Obi’s fish flopped once against the deck boards and went still, and every eye on the ship turned toward it like it was a feast instead of a single silver fish barely the length of a forearm.
“That’s it?” Bess crossed her arms.
“That’s what we’re feeding nine people tonight?”
“Caught two more this morning. Threw the small ones back.” Obi said it with more pride than the situation called for, and Toby ruffled his hair on the way past, laughing low in his chest despite everything.
“Boy’s got a talent, at least.” Toby crouched by the meager stores lined along the galley wall — a half sack of cornmeal, some salted pork gone soft at the edges, a few jars of preserves that had survived the crossing by luck alone.
“But talent don’t stretch nine bellies past two more days. We need a port. Proper stores. Flour, salt meat, anything that keeps.”
“And I need my kit replenished before we go further,” Clementine said, from where she sat cross-legged near the wounded boy’s cot — Obi’s own cot, still stained from the shoulder wound days old now and healing slow.
“What I carried off that plantation was what fit in my apron pockets running for my life. Half of it’s gone already. I’ve got nothing left for fever, nothing for infection past what’s already in that boy’s shoulder.”
Kofi crouched beside her, studying the shallow wound Obi carried like a badge instead of an injury.
“How bad.”
“Not bad yet. Could turn, if I run dry on what keeps it clean.” Clementine’s eyes came up to his, steady and unhurried the way they always were.
“I’m not telling you to change course, Kofi Brook. I’m telling you what’s true.”
“Trelawny’s still days off,” Yaw said, arms crossed at the rail.
“We stop somewhere first. Small port, somewhere Sterling’s name doesn’t carry loud enough yet to matter.”
“There’s a fishing village east of here,”no, not yet, a memory not yet earned — Kofi caught himself before the thought finished and let it go.
He didn’t know these waters east of the reef the way he knew Brook’s Reach’s shoreline.
That gap sat uncomfortably in his chest, a reminder that his sixty-seven years had a shape, and past its edges he was as lost as anyone.
“I don’t know what’s east of here,” he admitted, plain, because pretending otherwise had already nearly killed them once.
“None of us do. We’ll need someone who does, before long.”
“One thing at a time,” Bess said, already moving toward the stores with the brisk efficiency of a woman rationing against a hunger she understood better than most.
“Tonight we stretch what we’ve got. Tomorrow we find a port. Titus — you’re good with a line, aren’t you? Help the boy fish before the light goes.”
Titus grunted something that might have been agreement and moved to the rail beside Obi without further argument, and for a moment the ship held something almost like peace — the sound of a line hitting water, Bess muttering over her inventory, Toby humming low under his breath the way he always seemed to without noticing he did it.
It was Ezinne who raised the question of the flag, that evening, once the last of the light had gone soft and gold across the water.
“Every ship that means to be feared needs one,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a coiled length of rope with a scrap of old sailcloth spread across her knees.
“Something to fly when we come up on another ship. Something that says who we are before we ever say a word.”
“Skull and bones,” Titus said, without hesitation.
“Same as every pirate flag flying these waters. Let them know exactly what’s coming.”
“We’re not the same as every pirate flying these waters.” Ezinne’s fingers traced idle shapes on the sailcloth.
“A skull’s just a threat. I want something that means something, if anyone bothers to ask.”
“Means what?” Bess again, practical as ever.
Ezinne looked to Kofi, and something in her gaze made the rest of the deck go quiet, waiting.
“That thing you wear,” she said.
I’ve seen you touch it when you think nobody’s watching.
Yaw won’t say what it is, and neither will you, but I’ve been on this ship long enough to know it matters more than either of you lets on.”
Kofi’s hand found his own chest without meaning to, the small worn shape beneath his shirt.
He didn’t reach for it, didn’t draw it out.
He only held Ezinne’s gaze and let the silence answer some of it for him.
“It brought me somewhere I didn’t expect to end up,” he said, finally, careful with the shape of the truth even if he couldn’t hand over all of it.
“Somewhere better than where I was standing before. I don’t fully understand it myself. But I know it’s the reason any of us are sitting on this deck tonight instead of still on that row. ” Kofi took the compass out from under his shirt, with the sun symbol on the compass.
“Then that’s the flag,” Ezinne said, simple as that, like the matter had settled itself the moment he’d finished speaking.
“Not a skull. A sun. Same as the one on that compass face. Something that says we came back from somewhere we weren’t meant to come back from.”
“And under it,” Toby said, surprising everyone by speaking up at all, “chains. Broken ones. Let any ship that sees us flying know exactly what kind of trouble we are before they ever get close enough to find out.”
Kofi looked around the deck — Titus grudging but not arguing, Bess already nodding along despite herself, Obi abandoning his fishing line entirely to lean in and watch Ezinne’s hands move across the sailcloth.
Even Pockets had gone still on the rail, head cocked, as if he understood something important was being decided.
“Draw it,” Kofi said.
Ezinne did, working by lamplight long after the others had drifted off toward sleep — a golden sun rendered simple and bold against black cloth, a ring of broken chain links circling beneath it like a crown that had been struck apart.
By the time she finished, her fingers were stained with borrowed paint, her eyes heavy, and she held the finished cloth up for Kofi alone to see, the ship quiet around them but for the water against the hull.
“It’s good,” Kofi said, and meant it.
“It’s ours,” Ezinne said back, and that mattered more.
They ran it up the mast at first light, and for one unguarded hour the whole crew stood on deck and watched it catch the wind — Titus with his arms crossed and something almost like pride breaking through his usual scowl, Bess laughing outright when Pockets tried to climb the halyard after it, Toby’s low hum finding actual words for the first time since the escape, an old work song turned into something that sounded, for the first time in his life, like it belonged only to the people singing it.
Kofi stood at the wheel and let himself feel it too — not safety, not yet, but something close enough to it that he didn’t correct the feeling when it came.
Captain Bell wrote the proclamation himself, refusing his clerk’s offer to draft it, because a matter this important deserved his own hand and no other’s.
By order of the Crown and the Governor of Jamaica, a reward is hereby offered for the capture, alive or dead, of the escaped slave and murderer known as Kofi Brook, formerly of Brook’s Reach, for the maiming of Lord Sterling Brook, no relation, and the theft of a vessel belonging to the same.
Reward: five hundred pounds sterling.
He paused there, pen hovering, and Cross leaned over his shoulder uninvited to read the rest as it formed.
“The others,” Cross said.
“My lord’s given us names. Ought to price every last one of them, Captain. Send a message that runs deeper than just the ringleader.”
Bell’s jaw tightened at being told what he already intended, but he didn’t argue the point.
He wrote on.
Also wanted, associated with the above: the man called Yaw, believed second in command, three hundred pounds.
Tobias Freeman, called Toby.
Bess Odalys.
Clementine, called Auntie.
Ezinne.
Titus.
And the boy Obi.
He paused again at the child’s name, pen motionless above the paper for a moment longer than the others had earned, and Cross misread the hesitation entirely.
“Don’t go soft on that one, Captain. A slave that runs young grows into one that runs grown. Better to end it early.”
Bell didn’t look up.
“I’m not soft, Cross. I’m being thorough.” He finished the line.
One hundred pounds each, alive preferred for questioning, dead acceptable if alive proves impractical.
He set the pen down, read the whole of it back once in silence, and sanded the ink dry with the same unhurried precision he brought to every task that mattered to him.
“See this copied and posted in every port from here to Port Royal,” he said, folding the original into a leather dispatch case.
“And have my ship provisioned and ready to sail within the day.”
“You mean to hunt him yourself, Captain? Whole squadron’s at your disposal — could send lesser men to do the chasing while you—”
“I mean to hunt him myself.” Bell rose, straightening his coat with two sharp motions, his voice dropping into something colder and more certain than anything he’d said all morning.
“A man doesn’t earn a reputation like the one Brook’s already building himself by sitting in a colonial office reading reports secondhand. I want to see his face when he understands there was never any water wide enough to outrun this.”
Cross’s smile came slow and eager, the smile of a man who’d long ago traded the shape of his own dignity for a seat close enough to power to feel its warmth.
“Then I’ll ready the men, Captain. We’ll have him swinging before the season turns.”
Bell said nothing to that, only walked past him toward the door, already composing in his mind the first line of the report he intended to send to London the day Kofi Brook’s name stopped being a rumor and became, instead, a body delivered in chains.
Behind him, out past Brook’s Reach’s black rocks, the sea lay flat and waiting, giving away nothing yet of which direction the hunt would have to run.