He dug his hands into his pockets. “Maybe it’s best we do as your mother says. I know you can fight, but we must think of the girl.”
I looked across at Vix, lit up by the morning glare on the water. As Nereus hauled on the halyard, her gaff climbed to the peak. She wanted battle. It was what she was built for. She pulled at her moorings like a horse rearing against the reins.
“Vix is faster than Antelope,” I said. “She has more guns.”
“She is also smaller,” Ma said. “And you’re not an experienced captain.”
She and Pa shared a glance, while I bit back my frustration. Of all times, they chose now to be in accord. Further attempts to get my way by playing them off each other were easily routed. I rowed splashily back to Vix, cursing under my breath.
As Nereus gave me a hand up from the rope ladder, Kenté hopped off the hatch cover. “What’s wrong?” she cried. I must’ve looked particularly murderous.
“We’re not going to be in the fight,” I spat out. “Six four-pounders, we have. That’s two more than Antelope. Gods damn me.” I paced the deck. “I mean, who do they think’s been fighting the Black Dogs this whole time? They don’t even know Markos.” Kenté opened her mouth, no doubt to point out that Ma had met him in Siscema. “It’s different. You know it’s different.”
“An unfortunate turn of circumstance.” Nereus stared at the horizon. “For has she not canvas and powder and shot? Is she not built to blow holes in any ship that dare oppose her, and the gods damn them for trying?” He inhaled the salty air. “This is a day for battle.”
He understood. I wanted to crash through the waves, swift as the wind itself. I wanted to ram shot into the cannons and watch that cursed Alektor explode in splinters.
“We’re to sail around behind the island and wait at a rendezvous point for Antelope,” I said. “Ma will send up three bursts on the gun.” I curled my hands into fists. “When it’s safe.”
I knew nothing of safe anymore.
Just before noon we reached the island. I anchored Vix off the wooded shore, while Antelope sailed around to launch her attack on the Black Dogs’ fort. Absently I picked at my lip as I listened to the distant rumble of cannons and the occasional crack of a musket echoing across the water.
“And five makes eleven.” Kenté surveyed the dice on the deck. “I’ve won again.”
We had only been playing an hour, and I’d already lost two silver talents to her and one to Daria, who sat cross-legged beside Nereus. Her black hair hung in two complicated braids down her back. I suspected she liked both of them more than me, Kenté because she could plait hair and Nereus because he let her do whatever she wanted. I didn’t mind. All I cared about right now was the battle. And Markos.
How could they game while the cannons boomed? I was too jumpy to sit. My lip began to bleed, the rusty metal taste only setting me more on edge.
“The water’s so choppy.” Kenté glanced over her shoulder. “It’s making me nervous. It doesn’t look like a storm’s coming. The sky is perfectly clear.”
The waves did look rough. I wondered if the drakon was weaving back and forth beneath them, her undulating body churning the water. Though I didn’t see her, I sensed she was close.
I leaped to my feet. “I can’t bear it.” Gripping the handles of my twin pistols, I strode up and down. “What’s taking so long?”
Just because I was angry at my parents didn’t mean I wanted anything to happen to them. The shoreline was maddeningly still. If the Black Dogs had scouts lurking in the trees, I couldn’t see them, for the island was heavily wooded. Anyhow, there was nowhere from which to launch a boat—this side of Katabata Island was a wall of rocks ten feet high, sloping straight into the ocean.
A gun rolled like thunder, causing my shoulders to jump.
“You need to find something to occupy yourself.” Kenté shook the dice cup. I noticed she wore three lockets of varying lengths around her neck.
Pulling out both pistols, I decided to teach myself how to spin them, the way I’d seen rough men do to show off in taverns. I flipped the right one around on my thumb, and it dropped to the deck with a clatter.
Kenté winced. “Something else.”
I fumbled, dropping the pistol again. That’s when I realized. “The guns have stopped.”
Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Then an hour. And then I knew.
Antelope wasn’t coming.
I made my choice. “Run up the main and the staysail. Run out the guns.” I was fairly sure that was something people said.
“Best be cautious,” Nereus warned as he tied off the halyards. I wondered if he knew something we didn’t.
“All I care about right now is whether you know how to load those cannons!” I snapped.
He grinned, showing the gap in his teeth. “Ayah, I know.”
We sailed around the corner of the island. Kenté gasped.
Hespera’s Watch, was all I could think, because that’s what it looked like: smoke and fire and barrels bobbing on the water. Both Alektor and Antelope listed far over on their sides, and wreckage was scattered everywhere. Alektor had a gaping hole in her hull.
Myself, I had a gaping hole in my heart.
We sailed closer. The Black Dogs’ fort squatted on a rocky hill above the harbor, surrounded by a wall of spiky logs. The left side was partially collapsed, but not from today’s fight, for tangled vines grew over it. A stone tower rose up on the other side, once perhaps a lighthouse or a watchtower. Sunlight reflected off a cannon at the top, but no one seemed to be manning it—and no wonder, because the tower didn’t look very stable. Part of it lay in a steaming pile.
Daria curled into Kenté’s skirts. I let go of the tiller and drifted to the rail, everything but my parents forgotten. I squinted at the floating hulk of the Bollard ship. Her ragged sails trailed in the water and flames licked up her hull.
Not a single person, alive or dead, was in sight.
“We should have been in that fight!” My voice broke. “The Black Dogs didn’t have a ship that could touch Vix.”
“Didn’t need one.” Nereus nodded at the fort. “Artillery on that tower. That be a thirty-six pounder. And mark the long nines on the palisade.”
“They can’t have killed everybody!”
“I think not.” He pointed to the smoking wreckage. “The boats. Look.”
All of Antelope’s boats had been launched, and Alektor’s too. But I saw none among the bobbing flotsam, nor any pieces of them. No planks. No oars.
I swallowed. “What does it mean?”
Nereus spat over the rail. “Nothing good. Likely they been taken prisoner. Inside the fort.”
“It could be the other way around,” I suggested. “Perhaps the Bollards took the men from Alektor prisoner. Perhaps they rowed ashore of their own accord to attack the fort from on land.”
“Hear you the sounds of fighting?”
We all fell silent. I heard the slap of waves against wood. The crackle of fire. The wind rustling the trees. “No,” I whispered, and with that word went my hopes.
“We best come about.” Nereus turned away from the smoking ships.