Nobody moved.
The smoke stood straight up out of the jungle far below, black and thick, a single column against the bright morning sky.
Kofi watched it with his hand locked around the skull on his cane.
Obi had built that fire.
Obi, who’d sworn in the cove that he’d only light it if things went very wrong.
“Go,” Grann Rose said.
Kofi didn’t move.
His eyes had gone to Cato.
To Mingo.
To the dark iron rings on their shoulders.
“There’s no time, pitit,” Grann said.
“Go.”
“One minute.”
He crossed the dirt and knelt in front of the two boys.
Cato’s eyes were huge.
Mingo had backed against Titus’s leg.
Neither of them said anything.
Kofi reached out and laid one hand on each of their shoulders, over the brands.
Then he closed his eyes and listened.
At first, nothing.
The wind in the mapou leaves.
Ti Lune panting.
A goat somewhere.
His own heart.
Then, under all of it, thin and far away, two voices.
Small.
Crying the way a child cries after it has cried for so long that there’s no sound left, only breath.
Home.
Home.
Please.
They’d been crying the whole time.
Every night on the ship.
Every step up the mountain.
He’d just never had the ears to hear them.
“I hear you,” he said quietly.
“You can go now. Go home.”
Under his left palm, something shifted.
A small weight, lifting.
A soft sigh, so faint he barely felt it.
Under his right palm, the same.
He opened his eyes.
Cato was staring down at his own shoulder.
The iron ring was still there, carved into his skin.
But it looked different.
Duller.
Empty, like a house after everyone’s moved out.
“It stopped,” Cato whispered.
“It was always… and now it stopped.”
Mingo touched his own scar and burst into tears.
Kofi stood up.
His knees cracked.
His hand was shaking.
He didn’t let anyone see it.
Grann Rose was watching him with her one sharp eye.
“Good,” she said.
That was all.
Anne and Mary went to her together.
The old woman stood under the mapou tree, leaning on her staff.
Anne stopped in front of her and, for the first time since Kofi had met her, looked unsure of what to do with her hands.
Grann reached up.
Slowly.
She laid one long, bony palm against Anne’s cheek, then Mary’s.
“Mes filles,” she said softly.
My girls.
Mary’s eyes went wet.
She wiped them, fast and angry.
“We’ll come back,” Anne said.
Her voice was rough.
“Non.” Grann smiled.
“You won’t. Not for a long time.” She let her hand drop.
“Go fight for the living. And don’t forget the dead.”
Anne opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Then she turned and ran down the path after the others, and Mary went with her, and neither of them looked back.
The path Ti Lune took down the mountain wasn’t a path at all.
It was a gully.
A dry stream bed so steep that in places they slid more than walked.
Roots stuck out of the mud like the rungs of a broken ladder.
Loose stones rolled under their feet and clattered away into the green below.
Titus went first after Ti Lune, Nell riding on his back with her arms around his neck.
Theo came behind him with Mingo.
Kofi carried Cato.
Clementine came next, using her new staff to brace herself on every step, moving faster than she had any right to at her age.
Yaw brought up the rear.
The yellow dog ran ahead of all of them.
It went down the gully like it had been born there.
Never slipped.
Never stopped.
Every so often it would pause on a rock, look back over its shoulder at Yaw with its one floppy ear up, and wait until he caught up.
Then it would bound ahead again.
Theo fell three times.
The third time, he slid twenty feet on his back with Mingo clutched to his chest, yelling the whole way, and landed in a heap of ferns at Titus’s feet.
Titus reached down with one hand and hauled him upright by the collar without breaking stride.
“Thank you,” Theo gasped.
“Keep moving.”
“I am moving. I’m moving very fast. Mostly downward.”
Anne and Mary caught up to them halfway.
They came down the gully at a run, sure-footed as goats, and slowed only when they reached the group.
Kofi’s chest was burning.
His legs shook.
The cane-sword swung at his hip, bumping against his thigh with every step, and he kept reaching for it, then letting go.
He’d held a blade before.
He’d fought Bell in the cane at Trelawny with a borrowed sword and lived.
He knew how to swing.
He knew where a man’s weight sat and how to knock it off balance.
Sixty-seven years of hauling timber had given him arms like a dock crane.
But this wasn’t a borrowed sword.
He could feel it at his hip.
Cold through the cloth of his breeches.
Waiting.
He didn’t know what it would do when he drew it.
At the bottom of the mountain, at the edge of the cove, Obi was out of shot.
He knelt behind the starboard swivel gun on the Morning Star’s rail with an empty powder horn in his fist, staring at the two longboats rowing toward him across the green water.
“Toby!” His voice cracked.
“Toby, I’m out!”
“Then get down!”
Obi got down.
A musket ball cracked into the rail where his head had been, and splinters stung his cheek.
There were twenty soldiers in the two boats.
Maybe more.
Blue coats, white crossbelts, tall hats.
The French garde-côte.
They’d come around the point an hour after dawn in a sloop, low and fast with ten guns, and she sat now across the narrow mouth of the cove, broadside to the shore, her sails furled.
The boats had come out from her like hounds sent from a master’s horse.
The Morning Star had four swivel guns and a handful of muskets.
Toby, Bess, Ezinne, and Obi to work them.
And Pockets.
It hadn’t been enough for long.
“Here!” Ezinne crawled across the deck on her elbows with an armful of muskets.
Her hands shook so hard the barrels rattled together.
“Loaded. All of them. I think.”
“You think?”
“I’ve never loaded a musket before today, Bess!”
Bess snatched one, rose up over the rail, and fired.
The kick knocked her back a step.
Out on the water, a soldier in the front boat yelped and clutched his shoulder.
“There!” Bess snarled.
“Next!”
The first boat bumped against the Morning Star’s hull.
Iron hooks flew up over the rail.
Three of them.
They bit into the wood with a crunch, and the ropes behind them pulled tight.
Soldiers began to climb.
Toby was already moving.
He didn’t have a sword.
He had an oar, long and heavy, and he swung it like a club across the rail.
The first soldier over took it in the chest and went backward off the hull, arms windmilling, into the sea.
The second soldier didn’t climb.
He jumped.
He came up out of the boat like he’d been fired from a cannon, higher than any man should be able to jump, higher than the rail, and landed in a crouch on the deck in a spray of seawater.
He straightened up and grinned.
His eyes had gone flat and yellow, like a goat’s.
“Toby,” Ezinne breathed.
“Toby, he jumped. He jumped.”
“I saw.”
The leaping soldier drew a short sword and came at Obi.
Obi froze.
Toby got there first.
He swung the oar.
The soldier leaped again, straight up, clean over the swing, and came down behind Toby and drove the sword into his side.
Toby made a sound Kofi had never heard him make.
Not a scream.
A grunt, short and surprised, like he’d been punched.
He went down on one knee.
“Toby!” Obi screamed.
The soldier pulled his sword free and raised it again.
Something small and brown hit him in the face.
Pockets.
Screeching, all teeth and claws.
He clamped onto the soldier’s ear with both hands and bit down.
The soldier howled and swatted at him.
Pockets leaped off, snatched the powder horn off the man’s belt as he went, and scrambled up the rigging.
At the masthead, he hung by his tail, waved the stolen horn once like a trophy, and dropped it over the side into the sea.
Bess hit the soldier from behind with a cleaver.
He went over the rail.
But more were coming.
The second boat had reached the hull now too.
Hooks flew up.
A soldier came over the bow.
Another.
One of them had skin the color and grain of a palm trunk, rough and furrowed, all the way up his neck to his jaw.
Obi crouched beside Toby with both hands pressed over the wound in his side.
Blood came up between his fingers, hot and fast.
“Hold on,” Obi whispered.
“Hold on, hold on, they’re coming, they saw the smoke, they’re coming—”
From the beach, a dog barked.
They burst out of the jungle onto the sand at a dead run, and Kofi saw everything at once.
The French sloop across the mouth of the cove, gunports shut but crew on deck, a tall officer in a dark coat at her rail.
The two longboats against the Morning Star’s hull, one at the stern, one at the bow, ropes pulled tight, soldiers swarming up.
Bess on the quarterdeck swinging a cleaver.
Ezinne crouched behind the rail.
And on the main deck, just visible over the gunwale, Toby on his knees with Obi bent over him.
The Morning Star sat a long stone’s throw out in the green water.
Too far to swim with soldiers in the way.
Too far to throw a line.
A musket cracked from the stern longboat.
Sand kicked up at Kofi’s feet.
Then another.
And another.
The soldiers at the stern had seen them.
They’d turned in their boat and were firing at the beach.
A volley, all together, smoke rolling off the water.
“Down!” Kofi roared.
They threw themselves flat on the sand.
Balls whined overhead.
One hit the water behind them with a hiss.
Clementine didn’t go down.
She stood at the waterline with her staff in both hands and her loose grey hair blowing around her face, and she drove the staff into the wet sand at her feet.
“Oka-rima,” she said.
The sand in front of her split.
A wall came up out of the beach.
Not stone.
Wood.
Branches, thick as a man’s arm, twisting up out of the ground and lacing together as they rose, studded with thorns as long as Kofi’s fingers.
It grew in a heartbeat, higher than a man, wider than the whole crew lying on the sand.
Leaves burst out along it, green and shining.
The second volley hit it.
Kofi heard the balls strike.
A hard thock thock thock against the wood.
The wall shuddered.
Bark split.
Leaves blew off in a green spray.
But it held.
Theo lifted his face out of the sand and stared at it.
“Auntie,” he said.
“Auntie, what is that.”
Clementine didn’t answer.
She was already pulling a small knife from her apron.
She drew it across the pad of her thumb and pressed one drop of blood onto the root where the wall met the sand.
“For what I took,” she whispered.
The third volley hit.
This time the wall didn’t hold.
The center blew apart in a storm of splinters and thorns.
The blast knocked Clementine backward off her feet, and she went down in the shallows on her back, her staff flying from her hands.
“Auntie!” Kofi was up, running.
He grabbed her arm and dragged her to her feet.
She was soaking, gasping, a long scratch bleeding across her forehead.
“I’m all right.” She snatched up her staff out of the shallow water.
Her eyes were burning.
“I’m all right. Let go.”
“Clementine—”
“We need to get out there.” She was looking at the ship.
At the stretch of green water between them and its hull.
“Get everybody behind me.”
She stepped into the sea up to her knees and drove the end of the staff down through the water into the mud below.
The mangroves along the cove shuddered.
Kofi felt it through the soles of his feet.
A long, deep tremor, like something enormous waking up under the beach.
All along the shoreline, the mangrove trees shook.
Their roots, standing in the water on their tangled stilts, began to move.
They reached.
From both sides of the cove, the roots came snaking out across the water, low and twisting, grey and wet.
They met in the middle.
They wove together.
They thickened.
In the space of three breaths, a bridge lay across the green water from Clementine’s feet to the Morning Star’s side.
Narrow.
Uneven.
Slick. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
But a bridge.
“Go,” Clementine said.
Her voice shook.
“Go now. I can’t hold it long.”
Anne went first.
She didn’t take the bridge to the ship.
She took it halfway, to where the stern longboat bobbed against the hull, and then she jumped.
She landed in the middle of the boat.
Five soldiers.
They’d been reloading.
They looked up, startled, at a tall dark woman standing among them with a cutlass in one hand and a bottle in the other.
She pulled the cork from the bottle with her teeth, took a mouthful, and spat it in a long spray along the edge of her blade.
The blade caught fire.
Not a flicker.
A roar.
Flame ran up the whole length of the steel, orange and red and hungry, and the heat of it rolled across the boat.
The blade underneath had gone dark as grave dirt.
Anne grinned.
“Morning, gentlemen,” she said.
The first soldier swung his musket at her like a club.
She stepped inside the swing and cut him across the chest, and his coat went up in flames.
He screamed and threw himself over the side.
The second raised a pistol.
Anne’s blade took his hand before the hammer fell.
The third soldier didn’t run.
He stood up in the stern of the boat, and he was the one with skin like a palm trunk.
Up close, Kofi could see it on his hands, his arms, the backs of his knuckles, rough and grey and furrowed.
He raised one forearm.
Anne’s burning blade came down on it.
And stopped.
It hit with a sound like an axe hitting a stump.
Sparks flew.
The flames licked up his arm and blackened the bark and did nothing.
He grinned at her through his grey teeth.
For a heartbeat, Anne looked surprised.
Then she grinned back.
Her eyes changed.
The dark drained out of them.
They went pale, ash-grey, the color of smoke and old bone.
She looked at the bark-skinned man the way a carpenter looks at a board, searching for the knot.
There.
The inside of his elbow, where the bark creased and cracked to let the arm bend.
The hollow of his throat.
The backs of his knees.
She dropped low and slashed backward.
Not at his arm.
At the back of his knee.
The blade went in.
He roared and staggered.
She came up inside his reach and laid the flat of her burning blade against his shoulder, hard, and spoke a single word Kofi couldn’t hear.
The bark-skinned man’s arms dropped.
Both of them.
Like someone had hung sacks of wet sand off his wrists.
He stared down at them, straining, veins standing out on his neck, and couldn’t lift them an inch.
Anne put him down with the hilt to his temple.
The last two soldiers took one look at her and went over the side on their own.
Anne stood alone in a boat full of fallen men, the blade still burning in her hand, a long cut she hadn’t noticed bleeding down her forearm.
She was barely breathing hard.
On the Morning Star, Bess stood frozen at the rail with her cleaver forgotten in her hand.
“Who,” Bess said slowly, “is that?”
Mary took the bow.
The grapplers from the second boat were halfway up the hull when she reached them.
Four men on four ropes.
She came down the root bridge at a run, and as she ran, something changed in the air around her.
Every soldier on those ropes turned his head and looked at her.
They couldn’t help it.
Kofi felt it himself, standing on the bridge behind her.
A pull.
Like when someone says your name across a crowded room.
His eyes went to Mary and wouldn’t leave.
She was suddenly the most important thing in the world.
The only thing.
The soldiers on the ropes stopped climbing.
They hung there, staring.
Mary went past them like a shadow.
Two of them dropped.
Then three.
Kofi never saw the blades.
He only saw her hands moving, and men falling, and the faint, sweet smell of orange blossom on the wind.
The fourth didn’t look.
He’d turned his face away the moment the pull started and pressed it against the hull.
He held on to the rope with his eyes fixed on the planks in front of his nose.
When Mary came for him, he swung out from the hull on the rope and kicked at her with both boots.
She dodged.
He drew a long knife and slashed blind, and she had to throw herself flat against the hull to keep from being opened up.
“Clever,” Mary said.
She didn’t try to make him look.
Instead she went still.
Closed her eyes.
And listened.
To his breathing, ragged and fast.
To the way he muttered under his breath.
To the single word he kept muttering, over and over, the way a man repeats a prayer.
Her eyes opened.
They shone wet.
“Céline,” she said softly.
The soldier’s head snapped around.
“How do you know my daughter’s name?”
He was looking at her now.
That was all it took.
Kofi reached the ship’s rail and climbed over it, and came face to face with the leaping soldier.
The man was standing over Toby with his sword raised, Obi crouched in front of Toby with both arms spread wide like that would stop a blade.
The soldier’s goat-yellow eyes swung to Kofi.
He leaped.
Not toward Kofi.
Up.
Straight up, into the rigging, and then down, out of the sky, sword first.
Kofi’s hand closed around the skull on his cane and twisted.
It came apart with a click.
Black blade in his right hand.
Grave-cross sheath in his left.
He hadn’t planned it.
His hands knew what to do before he did.
He threw the sheath up over his head.
The soldier’s sword hit it hard enough to drive Kofi to one knee.
Pain jolted up his arm and into his shoulder.
The sheath held.
Black wood, iron-capped.
It didn’t crack.
The soldier landed beside him and spun and slashed low.
Kofi took it across the ribs.
Not deep, but it burned like a brand.
He grunted and swung the blade, and the soldier leaped back, clean out of reach, landing on the capstan, crouched like a cat.
They circled.
The soldier was fast.
Faster than anyone Kofi had ever fought.
Every time Kofi swung, he wasn’t there.
Up on the rail.
Up on the capstan.
Behind the mast.
And every time Kofi turned, the man came down from somewhere new.
But Kofi had built ships for sixty-seven years.
He knew every surface on this deck.
Every handhold.
Every place a man could land.
The capstan.
The rail.
The mast step.
The hatch cover.
There were only so many.
The soldier leaped again.
Kofi didn’t turn to follow him.
He turned to where the man had to come down.
The hatch cover, the only open space in reach.
He swung the sheath low and hard.
The soldier landed square into it.
The grave-cross sheath took him across both shins.
He went down.
Kofi’s blade came after.
The soldier didn’t get up.
Kofi stood over him, breathing hard.
Blood ran down his side.
His hands were shaking.
Then he noticed the cold.
It was coming off the blade.
He could see it.
A thin, grey, curling fog, pouring off the dark steel and sliding down onto the deck, spreading across the planks like spilled milk.
It crawled toward the rail.
It spilled over the side and down onto the water.
He hadn’t called it.
He didn’t know how to stop it.
Around the ship, the shouting faltered.
The French soldiers still in the bow boat had gone quiet.
One of them was staring at the fog creeping toward him over the water.
His face had gone white.
His hands were shaking so badly he dropped his musket.
It went into the sea with a splash.
Kofi felt it too.
Not fear.
Something under fear.
The feeling of standing at the edge of an open grave.
And under it, faint, from the water, voices.
Whispering.
Many voices.
Down in the green, under the hull, in a language he didn’t know.
Shipwright, one of them seemed to say.
Shipwright.
He shook his head hard.
The fog was everywhere now.
Rolling across the deck.
Over the rail.
Thick enough that he couldn’t see Bess on the quarterdeck.
Couldn’t see Obi beside Toby.
Couldn’t see the far side of his own ship.
Yaw came over the rail at the waist and saw the bow boat through the thinning edge of the fog.
Five soldiers still in it.
They’d shaken off whatever the fog had done to them.
Three were raising muskets toward the ship.
Toward Ezinne, who’d come out from behind the rail to drag Obi back.
Yaw drew.
The pistol came up in his hand faster than he’d ever drawn in his life.
He didn’t aim at the soldiers in the open.
He aimed at the one crouched behind the boat’s mast, the one with the clearest line on Ezinne.
There was no clear shot.
The mast was in the way.
He fired anyway.
The pistol bucked.
And what came out of the barrel wasn’t a ball.
It was a head.
A dog’s head, grey-gold and glowing, half the size of a man’s, jaws wide, made of something that looked like smoke and moved like teeth.
It shot out of the pistol snarling.
It hit the air beside the mast, and turned.
It went around the mast like a dog around a corner, and hit the hidden soldier full in the chest, and he went over the side with a shriek.
Yaw stared at his pistol.
The veve on the frame glowed like a coal.
“What,” he said.
At his feet, the yellow dog growled.
It was a growl he’d never heard from it.
Low.
Deep.
A growl that came up out of the planks.
Then the dog started to grow.
It went up and out all at once, its body swelling, its shape blurring.
Its yellow fur went grey-gold and see-through, like the dog’s head that had come out of the pistol.
Its shoulders rose past Yaw’s waist.
Past his chest.
Its eyes went from brown to burning.
When it was done, a spirit-hound the size of a horse stood on the deck beside him, one great head lowered, lips peeled back from teeth like ivory knives.
It looked at Yaw.
One ear flopped.
“Latch?” Yaw whispered.
The great head tilted.
Then Latch went over the rail.
He hit the bow boat like a falling mast.
Two soldiers went into the water at once.
A third swung his musket at Latch’s head, and the hound caught the barrel in his jaws and tore it out of the man’s hands and flung it into the cove.
Yaw felt it.
Every snap.
Every lunge.
It pulled at something inside him, deep in his chest, like a rope tied around his heart, and every time Latch moved, the rope pulled tighter.
His knees buckled.
Out in the bow boat, Latch flickered.
The great grey-gold body wavered like heat over a fire.
Then it went thin.
Then it was gone.
And a small, sodden yellow dog with one floppy ear was swimming hard for the Morning Star’s hull, paddling frantically.
Yaw went down on one knee on the deck.
The world tilted.
His face had gone grey.
His hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold his pistols.
“Too much,” he gasped.
“Too much. It took too much.”
Through the fog, at the stern rail, he saw Ezinne.
Out in the open, dragging Obi toward cover by the collar.
And in the bow boat, one soldier still standing.
Musket raised.
Aimed straight at her.
Yaw raised his second pistol.
His arm shook.
The veve on the frame flickered, then went dark.
There was nothing left in him to fire a hound.
So he did what he’d done his whole life, before spirits, before Bindings, before anything.
He breathed out, the way you breathe on a yardarm in the dark.
He let his arm steady.
He fired a plain lead ball.
The soldier spun and fell.
Ezinne dragged Obi behind the rail, safe.
She looked back over her shoulder and found Yaw through the fog, kneeling on the deck, still holding the smoking pistol.
It didn’t reach his eyes.
He was too tired.
“Old way still works,” he croaked.
At the bottom of the root bridge, Clementine stood waist-deep in the sea, both hands locked around her staff, holding.
The bridge was coming apart.
She could feel every root of it like her own fingers, and the French were cutting them.
Two soldiers from the stern boat, the ones Anne hadn’t put down, had swum to it.
They were hacking at it with hatchets.
Another had a lantern.
He smashed the glass against the roots and lantern oil ran down the wet grey wood, and he struck a flint, and fire caught.
The bridge screamed.
Not out loud.
Inside Clementine.
She felt the fire like it was on her own skin.
She gasped and almost let go.
She didn’t let go.
She drove the staff deeper into the mud and pulled.
The roots under the soldiers’ feet came alive.
They twisted up out of the water around their ankles, around their wrists, cinching tight, and dragged them down into the green shallows.
The man with the lantern went under with the oil still burning on the water around him.
The fire on the bridge hissed out as the roots sank.
The bridge was gone.
Half of it lay in tangles in the water.
But everyone who’d needed to cross had crossed.
Clementine stood alone in the sea, chest heaving, the blood from her forehead running into her eye.
In the second French boat, the one that had come in late and stayed back from the fighting, a soldier raised his musket.
He had a clear line.
Her chest.
Thirty paces.
She was standing still in the water with both hands on her staff, and she didn’t see him.
Beside him in the boat, another soldier saw what he was doing.
Brown skin.
Tight-curled hair under a battered hat.
A leg bound thick with cloth below the knee, stretched out in front of him in the bottom of the boat.
Hilaire Bastien.
He looked at the man aiming.
He looked across the water at the woman standing in the sea with leaves in her hair.
The musket fired.
At the last instant, Hilaire’s hand came up and knocked the barrel sideways.
It was a small movement.
Clumsy.
It could have been an accident.
A wounded man shifting his bad leg in a crowded boat.
The ball hit the water a hand’s width from Clementine’s head and threw up a white spout of spray.
She turned.
She saw the second boat.
The soldier with the smoking musket, cursing, beginning to reload.
And the man beside him.
With his leg bound up.
Looking straight at her.
Their eyes met across thirty paces of green water.
Hilaire didn’t nod.
He didn’t smile.
He didn’t do anything at all.
He just looked at her for one long breath, and then he looked away.
Clementine stood very still in the sea, the spray from the musket ball still falling around her.
Then she turned and waded for the ship.
The captain came over the far side of the Morning Star, the side nobody was watching.
Kofi didn’t hear him.
Nobody did.
The fog was still spilling off the deck, and the fighting was all on the other rail.
One moment the larboard rail was empty.
The next, a man crouched on top of it.
He was tall.
Dark coat, gold at the cuffs.
His hat was gone and his hair hung wet around his face.
His hands gripped the rail.
Except they weren’t hands anymore.
The fingers had grown long.
Too long.
The nails had turned black and curved and sharp as fishhooks.
As Kofi watched, the man’s face shifted.
His jaw lengthened.
His nose and mouth pushed forward, just slightly, toward a snout.
And his eyes caught the light, flat and green, like the eyes of an animal in the dark.
He looked straight through the fog at Kofi.
He saw him.
Kofi felt it.
From the stern longboat, Anne’s voice came across the water.
She’d seen the larboard rail.
She was too far away to reach it.
“Kofi! Larboard!”
Kofi spun.
The captain was already in the air.
Kofi threw the sheath up.
The claws came down on it like four knives at once.
The sheath held, but the blow drove him flat on his back on the deck, the breath smashed out of him.
The captain landed on top of him, all weight and wet coat and stink of something rotten, and the claws came down again at his face.
Kofi jerked his head aside.
The claws gouged the plank beside his ear.
He swung the blade up blind.
The captain twisted away from it like it was nothing and raked his claws across Kofi’s sword arm.
Kofi felt the skin open.
The blade nearly fell from his fingers.
Titus hit the captain from the side like a bull.
They went rolling across the deck together.
Titus had his machete.
He swung it twice.
The captain caught the second swing on his forearm.
The blade bit into his sleeve and stuck, and he grinned with too many teeth.
He tore the machete out of Titus’s hand and threw it over the side.
Then he took Titus by the throat and lifted him off the deck.
One-handed.
Titus was the biggest man on the ship, and the captain held him up off his feet like a sack of meal.
Titus kicked.
Clawed at the hand on his throat.
His face went dark.
Kofi got to his knees.
His sword arm was soaked in blood.
He could barely close his fist on the hilt.
The fog was still pouring off the blade.
Thick.
Grey.
Cold as a grave.
He didn’t know how to use it.
He didn’t know how to stop it.
So he stopped trying to stop it.
He looked at the captain.
At the animal eyes, at the hand around Titus’s throat.
And he let the cold come all the way up.
Out of the ground.
Out of the blade.
Out of himself.
Out of the place he’d gone to when he walked into the sea at ninety and didn’t come back up.
He let the captain see it.
The captain’s head snapped toward him.
For one heartbeat, the animal look in his eyes broke.
Underneath it, there was a man.
And the man was looking at Kofi, kneeling on the deck in the fog with a black blade in his hand, and whatever he saw there was the worst thing he’d ever seen.
His grip on Titus slipped.
Behind him, the planks of the deck split.
Roots.
Pale, wet mangrove roots, bursting up through the soil boxes of the ship’s garden, where the callaloo grew.
They came up and wrapped around the captain’s legs from behind, around his ankles, his knees, his thighs, and yanked.
Clementine stood at the waist rail, soaked and bleeding, her staff jammed into the soil of the garden box, both hands white on the wood.
The captain went down on one knee.
Titus dropped out of his hand onto the deck, choking.
The captain roared and tore at the roots with his claws.
They shredded.
More came up.
Titus came up off the deck.
He got under the captain’s arm and his shoulder, and he heaved.
All of him.
Eleven years of cane in his back, every bundle he’d ever hauled.
The captain went over the rail.
He hit the water flat on his back with a huge, slapping splash.
He came up gasping and spitting.
Blood ran from a gash in his forehead.
He looked up at the ship, at Titus leaning over the rail with his chest heaving, at Kofi kneeling in the fog.
At Clementine with her staff.
Then he turned and began to swim.
Hard.
Toward the sloop at the mouth of the cove.
The fighting stopped all at once, the way rain stops.
One moment the air was full of musket smoke and shouting.
The next, there was only the slap of water against the hull and the groans of wounded men drifting in the boats.
The French in the bow boat were rowing away, fast, hauling their fallen in over the side.
The stern boat drifted empty, Anne standing in it alone, the fire gone out of her blade.
Kofi’s fog was thinning.
Pulling back.
He could feel it going, the way you feel a held breath let out, and he let it go.
He looked down.
He’d slid the blade back into its sheath without realizing.
The cane was whole again.
The bone skull grinned up at him from under his palm.
His arm was bleeding badly.
So was his side.
He didn’t feel either one yet.
“Toby,” he said.
He was across the deck before he knew he’d moved.
Toby lay on his back by the mainmast with his head in Obi’s lap.
His face had gone the color of ash.
Obi still had both hands pressed over the wound in his side.
Blood had soaked through the boy’s fingers and his shirt and the deck beneath them both.
“I can’t stop it,” Obi was saying.
Over and over.
“I can’t stop it, I can’t stop it—”
Toby’s eyes found Kofi.
He tried to smile.
“Little scratch,” he rasped.
“Don’t talk.”
“Hurts something terrible.”
Clementine came through the thinning fog and dropped to her knees beside them.
She didn’t say anything.
She put her staff across her lap and pushed Obi’s hands away and pressed her own hands over the wound.
Toby gasped.
She closed her eyes.
“Oka-rima. Oka-rima, lo-senda ta.”
Her staff stirred in her lap.
From the knotted burl at its head, a green shoot pushed out.
Then another.
They grew in a heartbeat, curling down off the staff and onto the deck, and across it to Toby.
They wound around his chest.
His waist.
They found the wound in his side and laced across it, thin and green and soft.
And along them, all at once, small white flowers opened.
They smelled sweet.
Like rain on warm earth.
Under the flowers, the blood slowed.
Then slowed more.
Then stopped.
Toby let out a long breath.
His eyes fluttered shut.
“Is he—” Obi’s voice broke.
“Sleeping.” Clementine’s hands were trembling.
She took them away from the wound slowly.
“He’s sleeping. He’ll keep.”
She stood up.
She swayed.
Kofi caught her elbow.
She didn’t seem to notice.
She walked to the garden box nearest the mainmast, the one where the callaloo grew, the one her roots had burst up through to catch the captain.
She knelt.
From her apron pocket she pulled a single seed.
A plantain seed, dark and round.
She pushed it down into the soil with one finger and patted the earth over it.
“For what I took,” she whispered.
Then she sat back on her heels and closed her eyes and didn’t move for a while.
The others came to the main deck one by one.
Anne climbed up over the stern from the empty longboat, a strip of her own shirt tied around her bleeding forearm.
Mary came over the bow.
There wasn’t a mark on her.
Yaw sat against the mainmast with his head back, grey-faced, a sodden yellow dog curled in his lap, licking his chin.
Titus leaned on the rail and rubbed his throat.
Theo came up out of the hatch with Cato and the twins behind him, where he’d hidden them the moment the fighting started.
Bess stood on the quarterdeck with her cleaver hanging from her hand and stared at Anne.
Then at Mary.
Then at Clementine and her staff and the white flowers wrapped around Toby.
“Will somebody,” she said in a very calm, very level voice, “please tell me what happened on that mountain?”
Ezinne laughed.
A shaky, cracked sound.
Nobody answered.
Kofi stood at the rail and looked out across the cove.
The two French longboats were almost back to the sloop now.
He watched the soldiers climbing up her side.
Watched them haul up their wounded.
Watched the captain drag himself up a rope ladder, soaked and bleeding, and stand at the rail.
He was looking back.
At the Morning Star.
At Kofi.
Even from here, Kofi could see the green glint of his eyes.
Then the captain turned and barked an order.
All along the sloop’s side, facing the cove, the gunports began to open.
One.
Then another.
Then another.
Square black mouths, five of them, and in each one, the round iron face of a cannon rolling out into the light.
Behind her, the mouth of the cove.
The only way out.
Too narrow to pass her without coming within twenty yards of those guns.
Kofi’s hand closed around the skull on his cane.
“We won,” Titus said beside him.
His voice was rough from the choking.
“We won that.”
“We did,” Kofi said.
He looked at the five black mouths of the guns.
“And we’re still trapped.”