Theo cleared his throat twice before the whole crew actually turned to look at him, which seemed to amuse him more than embarrass him.
“Figured introductions were owed,” he said, one hand resting easy on the strange curved club at his belt, “seeing as I’m about to be the man standing between all of you and every reef between here and Trelawny.” He swept a well-balanced cutlass.
“Theo Marchand. Navigator, sometimes swordman, full-time man who knows more about currents than is probably healthy for anyone.”
“Free man,” Titus said, flat, not quite a question.
“Free my whole life,” Theo agreed, meeting Titus’s stare without flinching.
“Doesn’t mean I’ve spent that freedom proud of everything I’ve done with it. I’ll tell that story if you want it. Not sure it’s a supper story, though.”
Titus studied him a moment longer, then grunted something that wasn’t quite approval or rejection, and went back to sharpening his blade.
“He’s got a boomerang,” Obi said, delighted, already circling the strange weapon at Theo’s hip like it might do a trick on command.
“Throw-club,” Theo corrected, mock-wounded.
“Built it myself. Watched a sailor from the Indian Ocean trade routes demonstrate, spent four months getting the weight right so she comes back to my hand instead of the fish.”
“Does it have a name?” Ezinne asked, amused despite herself.
“Everything worth building has a name.” Theo considered a moment, entirely too pleased with himself.
“Call her Persuasion. She’s very convincing.”
They ate well that night for the first time since the escape — Toby working wonders out of the new stores, Bess grudgingly admitting the flour had been worth the risk of the port, a proper fire burning low in an iron pot lashed against the deck.
Ezinne sang first, something old reworked with new words about a ship that used to carry chains and now carried none, and the whole crew fell quiet to listen in a way that felt like church to people who’d never been allowed one of their own.
It was Yaw who broke the reverence, lifting a bottle he’d smuggled off Brook’s Reach in his coat lining, which he’d never once mentioned until now.
“To the ship,” he said, “and to whoever’s fool enough to come looking for us on her.”
“To Persuasion,” Theo added, raising his own cup, “who I fully expect to earn her keep before this voyage is through.”
Toby laughed outright at that, and even Titus allowed something close to a smile, and the bottle went around twice before anyone thought to ration it — which was how, an hour later, Kofi found Yaw and Theo locked in an increasingly loud argument about whose home island brewed better rum, neither of them remotely qualified to judge anymore.
“Trinidad,” Theo insisted, swaying slightly where he sat.
“Hands down. My father traded there twice a year; I know rum.”
“You’ve never set foot on Trinidad in your life,” Yaw shot back, delighted with his own accusation.
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain half a bottle of my rum, is what you contain.”
Pockets, drawn by the noise, dropped from the rigging onto Theo’s shoulder and immediately began investigating his coat pockets with the single-minded focus of a professional thief.
“Hey — hey, get out of there, that’s not food—” Theo laughed, prying small clawed fingers away from his collar, and lost the fight entirely when the monkey produced a biscuit from somewhere and fled triumphantly to the mast.
“I like him. Genuinely. More honest than half the men I’ve sailed with.”
“Pockets is a good one,” Kofi said, from where he sat nearby, watching the chaos with the particular fondness of a man who hadn’t laughed freely in longer than he could remember.
“Best thief on the ship, and he doesn’t even know he’s stealing.”
“Pockets.” Theo turned the name over, brow furrowed with drink-slowed curiosity.
“Why Pockets?”
“Because he never stops filling them.” Kofi nodded toward the small shirt Obi had stitched for the monkey weeks back, a scrap of sailcloth with a single crooked pocket sewn onto the front, currently bulging with what looked like at least one stolen button and half a biscuit.
“Obi made him that. The first thing Pockets ever did with it was fill it up and never once take anything out. Seemed like the only name that fit.”
“That’s—” Theo laughed, delighted in the specific way drunk men are delighted by simple explanations.
“That’s perfect. That’s a perfect name. I love this ship.”
Somewhere past midnight, full-bellied and heavy with rum and relief neither of them had earned the right to feel safe having yet, the crew drifted one by one toward sleep — Toby first, then Bess curled near the stores she still half-guarded even unconscious, then Titus and Obi and Clementine, until only the creak of rigging and the slow slap of water against the hull kept watch over a ship that had, for one night, forgotten it was being hunted.
Brook’s Reach did not sleep so easily.
Captain Bell stood on the deck of his ship, the Vigilant, watching his crew finish provisioning her by lantern light, every motion around him precise and unhurried because he’d insisted on it.
A man rushed into a hunt made mistakes.
Bell did not intend to make any.
“We sail with the tide,” he told his first officer, not looking up from the chart spread across the rail.
“Full stores, full powder. I want no excuse to turn back before we’ve found him.”
Behind him, unannounced and uninvited, Sterling Brook’s carriage rattled to a stop at the dock, and Sterling himself descended with the stiff, deliberate care of a man whose body had not yet forgiven him for what he’d lost.
“Captain.”
“My lord.” Bell’s tone carried the barest edge of surprise.
“This is Navy business now. There’s no need for you to—”
“There is every need.” Sterling’s remaining hand gripped the rail hard enough to whiten his knuckles, the empty sleeve pinned neat and deliberate against his side, a visible accusation he’d chosen to wear rather than hide. Read this novel at novelping dot com for the best experience.
“I want to be there, Captain. When you take him. I want to see his face understand exactly what it cost him to touch me.”
Bell studied him a long moment — the kind of study he usually reserved for a man he was deciding whether to trust with something valuable.
“Then find yourself a cabin, my lord, and stay out of my crew’s way while they work.” He turned back to his chart, already tracing a line south toward open water.
“I don’t intend to lose this hunt to anyone’s impatience. Yours included.”
Cross, lurking near the gangway with the eager posture of a dog awaiting a command, grinned at that, wide and unbothered by the insult riding just beneath Bell’s words.
“We’ll have him hanging from a yardarm before the month turns, my lord. I’d wager my commission on it.”
Sterling said nothing, only turned his gaze south, toward the water that held, somewhere within it, the ship, the man, and the arm he intended to see repaid in full.
The Morning Star drifted quietly under a moon gone thin behind cloud, every soul aboard her sunk deep into the particular, dreamless sleep of full bellies and too much rum.
Kofi woke to warmth against his chest — not comfort, not at first, but a pulse of heat sharp enough to cut through sleep and rum both, the compass suddenly alive against his skin where it had lain quiet and forgotten for weeks.
His eyes opened to darkness and the low creak of the hull, and for a moment he lay still, disoriented, certain he’d dreamed the sensation.
Then he heard it.
A wet, heavy slap — fish flesh against wood, once, then again, somewhere near the open hatch leading down toward the hold.
The smell came a breath behind the sound, thick and sudden, seaweed gone to rot and something underneath it that reminded him, with a lurch in his gut, of the sea’s smell the night he’d drowned in it.
Kofi sat up slowly, every old instinct from a shipwright’s decades of night watches screaming at him not to move fast, not yet.
The deck lay silent around him — Yaw sprawled boneless near the mast, Theo face-down and snoring, the rest of the crew lost somewhere in the dark shapes of sleep.
Nobody stirred.
Nobody but him had woken at all.
He looked toward the hatch.
A hand was sliding through the gap — pale and wrong in the thin moonlight, fingers webbed and tipped in claws that caught what little light there was, moving with a slow, deliberate patience that was somehow worse than speed would have been.
It found the edge of the deck boards and gripped, testing, and behind it Kofi heard — or felt, he wasn’t certain which — something vast shifting in the black water beneath the hull.
He opened his mouth, throat dry with a fear that had nothing to do with muskets or bounty papers, and the only sound that came out at first was a strange, useless yawn, his body still half-convinced this was only a dream worth sleeping through.
Then Pockets screamed.
The monkey shot upright from where he’d curled against Obi’s side, fur bristling, shrieking at a pitch that tore through the quiet like a struck bell — and the whole deck came awake at once, bodies scrambling upright into a darkness that had, in the space of one drawn breath, stopped being safe at all.