Dawn found the deck a wreck of scorch marks and spilled oil, and Yaw sitting alone near the mast with his hands still not fully his own.
He watched them tremble against his knees and couldn’t make them stop, not from cold, not from the last of the rum working its way out of him — from something else entirely, a delayed understanding of exactly how far up that mast he’d climbed and exactly how little margin that shot had actually had.
“You’re shaking,” Kofi said, dropping down beside him with two cups of something Toby had brewed strong enough to strip paint.
“Been shaking an hour.” Yaw took the cup anyway, both hands wrapped around it like it might anchor something.
“Kept telling myself it’d stop once the sun came up. Sun’s up.”
“You saved every soul on this ship last night.”
“I know that.” A short laugh cracked out of him, more disbelief than humor.
“I know that, and some part of me’s walking around today feeling ten feet tall about it, if I’m honest. And the other part keeps replaying the second before I pulled that trigger, when I thought — that’s it, that’s the whole story, Yaw falls off a yardarm drunk and everyone still drowns.” He looked down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.
“Both those things are true at the same time. Don’t know what to do with that.”
“Nothing to do with it,” Kofi said.
“Just carry it. Same as everything else.”
Theo had claimed the bow, cross-legged with his charts spread despite the fact that half of them had gone brine-stained overnight, muttering to himself in a way that might have been navigation or might have been something closer to prayer.
“Iron,” he said, when Kofi crouched near him.
“I told everyone iron would work. Half of you looked at me like I’d lost my mind, throwing nails at sea monsters—”
“Nobody doubted you in the moment, Theo.”
“Bess absolutely doubted me in the moment.” He didn’t look up from his charts, but his hand had gone still on the parchment, some of his energy draining from his voice.
“I’ve been telling myself for years that magic’s real the way ghost stories are real — something sailors say to explain bad luck and worse weather. Made it easy. Kept it at arm’s length, something to theorize about over a drink.” He finally looked up, and underneath the usual quick grin something rawer showed through.
“Doesn’t feel like theory anymore. Feels like I nearly watched all of you drown because I was right about something I never actually believed I was right about.”
“You saved us because you were right.”
“I know.” Theo huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Doesn’t make the last twelve hours feel any less like someone reached into my chest and rearranged what I thought the world was.” He shook himself, visibly, and some of the old performance slid back over his face like a mask settling into place. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
“Anyway. Recalculating our heading, since apparently ‘stay in open water’ is no longer a synonym for ‘stay safe.’ Give me an hour.”
The argument broke open over breakfast, when Titus finally said out loud what he’d clearly been sitting on since the fires went out.
“We nearly died last night. All of us. Over some sea witch nobody warned us about.” He set his bowl down harder than it needed to be set down.
“We traded one kind of dying for another, is what I’m saying. Whip and chain back there, teeth and claws out here. Difference being back there I knew exactly what I was up against.”
“And back there,” Bess shot back, “you didn’t have a say in whether you lived or died at all. Out here you do. That’s not nothing, Titus.”
“Tell that to the boy who nearly went over the rail.” Titus’s jaw was tight, his eyes finding Obi where he sat quiet near Clementine, still pale from the night before.
“I’m not saying turn back. I’m saying somebody should’ve told us what kind of water we were sailing into before we sailed into it.”
“Nobody knew,” Kofi said, quiet but firm enough to cut through the rising heat of it.
“I didn’t know. None of us did. That’s the truth of it, and I won’t pretty it up for you.”
“Then find out before the next time.” Titus held his gaze, unflinching.
“That’s all I’m asking.”
It could have stayed there, brittle and unresolved — except Toby, of all people, broke the silence that followed with a low, rough laugh that had no business sounding as warm as it did.
“You know what I keep thinking about,” he said, to no one in particular, ladling out more of the thin morning stew.
“Man threw a nail down a pistol barrel and shot a sea queen off a rail in the pitch dark, drunk as a lord. And it worked.” He shook his head, something like wonder breaking through the exhaustion on his face.
“Thirty years I cooked on that plantation and never once saw anything worth telling a grandchild about. One night on this ship and I’ve got a story I’ll be telling till I die.”
A few people laughed at that — real laughter, worn thin but genuine, the particular relief of people who’d survived something together that no one on land would ever believe.
Even Titus’s shoulders eased, fractionally, though the argument didn’t fully leave his eyes.
“We fix the ship,” Kofi said into the settling quiet.
“We learn what we can, where we can. And we keep sailing. That’s the only answer I’ve got, Titus. I won’t pretend I’ve got a better one.”
Titus held his stare a long moment, then gave a short, grudging nod, and picked his bowl back up.
Clementine hadn’t spoken through any of it, working instead with slow, deliberate hands to re-thread a string of shells and dark glass beads that had come loose in the chaos, her lips moving in a murmur too quiet to carry. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Kofi found her there once the deck had mostly cleared, the crew scattered to patching sail and scrubbing scorch marks and Theo’s endless muttering over charts.
“You’ve been quiet.”
“Been listening.” She didn’t look up from her beads.
“Sea doesn’t send something like that by accident, Kofi Brook. Not that Queen, not that horde, not the night after you all sat around a fire feeling safer than you had any right to feel.”
“You think it was after us specifically.”
“I think we sailed into water that answers to older rules than any king’s charts.” Her fingers finished the last knot and she held the string up, studying it against the gray morning light.
“The Crown’s laws stop at the edge of a map. Whatever’s under this ship doesn’t know there is a map.” She finally looked at him, dark eyes steady and unreadable.
“Could be it was only ever hunger, and we were simply meat that swam too close. Or could be the sea was testing what kind of thing has come sailing into it. I don’t know which, yet. But I’d not mistake that for bad luck and nothing more.”
Kofi held her gaze, an old unease settling low in his chest — the same unease he’d carried since the merchant’s gossip on Sterling’s , the sense of currents moving beneath him too large to see the shape of.
“And if it’s the second thing?”
“Then we’d best learn this water’s rules quick,” Clementine said, simply, and went back to her beads, “before it decides to teach them to us instead.”
By the time the sun sat high and the last of the scorch marks had been scrubbed pale against the deck boards, something had settled over the ship that Kofi hadn’t expected to find on the other side of last night’s terror — not safety, nothing so simple as that, but a kind of hard-won clarity.
He stood at the rail beside Yaw, both of them looking out at water that had tried, twelve hours ago, to pull every soul aboard down into it, and found he didn’t regret a single mile of it.
“Scared out of my mind half of last night,” Yaw admitted, quietly.
“And still. Rather be out here, scared, than back there .”
“Yeah,” Kofi said, and meant it all the way down.
“Same.”
Behind them, Theo’s voice rose over the deck, already plotting the next leg toward Trelawny with the particular stubborn cheer of a man determined not to let one terrifying night cost him his nerve — and ahead of them, past the horizon none of them could see yet, cane fields waited that none of them were ready for, though only one of them yet understood exactly how much.