Chapter 3, Roberts

  It took me a moment to recognize her when I pulled her from the water. Her body was limp, her face half-hidden beneath a snarl of soaked curls. But when I brushed them back, I knew. The shape of her nose. The curve of her jaw. Her eyelids, sealed shut, hiding hazel eyes I haven’t seen in years. But I’d know the sweep of those lashes anywhere. Her skin is still pale, though time has weathered it some. A faint line between her brows that wasn’t there before, like she’s been carrying too much. But otherwise, she’s the same.

  And now she’s on my ship, standing behind me as the crew gathers below the quarterdeck. I keep one hand wrapped loosely around her wrist silently declaring that she stays where I put her.

  The crew won’t question it, at least not out loud. They’ve seen me bring women aboard before and will assume this is the same. A passing amusement, a temporary indulgence and nothing to concern themselves with. Let them think that. It keeps the real reasons out of reach.

  I feel the tension in her arm, the way she resists just enough to remind me she’s still deciding how far she’ll let this go.

  "I take it you degenerates were placing bets this whole time?"

  Laughter ripples through the gathered crew, half-sheepish, half-proud. Good. That means the news I’m about to give them won’t land too hard. A few voices murmur agreement.

  "Did you find it?" Harken asks, cutting to the reason we’re here. The Molten Heart is a treasured relic, a paragon of natural beauty, lost in the Prophet’s War and still sought after by idiots with more greed than sense.

  "No." Before I can say more, half a dozen voices erupt.

  "Ah! Told you!" "Pay up, swines!" "That’s my coin, you cheating bastard!"

  I let it go for a moment, smirking as the crew bickers and coins change hands. Let them enjoy it. Then, I lift a hand and the voices die.“I spent an hour diving for it. There was nothing down there. It wasn’t the Heart.”

  “How can you be sure?” A voice calls from the crowd.

  “I’m the best diver on this ship and if I didn’t find what she was holding, no one could’ve.”

  A pause. “I’ve never seen the Molten Heart and neither have any of you, but we all know the Heart is stronger than the purest diamond. And it doesn’t burn. It glows. Whatever she had was consumed by flame before she even hit the water.”

  I glance around. Let that sink in. “So no, I don’t believe she had it.”

  Silence lingers so I move on. "She fights, so for now she stays.”

  A heavier silence follows. They expect a vote but I don’t call for one. Relinquishing my hold on Sarah’s arm, I step forward onto the edge of the quarterdeck, grinning as I let them wonder whether challenging me today is worth the trouble.

  Harken’s watching, impassive. I know he’ll have something to say later.

  "Well? Why are you all still standing around like confused chickens?" My voice is all amusement now.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Get back to work! We’ve got a whole day’s worth of sunlight left to burn. If the gods are feeling generous, we might even make the Sandbars in decent time," I say, kicking a rotting piece of something fishy toward the rail. It stops just short of going over.

  Jake moves first, ordering the swabbies back to holystoning the deck. He’s short, solid, built like he was poured into muscle and hardened in the sun. Young, brown skin sun-warmed and sweat-slick, dark hair cropped short, face always clean or close enough. My lead deckhand is all drive, no drag. He doesn’t bark to impress anyone. He’s not compensating, not sucking up. He just works like a machine and expects the same from everyone else.

  If something needs doing, chances are he’s already up to his elbows in tar or brine or blood, getting it done. The officers swear by him. The swabbies don’t have to, they just have to keep up.

  Manee’s up in the rigging, shoulders draped in canvas, a breeze catching the fabric like a cape. They keep their hair long enough to fall in light brown waves around their face, but short enough to stay out of their eyes. They are an expert delegate. They have to be, with how many hats they wear: bosun, gunner, carpenter, and with no navigator aboard, they’ve taken to sharing helm and charting duties with Harken when things get busy.

  Right now they’re coordinating with four other deckhands to rig the new foresail. The old one tore when we sailed into a whirlpool and the mast swung too hard, scraping the canvas along the yard’s iron fastenings. A clean tear at the edge, slow to spread, but dragging on us ever since. We’ve already replaced three others lost to our recent close calls. This one just happened to be the last on the list.

  I turn to Harken, who stands beside me. Tall and long-limbed, with hair the color of sand and a few grays in his beard, he looks every bit the seasoned quartermaster. Blue eyes steady, mouth unreadable.

  He doesn’t say much when he’s working, but once he’s off duty, he talks enough for three men and a parrot. Always got a joke, a story, or some fool remark that gets the whole crew laughing. That’s part of why he’s my best mate. That, and the fact that when he does say something that cuts to the heart of it, it usually counts.

  He’s our magnanimous quartermaster and easily the most popular officer aboard. But I take some credit for that. Most captains pass down punishment and execution orders through the quartermaster. I don’t. We vote as a crew, and I do the dirty work myself.

  “Soon as Manee’s got that sail rigged,” I say, “get us moving. Then call the officers to my cabin for council.”

  We’ll need to put our heads together to get through the Sandbars. It’s the trickiest leg of our runs to Thelos. We take a backdoor route to keep off the charts, but it comes at a cost. The winds there are erratic, the depths shift without warning, and the currents hit like a fist.

  If you don’t catch it early, it’ll pull you into dead air and currents that will set you drifting until they decide to spit you out. And past that? Nothing but open sea. Unfamiliar waters. Places we don’t run.

  If we’re wrong about our heading, it won’t matter how well we know these waters. The sea doesn’t forgive mistakes. A proper navigator could account for all of it, see the pattern in the chaos. Without one, every mile we sail is a gamble.

  And if I’m being honest, it’s the kind of gamble that keeps me up at night. Because eventually, even the best crew starts looking at the horizon and wondering if they’d be better off jumping ship.

  Navigators aren’t easy to come by. Good ones, even less so. And I don’t take crew by force, never have. And gods be good, I never will. I’ve made one exception: when a missing skill puts the whole crew in mortal danger. It’s written in the code.

  But there’s a fine line between following the code and making the same mistake twice. Sailing without a navigator puts the crew in danger. But trusting the wrong one nearly got us all killed.

  The last time I let someone chart a new course, she told me exactly what I wanted to hear. And the moment I stopped watching my back, she put a knife in it.

  That's why the ship’s in such a sad state. We were left to find our way out of a sea full of hazards, and we hit every damn one of them. Sirens, whirlpools, giant squid… you name it, we fought it off. Then we had to make an unplanned run for supplies in Thelos, without our usual safety nets in place.

  By the time we finally limped into safe port, we barely had enough time to restock before turning right back around to make our next meeting with Maria.

  These past twenty-one days have been nothing but survival. We patched sails, stitched up the wounded, fought off infection, and held the ship together just enough to keep moving. Only now are we starting to clean up the mess.