold rose from the ground.
Kofi felt it first in his legs, where he sat cross-legged in the grass beside the veve.
Not the cool of a mountain night.
Something deeper.
The cold of a cellar floor, of well water drawn at dawn, of the bottom of the sea.
It crept up through his thighs and into his belly and settled there.
The stars were out, thick and white.
Below him, the village had gone dark, its cook fires out one by one.
Nothing moved on the mountain.
He looked down at the veve.
The cornmeal lines lay pale against the black earth, exactly as Grann Rose had drawn them.
The cross.
The tomb.
The lines branching out from them.
He watched them for a long time.
Out of the corner of his eye, one line moved.
He snapped his head toward it.
Still.
Just cornmeal.
He looked away.
It moved again.
A slow curl, like a finger curling to call someone closer.
He didn’t look this time.
He kept his eyes on the cross.
The grass whispered.
A breeze, he told himself.
But the purple cloth on the cross hung dead still.
Then the whispering took shape.
Words.
Not English, not French, not anything he knew.
Many voices.
All around him.
Under him.
He didn’t move.
Between the graves, something stood up.
It was a man.
Or it had been.
He stood knee-deep in the grass between two wooden markers, and water ran off him.
Seawater.
It streamed from his hair, his torn shirt, and his fingers, and pooled black around his feet, though the ground was dry.
His skin was grey and swollen.
Weed hung from his shoulders.
Another stood up beside him.
Then another.
Sailors.
Drowned men, in the clothes of a dozen nations, water pouring off every one of them.
Kofi’s heart hammered.
His hands clenched on his knees until his knuckles cracked.
Grann had said.
Whatever comes, talk to you.
You don’t leave.
The drowned men didn’t come closer.
They stood among the graves, dripping, and watched him.
Then, behind them, the others came.
They were thinner.
Much thinner.
So thin their ribs showed through their skin.
They didn’t drip.
They shuffled.
Around every ankle was a band of rusted iron, and from every band, a length of chain dragged through the grass.
Men.
Women.
Children.
So many children.
Kofi’s breath stopped in his throat.
He knew those chains.
He knew that iron.
He had fitted the ring bolts it was fastened to.
He had set them into the Deliverance’s lower deck, row after row, by lantern light, one mallet strike after another, in a life nobody else on this mountain remembered.
The chained dead came through the drowned ones and stopped in a half circle around him.
They looked at him.
A mile below the graveyard, at the bottom of the ravine, Clementine couldn’t see her own hands.
She held them up in front of her face and saw nothing.
No shape.
No outline.
Not even the pale of her own palms.
She had walked into the trees at dusk, and the forest had taken every scrap of light with it.
She took a step.
Her foot came down on something soft that gave under her weight.
She took another.
A root caught her ankle, and she stumbled, catching herself on bark so cold it stung her palms.
Water dripped somewhere far below.
Plink.
Plink.
“Clementine.”
She froze.
It came from the leaves.
From everywhere at once.
A voice made of wind and rain and the creak of a trunk bending.
Not a man’s voice.
Not a woman’s.
“Clementine.”
“I’m here.” Her voice cracked.
“I’m here. I came.”
The leaves rustled.
Something soft brushed her cheek, then her neck.
Moss.
Or fingers.
It trailed across her face and away.
She went forward, hands out, feeling her way from trunk to trunk.
The ground sloped down.
Roots rose out of the earth higher than her knees, then higher than her waist, twisting over and under each other.
She climbed over them.
Ducked under them.
The air grew thick and wet and smelled of rot and green and something older than both.
Then, ahead of her, in the dark, a man groaned.
At the same hour, on the far side of the mountain, Yaw came down out of the trees onto the saddle of bare rock where the four paths met.
The old man was already there.
He sat on the same flat stone in the middle of the crossroads.
Same too-big coat.
Same straw hat with the torn brim.
Same crooked cane across his knees.
The yellow dog lay at his feet, chin on its paws, and lifted one floppy ear as Yaw came out of the trees.
The moon had risen.
It turned the four paths silver.
The old man took the unlit pipe out of his mouth.
“You escape.” His voice was dry and amused.
“Why you come back?”
Yaw stopped at the edge of the rock.
His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
“I heard you can give people power.”
“Oh, yes?” The old man’s eyebrows went up.
He leaned forward on his cane.
His eyes were very dark and very old, and they glittered.
“And you think you deserve mine?”
Yaw opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
The old man laughed softly.
He stood up slowly, leaning on the cane.
He was even smaller standing.
He barely came up to Yaw’s chest.
He tapped the cane once on the rock.
The sound rang out clear and high, like a struck bell.
And the four paths changed.
Up in the graveyard, the chained dead still hadn’t made a sound.
That was the worst of it.
They just looked at Kofi.
Hundreds of faces, hollow-cheeked, with the flat, patient stare of people who had nothing left to be afraid of.
Then one of them spoke.
A tall man, iron on both ankles, his voice rough and low.
“You built her.”
Kofi swallowed.
“Yes.”
“You fitted the rings. The bolts. The shelves.” The man raised one skeletal hand and pointed at him.
“You knew what she was for.”
“Yes.”
A woman beside him spoke.
“I was three weeks in her belly. Three weeks, lying in my own filth, with a dead man chained to my wrist for the last four days.” Her voice didn’t rise.
“Why did you let them take me?”
“I—”
“My son was six.” Another voice.
“They threw him over the side because he coughed.”
“I couldn’t breathe. There was no air. Just the grilles. Just those little grilles.”
“Why did you build the grilles so small?”
“Why did you build her at all?”
The voices came faster now.
Layered.
From all sides.
Why.
Why did you.
Why didn’t you.
Why.
Kofi pressed his hands flat on the cold ground.
“It was me,” he said.
The voices stopped.
“It was me.” His voice came out hoarse.
“All of it. Every plank. Every ring bolt. Every chain. I knew. I told myself I didn’t, but I knew. I built her with my own hands, and I’m sorry, and sorry isn’t enough, and it’ll never be enough.” He was shaking.
“Blame me. Put it on me. All of it. I’ll carry it. I’ve carried it sixty-seven years, and I’ll carry it sixty-seven more, and I’ll carry it into the grave, and I’ll carry it after.”
Silence.
The dead looked at him.
Somewhere behind them, somebody laughed.
Down in the ravine, Clementine followed the groaning.
She crawled toward it on her hands and knees, over roots and through wet leaves, until her fingers touched cloth.
A coat.
Wet.
Then a leg, and the man screamed, and she jerked her hand back.
“Who’s there?” A man’s voice, cracked and wild.
French.
Then, desperate, in broken Creole: “Ki moun? Who? Who’s there?”
She didn’t answer.
Her eyes were finally adjusting, or something in the forest was letting them.
A faint grey glow seemed to rise from the moss on the roots.
By it, she could make out a shape.
A man, maybe thirty, tangled in the roots of a tree so vast its trunk disappeared up into the black.
A patrolman’s coat, torn at the shoulder.
A musket lay in the leaves beside him, snapped at the stock.
His leg.
Even in the grey light, she could see it.
Swollen twice its size from the calf down, the skin stretched tight and shiny and black.
Two small punctures just above the ankle.
A snakebite.
And a bad one.
She knew the snake by the wound.
She knew how long he had left.
Not long.
His face turned toward her.
She saw it clearly now.
His skin was brown.
Lighter than hers, but brown.
His hair curled tight under his torn hat.
He was one of the hunters from the patrol.
One of the men who’d run through the jungle behind the dogs, calling out in French, hunting people who looked like her.
Who looked like him.
He saw her face.
He saw her dress, her wrapped hair, her bare feet.
His eyes went wide with terror.
“Non,” he breathed.
“Non, non. Please. Please.”
He tried to crawl backward.
His leg dragged.
He screamed.
Clementine didn’t move.
She knew exactly what would save him.
There was a vine that grew in wet ravines like this one, with small white flowers.
Its root would draw poison.
There was a moss for the fever.
A bark to slow the heart so the poison spread slower.
She could smell all three, somewhere close in the dark.
She also knew that if she saved him, he might walk out of this forest and straight to his captain.
And the patrol would come up the mountain with their dogs.
Up to the village.
To Grann.
To Nell and Mingo and Cato.
If she walked away, the forest would finish him by morning.
And nobody would ever know.
The man was crying now.
Silent, helpless tears running down into his ears.
Clementine looked down at her own hands in the grey glow.
At the dirt under her nails.
She’d been hiding what these hands could do for so long.
Long before Saint-Domingue, before the Morning Star, before Brook’s Reach, there was Scipio.
He whistled through the gap in his front teeth.
That was the first thing she noticed about him.
A big man, broad as a door, slow-talking, slow-walking, and he whistled everywhere he went.
He couldn’t carry a tune.
Not one.
Every song came out wrong, sharp where it should be flat, flat where it should be sharp.
The other field hands threw things at him.
He just grinned and whistled louder.
The first time he came to her, he’d laid his palm open on a cane knife.
Deep.
Down to the white.
He held it out to her in the dark behind the quarters, blood running down his wrist, and said, very politely, “They say you can fix this. They say not to tell anybody.”
She stitched it by moonlight with a sewing needle and thread she’d boiled in a tin cup.
He didn’t make a sound.
He just watched her work.
Three nights later, he came back.
He held out his other hand.
There was a scratch on it.
A tiny one.
The kind you get from a thorn.
“Hurts something terrible,” he said, with a perfectly straight face.
She knew.
He knew she knew.
She stitched it anyway.
They got a cabin together the next spring.
One room.
Dirt floor.
A window with no glass, and a door that stuck.
He carved her boxes.
Small ones, out of scrap wood he found in the yard, with lids that fit so snug you couldn’t see the seam.
Every one had a false bottom.
Under the false bottom, she hid her roots.
Her barks.
Her dried leaves and powders and the little clay jars of salve.
“So nobody finds them,” he said, handing her the first one.
“So you never have to stop.”
When she went out at night to heal someone in the quarters, a fever, a lash wound gone bad, a birth going wrong, Scipio sat outside the door.
If the overseer came walking, Scipio would start to hum.
Loud.
Terrible.
Off-key.
And she’d hear it, and pack everything away into the false bottoms before the door opened.
“You got a gift, Clem,” he told her once, lying in the dark with his arm under her head.
“Don’t let nobody make you feel ashamed of it. Not them. Not you.”
She laughed at him.
She told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.
But she kept those words.
She kept them close.
The overseer found one of the boxes on a Tuesday.
She never learned how.
Maybe somebody talked.
Maybe he just got lucky.
He came into the yard holding it up over his head, the false bottom pried open, her roots spilling out into the dirt.
“Obeah,” he said.
Loud enough for the whole row to hear.
“Whose is this?”
Clementine’s mouth opened.
Scipio stepped forward before a sound came out.
“It’s mine.”
The overseer looked at him.
At the box.
At the careful, clever carving.
“Yours?”
“Mine. I made it. I put all that in there.”
Clementine took a step.
Scipio turned his head, just slightly, and looked at her across the yard.
He shook his head.
Once.
Very small.
Don’t.
She stopped.
She didn’t say a word.
Not when they tied his hands.
Not when they walked him to the big tree at the edge of the cane.
Not when they threw the rope over the branch.
He didn’t whistle.
That was what she remembered.
For the first time since she’d known him, Scipio didn’t whistle.
She stood with the others and watched, and said nothing, and let him die for her.
She never healed anyone openly again.
Up on the mountain, the laughter came again.
Closer.
Kofi turned toward it.
The Baron sat on a gravestone.
Kofi hadn’t seen him arrive.
One moment the headstone at the edge of the graveyard was empty in the starlight.
The next, a tall figure was perched on top of it with his legs crossed at the knee, like a man at ease in his own parlor.
He wore a black tailcoat, rusty with age, and a top hat, tall and battered.
His face was painted white, or was white, or was bone.
Kofi couldn’t tell.
Dark round glasses sat on his nose, one lens cracked.
He held Kofi’s clay bottle of pepper rum in one long, bony hand.
As Kofi watched, he tipped it back and drank deep.
He lowered it and smacked his lips.
“Not bad.” His voice was deep and rough and full of laughter.
“Not bad at all. Old woman know how to steep a pepper.” He picked up the cigar from beside the veve, sniffed it, and grinned with too many teeth.
“Now this. This is a proper gift.”
A spark flared from nowhere.
The cigar caught.
Thick blue smoke curled up around the top hat.
The chained dead had gone completely silent.
The Baron looked at Kofi over the cracked glasses.
“So. You the one.” He puffed.
“The shipwright. Already died once, eh? Walked into the water all by himself.” He laughed, low and delighted.
“And now you back. Sitting in my yard. Crying on my dead.”
Kofi couldn’t speak.
“Why you come back, shipwright?” The Baron leaned forward, elbows on his knees, cigar dangling.
“Eh? What for? To feel better?” He gestured with the bottle at the chained dead all around them.
“You think they care if you feel better? You think it help them, you sitting here, beating your own chest? ‘It was me. Blame me. I carry it forever.'” He mimicked Kofi’s voice, high and pitiful, and cackled.
“It was me.”
“So?” The Baron shrugged.
Enormously.
“So what?”
Kofi stared at him.
The Baron took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at him.
“You love that guilt, shipwright. You hold it like a baby. It keep you warm at night. Make you feel like a good man. ‘Look how sorry I am. Look how much I suffer.'” He drank.
“The dead don’t eat guilt. The dead can’t spend it. You could sit here crying till your bones turn to dust, and not one of them get back one breath.”
The words hit Kofi hard, low in the stomach.
“Then what do they want?” His voice cracked.
“Tell me. What do they want from me?”
The Baron didn’t answer.
He just smiled, tipped his hat back, and nodded past Kofi’s shoulder.
Kofi turned.
One of the chained dead had stepped forward.
A girl.
She was small.
Thin, like all of them.
Fourteen, maybe.
A faded blue dress too big for her.
Her feet were bare.
Iron on one ankle.
He knew her.
He’d known her for a year, in his first life.
She’d come off the Deliverance on the ship’s second voyage, terrified and silent, and they’d put her on the row four doors down from his.
She’d had a way of tilting her head when she listened.
She’d liked to sit on the step at night and watch the stars come out over the black rocks.
The fever took her in the spring.
He’d carved her grave marker himself.
Out of a scrap of mahogany from the shipyard.
He’d cut her name into it, letter by letter, the best he knew how, and pushed it into the dirt at the edge of the cane.
In all the years after, he’d never once walked past that spot without looking away.
“Sabina,” he whispered.
She tilted her head.
Just like she used to.
“You carved my name crooked,” she said.
A sound came out of him.
Half laugh, half sob.
“I know. I didn’t know how. Not properly.”
“The B was backwards.”
“I know.” He was crying now.
He couldn’t stop.
“Sabina, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The ship. I built the ship that brought you. If I hadn’t—”
He stopped.
She came closer.
The chain dragged in the grass behind her.
She crouched down in front of him, the way children do, and looked him in the face.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“What?”
“Your sorry. I don’t want it.” Her voice was very calm.
“What am I going to do with it? Carry it around? I’ve got enough to carry.” She lifted her ankle, and the chain clinked.
“You been sorry for sixty-seven years. Did it bring anybody back? Did it get one person off that ship?”
“No.”
“You got given a second time, Kofi. Most of us didn’t get a first.” She tilted her head again.
“And you’re going to spend it sitting in a graveyard, crying?”
He couldn’t answer.
“We don’t want your guilt.” She stood up.
“We want you to do something.”
Behind her, the chained dead stood silent.
Watching.
Waiting.
And for the first time, Kofi understood that they weren’t accusing him.
They were asking him.
Down in the village, in the little terrace house where the children slept, Nell’s scream split the night.
Titus came awake with his machete already in his hand.
He’d fallen asleep sitting up against the wall, the twins curled against his side.
Now Nell was thrashing, clawing at her shoulder, her back arched so far off the mat he thought her spine would snap.
The brand glowed through her fingers.
Not red.
Not orange.
White.
White-hot, like iron pulled from a forge.
“Theo!” Titus roared.
“Theo!”
Theo tumbled through the door, half-dressed, eyes wild.
“What? What’s— oh God. Oh God, no.”
Mingo was screaming his sister’s name.
Cato had backed into the corner, both hands over his mouth.
“The leaves,” Theo gasped.
“Where’s Clementine? Where are the leaves?”
“Gone! They’re all gone!” Titus had Nell’s wrists, trying to keep her from tearing at her own skin.
She was burning up.
He could feel the heat coming off her.
“She’s dying, Theo. She’s dying, I can feel it—”
A shadow filled the doorway.
Anne.
She’d come fast.
Barefoot.
Her cutlass was still in her hand.
Mary was right behind her.
Anne looked at the girl, and her eyes changed.
The dark in them drained away.
They went pale.
Ashen.
The grey of smoke and old bone.
She stared at Nell with those grey eyes, and her face went very still.
“She’s close,” Anne said quietly.
“Too close. She’s got one foot over already.”
“Then do something!” Titus shouted.
Anne dropped the cutlass.
She pushed Titus aside, not gently, and knelt over Nell.
She put both her hands flat on the girl’s chest, right over her heart.
She closed her eyes.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the room went cold.
Not the cool of night.
The cold of a stone floor in winter.
Titus’s breath came out in white fog.
Frost crept across the dirt floor in thin, spidery lines, out from under Anne’s knees.
Anne’s lips moved.
Words Titus didn’t know.
“Vos-mari, kel tenebra. Tenebra kel mari. Sta. Sta. Sta.”
Nell’s thrashing slowed.
The white glow of the brand didn’t fade.
It still burned.
But the girl’s body went slack, and her breathing, which had been ragged and fast and failing, steadied.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
“What are you doing?” Theo whispered.
“Holding the door.” Anne’s voice was strained.
“She’s trying to go through. I’m not letting her.”
A thin line of blood ran out of Anne’s nose.
It dripped onto Nell’s dress.
Anne didn’t wipe it away.
Mary knelt beside her sister.
She put her hand flat on Anne’s back, and stayed.
“How long can you hold her?” Titus asked.
Anne’s jaw was clenched so tight he could see the muscles jump.
“Not till morning,” she said.
“Not alone.”
Titus looked at the door.
At the dark hillside beyond it.
At the black shape of the graveyard up on the bare shoulder of the mountain.
“Kofi,” he whispered.
“Hurry up.”
At the bottom of the ravine, Clementine put her hands on the hunter’s leg.
He screamed.
She didn’t let go.
“Hold still,” she said.
Her voice came out loud.
Clear.
It rang off the trunks of the great trees.
She hadn’t used a voice like that since Scipio.
Not once.
In the Hollow, on the ship, in the quarters at Brook’s Reach, she’d always whispered.
Always murmured.
Always hidden.
She wasn’t hiding now.
“Hold still,” she said again, “and I’ll save your life.”
The hunter stared at her.
His face was slack with shock.
She let go of his leg.
She crawled into the dark roots, following her nose.
There.
The vine with small white flowers, hanging over a wet rock.
She pulled it up by its root, bit through the stem, and chewed the root to pulp.
It tasted bitter and burned her tongue.
She spat it into her palm and pressed it into the punctures on his ankle.
He screamed again.
She went back into the dark.
The moss for the fever, soft and grey, from the north side of a fallen trunk.
The bark from the tree with the peeling red skin, stripped with her fingernails, rolled into a wad.
She came back.
She packed the moss against the back of his neck.
She put the bark between his teeth.
“Chew that. Don’t swallow it. Chew.”
He chewed.
Then she knelt beside him, laid both her hands on his leg, above and below the bite, and began to sing.
Not a whisper.
Not a murmur.
Out loud.
“Oka-rima, oka-rima, lo-senda ta. Mara-vek, mara-vek, di-sonu, di-sonu. Oka-rima.”
She didn’t know where the words came from.
They came up out of her the way water comes up out of a spring.
Her grandmother’s words, maybe.
Or older.
Or the forest’s own.
All around her, the trees began to creak.
The sound came from everywhere.
From above, from below, from the roots under her knees.
Great trunks leaning.
Branches shifting.
Leaves rustling with no wind to move them.
Under her hands, the swelling in the man’s leg began to drain.
She could feel it.
The poison pulling back, down, out through the punctures, black and thick, into the pulp of the root.
The shiny tightness went slack.
The black went purple.
The purple went dark brown.
His skin cooled.
The hunter stared at her with his mouth open.
His fever broke.
She felt the heat leave him all at once.
She sat back on her heels.
The forest had gone silent.
The hunter lay in the roots, breathing hard.
His leg was still swollen.
It would hurt for weeks.
But he would live.
He looked at her for a long time.
“Pourquoi?” His voice was barely a thread.
“Why? I hunt you. I hunt your people. With the dogs.” He swallowed.
“Why?”
Clementine thought about it.
“Because I could,” she said.
“And because somebody I loved once told me not to be ashamed of it.”
He didn’t understand.
She didn’t expect him to.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“Hilaire. Hilaire Bastien.”
“Well, Hilaire Bastien.” She got slowly to her feet.
Her knees ached.
“When you walk out of here, you remember who saved you. And you remember what she looked like.”
He didn’t answer.
He just kept staring.
Clementine turned to go.
Then stopped.
She’d taken the vine.
The moss.
The bark.
She’d taken from the forest.
She didn’t know why she did it.
It just felt right.
She reached up and untied her head wrap and let her hair fall.
Grey now, mostly.
Coarse and thick.
She took the little knife from her apron and cut off a lock of it, long as her finger.
She knelt at the foot of the great tree and tied it around one of the roots, in a small tight knot.
“For what I took,” she whispered.
“Thank you.”
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake.
A shiver, the way a sleeping animal shivers before it wakes.
Right in front of her, the soil split.
A root pushed up out of the earth, pale and twisting, dripping with black water.
It curled up and up, rising higher than her waist, then her shoulders, twisting around itself, gnarled and knotted, until it stood as tall as she did.
It snapped free of the ground with a crack.
It fell into her hands.
A staff.
Twisted mangrove root, dark and smooth and still wet, heavy at the head where the root had knotted into a fist-sized burl.
Pressed into the wood near the top, as if burned there, was a mark: a tree with its roots spread wide.
The voice came out of the leaves again.
Not a whisper now.
A rush of wind through the whole forest at once.
“Never take from the forest without leaving something in return.”
Clementine gripped the staff with both hands.
“I accept,” she said.
“Then you are mine. Mother of the Deep.”
The forest breathed out.
And all around her, softly, leaves began to fall.
At the crossroads, the four paths had become four roads.
Yaw stood at the edge of the flat rock and stared down each one.
The first ran down the mountain, and at the end of it he could see Brook’s Reach.
The shipyard.
The slave quarters on their row.
The black rocks along the shore.
It looked small from here.
And safe.
He knew every inch of it.
He knew exactly who he was there.
The second ran west along the ridge.
At the end of it stood a mango tree, heavy with fruit, its leaves silver in the moonlight.
And under it, smiling, stood Amara.
The third ran east.
It ended in a clearing, and in the clearing lay a man, asleep on a blanket by a cold fire.
A coiled whip beside him.
No musket.
No knife.
His chest rose and fell.
Cross.
The fourth ran up the mountain.
It ended at a gate.
A plain wooden gate in a fence of rough poles, shut tight.
Behind it, pressed against the bars, were people.
A family.
A man, a woman, three children.
They were ragged and terrified, and they kept looking back over their shoulders at something Yaw couldn’t see.
The woman had both hands on the gate, rattling it.
The smallest child was crying.
“Please,” the woman called.
“Please. Somebody. Let us through.”
The old man leaned on his cane beside Yaw.
“One road open for you tonight, boy,” he said.
“Only one.” The yellow dog sat at his feet, watching Yaw with calm brown eyes.
“Choose.”
Yaw’s feet moved before his head did.
He was walking west.
Toward the mango tree.
He couldn’t help it.
His whole body pulled that way.
Amara watched him come.
She was exactly as she’d been that day in Trelawny, before the dogs.
The scar on her chin.
The faded blue head wrap.
The same one tied around his pistol right now.
He was ten paces away.
Five.
Close enough to smell the mango blossoms.
Close enough to see her eyes.
She held up her hand.
He stopped.
“Don’t,” she said softly.
“Amara.”
“I know.” She smiled.
It was sad.
“I know, Yaw.”
“I wasn’t there.” His voice broke.
“I was there, and I wasn’t fast enough, and Cross—”
“I know.” She tilted her head.
“And now you’re going to go kill him. Aren’t you? That’s what you want the power for. To find him and kill him. For me.”
He didn’t answer.
“Don’t make me that.” Her voice was very gentle.
“Don’t make me the reason you hate. Don’t make me a bullet.” She looked down at the blue cloth on his pistol.
“Carry me. But don’t use me.”
He was crying.
He didn’t know when he’d started.
“I never got to say goodbye,” he whispered.
“In the cane. There wasn’t time. You were just… gone.”
“Then say it now.”
He stared at her.
At the mango tree.
At the moonlight in her eyes.
“Goodbye, Amara,” he said.
She smiled, and her smile was wide and real.
“Goodbye, boy who fell out of the mango tree.”
The wind moved through the leaves, and she was gone.
The mango tree was gone.
The west road ran out along the ridge into nothing but moonlight and grass.
Yaw stood there a long time, his hand pressed against the blue cloth on his pistol grip.
Then he turned.
He looked at the road to Brook’s Reach.
At the road to the sleeping man by the cold fire.
He looked at the gate.
The woman was still rattling it.
The child was still crying.
And behind them, whatever they were running from was getting closer.
Yaw walked up the fourth road.
He reached the gate.
He found the latch, rusted stiff, wrenched it open, and swung the gate wide.
The family poured through.
The man first, carrying the smallest child.
The woman, clutching the other two.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t thank him.
They ran past him down the mountain and into the dark and were gone.
Yaw held the gate.
Then, from the other side, came one more.
Limping.
Bleeding from a gash across his scalp.
His coat was torn and filthy, and he clutched one arm against his chest.
His whip was gone.
The ring-and-eye mark on his hand was dark and dead.
He stopped on the far side of the gate and looked at Yaw.
“Please,” Isaiah Cross said.
His voice was small.
Afraid.
“Please. Let me through.”
Yaw’s hand moved to his pistol.
It was out.
Cocked.
Leveled.
He didn’t remember drawing it.
The blue cloth hung from the grip, swaying.
Cross’s eyes went to the barrel.
He didn’t run.
He just stood there, shaking, bleeding, and waited.
Yaw’s finger was on the trigger.
One pull.
For Amara.
For the cane field.
For every time Cross had cracked that whip and grinned.
His hand shook.
His whole arm shook.
Don’t make me a bullet.
Yaw lowered the pistol.
He stepped back.
And held the gate open.
Cross stared at him.
At the open gate.
At the empty road beyond.
Then he limped through, past Yaw, close enough that Yaw could smell the blood on him, and down the mountain into the dark.
Yaw stood there, holding the gate.
He wasn’t forgiving him.
He knew that.
He didn’t think he would ever forgive him.
He just wasn’t going to let Isaiah Cross decide what kind of man he was.
Behind him, softly, the old man began to laugh.
Yaw turned.
The gate was gone.
The fence was gone.
The four roads were four paths again, silver in the moonlight, meeting in the middle at a flat rock.
The old man stood on the rock, leaning on his cane.
He was grinning.
“Now you know my name, boy.”
And Yaw did.
He didn’t know how.
The name was just there, in his chest, in his mouth, as if it had always been there.
“Legba,” he whispered.
“Mm.” The old man tipped his straw hat.
“Never close a door on someone seeking passage. Not the good ones. Not the bad ones. Not even the one you want dead. That’s my law. You keep it?”
Yaw’s throat was tight.
“I keep it.”
“Then you mine. Walker of the Open Gate.”
Heat seared through both of Yaw’s hands.
He gasped and looked down.
His pistols.
On the frames of both, just above the grips, a mark was burning itself into the metal.
A crossed staff.
A gate.
Glowing orange, then fading to a dull, dark etching.
When he looked up, the rock was empty.
Only the yellow dog was left.
It sat in the middle of the crossroads, floppy ear up, tail sweeping the stone.
It stood up, trotted over to Yaw, and sat down at his feet.
Up in the graveyard, Kofi was still on his knees in the grass.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
His voice came out raw.
Sabina stood in front of him.
The chained dead stood around them.
The Baron sat on his gravestone, smoking.
“I can’t undo it. I can’t unbuild her. I can’t bring any of you back.”
“Non,” the Baron agreed cheerfully.
“You can’t.”
Sabina crouched down again.
“What are you going to build?” she asked.
“Now. This time.”
Kofi looked at her.
He thought about the Morning Star, plank by plank, made new.
About the Hollow, and Phibba’s four little boats with their false floors.
About Cato’s face when he laughed.
About Juba’s grave under the mango tree.
About the slaver in the Windward Passage, riding low, packed full, and his own voice saying not today.
“A way out,” he said slowly.
“For everybody I can reach. Ships. Coves. Places to hide. A road across the sea nobody can follow.” His voice grew steadier.
“Not to make up for it. Nothing makes up for it. But because it needs building. And I know how to build.”
Sabina smiled.
“That,” she said, “I’ll take.”
Something eased in Kofi’s chest.
Something that had been clenched there so long, he’d forgotten it could open.
The memory didn’t vanish.
He knew it never would.
But the weight changed.
It stopped being something he carried to punish himself.
It became something he could build on.
He breathed.
For what felt like the first time in sixty-seven years, he breathed all the way down.
And then he heard it.
A small voice.
High and thin and far away.
Crying.
It didn’t come from the dead around him.
It came from below.
Down the mountain.
From the village.
He knew that crying.
Clementine had described it to him for weeks.
The thin, lost wail of something trapped.
Something chained into iron.
Something that didn’t belong there.
Home, it was crying.
Kofi didn’t hear the word.
He felt it.
Home.
I want to go home.
Please.
Take me home.
Nell’s brand.
He stood up.
His legs were numb with cold.
He didn’t care.
He turned toward the sound.
Toward the village.
Toward a white-hot glow he could almost see, far below, through the dark.
“I hear you,” he said.
His voice carried out over the graves.
“I hear you. I’ll carry you home.”
He meant it with everything in him.
“I’ll carry you home. And every one like you. Every one.”
The graveyard went silent.
The chained dead were looking at him.
All of them.
And one by one, as he watched, they began to bow their heads.
On the gravestone, the Baron had stopped laughing.
He was sitting very still.
The cigar hung forgotten in his fingers.
He was looking at Kofi’s chest.
Kofi looked down.
Under his shirt, where the compass hung on its cord, something glowed.
Faint.
Warm.
A soft golden light in the shape of a small sun, shining through the cloth.
The Baron took off his cracked glasses.
His eyes behind them were two black holes, deep as graves.
“That thing,” he said slowly.
“Where you get that?”
Kofi didn’t answer.
He couldn’t.
“That thing don’t belong to you, shipwright.” The Baron’s voice had gone low and quiet, and there was no laughter in it at all.
“It belong below.”
Then the light under Kofi’s shirt faded.
The Baron put his glasses back on.
And the grin came back, wide and white and full of teeth.
“Well.” He stood up off the gravestone, tall, taller than any man, his top hat blotting out the stars.
“Never refuse a soul that asks to be carried home, shipwright. Not one. Not ever. That my law. You keep it?”
“I keep it.”
“Then you mine.”
He struck the base of the black cross with the heel of his hand.
The ground split.
It split right through the veve, the cornmeal lines tumbling into the crack.
Black earth heaved.
Something rose out of it.
Slow.
Straight.
Dripping dirt.
A cane.
Black wood, polished smooth.
Its tip was capped with iron.
Its body was carved to look like a grave marker, flat and plain, with a cross at the top where it would meet a man’s palm.
Resting in that cross, set into it, was a skull.
Small.
Carved of old bone gone yellow.
Grinning.
Wearing a tiny top hat.
The Baron’s face.
Kofi reached out and took it.
It was cold.
Colder than the cold that had come up out of the ground.
He wrapped his fingers around the skull and turned it, and something clicked, and the cane came apart in his hands.
The body of it was a sheath.
Inside was a blade.
Thin, straight, and dark as the sky between the stars.
He slid it home.
It clicked shut.
“Lord of the Drowned Road,” the Baron said.
And laughed, deep and rolling, and the laughter went on and on, until it filled the whole graveyard, the whole mountain, the whole sky.
Then, all at once, it stopped.
The gravestone was empty.
The dead were gone.
Kofi stood alone at the foot of the black cross with a cane-sword in his hand.
Over the edge of the world, the first grey light of dawn was coming.
At that same moment, down in the terrace house, the brand on Nell’s shoulder went out.
Not dimmed.
Out.
Like a candle pinched between two fingers.
The white glow vanished.
The skin around the ring went cool.
And from inside the ring, for one heartbeat, came a sound.
A small, soft sigh.
Like something setting down a heavy load.
Like something finally going home.
Then nothing.
Anne fell backward off her knees and hit the floor.
The frost on the ground melted in an instant, soaking the dirt.
The cold drained out of the air.
Her eyes went dark again, their own color.
She lay there, gasping, blood smeared across her upper lip.
Mary caught her head before it hit the floor.
Nell opened her eyes.
She blinked up at the thatch.
Then she looked down at her shoulder, where the iron ring was still marked into her skin.
But it was just a scar now.
Nothing inside it crying.
“It’s quiet,” she whispered.
“Mingo. It’s quiet.”
Her brother threw his arms around her and sobbed.
Titus slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor.
He was shaking all over.
Theo had both hands pressed over his mouth.
Anne lay with her head in Mary’s lap and stared up at the ceiling.
Then she turned her head.
She looked out the open door, up the hillside, toward the graveyard on the bare shoulder of the mountain, where the first grey light was touching the black cross.
“What,” she said hoarsely, “did he just do?”
Nobody answered.
They stayed like that for a long while.
Nobody moved.
Nell fell asleep again, breathing slow and easy, her brother still holding her.
Theo crept outside and sat on the step and stared at the paling sky.
Titus didn’t let go of his machete until the light outside turned from grey to gold.
They came down the mountain at sunrise, from three directions.
Kofi came down from the graveyard, walking slow, leaning on a cane that hadn’t been in his hand the night before.
Black wood.
A small bone skull where his palm rested.
His face was grey with exhaustion.
His eyes were clear.
Yaw came up from the crossroads with mud on his boots and his straw hat pushed back.
A yellow dog with one floppy ear trotted at his heels.
When Yaw stopped, it stopped.
When he walked, it walked.
Clementine came up from the ravine.
She held a staff of twisted root as tall as she was.
Her hair hung loose and grey around her shoulders.
And tangled in it, all through it, were leaves.
Small, green, fresh.
They met in the middle of the village, under the mapou tree.
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
They just looked at each other.
At the cane.
At the pistols with their new, dark marks.
At the staff.
Then Yaw laughed.
Shaky.
Disbelieving.
“You look terrible.”
“You have a dog,” Kofi said.
“He won’t leave.”
“I see that.”
Clementine said nothing.
She reached out and touched Kofi’s cheek with her fingertips, just once, the way you’d touch a child to make sure he’s really there.
The village had come out of their houses to watch.
The crew came running from the terrace house: Titus, Theo, the children.
Nell ran straight into Clementine’s skirts and held on.
Behind them came Mary, supporting Anne, who was pale and bloodied and walking stiffly, but grinning.
Anne stopped in front of Kofi.
She looked at the cane-sword.
At his face.
Her eyes narrowed.
She pulled the pepper-rum bottle off her belt, uncorked it with her teeth, and took a long swallow.
Kofi’s hand came up.
He didn’t know why.
It just reached for the bottle, all on its own.
Anne stared at his hand.
Then at him.
He stared at his own hand.
He’d never liked rum.
Not in either life.
Slowly, Anne held the bottle out.
He took it.
He drank.
The pepper burned the back of his throat, and something in him that he didn’t recognize said yes.
He lowered the bottle, coughing.
Anne was grinning at him.
It was a strange grin.
Knowing.
A little wary.
The look of someone who’d just recognized a face in a crowd.
“Well,” she said.
“Look at you.”
Nobody said what they were all thinking.
Nobody asked what had happened on the mountain.
Not yet.
They were too tired, and the children were too hungry, and Grann Rose sent word down through the village that everyone would eat before anyone talked.
So they ate.
A woman of the village brought cassava bread, still warm, and a pot of bush tea that smelled of lemongrass and ginger.
They sat around the fire outside the terrace house in the early light.
Nell fell asleep again in Clementine’s lap, the staff of mangrove root laid across both their knees.
The yellow dog lay with its chin on Yaw’s boot.
Kofi set the cane-sword against his leg and kept looking down at it, as if it might vanish.
Grann Rose sat on her stump with her staff across her knees, watching all of them and saying nothing.
When the bread was gone and the tea had gone cold, Kofi looked at the two sisters.
“You held Nell all night,” he said.
“Titus told me.”
“Not all night,” Anne said.
“You finished it.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, smearing dried blood.
“Whatever you did up there.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because she was dying.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.” Anne’s grin flickered.
“Some of us don’t need a reason.”
Kofi studied her a long moment.
“Why do you want to sail with us?”
Anne didn’t hesitate.
“We’ve been fighting the Navy for years. The two of us. No ship of our own. No crew. Just a boat when we can steal one, and our names on posters.” She jerked her chin at the cane-sword against Kofi’s knee.
“You’ve got a ship. You’ve got a crew. You’ve got a song the whole Caribbean is singing.” She shrugged.
“We want in.”
Kofi looked at Mary.
Mary didn’t answer right away.
She sat very still, her whetstone forgotten in her lap.
She looked at him, and her eyes changed.
They shone wet, suddenly, the way eyes shine just before tears.
She held his gaze for a long time.
She was seeing something.
He could feel it, a pressure against his chest, like someone leaning on a door.
“Everything you love is in this village,” she said quietly.
Kofi didn’t move.
Mary tilted her head, frowning slightly, as if she’d heard a sound she couldn’t place.
“And there’s something old in you,” she said.
“Older than your face.”
Kofi went still.
Across the fire, Yaw had stopped breathing.
Mary shook her head, as if shaking off a dream.
The wet shine faded from her eyes.
She wiped them, quick and irritated, with the back of her wrist.
“I want to be on a ship with a man like that,” she said.
Kofi didn’t answer.
He couldn’t.
Mary didn’t press.
She picked up her whetstone again.
Shhk.
Shhk.
Titus broke the silence.
“They’re bait.”
Everyone turned.
“I’m sorry. But somebody has to say it.” Titus sat forward, elbows on his knees.
“They walk in with a hundred thousand pounds on each of their heads. Every bounty hunter in the Caribbean knows those names. We take them aboard, and every one of those hunters follows them straight to us.”
“Titus.” Theo’s voice was quiet.
“She held Nell. All night. She bled for her.”
“I know what she did.”
“Then—”
“I know what she did, Theo.” Titus looked at Anne.
Then at Nell, asleep in Clementine’s lap, her shoulder quiet.
His jaw worked.
“I’m just saying it out loud.”
“Fair enough,” Anne said.
She didn’t look offended.
“You’re not wrong.”
“They came off that roof in Nassau for strangers,” Yaw said.
The yellow dog had its head on his knee now.
“They didn’t have to. They didn’t know us. That’s enough for me.”
“Two of the most famous pirates alive want to join us,” Theo said.
“Us. A stolen ship, a monkey, and a navigator who can’t chart a cave. Honestly, why is this even a discussion?”
Clementine hadn’t said anything.
She was watching Anne.
Specifically, Anne’s hands, resting on her knees.
She looked at them for a long moment.
Then she glanced, just once, at Grann Rose.
Grann Rose looked back at her.
Calmly.
With no expression at all.
Clementine looked away.
She didn’t say a word.
Kofi let the silence sit.
Then he said, “We vote.”
Anne’s eyebrows went up.
“A vote?”
“It’s not my ship. It’s ours. Everybody on it gets a say.” He looked around the circle.
“The rest of the crew’s on the Morning Star. They’ll vote when we get down. But everyone here says their piece now.”
He raised his own hand.
Yaw raised his.
Theo raised his so fast he nearly fell off his stool.
Clementine raised hers slowly, still looking at Anne’s hands.
Titus sat with his arms crossed for a long moment.
Then he looked at Nell again.
At her quiet shoulder.
He raised his hand.
Last.
“If they get us killed,” he said, “I’m haunting all of you.”
“Get in line,” Kofi said.
“The Baron’s got first claim.”
Titus stared at him.
Then he laughed.
Short and rough and surprised.
Kofi turned back to the sisters.
“One condition.”
“Name it.”
“Nobody on my ship owns anybody. Nobody gives orders because of who they were born as. You fight for the person next to you, or you get off at the next port.”
Anne held his gaze.
Something moved behind her eyes.
Something that looked, for just a moment, almost like pain.
“Aye, Captain,” she said.
“Good,” Mary said, without looking up from her blade.
For a while after the vote, nobody seemed to know what to do with themselves.
Theo kept looking at Anne and Mary and grinning.
Titus went to refill the tea and came back with a second pot nobody had asked for.
Yaw scratched the yellow dog behind its floppy ear, and the dog leaned its whole weight against his leg.
It was Theo who finally thought to say it, leaning toward the sisters as if sharing a secret.
“There’s something else you should know. Since you’re crew now.” He lowered his voice.
“The Navy captain who’s hunting us. He’s not just any captain. He’s got a Binding. Chains out of the ground. He killed a girl in Trelawny. His name’s Bell.”
Anne’s grin faltered.
Just for half a second.
It slipped, and something underneath it showed, raw and startled, and then it was back, crooked and easy, as if it had never moved.
Mary’s hand went still on the whetstone.
The shhk, shhk stopped.
Then started again.
Nobody noticed.
They were all looking at Theo.
“Bell,” Anne said lightly.
“Heard of him. Nasty piece of work.”
“You have no idea,” Theo said.
“No,” Anne agreed.
“I don’t suppose I do.”
Grann Rose stood up.
It took her a long time.
She leaned on her staff, and her knees cracked.
When she was upright, she looked around at all of them.
At Kofi and his cane.
At Yaw and his dog.
At Clementine and her staff and the leaves in her hair.
“Three,” she said.
“Three in one night. I don’t see that in forty years.”
She walked over to where Nell lay asleep in Clementine’s lap.
She knelt, slowly, and touched the quiet brand on the girl’s shoulder with one long finger.
“This one, he carry home already.” She looked up at Kofi.
“The rest, you carry today. Him and him.” She pointed at Cato.
At Mingo.
“And every one after.”
She stood again.
“Now,” she said.
“We break the chains.”
She reached down to take Cato’s hand.
Running feet.
Pounding up the path.
Ti Lune came around the edge of the terraces at a flat sprint.
Her pale cotton wrap was torn, her feet bleeding.
She didn’t slow down.
She ran straight to Grann Rose and grabbed her arm and pointed back down the mountain, toward the sea.
“Grann! Grann!” She was gasping.
“The cove!”
Everyone turned.
Far below, past the terraces, past the jungle, past the black fold of the ravine, the sea lay flat and bright under the new sun.
And at its edge, where the hidden cove should be, a single column of dark smoke was rising straight up into the morning sky.
Obi’s signal.
Kofi’s hand closed around the skull on his cane.
“They found the ship,” he said.