A muscle in Archer’s jaw leapt. His legs were braced apart, and he was still as a stone despite the pitch and yaw of the deck. “She knew,” he repeated. “And I didn’t tell you.”
* * *
Archer felt torn straight down the middle as he watched them. Lamentation stood still, stunned—as though he’d been shot. He looked the way he had the day after theSwallow, when Archer had told him he was leaving the navy. Not by choice.
He looked as though Archer had betrayed him.
And Ruby—
Ah God. Ruby. Her clear gray eyes flicked from him to Lamentation and back again, and he could tell by her face that she didn’t know what had happened. He could see—in the tiny curl of her shoulders, in the way her face tipped down—that she thought Lamentation’s shock and anger were her own fault.
But the fault was his. It had been from the very beginning.
Anguish was a fishhook in his guts. He couldn’t find any words, didn’t know how to tell Lamentation the truth. Hehadto keep lying to his crew, because he needed them to believe he had the situation under control.
But he didn’t.
TheVulcanowas empty. He had a brace of pistols on his chest and a dog’s diamond collar in his hand and nothing on his lips but false assurances.
The truth was, he didn’t know how to find the princess. He didn’t know what came next.
“I didn’t want you to know,” he said to Lamentation. “I wanted you to think that the risk from the Quenby scheme was over. I wanted you to believe that you were safe.”
“But we weren’t!” Lamentation’s voice cracked on the words. “We weren’t safe. You knew we weren’t.”
“I thought I could resolve the situation before you came to any harm. I thought—”
Ruby broke in. “There was no danger to any of you. Not from us. The three of us agreed we would not reveal what we knew.”
Lamentation drew back, as though her interjection stung. His throat worked as he looked at her and then looked back at Archer. “But you didn’t know that,” he said. The words were low, fractured—the rhythm of his voice broken, like a clock out of time. “When she came to the door and you recognized her face, you had no idea what she would do. Who she would report to. And still you let her in our house and told us nothing of the risk.”
Archer felt like his chest was caving in, a solid sucking gravity inside him, drawing his bones and organs tighter and tighter.
He had wanted to protect them. He didn’t want them to be afraid.
He’d wanted them to believe that he was strong enough and competent enough to keep them safe. That he was more than a convict or a disgraced sailor, more than an alley dog with too-sharp teeth and no future beyond bread and irons. More than what he’d been.
But as he looked at Lamentation, he felt nauseous, almost fevered.
He could tell himself all he wanted that he’d had the best of intentions. That he’d done it forthem.
But that too was a lie. It had not all been selfless. He’d wanted them to believe in him so that he could believe it too.
“What would have happened to us,” Lamentation demanded, “if Ruby had written to her father that very day and told him you were Quenby—if they’d carted you off to jail? What would have happened to Gerry and me if you left and never came back?”
Archer swallowed back the hot agony in his throat. “They wouldn’t... Ruby wouldn’t have done that.” His voice was hoarse.
Lamentation looked hurt now, which was far worse than furious. “It’s not aboutRuby,” he said. “It’s about you, keeping your secretsagain. Lying to us—for our own good, was it?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t make sense of anything just now. He didn’t know what it had been like. He could not remember anything beyond his own vast need and fear and shame.
It didn’t matter anyway. Lamentation pushed his hair off his damp forehead and jerked his chin up. “I’ll set the goddamned sails. But I’m not going with you after that. To the ambassador’s house. Or to Penney.”
Lamentation spun and stormed away. His boots slapped solidly against the slippery deck, and Archer could see him as he’d been a decade ago: wiry and mischievous as he clambered up the mast, blond curls whipping in the wind. A boy. A sailor. His.
Gerry stood alone on the deck. His gaze followed Lamentation and then, slowly, came back to Archer. “I understand why you did it,” he said. “But you needn’t have.”
“I—”
