The first grappling hook clanged against the gunwale at dawn, its iron teeth biting deep into salt-softened oak. Old Brennan heard it from his hammock in the fo'c'sle, a sound he had dreaded for thirty years at sea and had never quite managed to forget. The second hook followed, then a third, the three impacts spaced with military precision across the port side of the Mare's Folly . Above him, boots thundered on the deck, and somewhere amidships a woman screamed, cut short.
Brennan rolled from the hammock. His knees cracked against the planks, and the scar along his ribs, the one he'd carried since the wreck of the Solbright , pulled tight like a bowstring. He reached for the belaying pin he kept lashed beneath his bunk and found it gone. The lad from Vossport had borrowed it two nights ago to crack a coconut and had not thought to return it. Brennan cursed softly, in the old way, in words that tasted of iron and tar, and took up a marlinspike instead.
"Korrick," he called, low, into the dimness of the fo'c'sle. "Korrick, boy, are you awake?"
No answer from the hammock across from his. Korrick Coalvein lay still as a bundled sail, his breathing too even, too slow. Brennan crossed the narrow space in three steps and shook the boy's shoulder. Korrick's eyes snapped open at once, bright with the particular wakefulness of one who had been waiting for exactly this summons. He was already unlacing his boots.
"I heard the hooks," Korrick said. "Three of them. Starboard approach, port boarding. They've got a pinnace in the water."
"A pinnace and a longboat, I'd wager," Brennan murmured. He could feel the weight distribution of the Mare's Folly shift as men swarmed up her sides, the ship settling an inch deeper into the swell. "They're not customs. Customs sends two men in a rowboat and asks politely for the harbormaster's stamp. This is something else."
Korrick pulled his second boot tight and stood, buckled on the leather belt that held his smithing tools, the small hammer and the set of fine picks he used for delicate work. He was seventeen and broad across the shoulders, with the soot-darkened hands of someone who had stood at a forge since he could walk. He had been Brennan's apprentice for eight months now, and in that time Brennan had taught him to read the weather by the color of the morning sky, to splice a rope by feel, and to keep his mouth shut when the old man was thinking.
"Master Torvald," Korrick said. "Lysander. Where are they?"
Brennan closed his eyes. He could map the Mare's Folly in his mind as clearly as he could map the lines on his own palm. Torvald would be in the captain's cabin, where he had taken to sleeping with a loaded crossbow propped against the bunk. Lysander Vane, the young lord who had bought passage to the Shimmering Reach and paid in coin that no honest man would accept, would be in the forward hold with the relic he carried in a lead-lined case. Or he would be trying to be there. The boy was clever, but he was also nineteen, and nineteen-year-old noblemen had a habit of doing the obvious thing at the worst possible moment.
"Stay behind me," Brennan told him. "Do not speak unless spoken to. If they ask your name, you are a deckhand from Salt-Dock named Jem. If they ask your trade, you are a cooper. Do not let them see your hands."
Korrick looked down at his palms, at the calluses and the burn scars, and understood. A cooper's hands were smooth. A smith's hands told stories.
Brennan led the way up the ladder to the main deck. The hatch came open onto chaos and grey light and the briny wind of the open sea. The Mare's Folly rolled gently in the long Pacific swell three days out of any port she cared to name, her sails furled tight against the yardarms because they had been becalmed since midnight. Around her, blocking out the pale eastern sky, hovered a black ship, low and lean and bristling with pikes. Her hull was tarred so dark it seemed to drink the morning. At her bow flew a flag Brennan did not recognize, a grey field charged with a single open eye, the pupil a vertical slit like a cat's.
Pirate-hunters. The Inquisition's private fleet, the kind that sailed under letters of marque from the Church of the Deep and answered to no harbor-master and no admiral. Brennan had seen their like before, off the coast of the Amber Isles, twenty years gone, when they had burned a slaver out of the water and left the screaming to carry for a mile across the flat sea. They were not men who came to ask questions. They were men who came to read the answers in the wreckage.
A dozen of them had already gained the deck. They wore boiled leather over chain, and their faces were hidden behind half-helmets of black iron, and they moved with the disciplined silence of soldiers who had done this work many times and found no romance in it. At their head walked a tall figure in a long coat of grey wool, the coat unbelted, hanging straight as a cassock. He did not wear a helm. His face was bare to the salt wind, and it was a face that had been handsome once and was now a ruin of sharp angles and hollows, the skin drawn tight over the skull as if the flesh had been pared away with a knife. White hair, thin and lank, hung to his shoulders. His eyes were the pale blue of shallow water over white sand, and they moved across the deck of the Mare's Folly with the patient attention of a man cataloguing inventory.
Brennan knew him. Of course he knew him. He had known this man since before Korrick was born, since before the Solbright went down, since the days when the name Vane had meant something other than ruin. The recognition sat in his chest like a swallowed coal.
Morrath Vane. The Inquisitor-General. The patriarch of the fallen Vane dynasty. The man who had spent thirty years and three fortunes chasing the legend of the Golden Argosy and had finally, in his old age, found something worth more than gold to spend in the pursuit of it.
Morrath's gaze passed over Brennan without a flicker of acknowledgment. His thin lips moved, and his voice came out reedy and precise, the faint aristocratic drawl of the old provinces still clinging to his consonants like moss to a drowned stone.
"The captain of this vessel. Present yourself."
Master Torvald came up the ladder from the aft cabin with the crossbow in his hands. He was a big man, red-bearded, with the rolling gait of a lifelong sailor, and he had not shaved in four days. He held the crossbow low, not raised, not aimed, but present, and his eyes were hard.
"I am Captain Torvald, master of the Mare's Folly , duly licensed by the Harbor Commission of Vossport to trade in the Shimmering Reach and the Amber Isles. By what authority do you board my ship, sir?"
Morrath smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. It rearranged the ruin of his face into something worse than the ruin had been.
"The authority of the Office of the Inquisitor-General, under the seal of the Lord Cardinal of the Deep, and by the warrant of the Holy Court of Salt and Sorrow. I am Morrath Vane, and I seek two things. A runaway apprentice, a boy of fourteen years, fair-haired, going by the name of Pip. And a stolen relic, a small leaden case bearing the seal of the Vane house. You will produce both, or I will tear this ship apart plank by plank and sift the sawdust."
"I have no apprentice by that name," Torvald said, "and I carry no sealed case. You are welcome to search my vessel and satisfy yourself."
Morrath's pale eyes narrowed. He raised one hand, a gesture small and precise, and four of the black-helmed men moved at once toward the forward hatch that led down into the cargo hold. They moved with the efficiency of men who had practiced this choreography until it was muscle memory. One of them, passing Brennan, paused and looked at him directly, and Brennan saw the young hard face inside the helm, the fresh shave, the eyes of a man who enjoyed his work. The soldier's hand rested on the pommel of his shortsword, and his fingers drummed once, twice, in unconscious rhythm.
Brennan did not move. He stood very still, the marlinspike loose at his side, and he watched Morrath Vane across the twenty feet of deck that separated them. The old man had aged terribly. The last time Brennan had seen him, at the funeral of Lysander's mother, Morrath had still been a figure of menace, broad-shouldered and iron-voiced, the kind of patriarch whose shadow fell across an entire duchy. Now the shadow had collapsed inward, and what remained was a tall, starved thing wrapped in grey wool, a man who had spent everything he had on the chase and had nothing left to spend except other people's sons.
"Where is the boy?" Morrath asked, his voice carrying across the deck with a tremor that might have been age or might have been something else. "Where is Lysander?"
The name landed on the deck like a thrown gauntlet. Torvald's grip on the crossbow tightened. One of the black-helmed soldiers took a half-step forward, hand on sword. Korrick, behind Brennan, shifted his weight, and Brennan felt the movement through the deck planking and willed the boy to stillness with every ounce of concentration he possessed.
"I have no one by that name aboard," Torvald repeated, and this time his voice was harder, the brogue of the Outer Isles thickening his vowels. "I carry passengers under contract, and their names are their own business. You have your warrant, sir, and I have my license. Search and be done with it, or get off my ship."
Morrath studied him for a long moment, the pale eyes unreadable. Then he gestured again, and the four men descended into the forward hold. Their boots rang on the ladder rungs, and then their footsteps moved into the dimness below, and Brennan heard the sounds of cargo being shifted, crates dragged across planking, the methodical ruin of a thorough search.
From the direction of the galley, a woman's voice rose in sharp protest, cut off by a man's grunt. Sera Blacktide, the navigator, the tide-runner Brennan had hired out of Salt-Dock for her uncanny eye for weather and her absolute refusal to ask questions about cargo. She had a tongue on her that could strip paint at twenty paces, and the soldiers were discovering this to their cost.
Morrath turned his attention to the passengers assembled on deck, the handful of traders and a priest who had booked passage at Vossport. He studied each face in turn, and when his gaze reached Brennan, it stopped. The pale eyes widened by a fraction, the only change in that ravaged face.
"Old Brennan," Morrath said softly. "I had word you were still alive, somewhere. I did not believe it. You look like your father."
"Your memory is better than mine, Lord Vane," Brennan said, and his voice came out steadier than he had expected. "I don't recall your face from the last time. It has been... altered."
Something flickered in Morrath's expression, too fast to read, and was gone. "Thirty years since the Solbright ," Morrath said. "Thirty years you have been hiding, and now here you are, on a ship called the Mare's Folly , sailing the same waters. Tell me, old man, do you believe in fate? I never did, until recently."
"I believe in tides," Brennan said. "And in keeping my affairs my own."
"Your affairs became my affairs the moment my nephew bought passage on your ship." Morrath stepped closer, and Brennan could smell him now, the wool of his coat, the ink and candle wax of long nights in a chart room, and beneath it all, the faint sweet rot of a man whose body had begun to fail him. "Lysander stole something from me. A relic, a small leaden case, the property of our house for four generations. He stole it and he ran, and I have spent a year and a half tracking him from one end of this ocean to the other. He was seen boarding this vessel at Vossport, under the name of a merchant's son. Where is he?"
Brennan said nothing. The marlinspike felt very heavy in his hand, and very useless. Across the deck, Torvald had not moved, the crossbow still held low, his thumb resting along the stock, not on the lever. The black-helmed soldiers ringed the deck, and there was no angle of approach that did not end in iron and numbers.
From the forward hold, one of the soldiers called up, his voice echoing in the confined space. "My lord. The hold is empty of any sealed case. There is, however, a false bulkhead, freshly constructed, behind the water casks."
Morrath's thin smile returned, and this time it reached his eyes, and the eyes were not smiling at all. "Tear it down," he said, without looking away from Brennan. "Tear down every board on this ship until you find what I have come for."
Brennan closed his hand tighter around the marlinspike and did not answer, because there was nothing to say that would not make things worse, and in his experience things were about to get considerably worse on their own.
The first soldier dropped through the forward hatch with the practiced ease of a man who had done it a thousand times, his boots ringing on the ladder rungs, and a second followed, and a third, and then the sounds that came up from below were the sounds Brennan had been dreading: the shriek of nails being wrenched from seasoned wood, the splintering crack of a plank giving way, the low triumphant grunt of a man who had found something he had been looking for. He stood very still on the listing deck and listened to the ruin of his ship, and each sound was a small bright point of hatred in the long gray afternoon of his life.
Morrath Vane had not moved. He stood in the same place, his thin hands folded one over the other at his waist, his pale eyes fixed on Brennan with the patient attention of a man watching an insect decide which way to run. Behind him, the black-helmed soldiers held their positions, and beyond them the lean gray hull of the hunter vessel ground against the Gunwale's side with a slow and groaning intimacy, and somewhere in the rigging a halyard clinked against a mast in a rhythm that sounded, to Brennan's exhausted ear, like a small bell tolling for the dead.
"My lord." The voice came up from the hold again, and there was a different quality in it now, a note of something that might have been surprise or might have been satisfaction. "There is a case. Lead. Sealed. There is a mark upon it."
Morrath's folded hands tightened, the knuckles whitening, and for the first time since he had come aboard something moved behind those pale eyes that was not cold calculation. "Bring it to me," he said. "Handle it as you would handle an infant. If it is damaged, you will be."
There was a long silence, and then the shuffle of boots on the ladder, and then two soldiers came up onto the deck carrying between them a small leaden case, dark with age, no bigger than a loaf of bread, and they set it down on the planking at Morrath's feet with a care that was almost reverent. Morrath did not pick it up. He looked at it for a long moment, and Brennan saw his lips move without sound, as though he were reading an inscription too small for anyone else to see.
Then Morrath looked up, and his gaze moved past Brennan to where the rest of the crew stood clustered at the base of the mainmast, and his eyes found Lysander Vane as a needle finds north. "You," he said. "Step forward."
Lysander did not step forward. He took a half step back, and the man behind him, the broad one with the broken nose, shifted his weight to cover the movement, and his hand went to the hilt of the short blade at his belt. The gesture was small and almost unconscious, and Morrath's gaze flicked to it and dismissed it in the same breath, the way a man dismisses the buzzing of a fly.
"I am not going to harm you," Morrath said, and his voice had changed again, had taken on the patient reasonable tone of a man explaining a simple truth to a child. "I have what I came for. I have no quarrel with you or with this vessel or with this crew, beyond the business of recovering what was stolen from me. You have been used, boy, as a convenient hiding place. Your father would have done the same, in his way, but he lacked the spine for it. He always did."
The word father moved through Lysander like a hand closing around a throat. He did not speak, but his face changed, the color draining from it in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, and Brennan saw the boy's hand come up to the place at his chest where the trinket hung beneath his coat, and Brennan understood, in that small and terrible instant, that the boy had not known what he carried. That the trinket was not his. That it had been put on him by someone, somewhere along the way, and that he had worn it without question because the person who had given it to him had been someone he trusted.
Morrath saw the motion of the hand. Of course he saw it. He saw everything, the old spider in his web, and his thin smile came back, and this time it was the smile of a man who has just been told exactly where the last piece of his prize is hidden.
"Search him," Morrath said softly.
Two soldiers moved forward, and the rest of the crew tensed, and for a moment Brennan thought it was going to happen then, the stupid brave hopeless moment, the moment that lives in songs and never in the recollections of the men who actually survived. He thought Korrick would move. He thought the big man with the broken nose would move. He thought Torvald would at last bring up the crossbow and make his single shot count.
None of them moved. They stood and watched as the two soldiers reached Lysander, and one of them caught the boy's arm and twisted it behind his back, and the other opened his coat with the dispassionate efficiency of a man undressing a corpse, and the trinket came out on its length of cord and swung in the cold air, and the soldier who held the boy's arm reached for it and broke the cord with a single sharp pull and handed the trinket to his companion, who carried it to Morrath and laid it in the old man's outstretched palm.
Morrath held the trinket up to the gray light. It was, Brennan saw, a small thing: a disc of some dark metal, no larger than a crown piece, hung from a short chain, its surface covered in a pattern of fine lines that might have been script or might have been ornament. Morrath looked at it for a long moment, and then he closed his hand over it, and the hand closed with a tightness that made the tendons stand out like cords under the papery skin.
"Lysander," he said, and the boy's name in his mouth sounded like a door being shut. "Your father is a dead man, boy. He has been a dead man since the night he took this from me. Do you understand that? He is walking around somewhere with a corpse's luck and a corpse's time, and when I find him, I will take from him everything he has left, including the breath in his body. That is what I do. That is what our family has always done."
Lysander said nothing. The soldier still held his arm, and the boy was very pale, and there was a small muscle in his jaw that jumped and jumped and would not stop.
Morrath turned away from him as though he had ceased to exist, and his gaze swept the deck, and it found Brennan, and it held. "You have cost me a year and a half," he said. "You and this tub of yours and the boy you have been hiding. I had thought, when I came aboard, to take the ship and leave you in the water. I am a reasonable man. I have what I came for. There is no profit in further unpleasantness."
He paused, and the pause had the quality of a held breath.
"There is, however, the matter of the cost. A year and a half is a long time. It is a great expense of men and ships and good information. I am not a rich man, Captain. The Vane fortune is a memory, and a lie, and the small reliable income of a family that has learned to do without. I will require compensation."
The words fell on the deck like stones into still water. Brennan felt the shape of what was coming, and his hand tightened on the marlinspike until the handle creaked under his grip.
"Compensation," Brennan said. His voice came out flat, and he was glad of it, because he did not trust what might have come out otherwise. "What manner of compensation, my lord?"
Morrath tilted his head, and the gesture was almost avian. "You have heard, I think, of the island they call the Shimmering Reach. You have heard, perhaps, of the vessel that was lost there, long ago, the great golden ship that the poets cannot stop singing about. I have, over many years, gathered a great deal of information about that vessel and that island, and most of that information is, at present, useless to me, because I no longer have the means to act upon it. You, on the other hand, are a treasure hunter, or so my man in Vossport told me, and you are going to the Reach, and you have a crew, and you have a ship, and you are, by all accounts, desperate enough to sail into the mouth of a legend on the word of a dead man's map."
He let the silence stretch, and then he smiled, and the smile was the worst thing Brennan had seen that afternoon, worse than the soldiers, worse than the crossbow, worse than the careful way the man had walked across his deck as though he already owned it.
"I will tell you where the Argosy lies. I will give you the bearings, the approach, the tides, the winds, the season. I will give you the keys to a fortune that would make your children's children into kings, Captain, and all I will ask in return is a tenth part of what you take from her, and the head of Lysander Vane, delivered to me in a cask of brine at any port of my choosing."
The deck tilted, and for a moment Brennan thought it was the sea, but it was not the sea. It was the world, shifting under his feet, rearranging itself into a shape he did not recognize. He looked at Lysander. The boy was looking back at him, and the look on his face was the look of a man who has just been told the price of his own life and is not yet sure whether the teller is serious. Beside him, Korrick had gone very still, the way Korrick went still when he was working something out, and Torvald's thumb had at last moved to the lever of the crossbow, and the small click of the mechanism engaging was the loudest sound Brennan had ever heard.
The black-helmed soldiers heard it too. Six of them shifted as one, the points of their boarding pikes coming up to a ready position, and the geometry of the deck changed in a single breath from a standoff to a killing floor, and the only thing that kept it from being a killing floor in fact was the fact that Morrath Vane, in the center of it all, had not moved, and had not stopped smiling, and was looking at Brennan with the patient expectant gaze of a man who has made an offer and is waiting, with great interest, to see what manner of man he has made it to.
The smile on Morrath Vane's face did not waver when the crossbow lever clicked home, but something behind the smile did, a calculation running behind the rheumy eyes, a figure being revised on some invisible ledger. The old man was, Brennan realized, enjoying himself. He was enjoying himself the way a cardsharp enjoys a hand that has not yet been decided, the way a man who has bet his last coin on a long odds wager enjoys the brief eternity between the deal and the turn.
"Captain Brennan," Morrath said, and his voice was mild, almost paternal, the faint aristocratic drawl of a man who had once been on a first-name basis with admirals. "I had hoped we might dispense with the posturing. Your Master Torvald is a man of considerable skill, I am sure, and the crossbow he has been so kind to display for my men is, I am told, of the make that was favored by the Coldpeak regiment in the year of the Long Frost, a weapon capable of driving a bolt through an inch of oak at fifty paces. But I wonder if he has counted the crossbowmen on my own deck." He tilted his head, almost delicately, as if listening to a strain of music only he could hear. "Fourteen, as it happens, and all of them with the good sense to aim at the rigging rather than at the wood, and I think you will agree that a ship without rigging is a coffin with a sail."
The deck was silent except for the soft creak of the Blacktide's hull working in the swell, and the distant call of a gull, and the slow tick of the rigging against the mast, and Brennan could feel the weight of the offer settling into his chest like a stone into water. A tenth of whatever was aboard the Argosy, if there was an Argosy, and a tenth of nothing was still nothing, and a tenth of everything was a kingdom, and the head of Lysander Vane in a cask of brine was, he thought, the kind of price that a man could live with, if he were the kind of man who could live with such things, which he was not, and had never been, and which was why he was here, on this ship, in this season, with this boy, instead of somewhere warm and quiet and far from the sound of crossbows being cocked.
"I will not give you the boy," Brennan said.
The words came out of him in a voice he did not recognize, low and even and very tired, the voice of a man who has just decided something that cannot be undecided. Beside him, Korrick made a small sound, half protest and half something else, and Torvald's thumb eased off the lever of the crossbow by a fraction, and Lysander Vane, who had been so still that he might have been carved from the same oak as the deck, turned his head and looked at Brennan with an expression that Brennan could not read, and did not try to.
Morrath Vane's smile thinned but did not disappear. "Then we are at an impasse, Captain, and I confess that I had hoped to avoid one, because impasses are expensive, and I am, as I am sure you have gathered, a man who has very little left to spend. I had hoped that the offer itself would be persuasion enough. It has always been, in my experience, the most effective form of argument. But if argument is not what moves you, perhaps demonstration will serve." He raised one thin hand, a gesture that was almost courtly, and the black-helmed soldiers did not move, but the geometry of the deck shifted again, the pikes settling into a pattern that was no longer a standoff but a net, and Brennan's hand went to the hilt of his sword without his permission, the old reflex, the one that had kept him alive through three wars and two mutinies and one very bad winter in the Saltgravel Isles.
"Wait." The word was Korrick's, sharp and sudden, and it cut through the tension like a knife through wet rope. Korrick had stepped forward, and his hand was raised, and his face was the face of a man who has just remembered something, or just seen something, or just understood something that no one else in the room has yet understood. "Captain. Captain, look at the boy. Look at the letter in his hand. Look at the seal."
Brennan looked. Lysander Vane was holding the letter, still, the way he had been holding it since the reading, and the seal was a smear of red wax at the bottom of the page, and Brennan had assumed, because he had not been looking closely, because he had been looking at Morrath, that the seal was the device of some merchant house or some minor noble, but the smear was not a smear, it was a press, and the press was a sun, and the sun was flanked by two crescents of waves, and the device was one that Brennan had seen before, once, on a chart in a chart-room in Port Ardent, on a chart that was very old and very carefully locked away, on a chart that was marked in a hand he had not been able to read.
"Solbright," Korrick said, very quietly. "The seal is Solbright. The seal of House Aurum. The seal of the lost line."
Morrath Vane's smile vanished. For the first time since Brennan had laid eyes on him, the old man's face was naked, and what was underneath the smile was not pleasant, was not even human, was the face of a man who has just been told that something he has spent his whole life pursuing is not where he thought it was, and is, in fact, in the hands of the one person he most wanted it to be out of. "That is not possible," Morrath said, and his voice was no longer mild, and no longer paternal, and the aristocratic drawl had thickened into something that sounded, for the first time, like a snarl. "The Aurum line is ended. The Solbright was lost three centuries ago. Every record, every witness, every scrap of proof has been gone since before I was born."
"Then explain the seal," Korrick said. "Explain the letter. Explain the boy, Morrath. Because if I am reading this aright, and I am almost never wrong about such things, then the child you came here to ransom is not a Vane at all. He is the last heir of a house that the Vane dynasty has been pretending, for three hundred years, never existed."
The deck was very still. The gulls had stopped calling. Even the rigging had stopped its slow tick against the mast, as if the ship itself were holding its breath. Lysander Vane was looking at the letter in his hand as if he had never seen it before, as if the words on the page had rearranged themselves into a sentence he could not parse, and Brennan could see, in the boy's face, the slow dawn of something that was not quite understanding and not quite horror, but was somewhere in the territory between them.
"I don't understand," Lysander said, and his voice was very small, and very young, and for the first time since Brennan had known him, did not sound like a young man pretending to be older than he was. "I don't understand any of this. My father said I was a Vane. My mother said I was a Vane. The records in the family chapel say I am a Vane. Who is this woman? Who is this Captain Sera? And what is the Solbright, and why is my grandfather looking at me as if he has never seen me before?"
Morrath Vane did not answer. He was looking at Lysander with the expression of a man who has just been told that the ground beneath his feet is not ground at all but a painted cloth, and that the drop beneath the cloth is very far indeed. The soldiers around him had begun to shift, uncertain, the geometry of their pikes loosening, the net becoming a confusion, and Brennan could feel the moment beginning to slip, the way a held breath begins to slip when the lungs give out, and he made a decision.
"Master Torvald," he said, very quietly. "The crossbow. Not at the old man. At the rope."
Torvald did not hesitate. The crossbow rose, and the bolt flew, and the sound it made was a clean sharp snap, and the rope that held the Blacktide's main halyard parted with a sound like a sigh, and the great sail came thundering down across the deck in a single breath, a fall of canvas that swallowed three of the black-helmed soldiers whole and sent the rest of them staggering, and in the chaos that followed, in the shouts and the swearing and the bright bright chaos of a deck gone mad, a small figure in a grey coat slipped over the rail and into the dark water of the Reach, and was gone.
Brennan did not see where Lysander went. He did not need to. He had spoken to the boy, quietly, in the hour before the Blacktide had come over the horizon, and had told him, in the voice he had once used to tell his own children that the world was not as kind as it looked, that if the moment came, the moment would be the only moment, and that the rail was the only door. He had told him that the water would be cold. He had told him that the current would take him west, toward the shoals, where the Blacktide's longboats could not easily follow. He had told him that if he was the man the letter said he was, then he would know what to do when the moment came, and if he was not, then it did not matter anyway, because the water was the same water for both of them.
The sail settled across the deck, and Brennan found himself on his knees in the wet canvas, and Korrick was beside him, breathing hard, and Torvald was standing over them both with the spent crossbow held like a club, and across the fall of canvas Morrath Vane was screaming orders that no one was listening to, because the deck of the Blacktide was a tangle of men and rope and broken spar, and in the middle of the tangle a single black-helmed soldier was trying to pull himself out from under the main gaff, and was not succeeding.
"Captain," Korrick said, his hand on Brennan's shoulder. "Captain, we have to move. The current. The boy."
"I know," Brennan said. "I know. I know what I have done."
He got to his feet. The deck was still tilting, but the tilt was the sea again, only the sea, and the stars above the Reach were coming out one by one, in the slow patient way that stars have, indifferent to the small griefs of men on the water below them. Somewhere to the west, in the dark, a boy who was not a Vane was swimming toward a ship he had never seen, toward a horizon he had been promised, toward a name that was not his own, and Brennan, who had given the order, who had told the boy to go, who had known all along that the moment would come and that he would not be able to stop it, stood on the deck of the Blacktide and watched the dark water close over the place where Lysander had been, and felt, for the first time in many years, the clean cold weight of having done a thing that could not be undone.
Morrath Vane found him there, an hour later, when the sail had been cut away and the deck had been cleared and the soldiers had been put to the work of repairing what could be repaired. The old man looked older than he had an hour before, and smaller, and the smile was gone for good, replaced by something that Brennan did not want to look at for very long. They stood together at the rail, the two of them, in silence, and watched the dark water, and did not speak, because there was nothing to say that the water had not already said, and the night was very quiet, and very cold, and somewhere to the west a small light was moving on the surface of the Reach, low and steady, the color of old gold, and it was moving away.