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Shock emptied Charles’s face.
That seemed like a bad sign. Surreptitiously, I tugged at my bindings. They were still as tight as they’d been when the soldiers dragged me to the gallows. Whatever Grant had used to free his own bindings, he hadn’t used it on me. Perhaps he’d lost it in the chaos.Perhaps…
An unwelcome premonition prickled across my skin.
“Well.” Kaspin puffed out a breath. “Thatisunfortunate. Your stash has been found and confiscated by the Crown to fund the war effort. Quite publicly. Don’t tell me that’s all you have?”
Charles’s eyes flicked from me to Kaspin, then to the man whose hand still rested around his throat like a meaty collar.
“Of course not,” Charles bluffed, badly. “There’s always more.”
“More already in your possession?” Kaspin inquired. He sauntered closer, free hand fiddling with the knife at his belt. A curved thing, it screamedgutting. It was well-made too, as was his silver-buttoned, knee-length coat. Whoever Kaspin was, he had money. “I haven’t time to wait for you to steal it. The Queen’s Guns are hunting your kind like dogs.”
The Queen’s Guns. Yes, I knew for a fact that the Queen’s Guns were currently hunting brigands in the Lesterwold, because they had arrested me there two weeks ago. Kaspin was implying that Charles was a highwayman, like I was supposed to be. Not just a gambler, then, down on his luck. A proper criminal.
I shifted my wrists again in my bindings, but they still didn’t budge.
Waiting for Charles’s reply, Kaspin slowly drew on his pipe and exhaled a stream of smoke.
Charles stared at him, unable or unwilling to answer.
“Because if you do not have the money,” Kaspin continued, “I will open your throat right now and take your head back to the fort tomorrow. There will be a reward, no doubt, and that will alleviate my losses. Speck, did you bring a saw?”
“Just a hatchet,” his bruiser replied. “Bit blunt. Sorry, boss.”
Kaspin frowned, but nodded. “All right, go fetch it.”
“Saint’sblood—Ican pay!” Charles shouted, cutting through the rhythm of the oars, the shush of sleet on the roof and the slamming of my heart. His frantic eyes fixed on Kaspin and my dread redoubled.
Charles would not look at me. That tilt of the chin, the tension in hisshoulders—itwas the same way my father had held himself when his new wife bundled me onto a coach with nothing but a satchel and the clothes on my back.
I was right. Unfortunately.
“The woman is your payment,” Charles Grant said. “Enough for all my debts.”
Speck and Kaspin both looked my way, and even some of the nearby oarsmen cast a sideways glance.
I, for my part, could only stare at Charles. Betrayal gouged through me, irrational though it was. I’d known this man for mere moments, but we’d faced death together. I’d saved his life. He’d saved mine. Andnow…
“Her?” Kaspin repeated. “She’s not even pretty, man.”
From the way the big man Speck considered me, he disagreed with Kaspin on that point; I wanted to crawl out of my skin.
“She is a Stormsinger.” Charles delivered me into servitude without falter. “A powerful one too. She called up this storm herself, Kaspin.”
Kaspin considered me fully. He advanced, head tilting in consideration, pipe smoldering. “A Stormsinger. Is that right, woman?”
I raked in a breath, willing time to slow so I could order my thoughts. But all I could think of were my mother’s scarred wrists and her warning blue eyes.
Six years in chains, that’s what these are, love, my mother’s voice said.Chained to a bulkhead. Chained to a mast. I sung fleets into battle. Sung good men and women to the bottom of the sea. That, Mary, is a fate worse than death.
Now I faced the same fate, wrists scraped raw by rough rope, surrounded by strangers in the swinging lantern light. What if shewasright? I would be passed from crew to crew, each more disreputable than the next. Furthermore, with the war still raging across the Winter Sea, I might end up in the hands of the Mereish or the Cape. I might be used against my own countryfolk, perhaps even my mother, if she still lived and sailed somewhere out there.
But was that a fate worse than death? I’d looked death in the eyes today, felt her noose around my neck, and I couldn’t bear to face her again. Not tonight. My will to live still burned, hot and ready to blaze.
As a Stormsinger, I had value. I’d be kept alive. I’d suffer, but I’d live. And while I lived, I couldescape—Icouldn’t say what I’d escape to, not yet, but that would come.
I met Kaspin’s eyes and thought of my mother, of her strength and the hard line of her jaw. And so, I gave them her name instead of my father’s, together with all its promises and destiny.
