“ ‘Know this. I’ll never harm you, Nick Oresteia,’ she said, ‘and that you have as a promise. For I owe you a debt. Keep her safe for me.’
“I looked up and my heart near dropped out of my chest. You were sitting on the lee side, wet to the knees, for we was riding that low in the water. Every time a swell came, it dunked you to the waist, but you just laughed. ’Course I panicked. I yelled at you to come down into the cockpit. Then I heard her.
“ ‘As if I would ever let her fall,’ she said. And just like that, she was gone.”
He sighed. “I never even told your ma. Guess I’m just an old fool. I reckoned maybe if I didn’t say it out loud …”
I wiped my face with my sleeve. “I thought the god in the river didn’t want me.” Now I was sobbing in earnest. “I called his name so many times and he never—he never answered me.”
“Hush, girlie.” He wrapped me in his arms. “You were never unwanted. The truth is, the sea loved you from the moment you were born.”
“But it’s all wrong.” I sniffed. “I’m supposed to be on Cormorant. This isn’t what was meant to happen.” I dug my face into his sweater. “I was supposed to be with you.”
Trailing his fingers down my cheek, he said gently, “No.” He kissed the top of my head. “I knew the minute you took that letter of marque. Knew it was your fate coming for you. That cutter is a beauty. You mind what I taught you and take good care of her now.”
“But I love Cormorant.” I pressed my palm flat on her warm cabin roof. “That ship doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He smoothed my hair. “Sometimes we have to let the past go before we can see our future sitting there in front of us.”
I closed my eyes. “She’s pretty and fast but she’s not … home. She never, ever will be.” I rested my cheek on his shoulder, breathing in the muddy, familiar scent of his clothes.
“Stop crying now.” He slung his arm around my waist. “Don’t you have more Emparchs to be rescuing?”
I laughed, even as I sniffled.
“Be careful,” he warned. “I fear she’ll ask more of you than he’s ever asked of me.”
“Thisbe Brixton said she was a fish and Nereus was a shark, come to eat her. But surely they must be friends. Surely the god of the river and the god of the sea—”
“Cousins, at most. Allies, sometimes.” He gazed out at the horizon where, beyond the city walls, the sea waited in the night. “But friends? No.”
He went belowdecks, leaving me alone. Through the open window, I heard his voice rising and falling. Pa always talked to Fee just the same as he did to everyone else. He didn’t much mind when she didn’t talk back.
I sat on the cabin roof past midnight, knees curled to my chest. One last night watch, feeling everything. The noises of her tackle creaking and clacking. The swirl of water against her hull. The singing of tiny frogs under the docks. Only when I unfolded my stiff legs did I realize what I’d been doing was memorizing, because this was it.
The last time this would be home.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Three days later Tychon Hypatos and his wife threw a grand party for Markos at their house. Fortunately my new dress was finished that very morning. Pressed and wrapped in paper, it was carried down to Vix by a shopgirl who stared bug-eyed at Nereus’s tattoos.
The party was like nothing I’d seen before, even at Bollard House. The courtyard was strung with floating paper lanterns. Piles of grapes and cheese spilled down the middle of the long tables. There were even sculptures made of food, which seemed very silly to me.
I could tell Markos’s aunt—or cousin, or whatever relation she was to him—didn’t like me. As she stared at me in the receiving line, I had the distinct feeling she knew exactly what we were doing when he slipped down to Vix at night.
As if it was her business.
She nodded politely as she welcomed Nereus, Kenté, and me, though I knew she considered us a lot of rough scalawags. I discovered Daria, in a stiff pink dress, sulking by the dessert table. There was no one her age at the party, and Markos had abandoned her to discuss politics. Kenté took her for a turn on the dance floor to cheer her up, while Nereus and I hid in a dim corner behind a tower made of fruit.
“Nereus—” I hesitated. “Now that you’re done helping me, what happens to you?”
“Oh, I doubt I’m finished with that.” Long sleeves covered his tattoos, but his gap-toothed grin still made him look disreputable. “Because you ain’t finished. Not even close.”
“I would ask what you mean by that, but you won’t tell me anyway.”
“You’re learning.” He winked, downing his first glass of wine. He had four—two in his hands, two on the table.
“Will you sail with me?” I hoped he would say yes. “As first mate on Vix? Really, you should be captain. No men will want to sail under me.”
“Ayah? I don’t know about that.” He drew a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket.
It was a printed leaflet. A tale—highly embellished—about a girl who stole a pirate ship, who folk were calling the Rose of the Coast. I wished I’d done half the things it said I’d done. The caricaturist had drawn me with a feathery plume in my hat. I resolved to get one immediately.
“But this is mostly nonsense.” I lowered the paper. “I don’t in any way resemble a rose.”
“Your hair is reddish.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” I tossed the pamphlet onto the table. He smoothed it, tucking it back in his pocket.
I might have questioned him further, had not Tychon Hypatos and another man chosen that moment to invade our corner.
“Aha! Miss Oresteia. I had quite given up hope of finding you. I have here a man who greatly wishes to meet you.” Hypatos gestured with a flourish. “This is Basil Maki, the Kynthessan Consul. Representative of the Margravina.”
The man bowed. “Current carry you, as your folk are wont to say.”
“Oh good,” I said. “Are you the one to talk to about the ten silver talents I was promised?”
“You don’t waste any words, do you, Miss Oresteia?”
“Captain Oresteia,” I corrected. “My contract said I was to deliver the box and its contents to Valonikos.”
“The contents I see,” he said with a smile. “Have you presented them to the dock inspector?”
“Seems to me that’s a lawyer’s answer.”
“Alas, I am a lawyer.” He bowed again. “Or I was, before the Margravina elevated me to my position.”
“I suppose Markos could go present himself to the dock inspector,” I said. “If that would get me ten talents.”
His eyebrows lifted practically into his hairline, I guess because I’d spoken so familiarly of the true Emparch of Akhaia. “I ought to inform you that the Black Dogs have petitioned me for the return of their property,” he said. “Of course, it is a jurisdictional issue now, since the ship in question is outside the boundaries of Kynthessa.”
I didn’t understand half his words. “I was a privateer. A letter of marque gives me leave to take a prize. I know my rights.”
He tilted his goblet toward me. “Nevertheless, the Black Dogs are claiming you stole a cutter from them.”