Theo only seemed relieved that I’d spoken at all. “Morland,” he said. “There aren’t any canal maps aboard. I checked the storage holds, but—”
“Southeast past Gilmore,” Patrick muttered, though he continued to cradle his forehead in one hand. His eyes were now pinched closed. “Due east, seven clicks after Fuller’s Pass. Then straight on.”
Theo looked at Patrick with a creased brow. “You’ve been there before?”
“Been everywhere,” Patrick said, seemingly with momentous effort.
“And you memorized the geography?”
“I did,” he said bluntly. When I finally saw his face, it seemed stricken.He leaned his head back on the bench seat, a bruise burgeoning slowly over his right cheekbone.
Questions poured in, a river of them, but instead of asking a single one, I slept.
When I woke, it was dark beyond the curtains. Theo’s light snores sounded nearby. Water lapped gently against the hull, and moonlight broke over Patrick’s face.
He was awake, his fingers steepled in front of his lips. And finally, as though the dim made it easier to do so, he was looking at me. Watching.
His eyes were silver, swirling in unshed misery.
I was curled onto my side and found no energy to rise. My lip trembled. “Will you tell me everything?” I asked, terrified that he would turn away. Terrified of what he might say if he didn’t.
If he denied owing me a damn thing, that would be just as well. What would he have to say to Lord Tanner’s agent, harbinger of Kenton’s downfall? Would he spit and yell this time? Or worse, those same deadened eyes I’d seen after our capture? That slow breaking.
Did he hate me?
His expression faltered, then collapsed altogether. One beat, two, and he left his seat.
Not to leave, but to kneel before me.
He didn’t touch me. Didn’t reach out to take my hand.
Instead, he said with a depth I could not fathom, “I’m sorry, Scurry girl.”
He told me everything. Every wretched detail. From the moment Lord Terrence Shop had stepped into his room and spoken of wolves, made outlandish promises of a truce and idium for the brink, to the moment my mother hung.
“I didn’t trust him,” Patrick said, “but he wanted Tanner dead, and it seemed we could agree on that.”
With every word, I felt fire lash beneath my skin. “And you all decided that I should be the one?”
His eyes flashed. “No.”
“Then who?” I asked, just now picturing it, Patrick and John and Theo and Lord Shop, foreheads bent as they concocted a plan I wasn’t party to.
“Me” came a cracked voice, and Theo’s body rose in the dark. I couldn’t see his face, but the register of his voice was soft and pained. “We told Patrick that it would be me.”
It would have been more dignified, had I lifted my head from the bench seat, untucked my limbs from the curl of my torso. I did neither. What use was dignity now?
“Why?” I asked. A child questioning the turn of the earth.
Theo sighed like it might be his last. “Because my father decided that it would benefit him most to haveyouassassinate Tanner, and I told him Patrick would never allow it. I told him he’d refuse to siphon a drop of idium if that was the case.”
“So you tricked the ink out of him and passed it on to me?”
Theo nodded gravely. I was glad I couldn’t see the contours of his face.
“Was my mother to be hanged in the hopes it wouldinspireme to… to kill?” The words left my lips on a tremble, the realization that I was now a murderer finally dawning.
For seven years I’d escaped without blood on my hands, and it had caught up to me anyway.
