And she would have used every single one to bring her nephew back to life.
Maris slid a ring from her right hand. It was a heavy silver band, but when she closed her fist around it, the metal shattered, the shell crumbling away to reveal the thinnest length of golden thread.
She was still wrapping one end around her narrow wrist when Katros hauled himself over the side of the ship, boots sloshing as he landed on the deck.
Red ran into one eye, and his ruined tunic clung to his body, fresh blood blooming here and there against the once-white cloth. But the wounds were shallow, and he was upright, and dragging another body in his wake.
He dropped the second thief onto the deck, where the man shuddered and retched, seawater rattling in his chest. His head fell back, the strength going out of his limbs.
Maris’s mind raced. She should keep him alive, question him, find answers.
But Valick.
Her older nephew must have seen the struggle in her eyes, because he squeezed the sea from his shirt and said, “I broke his jaw. Doubt he can speak.”
She shot Katros a grateful look, then began to wind the golden thread around the man’s limp wrist instead of her own. It looked as brittle as a strand of hair, but it held firm, even biting into the skin. She twisted the other end around Valick’s palm, curling his dead fingers over it.
Katros watched, eyes dark, and if he judged her for using such illicit magic, he said nothing. He knew she would have done the same for him.
Maris squeezed her youngest nephew’s hand and said a single word, the one that had been carved onto the inside of the heavy silver ring. The spell lit like a fuse, began to burn its way across the gold thread, moving from the thief’s body to Valick’s.
From the living to the dead.
“What happened?” asked Maris, watching as the light traveled down the golden thread, turning it black in its wake.
“Thieves,” said Katros. “They came aboard as patrons, claimed they had something to sell.” He nodded to the empty chest. “It was a cloak, designed to shield against wards.”
Maris looked to the charred body on the deck. Its clothes burned black against its skin. “Little good it did him.”
“It was a ruse,” said Katros, but Maris wasn’t listening. In that moment, the light reached Valick’s hand, and winked out. As it vanished, the thief went still, and Valick inhaled sharply. The thread crumbled to ash between the two men. The thief sagged in death, and Valick’s chest rose and fell, and Maris herself finally exhaled.
She felt tired, as if she’d paid for the life herself after all.
“Fools,” she muttered, rising to her feet. “Two lone men thought they could rob my ship?”
And that’s when Valick opened his eyes, and said a word that sent a shiver down Maris’s ancient spine. “Three.”
Maris’s head snapped toward his face. “What?”
Valick sat up, wincing even as the wound between his ribs began to knit. “There were three of them,” he coughed, blood still staining his teeth. “One got away.”
Maris straightened, scanning the horizon. It was nearly dusk, the line between sea and sky smudged with fog, but in the distance, she could just make out the retreating shape of a small boat. She gauged the distance, but the Ferase Stras was not a vessel meant to move with any speed. Someone had robbed her ship. And he was getting away. But no cloak could save him from the many protections she’d laid upon the market.
“Fast or slow,” she said, half to herself. “The other wards will do their work.”
“They were after something,” said Katros.
“And they got it,” said Valick.
Maris’s mood darkened as Katros drew a piece of paper from his sodden clothes. The ink had bled and the parchment was barely holding together, but she knew every piece in her collection.
Including this one.
There were a great many objects aboard the Ferase Stras, all of them forbidden. But forbidden could mean a number of things. There were talismans like the ring she’d just used, forbidden because they went against the law of nature. There were others that bound mind and will, forbidden because they went against the law of control. There were things forbidden for the potency of their power, or the scale of their magic, or the volatility of their spellwork, and things forbidden because in the wrong hands they could raze kingdoms, or splinter worlds.
This was none of those.
Maris frowned.
It wasn’t the most powerful object on her ship, not by far. And yet, these men had gone to all this trouble to steal it. Worse, they hadn’t just known what they were looking for. They’d known where it was aboard the ship. The market’s cluttered impression was a ruse; there was in fact an order to it, a logic to the placement of every piece in her collection. And at least one of them must have known where to look. He’d seen a map, not to the Ferase Stras but of it—its rooms, its hoard. And that was just as dangerous as half the things aboard.
Maris shook her head. A problem for another day.
First things first.
She dropped the slip of paper and turned, abandoning the deck, the ship’s contents unfolding in her mind as she wove through crowded corridors, past cabinets and cases and alcoves that to anyone else would have seemed cluttered. But she knew where she was going, and found what she was looking for.
A black box, a gold eye carved into the top.
Inside, half a dozen grooves in a velvet-lined tray. Four of the slots were empty. The remaining two held panes of colored glass, each the size of Sanct cards.
Her nephews were sharp. Chances were they had not forgotten anything important.
But Maris wasn’t in the habit of taking chances.
She drew a glass card from the case and returned topside, held the brittle pane up and spoke.
“Enis,” she said.
Begin.
The glass pane fogged momentarily between her fingers, and when it cleared, the deck beyond began to draw itself back, and back, and back, retreating through the minutes until the thieves were there again, having just set foot aboard her ship.
“Skar.”
Stop.
The image shuddered, held, the figures frozen as they set the trunk down on the deck in front of her nephews.
Maris strode forward, putting herself in the center of the scene, her back to the image of Valick and Katros so she could better see the thieves.
“Enis.”
The scene rolled forward, just as it had. She turned in a circle as she watched it all play out, saw Valick’s death and the thieves’ attack, the first broken by the wards, the second gone with Katros over the side, saw the parcel break against the deck, only to be salvaged by the third.
And as he stumbled, dazed and bleeding toward the ship’s edge, she saw it, through the tear in his shirt—a tattoo, or perhaps a brand, across his ribs. And though she couldn’t see the entire image, she knew what she was looking for, and there it was: a hand.
Then the thief was gone, over the side, and Maris was there once more, kneeling over Valick as the past caught up to the present, and the glass splintered in her hand, and turned to sand, and blew away.
Maris sighed, and felt every one of her many, many years, and then she turned to Katros.
“Search the bodies,” she said. “And throw them over.”
“And then?” asked Valick.
Maris glanced at the horizon. The other ship was gone. Her aching fingers cracked as they closed into a fist. No one stole from the Ferase Stras.
“Clean yourself up,” she told him. “I have a favor to call in.”
Part Two
THE CAPTAIN AND THE GHOST
I
Delilah Bard leaned against the rail of the Grey Barron, watching the prow split the sea.