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I lifted the hatch just as John Randalf hit the end of a dark passageway, clad in nothing but trousers and a dirty shirt. He kicked at a locked door with a bare, frantic foot, a candle lantern swinging madly in one hand. He swore, each word punctuated by an impact.
“Saint’s. Bloody. Fucking. Crown!” One last kick and the door broke in. He vanished through, leaving me skulking in the hatchway like a suspicious groundhog.
What was Randalf doing here? Alive? It had been over a month since Lirr burned his ship. I’d seen his crew gutted, strung from the yards and roasted alive. I’d heard them. Smelled them.
Had I been mistaken? I’d never seen Randalf without a wig and this man wore none, but his face andvoice…
I had to know. I peered back down into the galley, but the main door was still closed. My guards must have heard the commotion, but retrieving me evidently hadn’t been their first thought.
I climbed up into the passageway and closed the hatch. With careful steps I followed the strange man, but no sooner had I reached the doorway than he reappeared.
His feral eyes fell on me and went very, very round.
I leveled the poker at his chest, claiming the space between us. “Why aren’t you dead?”
He looked from me to the makeshift weapon, trying to recover himself, and slowly raised his hands. “Where have you been? Hell, it doesn’t matter. Help me, woman, and I can protect you.”
Protect me? I pressed the tip of the poker into his chest. “Mynameis Mary Firth, and if you haven’t forgotten, you bought and tortured me. Why would I help you? Why are you here?”
Randalf’s eyes flicked over my shoulder to the emptypassage—footstepsand shouts drew closer with every passingmoment—butat the tone of my voice his gaze dragged to me, and he looked cautious for the first time.
“I should stick this in your belly and leave you to die.” I meant it. The words felt dangerous on my tongue, hot and deadly and primed with potential for violence that both satisfied and unsettled me.
He heard my sincerity too. He inched back from the poker and I followed him, keeping the point flush with his bedraggled shirt. My trained hand did not waver.
“I’m not the only prisoner,” Randalf spat. I heard an echo of the man I remembered then, coldly ordering me starved and left to the wind. “I’m sure you’ve heard their cries? There’s a hundred of us in that hold, witch. A hundred!”
“Why?” I asked. I hadn’t heard anything of the sort, but I hadn’t been here long. “Why would Lirr keep so many prisoners?”
Footsteps thundered closer and pirates shouted, coordinating their search.
“Saint knows!” Randalf hissed, as if that could keep us from being found. “He feeds us, even sends the surgeon to us, but he’s never breathed a word of why. We haven’t time for this! Help me, damn you! If you won’t help me, let me go! Are we still near the Usti coast?”
I held two thoughts, one on each side of a scale, and weighed them.
One was the memory of bitter cold, and the pain of bloodied wrists. The other was a hold full of prisoners, trapped in the dark. One was vivid and real, sharp with remembered pain; the other was the babbling of a despicable man. Even if it wastrue—andI would find out if itwas—Randalf’spart in my story had ended a long time ago.
Pirates thundered past our passageway and slowed. Lanternlight swelled.
“Fleetbreaker?” someone called, deferential.
I looked over my shoulder. The pirate, a small man, startled when he realized I wasn’t my mother. But when I spoke, I sounded just like her.
“Your quarry is here.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Tane
MARY
Lirr’s pirates dragged Randalf into a grand cabin. A balcony stretched the length of the stern, vaguely revealed by bottle-bottom windows. The small panes, each lined with black wrought iron, diffused the dawn light over the rest of the room.
There was a long, central dining table, a writing desk, ranks of heavy chests and bulkheads laden with prizes from every corner of the world. There were swords and flintlocks, pieces of armor, small round shields painted with bright colors of Sunjai, and various eccentricities I didn’t have time to identify. But it was obvious that Lirr liked his talismans, and his travels had been broad.
Despite these myriad distractions, two things demanded my focus as Randalf was shoved to his knees, surrounded by a gang of six pirates.
One was the figureheads, or rather, the fragments of them. Shattered and charred, they were arranged on the bulkheads between thetrophies—halfof a roaring lion’s face, a reaching hand, the outline of a splintered sword, the curve of a feminine hip. But I sensed no ghistings attached to them.
