Not Livion. He would take a slight as his due until someone told him what to do.
I’ll get my revenge the old-fashioned way, Jeryon thinks. Nothing threatens trade like mutiny, and trade is all the Trust and the city care about. The Trust will be his hammer and the law his anvil. He looks forward to seeing the fear in his mates’ eyes as they’re condemned. He looks forward to watching them struggle or, better, sit stunned as mullets while they’re carted through town and rowed to the gibbets, then listening to them scream as thirst gets its claws into them. It’ll take three days for them to die. Such is the essence of justice.
The poth settles against the transom, her knees pulled up, her smock tucked around them, her arms shrunken into her sleeves and wrapped around her calves. She feels unmoored in such an empty smock. And it will be a long, hot afternoon. She’s already thirsty. Who decided poths must wear dark green?
When the Comber is far enough away that Jeryon can no longer make out the crew on deck, he says, “There are two things you need to know, poth.”
“Sit,” Everlyn says.
“What?”
“Sit,” she says. “I like your shade, but not you looming over me like some shipowner on his parlor throne.”
He sits, pressing his spine as far into the bow as possible. If that’s how it’s going to be, let her squint, he thinks. She does.
“One,” Jeryon says, “here’s what stands between us and Hanosh. The nearest land is Eryn Point at the mouth of Joslin Bay, eighty nautical miles away. Hanosh is twenty beyond that. If we had oars, half a barrel of water, and the stamina of guilded rowers, we could make the trip in three days and see my mates tucked into their gibbets in four. Instead, we have the Tallan River.”
“What’s that?” she says.
He looks as if she’d asked, What’s air? “It’s a current. The current. How can you live in Hanosh and—”
“I’m not Hanoshi,” Everlyn says. “I’m Aydeni.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s the fault of you Aydeni that we’re here in the first place.”
She nearly stands. The dinghy rocks severely. She doesn’t care. “I’m here because I wouldn’t have a hand in your death.”
“You’re here,” Jeryon says, “because Ayden wouldn’t sell us its store of shield. At any price.”
“I wouldn’t have a hand in Hanoshi deaths either,” she says. “Your Trust didn’t come to me. I went to them. I said I could help.”
“They trusted you?” he says.
Ayden, deep in the mountains west of Hanosh, has been the city’s chief rival in the Six Cities Trading League since it was allowed to join. Their admission ended a ruinous war and ushered in four decades of mutual prosperity, but for the last several years they’ve been taking baby steps toward another conflict. There’s not enough money to go around. Pirates who’ve plundered Hanoshi ships are rumored to have been Aydeni privateers. Bandits who’ve attacked Hanoshi caravans are suspected of being backed by Ayden. Not that Hanosh doesn’t have its own agents in Ayden to steal their trade secrets. Not that they aren’t rumored to have attacked Aydeni traders too. Denying Hanosh the golden shield it needed to fight the flox was the first adult step, even if Ayden claims they only took it because two years ago Hanosh gouged them on the price of grain after a drought doomed their crops.
“Of course they didn’t trust me,” Everlyn says. “They thought I was a saboteur, maybe a venomist. But my patients, the shipowners’ wives, they vouched for me.”
Owners aren’t easily swayed, and their wives don’t sway lightly: Where’s the profit? Jeryon figures her advocates still consider it fashionable to have an Aydeni apothecary, just as some still wear boots and plain smocks instead of returning to sandals and embroidered chitons and mantles. To get her on the Comber would signal their power.
“Which brings us back to the Tallan River,” he says. “An actual agent probably would have been briefed on it.” He lays his arms over the gunwales. “The sea is shaped like the bow of a boat pointing north. That—” he points to the starboard oarlock, “is Chorem. And this—” he points to the larboard oarlock, “is Yness. Eryn Point is a couple hands forward, where the center thwart would go. Everything aft of the oarlocks is ocean: trackless, empty ocean. Now—”
As he scoots forward, Everlyn tucks her knees tighter.