I was about to say she hadn’t been there when we danced, but then I remembered she could make herself invisible. She was wrong about Markos though. He’d wanted to kiss me long before he ever saw me in a dress.
Secretly I was glad I hadn’t lingered to see him run through with a cutlass or shot full of bullet holes. If that made me a coward, I didn’t care. Images flashed unbidden through my mind. Markos crumpled on the floor. Blood clotted in black curls. Blue eyes staring.
Stop. I pressed my fingers to my temples. Not thinking of him at all was the better way.
But I could not do that, so I focused on the last time I saw him. A boy with two swords, facing a staircase. I closed my eyes and froze him in that moment.
“Anyway,” Kenté went on. “Perhaps it’s as Nereus says. Perhaps there’s a chance.”
I exhaled in a huff. “Oh, not you too.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just that he says it like he knows something.”
Farther up the deck, Nereus entertained Daria by fashioning things out of a rope end. Pa used to do that when I was little. My eyes blurred.
“Well, he doesn’t,” I said gruffly. “How could he?”
Hope was only going to make it hurt more.
Nereus whistled. “Ship ho!”
The vessel lay anchored off Enantios Isle. Her masts were bare, her square sails stowed away. They must have seen us approach, for a white signal banner unrolled and began to climb the flag halyards.
“White flag.” I squinted at the ship. “Whoever it is, they want to parley with us.”
“What if it’s the Black Dogs?” Kenté cried. “It might be a trick.”
“Look sharp,” said Nereus. The muscles under his mermaid tattoo tightened as he gripped the rail. “And be ready to run.”
The ship was a lovely three-masted bark with good lines. Her paint marked her as the Antelope of Iantiporos. Under the blue and gold of Kynthessa, she flew her own pennant. The wind had wrapped it around a rope, where it flapped halfheartedly. The bark was obviously a merchant ship, although four small cannons were mounted on her deck.
The breeze flipped the pennant over. I gasped.
A cask, crested by three stars.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
I waited alone at the port rail as Antelope’s dinghy rowed across. I wasn’t about to let the Bollards lay eyes on Daria until I was sure they could be trusted.
When I saw who sat in the boat, rowed by a lone crewman, I almost wished we’d run for it. She wore a drapey gold tunic under a short cape, fastened at the shoulder with a Bollard brooch. Sun glinted on her earrings as she stood, grasping the ladder we’d tossed over the side. Indeed only Ma could maintain such an air of detached authority while ascending a wobbly rope ladder.
“I suppose you have an explanation for how you managed to acquire a cutter of this expense and quality,” she said, climbing over the rail. “Especially as it seems to me this one greatly resembles the ship I heard Diric Melanos was sailing recently.”
Another girl might have embraced her mother. We eyed each other like wary cats circling.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” I blurted.
“As it happens, looking for you,” she said. “I went to visit the Oracle in Iantiporos. She told me we’d meet you here.” She tilted her head, studying me. “The Emparch was with you in Siscema, wasn’t he? It’s why you acted so strangely. He was the courier boy who came to dinner.”
“No.” I took a step backward. My mother had consulted an oracle about me? The expense must have been astronomical.
“Caro. You can tell me.”
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered.
She smiled, showing all her white teeth. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
The crewman finished stowing the oars. I would have recognized him instantly if he hadn’t been wearing a woolen cap pulled down low. I knew his every mannerism. I knew his broad shoulders and the strong grip of his suntanned hands as he climbed the rope ladder.
“Pa!” I flung myself at him the moment he cleared the rail.
“Caro! What’s the meaning of this?” He released me, but kept a hold on my shoulders. “Where’s Fee? Where’s Cormorant?”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t have the courage to watch his stricken face when he realized what I had done. “I’m so sorry.” I buried myself in his jacket, finally letting the tears flow.
“Caro—” He lifted my chin. “Caro, d’you mean she’s sunk? Where’s Fee?”
“Oh!” I hiccupped. “Not sunk. I had to leave Cormorant in Casteria. The Black Dogs—I couldn’t get back to her. And Fee jumped overboard to save us. I—don’t know what happened to her.”
“I never did sail with a crewman scrappier than Fee,” Pa said, though his eyes remained troubled. “I wouldn’t count her out.”
“I for one would like to know about the cutter,” Ma said. “And the Emparch.”
Pa curled his arm protectively around my shoulders. “Will you just leave off for a minute? Can you not see she’s upset?”
I knew he was distressed too. Fee had crewed with us for years. She and Pa were a team, and Cormorant was our home.
“Look here, Nick, I came all the way out here—”
“The Emparch isn’t here,” I said. They both turned as one. “Not anymore.” My throat tightened. “Markos—the Emparch—he’s dead.”
“No, he’s not.” Ma shook her head. “The Black Dogs are trying to ransom him back to his relations in Valonikos.”
She said something else, but I didn’t hear.
“Oh,” I said stupidly.
Markos. Alive. I couldn’t let myself believe her. It wasn’t as easy as that.
Ma and Pa went on talking, their voices an incomprehensible buzz. I put a hand to my forehead and tried to breathe.
Markos.
“Are you sure?” I finally managed, so much later that they both looked at me, confused. “The last time I saw him, he was fighting off ten pirates.” I swallowed down tears. “He traded his own life for his sister’s.” The rest of the long story spilled out between choked sobs.
Pa pulled me against his rough wool coat. I closed my eyes, relaxing into the familiar homey smell of his clothes. “I might’ve known you’d open that box,” he said. “You’re an Oresteia, all right.”
“She is that,” Ma muttered under her breath. “A Bollard has more sense.”
I lifted my head. “But how do you know about—about Markos?”
“A courier came to our premises in Iantiporos with a letter. He’d ridden all night through that storm,” Ma said. “The letter was to go via fast packet to Valonikos. It bore the name Diric Melanos. They might have put it on a ship straightaway and sent it on, had I not at that very moment walked into our offices.”
“Let me see it.”
She handed it over, and I skimmed the contents. It was as she said. Captain Melanos had sent a ransom note to Markos’s relatives.
I lowered the letter. “But the Black Dogs tried to kill him.”
“People like the Black Dogs sell themselves to the highest bidder.” By the flare of her nostrils, it was easy to see what Ma thought of that. “A man like Melanos is thinking of Valonikos. Of how it’s said that in the Free City, gold flows like the river. He wonders, what sort of family will shelter a deposed Emparch? And how much might they be willing to pay?”