Page 84 of Tempest

It sloshed into the glasses, dark as old blood.

“Do you spend all your time drinking and watching the horizon?” Cat said, gesturing towards the harbor.

“Not all of it. I prune the path and dust the altar from time to time,” Ana replied, finishing the second glass with ease.

Cat was not so quick to drink. She needed her wits and knew better than to try to match Ana glass for glass. The Seawolf was not just renowned for her teeth but her belly too. Instead, Cat held the wine close and paced, taking a turn around the tower.

Navigating along the bell, she came to a little table against the wall, positioned with a clear view of the harbor and horizon. There was a pile of notes on the wooden top, held down with a well-maintained spyglass, and a pot of ink alongside a sheaf of quill pens. But it was the block of wax that caught Cat’s eye. Thick, red like the wine.

The kind of wax used to seal letters.

In her boots, her toes curled.

Cat did not bend to inspect the papers. It would be too suspicious. Nor could she read them if she tried. A glimpse was enough to know the letters were not written in Meridian or Esperese but Arcayan, its script whorled and dotted, wholly different from northern languages.

Satisfied, Cat casually turned back to face Ana.

“I see you’re still reporting on the Esperese fleet,” Cat mused.

“And whoever else sails into port,” Ana answered, an edge to her words. “I keep a weather eye for some friends. That is all.”

Cat studied her wineglass. “The same friends?” Her tone was light. And calculated.

“Come to think of it, most of them are dead,” Ana said, sighing. She tossed her braid and looked out to sea, her eyes lost in thought for a long moment.

“I expected you to go home,” Cat said, still trying to get a measure of Ana, to balance the woman in front of her with the woman she had known. “To be dancing in Nera, not shut up in a tower, serving gods you don’t believe in.”

“You are certainly one to speak of gods and belief, Widow Rose,” Ana replied, her smile sharper now. “You saw them kill Harry, didn’t you?”

Cat startled at the name. Worse still was the wet sheen in Ana’s eyes. The sorrow took Cat by surprise, and she realized she could not recall ever seeing Anamina weep. Not even when she stumbled into port half dead and missing her arm.

“Yes.” It was all she could say.

Ana drew a breath, her voice tight. “And the way he died? I heard rumors . . .” she said, her voice trailing off.

The gruesome memory flashed in Cat’s mind and she could not help but flinch. She would have liked to spare Ana the pain of such things, but that was not the world they lived in.

“The reality was worse,” Cat murmured, dropping her gaze to look at the floor. She traced patterns in the wood beneath her, hoping for a distraction.

Instead, she saw Harry Morovant’s corpse back in Archenport, his broken body in the middle of Hargrove Square.

Tied down and ripped apart. Sewed back together. Nailed to a post. Left to rot on my doorstep. Too cursed for even the crows.

Ana snatched the still-full wineglass out of Cat’s grasp and drained it dry.

“To Harry. To Captain Morovant, dead and gone,” she muttered, slapping the empty glass down on the table, her head shaking back and forth. “You know, a small part of me believed he might find a way out of it. Or that it was a ruse, a trick. He was always good at that sort of thing. Slippery, sharp. And quick with a bribe.”

Cat did not doubt he tried, from the prison cells of Fort Morden all the way up to his execution.

“Governor Osprin is not the type to be bought off,” she answered. Her skin crawled at the thought of him, a reaper behind his ornate desk. “Unfortunately.”

A black eyebrow arched high on Ana’s face, her look changing.

“You speak as if you know him,” she said slowly.

Dread pooled in Cat’s stomach and the floor seemed to sway beneath her, as if it might drop out at any moment.

“All of Archenport knows him,” Cat answered, disdainful. It was not even a deception, her feelings about Osprin decidedly negative. “It’s hard to miss the man standing next to the executioner every single day.”