The first gun fired before anyone could move.
Kofi saw the flash at the sloop’s side, a burst of orange inside a gout of white smoke.
Then the sound hit him, a flat, hard boom that slapped off the walls of the cove.
Then the ball.
It struck the Morning Star’s starboard rail ten feet from where he stood.
The rail exploded.
Wood burst outward in a spray of splinters as long as his hand.
He threw an arm over his face.
Something stung his cheek.
Somebody screamed.
The whole ship shuddered under his feet.
“Down! Everyone down!”
They hit the deck.
Titus dragged Theo flat.
Bess threw herself over Obi.
Clementine curled her body over Toby, still wrapped in his white flowers by the mainmast.
Cato and the twins were already back down the hatch, Ezinne shoving them ahead of her.
Kofi lay on his stomach with his cheek against the planks and splinters raining down around him.
Silence.
Then the sound of the French reloading.
A long scrape of iron.
A rammer thudding down a barrel.
He lifted his head.
The sloop sat across the cove mouth exactly where she had been.
Broadside on.
Five guns.
The captain at her rail, a dark shape against the bright water, watching.
“Warning shot,” Titus growled beside him.
He spat out a splinter.
“That was them saying the next one won’t miss.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
Kofi didn’t answer.
He was looking at the sloop.
Not at her guns.
At her hull.
At the way she sat in the water.
A ship that size, anchored in a cove like this, with the tide running out and the wind off the land, would never lie broadside to the shore on her own.
She’d swing.
The current would take her stern and pull her round until her bow pointed out to sea, like a weathervane.
Every ship did.
This one hadn’t swung.
He squinted.
Traced the line of her anchor cable down from her bow into the green water.
And there.
A second rope.
Thinner.
Running from the anchor cable back along her side, up through a port near her stern, and made fast inside.
“She’s on a spring,” he said.
Theo lifted his face off the planks.
“A what?”
“A spring line. It runs from her anchor cable to her stern. It holds her sideways. Keeps her guns pointed at us.” Kofi’s mind was racing.
Every ship he’d ever built had a spring rigged at some point.
He knew exactly where it would be fastened, how thick, how much strain.
“Cut it, and the tide swings her round. Her bow comes to us. Her guns point out to sea.”
“How do we cut it?” Bess called from across the deck.
“It’s on her other side. Behind her. Under her guns.”
Kofi looked at Yaw.
Yaw sat slumped against the mainmast, grey-faced, his eyes half closed.
The yellow dog lay across his legs.
His pistols hung loose in his hands.
He opened one eye.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he croaked.
“One shot.”
“I can’t feel my arms, Kofi.”
“One shot.”
Yaw closed his eye again.
Breathed.
Opened it.
“I can’t hit what I can’t see,” he said.
“And if I stand up, they’ll blow my head off.”
“Then we make it so they can’t see either.”
Kofi looked down at the cane in his hand.
He tried.
He knelt behind the shattered rail, drew the blade an inch from the sheath, and tried to make the fog come.
Nothing.
He drew it further.
Gripped the hilt until his knuckles cracked.
Thought about the cold that had come up out of the ground at the cross.
About the dread on the captain’s face.
About the whispering under the water.
Nothing.
Not a wisp.
He drew the whole blade out and held it up in the sunlight.
Dark steel.
Cold to the touch.
Ordinary.
“Come on,” he muttered through his teeth.
“Come on.”
Across the cove, the French were running out the guns again.
He could hear the trucks rumbling across the sloop’s deck.
“You’re pushing it.”
Anne crouched beside him.
He hadn’t heard her move.
She had a strip of her shirt tied around her forearm, already soaked dark, and she was watching his hands.
“You’re shoving at it like a man trying to push a cart uphill.” She tilted her head toward the blade.
“Don’t. The dead don’t like being shoved.”
“Then how?”
“How did it come before?”
He thought about it.
On the deck, with the captain’s hand around Titus’s throat.
“I stopped trying to stop it.”
“Right.” She grinned.
“So stop trying to start it, too. Let it go where it wants. You just hold the door open.”
He stared at her.
“Trust me,” Anne said.
“My spirit’s married to yours. I know how he gets.”
Kofi looked down at the blade.
He let his grip loosen.
Let his shoulders drop.
He stopped thinking about the fog at all.
He thought instead about the drowned men standing in the graveyard, water pouring off them.
About how patient they’d been.
How long they’d waited.
All right, he thought.
Come if you want to.
The cold came up out of the blade like breath out of a mouth on a winter morning.
Grey fog poured off the dark steel.
Down his hand.
Down onto the deck.
Over the shattered rail and onto the water.
And this time it didn’t trickle.
It rolled.
It spread out across the cove in a low grey wave, thickening as it went, swallowing the green water, swallowing the mangroves, climbing up the sloop’s black hull.
In twenty heartbeats, Kofi couldn’t see the French ship at all.
He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
Anne clapped him on the shoulder, hard.
“There you go,” she said.
“He’ll see us,” Clementine said quietly.
They all turned.
She was still kneeling by Toby, one hand on his chest.
“The captain. His spirit sees in the dark. He saw Kofi through the fog on our deck. He’ll see us move.”
Nobody spoke.
Mary was the one who broke the silence.
She was looking across the deck at the stern rail, where the French longboat Anne had cleared still bobbed against the hull, empty, bumping on its painter.
“Then we give him something to look at,” she said.
Anne followed her eyes.
A slow grin spread across her face.
“Oh, I like that.”
“What?” Theo looked between them.
“What do you like? What are we liking?”
“Fire.” Anne was already uncorking the bottle at her belt with her teeth.
“In the fog. He sees in the dark, so he’ll see a fire from a mile off. We take the boat out the other way. Toward the far side of the cove. He’ll think it’s you making a run for it.” She spat the cork onto the deck.
“And while he’s chasing a burning sword in a little boat, the Morning Star slips out the front door.”
“And if he shoots the little boat?” Titus asked.
Mary stood up.
“He won’t be looking at the boat,” she said.
“He’ll be looking at me.”
They went over the stern rail together and dropped into the longboat without a sound.
Kofi watched them from the quarterdeck.
Mary took the oars.
Anne stood in the bow, cutlass in one hand, bottle in the other.
They pushed off and slid into the fog and were gone.
A heartbeat later, out in the grey, a long roar of flame bloomed.
Orange.
Bright.
Moving.
Moving away from the cove mouth.
Toward the mangroves on the far side.
On the sloop, a shout.
Then another.
French voices, rising.
Then a rumble of gun trucks, iron wheels on planks.
The guns were turning.
Following the fire.
“Now,” Kofi said.
“Now. Weigh anchor. Quietly.”
Titus and Theo threw themselves at the capstan.
Bess and Ezinne hauled at the bars beside them.
Even Obi pushed, his small shoulders braced against a bar, face screwed up with effort.
The anchor chain came up through the hawse hole one slow link at a time.
Every clank sounded to Kofi like a church bell.
He went to Yaw.
Yaw had pulled himself to his feet against the mast.
He was swaying.
His face had gone from grey to almost green.
The yellow dog sat at his feet, staring up at him, tail still.
“Can you stand?”
“I’m standing.”
“Can you shoot?”
Yaw raised one pistol.
His arm trembled so hard the barrel shook.
“We’ll see,” he said.
The anchor broke free of the bottom.
The Morning Star began, very slowly, to drift with the tide toward the cove mouth.
Toward the sloop.
The fog swallowed them.
Kofi stood at the wheel and steered by memory and nothing else.
He couldn’t see the bow.
He couldn’t see the water.
Grey all around, thick and cold and wet, beading on his eyelashes.
Somewhere ahead, close, was the sloop.
Somewhere to the left were the rocks at the cove mouth.
Somewhere to the right, the sandbar.
Theo stood beside him, hands white on the rail, whispering soundings he could only guess at.
“Steady… steady… I don’t know, steady… maybe…”
Behind them, far off now, the orange glow of Anne’s fire bobbed in the fog.
Muskets cracked from the sloop.
Then the boom of a gun, aimed at the fire.
Kofi flinched.
The glow didn’t go out.
Then the water spoke.
It came from below.
From the green under the hull, the cold black under the green.
The same whispering he’d heard during the fight, voices without breath, words without shapes.
Only this time, the words had shapes.
Left, shipwright.
He went still.
Left.
Rocks.
He didn’t think.
He threw the wheel hard to port.
The Morning Star heeled.
Something scraped along her starboard side.
A long, low groan of wood on stone that he felt through his boots.
Then silence.
Then open water.
Theo was staring at him.
“How did you—”
“The water told me.”
“The water—”
“Later, Theo.”
Ahead, through the fog, a shadow loomed.
Huge.
Black.
A wall of wood rising out of the grey not forty yards away.
The sloop.
Kofi could see her side now, close enough to make out the seams in her planking.
He could hear her crew.
Running feet.
Shouting in French.
All of it on her far side, toward the fire.
And there, low on her hull, running from her bow along her side to a port near her stern: a rope.
Thick as a man’s wrist.
Taut as a bowstring.
The spring line.
“Yaw,” he breathed.
He’d dragged himself there one hand over the other.
He raised his pistol and laid the barrel on the rail to steady it.
His arm shook.
The veve on the frame flickered, dark, then faintly orange, then dark again.
“I don’t know if there’s anything left,” he whispered.
“Then use what there is.”
Yaw closed his eyes.
At his feet, the yellow dog stood up.
It pressed its whole body against Yaw’s leg.
Its tail went very still.
Yaw opened his eyes.
He fired.
The hound’s head that came out of the barrel was small.
Smaller than before.
Barely the size of a man’s fist, grey-gold and faint as breath on glass.
It shot out over the water, snarling silently.
It went wide.
Too wide.
Kofi’s heart dropped.
Then it turned.
It curved in the air like a dog veering after a rabbit and struck the spring line square, jaws snapping shut.
The rope parted with a crack like a pistol shot.
Yaw’s knees gave out.
He went down against the rail.
The dog caught his collar in its teeth and held on.
The sloop began to swing.
Slowly at first.
Her stern drifted out on the tide.
Her bow swung round toward the Morning Star.
Her broadside, her five guns, her five black mouths, swung away, out toward the open sea, pointing at nothing.
On her deck, someone screamed an order in French.
Too late.
The Morning Star slipped past her bow so close that Kofi could have thrown his cane onto her deck.
Clementine stood at the waist rail as the sloop slid by.
She was watching the French sailors running across the sloop’s deck, shouting, hauling at lines.
Watching the officers yelling orders.
Watching the guns, all pointed the wrong way.
And at the sloop’s bow rail, standing still while everyone else ran, was a man.
Brown skin.
Battered hat.
One leg wrapped thick with cloth below the knee.
He leaned on the rail with both hands, and he was looking straight across the narrow gap of water at her.
Hilaire Bastien.
He had a clear view.
A clear line.
He could have shouted.
Pointed.
One word to the officer beside him and the guns would have swung back, and the Morning Star was close enough that even a bad gunner couldn’t miss.
He didn’t shout.
He didn’t point.
He looked at her, and she looked at him, and the fog moved between them.
Then the Morning Star was past, and the sloop’s bow was falling away behind them into the grey, and he was gone.
Clementine stood at the rail a long time after.
They found the longboat a quarter mile out, beyond the cove mouth, in the open sea where the fog thinned to wisps.
Mary was rowing.
Anne sat in the bow with her cutlass across her knees.
The flame on the blade had gone out.
A thin trail of smoke still rose from the dark steel.
There was a musket ball hole through the longboat’s side just above the waterline, and the boat sat low, half full of water.
Titus threw a line.
Mary caught it one-handed without looking up.
They came up the side, Anne first, then Mary.
Anne vaulted the rail and landed on the deck and stood there, dripping, grinning, her eyes still bright.
“Well,” she said.
“That was fun.”
“They shot at you,” Theo said.
“They shot at the boat.” She held up her bandaged arm.
“Mostly.”
Mary climbed over the rail behind her.
She didn’t say anything.
She just looked back toward the cove, where the last of the fog was lifting and the sloop sat broadside to the open sea, guns pointing at empty water.
Then she looked at Kofi.
“Good,” she said.
Nobody spoke for a long while after that.
The Morning Star ran north before the wind.
The coast of Saint-Domingue slid away behind them, green mountains rising into cloud, smoke from the boiling houses along the plain.
Then just mountains.
Then just a blue line on the horizon.
Then nothing.
The crew sat on the deck.
Wherever they’d stopped.
Nobody went below.
Nobody ate.
Titus sat with his back against the capstan and his eyes closed, rubbing his bruised throat.
Theo lay flat on his back on the planks and stared at the sky.
Bess sat on an upturned bucket with her cleaver across her knees, still gripping it.
Ezinne came up out of the hatch with the children and sat with them in a heap by the mainmast, all of them leaning on each other.
Yaw slept against the rail where he’d fallen.
The yellow dog slept on his chest.
Kofi stood at the wheel.
His arm had started to hurt.
Then his side.
Then everything.
He looked down and found his shirt soaked through with blood, and dimly thought somebody should probably look at that.
It was Clementine who finally broke the silence.
“Toby,” she said.
Everyone turned.
Toby’s eyes were open.
He lay by the mainmast, still wrapped in the green vines and the white flowers.
He blinked up at the sails.
Then his eyes moved.
To Clementine, kneeling over him.
To Obi, who had scrambled across the deck on his knees.
To the strange flowers on his chest.
His lips moved.
“Who,” he said, very hoarsely, “has been cooking?”
Obi burst into tears and threw himself on Toby’s chest.
Toby grunted in pain and wrapped one big arm around the boy anyway.
Bess put her cleaver down for the first time since the fight.
“Nobody,” she said.
Her voice cracked.
“Nobody’s been cooking. You’ve been lying there being stabbed.”
“Well.” Toby closed his eyes.
“That’s no excuse.”
Somebody laughed.
Then somebody else.
Then the whole deck was laughing, shaky and exhausted and close to tears, and for a moment Kofi let himself lean on the wheel and laugh with them.
They ate that evening for the first time in a day and a half.
Bess cooked.
She wouldn’t let anyone else near the galley.
Salt fish and rice and the last of the plantains from Grann’s village, fried crisp in the iron pan.
When it was done, she carried the first bowl out of the galley herself, crossed the deck, and set it down in front of Anne.
Anne looked at it.
Then at Bess.
“I counted,” Bess said.
“Two more mouths. That’s two more bowls a day. Every day. Rice doesn’t grow on ships, and fish don’t jump into the pot on their own.” She folded her arms.
“So. Can famous pirates cook?”
Anne opened her mouth.
“No,” Mary said.
Anne shut it.
Bess narrowed her eyes.
“Then you’ll learn.”
“Fine by me,” Anne said, and picked up her spoon.
Toby, propped up against the mast with a blanket around his shoulders, had insisted on being carried to the galley fire.
He watched the sisters eat with an expression of deep, pained concern.
“You’re too thin,” he told Mary.
Mary looked down at herself.
“Eat more,” Toby said.
“Both of you. You fought for my boy.” He looked at Obi, asleep against his knee.
“Anybody who fights for my boy eats until they can’t stand.”
Mary looked at him for a long moment.
Her eyes went wet.
She wiped them, quick and irritated, and picked up her spoon.
Obi had woken up and was staring at Anne’s cutlass where it lay across her knees.
“Is it true?” he whispered.
“It catches fire?”
Anne looked at him.
Then at Toby, who was glaring at her.
Then back at Obi.
She sighed.
She picked up the bottle, took a mouthful, and spat it along the blade.
It caught with a soft whump.
Obi made a sound like a teakettle and nearly fell backward off his stool.
Ezinne caught him by the collar.
Toby put his face in his hands.
Ezinne hadn’t said much since the sisters came aboard.
She sat a little apart on a coil of rope with her fiddle across her knees, watching them.
Watching Anne put the fire out with a wet rag.
Watching Mary sharpen her knife.
Watching the flowers on Toby’s chest.
Under her breath, she started to hum.
No words.
Just a tune.
Something new.
Something nobody had heard before.
Kofi heard it.
He didn’t ask.
“So,” Bess said, when the bowls were empty.
She set hers down with a clack and looked around the circle.
“Somebody’s going to tell me. Right now. What happened on that mountain.”
Everyone looked at each other.
Then they all started talking at once.
“There was a graveyard—”
“—a whole patrol, Bess, with dogs, and Yaw just ran—”
“—and Nell’s brand went white, white like a forge, and Anne put her hands on her and the whole room froze—”
“One at a time,” Bess snapped.
Silence.
Clementine went first.
She didn’t stand up.
She just laid her staff across her knees in the firelight so they could all see it.
The twisted mangrove root.
The knot at the top.
The mark pressed into the wood.
A green shoot had sprouted from the burl since the morning, and as they watched, a small white bud on it slowly opened.
“Grann Rose sent me into a forest,” she said quietly.
“In the dark. Alone. Something in there called my name. I found a man dying. One of the hunters.” She paused.
“I healed him. Out loud. The way I haven’t since…” She stopped.
“In a long time.”
“And then?”
“And then the forest gave me this.” She touched the staff.
“And told me its name. Gran Bwa. The great wood.” She looked down at the bud.
“Mother of the Deep, it called me.”
Ezinne’s eyes had gone huge.
Yaw went next.
He was sitting against the rail with the yellow dog in his lap.
“I went back to the crossroads.” He scratched the dog behind its floppy ear.
“The old man was there. With his cane and his dog. He showed me four roads. I had to pick one.” His hand went still on the dog’s head.
“Amara was on one of them.”
Nobody spoke.
“I said goodbye,” Yaw said.
“And then I picked the gate. And then he told me his name.” He looked at the dog.
“Legba.”
At the sound of the name, the dog’s head came up.
Its ears pricked, both of them, even the floppy one.
Its tail thumped once against the deck.
Bess stared at it.
“The dog knows its name?”
“It’s not his name,” Yaw said.
“It’s… well. It’s sort of his name.” He frowned.
“I’ve been calling him Latch.”
The dog’s tail thumped twice.
“And you?” Bess turned to Kofi.
Kofi had been quiet.
He sat on a coil of rope near the galley fire with the cane across his knees, his arm wrapped in a bandage Clementine had made him sit still for.
He looked down at the skull on the hilt for a long time.
“I sat with the dead,” he said.
“At the Baron’s cross. All night.”
“What did they say?” Ezinne asked.
“They asked what I was going to build.” He turned the cane slowly in his hands.
“And when I told them, he gave me this. The Baron.” He touched the skull.
The tiny bone top hat.
“Baron Samedi.”
He didn’t say why the Baron had chosen him.
He didn’t say you already died once.
He didn’t say walked into the water all by yourself.
He didn’t look at Yaw.
Yaw didn’t look at him either.
“That’s it?” Bess said.
“That’s all you’re going to tell us?”
“That’s all I know how to tell.”
Bess studied him for a long moment with narrowed eyes.
Then she grunted and let it go.
Pockets chose that moment to strike.
He’d been sitting on Cato’s shoulder the whole time, watching Anne’s bottle with great interest.
Anne had set it down on the deck beside her stool.
Pockets dropped from Cato’s shoulder, scampered across the planks, snatched the bottle in both hands, and fled up the rigging.
Missed.
Halfway up the mainmast, Pockets stopped on a yardarm, pulled the cork with his teeth exactly the way Anne did, and took a big, proud swig.
He froze.
His eyes went wide.
His face went through several expressions very fast.
Then he screamed.
A high, outraged, betrayed shriek that echoed off the sails.
He flung the bottle away from him as hard as he could.
It tumbled down end over end toward the deck.
Kofi caught it.
He didn’t think about it.
His hand just came up and caught it, neat as a ball.
Rum sloshed over his knuckles.
The smell of it hit him: rum and hot pepper, sharp and fiery.
Something in his chest went yes.
He looked at the bottle in his hand.
“Can I?” he said, to Anne, before he’d decided to say anything at all.
Anne raised her eyebrows.
She waved a hand.
Go on.
He drank.
The pepper burned all the way down.
He didn’t cough this time.
He took another long swallow.
Then another.
Then he lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let out a long, satisfied breath, and felt better than he’d felt in days.
His other hand had drifted to his coat pocket.
He hadn’t noticed it go.
There was something in there.
Three thick dark cigars, wrapped in a twist of cloth.
He didn’t remember putting them there.
He thought, distantly, of Grann Rose’s hand brushing his coat as he’d turned to leave the village.
He pulled one out.
He leaned toward the galley fire and lit it from a coal.
He drew on it.
Blue smoke curled up around his face, rich and sweet.
He leaned back on his coil of rope.
He puffed.
He took another swig of pepper rum.
Then he looked up.
Every single person on the deck was staring at him.
Theo had his mouth open.
Titus had one eyebrow raised so high it had nearly vanished into his hairline.
Toby had a hand over his heart.
Obi was staring at the cigar like it had grown teeth.
Even Pockets, up on the yardarm, had stopped screeching.
Kofi took the cigar out of his mouth.
“What?”
Anne burst out laughing.
She laughed so hard she slid off her stool onto the deck.
She lay there on her back, clutching her stomach, her bandaged arm flung over her face, howling.
“What?” Kofi demanded.
“You’ve never had a cigar in your life,” Titus said slowly.
Kofi looked at the cigar in his fingers.
Then at the bottle in his other hand.
He hadn’t.
Not once.
Not in either life.
He’d always hated the smell of the overseers’ pipes at Brook’s Reach.
“Oh,” he said.
Anne sat up, wiping her eyes.
“It’s the Baron,” she managed.
“It’s the Baron, Kofi.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every spirit leaves something on you. When it binds you.” She was still hiccupping with laughter.
“A habit. A taste. A hunger you never had before. Something that’s theirs, sitting inside you.” She pointed at the cigar.
“The Baron likes his rum hot and his cigars thick. Now so do you.”
Kofi looked at the cigar again.
Slowly, he put it back in his mouth.
It tasted wonderful.
“Is that why you drink the pepper rum?” Theo asked Anne.
“Maman Brigitte.” Anne grinned.
“Can’t stand it plain anymore. And I curse like a dockhand. Didn’t use to.” She paused.
“Well. Not as much.”
“Everybody who knows the spirits can see it,” Mary said.
She hadn’t moved from her stool.
Her whetstone was going again, slow and steady.
Shhk.
Shhk.
“That’s what makes it dangerous. A man who knows what to look for can read your Binding off you like a name on a poster. That Navy captain’s second, the one who killed Yaw’s girl. Did he count rice?”
“How did you know that?” Yaw said sharply.
“Because his spirit makes him. That’s how.” Mary looked at him.
“Yours will too. Look at the door.”
Yaw blinked.
“What?”
“The cabin door. Behind you.”
He turned.
The door to the aft cabin stood shut behind him, latched.
He realized he’d been staring at it.
Not just now.
All evening.
Every time his eyes wandered, they’d drifted to that door.
And his fingers itched.
A small, persistent itch, deep in his knuckles.
He wanted to get up and open it.
Not to go in.
Just to open it.
He made himself look away.
“That’s going to get very annoying,” he said.
“And the dog,” Mary added.
“He’s not going anywhere.”
The yellow dog thumped its tail.
Across the circle, Clementine absently reached up and pulled something out of her hair.
A leaf.
Small and green and fresh.
She looked at it for a moment, frowning, as if she wasn’t sure where it had come from.
Then she noticed everyone looking at her, too.
She sighed and tucked the leaf into her apron.
“Don’t,” she said.
Theo, very wisely, didn’t.
It was Toby who called the vote.
He did it from his blanket by the mast, propped up on one elbow, still pale.
“Kofi says we vote on the new ones,” he said.
“So. We vote. I say yes. They fought for my boy.” He raised his hand.
Obi’s hand shot up so fast he almost fell over.
Ezinne raised hers slowly, still humming under her breath.
Bess sat with her arms folded and looked at the two sisters for a long time.
At Anne’s crooked grin and bandaged arm.
At Mary’s quiet, steady face.
“Two more bowls,” she said.
“Every day.”
“We’ll learn to cook,” Anne said.
“You’ll learn to catch it, too.”
“Fine.”
Bess raised her hand.
Last.
“Galley duty,” she said.
“Both of you. Starting tomorrow. And if I find either of you wasting rice, I’ll throw you to the mermaids myself.”
“Aye,” Anne said gravely.
“Galley duty.”
Mary just nodded.
And that was that.
The ship had gone quiet by the time Kofi went below.
Most of the crew slept on deck in the warm night, sprawled wherever they’d fallen.
Toby and Obi under the mast.
Titus against the capstan.
Theo with his charts over his face.
Yaw against the rail with the dog curled on his feet.
Below, in the little space they’d cleared for the children, Kofi found Cato, Mingo, and Nell asleep in a heap in the twins’ hammock, tangled together.
He sat down on a sea chest beside them.
The lantern swung on its hook.
Its light moved over the three small shoulders.
Over three iron-ring scars.
Quiet scars now.
Empty.
Nothing inside any of them crying.
He’d heard each one go.
Felt them leave.
Like a sigh.
Like something setting down a load it had carried far too long.
He thought of the Hollow.
Of Pa Cudjoe’s drum, slow and steady in the dark.
Of Tanty Abba’s cinnamon fish.
Of the glowing lagoon.
Of a woman sitting on her doorstep with a little girl in her lap, saying, I’m tired.
I won’t go back on the water with my girl.
Sukey.
Sukey, who still had a brand on her shoulder.
Who still had something chained inside it, crying to go home.
Who Phibba smoked every night, and every night, it only dulled.
Kofi sat up straight.
He could free her now.
He could free her the way he’d freed Nell and Cato and Mingo.
Kneel in front of her.
Listen.
Say go home.
“You thought of it too.”
Mary stood at the foot of the ladder.
He hadn’t heard her come down.
She stood half in the lantern light, a blanket around her shoulders.
“The woman you left in the Hollow,” she said.
“The one with the brand.”
“Sukey.” Kofi frowned.
“How do you know about her?”
“Your navigator talks.” A faint smile.
“A great deal.”
“I can free her. I can sail back and free her.”
“Yes.” Mary came down the last step.
Her face had gone serious.
“You should. Quickly.”
Something in her voice made the back of his neck prickle.
“Why quickly?”
Mary sat down on the sea chest across from him.
She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.
For a moment, she didn’t speak.
“Anne and I raided Ironbound ships,” she said finally.
“For years. We read their papers. Their letters. Their orders.” She paused.
“The Company gives its salt masters something. A ring. Cold iron. They hang it on a thread, and it pulls. Toward the brands.”
Kofi went very still.
“It’s weak if the brand’s been dulled,” Mary went on.
“Smoked, the way your old woman does it. Faint. But it never stops pulling. Not while there’s something still chained inside.” She looked at the three sleeping children.
At their quiet scars.
“These ones, it can’t feel anymore. You took that away.”
“But Sukey,” Kofi breathed.
“If anyone took a ring from that salt pan,” Mary said softly, “your Sukey is a lantern. Burning in the dark. Pointing straight at your Hollow.”
The lantern swung on its hook.
The ship creaked.
Kofi was already on his feet.
He was already up the ladder.
“Theo!”
Theo jerked awake on deck, charts flying off his face.
“What? What, what is it, are we sinking?”
“Cat Island,” Kofi said.
“Set a course for Cat Island.”
“Now?” Theo scrambled up, blinking.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Now.”
Two hundred miles to the north, across the dark water, three ships weighed anchor under a sky full of stars.
The Vigilant first, tall and heavy, her lanterns lit.
Behind her, low and quick and black in the water, two shallow-draft sloops with the names of English saints painted on their sterns.
Forty men crowded their decks.
In their holds, coiled like sleeping snakes, lay two hundred fathoms of cold-iron chain.
Captain Edmund Bell stood alone on the Vigilant’s quarterdeck.
He held a ring of cold iron up on a black thread.
It turned.
Slowed.
Settled.
Pointing north.
Faint.
Steady.
Patient.
Behind him, Sterling Brook limped up the ladder, his cane thumping on each step.
“Well?”
“Still there,” Bell said.
“Then we go?”
Bell lowered the ring and closed his hand around it.
“We go.”
He turned to his first officer.
“Make sail.”
The order went down the deck.
Men swarmed up the rigging.
Sails dropped and filled with a sound like thunder.
The Vigilant leaned into the wind.
Behind her, the two black sloops followed.
North.
Toward Cat Island.
Toward the Hollow.