I waited. “I thought you’d be spending the day with your admirers.”
“I needed to get away. Nereus said you’d gone out.” He looked at me and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your jacket.” He tapped the gilt trim. “It’s just like mine.”
I pretended to be offended. “It is not. It’s bottle green. Yours is blue.”
He fell in beside me, and we walked in companionable silence. I snuck sidelong glances at him. He wore a snowy new shirt, but the cravat he had left dangling. I didn’t think the old Markos would have appeared in public looking so sloppy.
“Caro, I like this city,” he said, hands in pockets, as we threaded through the bustle of the market. A man jostled his shoulder, but he didn’t snap or demand an apology. Almost, I thought he might have shoved back a little. “I like all the commotion. All the ships. I like that it’s proud of being free.”
“Markos …” I hesitated, unwilling to spoil his fun. “Should you be walking around the docks like this? Isn’t your cousin Konto likely to send more mercenaries? Or assassins?”
“I’ll hire bodyguards.” He shrugged. “But for now I like walking around by myself. I’ve never done it before.”
I shook my head. Just like him to get excited about something silly like that. Spotting a food stand, I tugged his sleeve. “Let’s get some fish in a cone.”
“Fish in a what?”
“A cone. There’s a place on this street sells the best fish in a cone on the River Kars.”
He stared at me blankly.
I’d forgotten I had to explain the simplest things to him. “Fried in bread crumbs and served in a cone of paper.”
He looked extremely skeptical, but that went away ten minutes later. We walked up the street, our mouths full of flaking, hot fish.
Markos licked the grease off his fingers. “You should’ve made it like this on the wherry.”
“I can’t. They fry it in a vat of boiling fat.”
He made a face. “Sorry I asked.”
I halted, noticing a shop on the corner, and wiped my hands on my trousers. The sign read Argyrus & Sons, and underneath in smaller letters, Valonikos–Siscema.
A bell rang as I pushed through the door. The girl at the front desk looked up from her paperwork.
“This is Argyrus and Sons?” I asked. “The salvagers?”
“We are as the sign claims,” she agreed. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirtwaist tucked into trousers. Her face and arms were tanned golden, and her brown hair twisted into a loose bun at the base of her neck. I liked the look of her, a working girl like me.
“Is Finion Argyrus here?”
“He’s in Hespera’s Watch on a job,” she said briskly. “I’m Docia Argyrus. The daughter. How can I be of help to you?”
“Current carry you,” I said. “I didn’t know there was a daughter.”
Eyes narrowing, she crossed her arms. “It didn’t fit on the sign.”
“I’m Caroline Oresteia,” I began, drawing a bag of coin from my pocket.
“The girl pirate.” She examined me head to toe. “Didn’t think to meet you. Interesting.”
“Privateer,” I corrected. “I took a prize recently. The cutter Victorianos.”
“I know her.”
“In her hold she had a chest of silver talents.” I dropped the bag on the table. “I am given to understand that your firm be overseeing the salvage of Jolly Girl and the other wherries as were lost at Hespera’s Watch. I want to pay.”
She glanced at Markos. If she guessed who he was, she didn’t say.
“Additionally,” I said, as she got out a pen to write down my instructions, “can you please include in the letter that in the cases of these four men”—I spelled out the names of the wherrymen who had died at the Black Dogs’ fort—“I wish to pay ten talents to each man’s wife or heir.”
“On top of the other costs?”
“Ayah.”
Her pen paused. “That’s an awful lot of coin.”
“Basil Maki is representing me in this matter. He’s the Kynthessan Consul. So be sure to go to him if you need more money.”
After we left the shop, Markos refused to speak to me for three whole blocks. “I told you I wanted to do that,” he said in a growl.
“You haven’t the coin. I have.” I grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop. “I wouldn’t have Vix if it wasn’t for you. So in a way, it’s your money too.”
“It isn’t,” he said sourly. “While you stole that ship and rescued my sister, I was unconscious and tied up.”
“Ayah, well, not everyone can be good at everything.” I grinned. “You know what I mean. If I hadn’t met you, none of this would have happened.”
“I have been thinking that myself,” he admitted. “About how thankful I am that I was fated to meet you.”
“It was luck.” Even as I said it, I knew it to be a lie.
“You still believe that, after all this? Think of everyone who helped save Daria and me. All the people we met along the way. The wherrymen, the Bollards, even Nereus. They all have one thing in common.”
Me.
This whole time I’d been thinking I was in Markos’s story, but maybe I’d had it backward. Maybe he was in mine. I heard the heron’s leering whisper in my head. Laughter.
“Caro.” Markos reached for my hand. “I want you to stay. With me.”
Panicked, I tugged away. My thoughts raced in confusion as I looked somewhere, everywhere—anywhere but at him.
“Not like that.” He let me go. “Wait. That didn’t come out right.”
“You better not have meant it like that.” I strode down the cobblestones, my emotions bubbling and boiling in a way I found distinctly unpleasant.
“Well, I didn’t. Will you stop?” He chased me down the street. “Caro, I didn’t. If only because if I did, you’d probably slap me. Again.” He took a breath. “Let me finish.”
“You said when we …” I was too embarrassed to continue. “You said there’d be none of that talk.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “But some things have to be said.”
I stopped to face him. “I don’t want you to change my life.”
He squinted down at me in the noon sunlight. “It’s a bit too late for that, isn’t it?”
I remembered what Pa had said. Sometimes we have to let the past go before we can see our future sitting there in front of us.
The world had changed. We could not go back.
“But I’ve been thinking, a fast cutter has to be of some use to me. I mean, us. I mean …” Markos gathered his words. “What I mean to say is, since you’re not going back to the river, I wish you would sail out of Valonikos. You can be a privateer. For me. I know I don’t have an army, or a fleet.” He shrugged. “But I have to start somewhere.”
He extended his hand, as working men do to seal a bargain.
I took it. His fingers were warm in my grip. Lowering my voice so no one else on the street would hear, I said, “Markos Andela, Emparch of Akhaia. Lord of et cetera, et cetera. I will always be your friend. I will sail for you.” I held up my free hand in warning. “Not for Akhaia. For you.”
He did not kiss me, opting to stay at handshake’s length. I could tell he felt it too—the moment demanded a certain solemnity.