I shot him a dirty look, but my lips couldn’t help twitching into a smile.
It was late afternoon when the Bollards and wherrymen rounded up the remnants of the Black Dogs and brought them down to the beach, placing them in a makeshift pen by the stockade. Never one to let a profit slip by her, Ma had found several items she liked among the pirates’ stash. Those were stacked on what was left of the dock. By the time the last beams of sunset slanted over the harbor, lighting up the bobbing wreckage with an orange glow, every corner of the fort had been swept. All the pirates were accounted for.
Except one.
The shadowman Cleandros had disappeared. Pa hauled Diric Melanos out by the neck and flung him down. “Reckon I know three different harbor masters and a magistrate who’d like to get their hands on this filth.”
I stood over him with my pistol. “Where’s the shadowman?”
“Fat lot of help he were to us.” Melanos spat on the sand. His fine coat was torn and his hat missing. “Buggered off during the battle, didn’t he? The bloody coward. Told him we was going to kill the boy, just after we got the money, is all. He still wouldn’t shut up about it. Good riddance, says I. You can’t trust a shadowman.”
Myself, I was surprised Captain Melanos hadn’t ended up with a bullet hole in him during the battle. I suppose the wherrymen were content to watch him hang.
As we waited on the beach for Nereus and the wherrymen to bring Vix around, Ma reeled off instructions.
“Make for our offices in Iantiporos,” she said to me, spelling the name of the street so I would remember it. “Send a message to Bolaji. Tell him to have two ships meet us here in full haste.”
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m staying with my crew. We’ll try to salvage what we can of the ship. Reckon your pa will stick around too.” She gestured to her injured arm. “He’s got some misguided notion that I need taking care of. Anyway it seems to me you’ve proved yourself on that cutter.”
“They don’t know me in Iantiporos,” I said, suddenly uncertain. “What if—?”
She unpinned the brooch from her doublet, pressing it into my hand. “Bring Kenté with you. And show them this.”
Pa stood alone on the beach, fumbling with an alchemical match. I waded through the sand to stand beside him, curling my arm through his. His worn overcoat smelled like home.
Leaning on his shoulder, I took in the beach, the bobbing shipwrecks, and the sunset. Out there the sea rose and fell in a lulling rhythm. Farther down the sand, Thisbe Brixton was passing a flask among the other wherrymen. Their straggling voices rose in the chorus of a very rude song.
Seeing her struck a memory. She had recognized Nereus. Sure, and doesn’t a fish know when a shark comes to eat him? An even more chilling thought followed on its heels.
Pa knew him too.
You, he had whispered, back when they came face-to-face on Vix. Cold suspicion trickled through me.
“Pa,” I began cautiously. “You said the day my fate came for me, I would know.”
He turned toward the sea, puffing on his pipe. “Ayah,” he said slowly. His eyes looked troubled. “So I did.”
“Is it true that all the Oresteias were favored of the god in the river? There weren’t any of them who”—I braced myself—“who were, I don’t know, something else? Something different?”
Markos ambled up the beach, shading his eyes into the setting sun. Vix was coming around the point, her sails billowing white against the sky. At the sight of her, something struggled to rise within me.
“Listen, Caro,” Pa said, a thickness in his voice, and my heart wanted to shatter. His throat bobbed. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Suddenly I didn’t want to hear it. Not yet. I pulled free, shoving my hands in my pockets, and ran to catch up with Markos.
Halfway down the beach, I paused to look back at Pa. His shoulders drooped, and I was acutely aware of the lines on his face. He’d known the truth all along. I was certain of it. Emotion clawed at me, but I shoved it bitterly away. I didn’t want to listen to him. How many lies had he told me?
We rowed out to Vix, where Daria leaned over the rail, waving frantically while one of the wherrymen’s wives struggled to keep her from falling overboard.
“Markos!” she shrieked as he climbed the ladder, in a manner completely unbefitting an Emparch’s daughter.
“Little badger!” He dropped to his knees on the deck, gathering her up. She buried her face in his chest.
Some things are not what you expect, like the most arrogant boy in the world crying into the shoulder of his eight-year-old sister’s nightgown. Kenté and I exchanged glances, turning away to give them privacy.
Descending into the darkness of Vix’s cabin, I unbuckled my heavy belt and dropped it in a heap on the bench. Now that everything was quiet again, I didn’t know what to do. I wished Vix had a cozy red-checkered tablecloth and a familiar bunk heaped with blankets. I wished Fee was there making tea.
My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t recognize my life anymore.
The hatch creaked. “It’s much bigger than Cormorant, isn’t it?”
I closed my eyes against his voice.
Boots scuffed on the floor as Markos stepped down from the last rung of the ladder. With only the lone lantern, I couldn’t see his face. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot—”
I swallowed. “It’s fine.”
“Like hell it is. You told me she was your home,” he said. “You told me when a sailor loves a ship, it hits you so hard you can’t breathe.”
For once he had called the wherry “she” and not “it.” Somehow that made the lump in my throat more painful.
“It’s done.” I whirled away from him.
“Caroline, I’m sorry.” He followed me, holding himself stiffly. “I’m ever so sorry. It’s my fault. You let her go for me.”
“For Daria,” I corrected, biting my lip. A hot tear seared my cheek. “You jumped into the middle of a bunch of pirates all by yourself,” I said to the wall. “I thought you were dead.”
I felt him standing behind me. “Caro, Fee won’t let anything happen to Cormorant.”
“If she’s alive,” I whispered. Hope warred with despair inside my chest.
“I choose to believe that she is,” he said. “And that Cormorant is still tied up at the Casteria docks. But I don’t know. I … was unconscious when they carried me down to Alektor. When I woke, we were at sea.” He set a tentative hand on my waist.
“What do you mean, unconscious?” I turned, almost whacking my forehead on his chin. My heart reeled with alarm and something else as I examined his face. “What did they do to you? Did they torture you?”
He didn’t say yes or no.
“But why?” I asked, taking his silence as a stupidly gallant attempt to protect me. “Did they want to know something?”
“No. They just … thought it was fun.”
I grabbed his chin, turning his face toward the light. Besides the black eye, he had a mottled purple bruise along his jawline, crested by a long scab. But his left ear was the worst of it.