The Speaker

by Traci Chee

  “Actually,” Sefia said, “I agree with him.”

  “Huh?” Versil frowned, as if in the brief pause he’d forgotten what they were talking about. “Of course you do. See, Aljan? If the sorcerer says I’m right, I’m right.”

  Aljan made a face. “Shouldn’t you be scrubbing a pot or something?”

  “Oh, right.” Versil’s smile seemed broader for the patches of white at the corners of his mouth. Leaping to his feet, he danced toward the unwashed dishes. “You two are just more fun.”

  Aljan didn’t approach Frey that night, but on the trail two days later, as they headed out of Shinjai into Gorman, he passed her a pleated sheet of paper inked with flowers—his version of a bouquet.

  Sefia was watching her when Frey glanced up. Their eyes met, and there was a little less anger in her face than there’d been the day before. She lifted the piece of paper and smiled, ever so slightly.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  As Frey tucked the flowers away, Sefia reached for the green feather she still wore in her hair.

  The vane was tattered; the barbs were bent. She tried to smooth it between her fingers, but some things, once damaged, couldn’t go back to what they used to be.

  Ahead of her, Archer rode on, stiff and broad-shouldered in the saddle.

  She slipped the feather between the pages of the Book and closed it with a sigh.

  POWER

  TO

  CHAPTER 18

  The Shrinking Sea

  After three days waiting among the islands east of Hye, searching for signs of the Crux, the Current of Faith spotted smoke on the horizon, like a poisonous bloom above the turquoise seas.

  In the haze, Captain Reed saw flashes of orange and explosions of powder—two frigates the size of the Current fighting something much bigger . . . something with a gold hull.

  Serakeen’s ships must have caught the Crux. What a prize they must have thought her, with those gem-studded rails, the plunder in the holds, the slaves belowdecks.

  Reed knew he could leave them to their fate. A bejeweled brawler of a ship, the Crux had passable odds of survival. And if she didn’t make it, no one would know the Current could’ve saved her. Reed and his crew would have the Trove to themselves. All the treasure. All the glory.

  But Dimarion had put his ship and his crew on the line to give the Current a chance to escape. What kind of person would Reed be if he abandoned them now?

  Not the kind of person he wanted to be remembered as.

  Not the kind of person who deserved to be remembered.

  “Prepare for battle!” he cried, and the crew sprang into action, securing the portholes and readying the great guns. In his carpentry workshop, Horse prepared shot plugs and lead sheets to reinforce the bulkheads. Marmalade, the ship’s girl, went skipping across the deck, bringing armfuls of weapons up from the magazine.

  As they neared the fighting ships, the noise of the battle struck them: the booms of cannons, the report of rifles, the shouts of men rising over the tumult of the sea.

  Then the Current was in the smoke. Close enough to smell the gunpowder.

  The Crux was surrounded, her gold hull pitted, her masts broken, her cannons sputtering as she fought off two ships half her size: one of Serakeen’s black-and-yellow scouts . . . and a blue frigate flying the flags of the Everican Navy.

  Reed’s chest tightened. Serakeen and the Blue Navy? If they’d formed an alliance, they’d smother the east, and outlaws—true outlaws that had called the seas home for generations—would be driven out and hunted down like game.

  “It’s just like Bee told us,” Jules said, pausing at the rail beside him.

  He shook his head. “You were right. We should’ve helped Bee and the Bad Eye when we had the chance.”

  Jules’s voice was soft as velvet when she said, “Can I put that in my song about you, Cap?”

  For a moment, they exchanged sad smiles. Then with a quick salute, she dashed back to her watch.

  Captain Reed scanned the waters, sizing up the action. The frigates were going to flank the Crux, pinning her between them. With cannon fire coming at her from both sides, it’d be a bloodbath.

  To stop them, the Current would have to sail behind them, fire on the Evericans, reload, and fire again on Serakeen’s scout. She’d have to be quick.

  But in these parts, there was no one quicker.

  “Gun crews, prepare to fire!”

  They sliced through the seas clean as a knife.

  The Evericans didn’t even see them coming. The windows of the officers’ quarters gleamed, exposed, at the stern of the blue frigate.

  Then the cannons of the Current of Faith let loose.

  Shot soared through the air and went battering into the enemy vessel, shattering glass, splitting beams like kindling. The rudder snapped. One cannonball grazed the lower gun deck, opening up a gaping hole along the port side, revealing blood, bodies, and iron.

  The Crux let off a broadside of her own, demolishing the Everican hull. A mast snapped. Men screamed.

  The crew of the Current prepared the next volley.

  But Serakeen’s scout was ready for them. Fire spewed from their aft guns.

  “Incoming!” someone cried.

  The crew ducked behind the gunwale as scrap shot splintered the side of the Current.

  Reed flinched as a bit of shrapnel cut into his cheek. “Fire!” he shouted.

  The black-and-yellow ship took the explosions all along her stern, large chunks of iron raking her fore and aft, revealing her innards.

  A killing blow. No ship could recover from that.

  “Jules!” Marmalade’s thin voice pierced the air. “No, no, no!”

  Fear clenched Reed’s guts.

  Jules?

  Not Jules.

  Not his chanty leader, his runner, his brawler, his singer, his conscience, his friend. Not Jules.

  He bounded down to the main deck as the Crux fired on Serakeen’s ship. Heat and flame rippled the air, nearly throwing him off balance.

  He skidded to a stop beside his chanty leader, where she was laid out among the cases of shot, blood darkening her clothing in a dozen different places. Glass and nails spiked her left side, and a shard of rusted iron protruded three finger lengths from her stomach.

  Doc was already there, cleaning wounds, removing shrapnel. Captain Reed knelt beside them.

  “She saved me,” Marmalade said, shuddering in Horse’s enormous arms. “She saved me.”

  “Not quick enough to save myself, though.” Jules coughed, grimacing at the pain.

  Doc glanced up for half a second, long enough for Reed to see the grim expression behind her spectacles. But she didn’t stop suturing.

  Across the water, flames spewed from the black-and-yellow ship. Sailors screamed and pitched themselves, burning, into the waves.

  The blood wouldn’t stop. Reed felt it puddle around his knees.

  Jules was ashen. “I never got to make that song about you,” she whispered, her strong, musical voice reduced to a mere thread. “Now no one’s gonna know I saved your life.”

  He gripped her hand, but her skin was going cold. “We’ll tell ’em,” he said. “We’ll tell everyone.”

  She tried to smile, but tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Make it a song, will you, Cap? Something to sing when the sun goes down in the west—” Blood came bubbling up in her mouth, and her next words were a wet, suffocating gasp. “Don’t forget, okay? Don’t forget . . .”

  “Never,” Reed whispered. “You’re my crew, now and always.”

  Always, she mouthed, but her voice was already gone.

  Then she closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again.

  • • •

  That evening, while the Current and the Crux lay at anchor in the shelt
er of a cove, their crews gathered on the beach to burn the bodies of the dead.

  Together, they sent six funeral pyres flaming onto the water. Three for Dimarion’s crew, two for his slaves, and one for Jules.

  The Current’s other chanty leader, Theo, sang one of her favorite songs. Though his baritone was strong, Reed couldn’t help missing the way Jules had sung it—hard and raw, like an open wound.

  But she’d never sing again.

  “You miss a man so much,” Horse said. In the crook of his arm, Doc laid her head against his chest.

  Marmalade hadn’t stopped crying since Jules went still, sometimes whimpering, sometimes sobbing so hard it was like her grief would rip her in half.

  Later, when they gathered to eat and drink and tell stories about the dead, Reed stood apart, barefoot in the surf, feeling each wave flood around his ankles and recede again like an intake of breath.

  He closed his eyes, immersing himself in the sounds of the ocean, the babble of the shallows and the growl of the deep. The water spoke to him of danger. Of navies amassing off the coast of Everica and of outlaws fleeing like fish before a great blue heron. Of pirates circling Liccaro like sharks. Of blockades and fierce armadas and invaders in the Central Sea.

  Of Jules, her body reduced to ash.

  Of red lights in the west.

  He’d tried. He’d tried to be someone worth remembering. And it had cost Jules everything.

  At his ankles, the rhythm of the waves changed—faster, deeper. Opening his eyes, Reed found Dimarion standing beside him like an oaken mast, swaying slightly in the breeze. A silk scarf almost hid the bandage around his head, and a fine linen shirt almost covered the bruises at his collarbone, but he couldn’t disguise his limp or the carved mahogany cane at his side.

  That he could have snuck up on Reed in his condition was a remarkable feat of grace.

  In one of his hands, two glasses of brandy flashed like spheres of topaz. Passing one to Reed, he lifted the other in his splinted fingers. “We owe you our lives, Captain. Whatever you want, it’s yours, as long as it’s in my power to give. The hammer of the Thunder Gong? Take it, and let bygones be bygones.”

  Reed raised an eyebrow. So Dimarion had the mallet. He’d thought it’d been lost in the maelstrom five years ago. Ordinarily, he would’ve leapt at the opportunity. But treasure and great deeds didn’t hold the same allure as they once had. Not today.

  Slinging back his drink, Reed wiped his mouth and pulled a piece of paper from his front pocket. “That’s what’s inside the bell of the Desert Gold.”

  It had been Meeks’s idea to make a charcoal rubbing of the inscription—a perfect copy of the words that Reed hoped would tell them where to find the Trove of the King.

  Taking the sheet of parchment, Dimarion turned it sideways. “Is it a map?”

  “It’s writin’.”

  “It’s riding what?”

  Reed shook his head. He’d made a similar mistake, not long ago. “I met a kid on my way to Jahara,” he said, explaining about Sefia, the book, how she could read it.

  “Like you and the sea,” Dimarion said, nodding.

  “Yeah.”

  “And she’s the only one who can locate the Trove?”

  Captain Reed scratched his chest, remembering his first tattoos, the words he’d buried beneath more ink as soon as he got the chance. “The only one I trust,” he said, shrugging. “Look . . . you try to find someone to decipher them marks if you like, but I can’t go with you.”

  Dimarion tucked the rubbing into his shirt. “You’re planning something, aren’t you? You’re going to do something so dangerous, so illustrious, that it’ll make the rest of us curdle with envy.”

  “Dangerous, yes. Illustrious, no,” Reed said, staring hard at their ships in the sunset. “I lost a sailor today. Her name was Jules.”

  The captain of the Crux raised his glass.

  “How many others have we lost already?”

  The ships Bee had listed came rushing back to him: the Graybird, the Pickax, the Only Star . . .

  “We’re outlaws, Captain. Unless we’re on the same crew, there is no ‘we.’”

  . . . the Fool’s Gold, the Rose, the Marilyn . . .

  “Maybe there should be. Maybe outlaws need to start lookin’ out for each other.”

  Dimarion scoffed. “Outlaws, banding together? You’d have an easier time catching minnows with your pinkies.”

  . . . the Better Luck Next Time, the Water Dog, maybe even the One Bad Eye . . .

  “I know,” Reed said. “But if someone doesn’t try, we’re all as good as dead.”

  “Who, you? You’re the worst of them. ‘No authority but the gun and the sea,’ remember?”

  Reed patted his silver revolver. “It ain’t my gun they’d be answerin’ to.”

  Dimarion’s dark eyes gleamed. “The Lady? Is she still alive? Where has she been all these years?”

  “A little place called Haven.”

  A hidden island surrounded by riptides and rocks, Haven was home to Adeline Osono and Isabella Behn, two of the toughest people Reed had ever met. In her younger days, Adeline had been sheriff of an outpost in the Central Sea, where she’d kept order in a lawless territory. She had quicker trigger fingers than anyone, even Reed, and once her name had commanded the respect of every smuggler, slaver, and cutthroat in Kelanna.

  She was the Lady of Mercy, the original owner of Reed’s legendary gun. If anyone could keep a community of fighting, thieving outlaws from killing one another, it was her.

  “This will be challenging,” Dimarion said.

  “Yep.”

  “Painstaking.”

  “Yep.”

  “And small.”

  “Yep.”

  Dimarion dug his cane deeper into the sand. “I’ve known you a long time, Captain. You don’t do small. Small deeds aren’t the ones you’ll be remembered for.”

  “I know.” Reed thought of Jules—getting a tattoo to remember each of her family members until her arms were a tangle of songbirds and jungle flowers; making up little ditties during the morning watch; saving Marmalade from cannon fire. “But they make you the kind of person who should be remembered.”

  “So you’re done with trying to live forever, are you?”

  Captain Reed hesitated. He’d dedicated years of his life to immortality. To finding artifacts that promised him eternal life. To collecting adventures so impressive you couldn’t resist retelling them. It had been a good dream, but some dreams you had to let go.

  “It ain’t worth livin’ forever if you’re just livin’ for yourself.”

  “Right.” Dimarion sighed. “So when do we start?”

  “We?” Captain Reed asked, startled.

  “‘We’ indeed, if you’ll have me. It might be a nice change of pace to achieve something that isn’t motivated entirely by self-interest.”

  Dimarion was a plunderer and a pillager who kept slaves as spoils. He was probably the last among all the outlaws Reed might have asked for help.

  “I mean it, Cannek. If you do this, I’m with you.”

  “The Lady won’t like it one bit if I sail in with a ship full of slaves,” Reed said flatly. “In fact, she might even have my head for showin’ you the way.”

  Dimarion rolled his eyes. “I don’t beat them, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’re probably better cared for than some of your own crew. They’re certainly better clothed—”

  “You said you’d give me anything in your power to give,” Reed interrupted. “You don’t get to be a slave-owner and a hero.”

  Dimarion curled and uncurled his fingers so many times Reed thought for sure he’d hit him.

  Well, try to hit him.

  “Give up my slaves—or give up my word and my honor.” The captain of the Crux slung a heavy ar
m around Reed’s shoulders. Harder than he needed to. His smile was half-snarl. “Fine. We have a deal. You’re too clever for your own good, you know that?”

  Captain Reed smirked. “Seems like I’m just clever enough.”

  “You’d better be, if you hope to pull this off.” Deftly, Dimarion steered him back toward the bonfires, where the silhouettes of their sailors were black as burned matchsticks against the flames. “We’ve already lost sailors. We’re bound to lose more, before this is over.”

  HOW

  THE

  CHAPTER 19

  Strange Marks

  It’s said that all legends start small, and the legend of Cannek Reed was no exception. He was sixteen when he left his home in the Everican interior—a skinny kid with hunched shoulders and an awkward gait that gave little indication of the greatness inside him.

  Except for his eyes—those striking blue eyes, the color of the water on a clear day.

  His mother’s eyes, though she was long gone.

  There had been one last beating the night before he left. Shouting: his father’s wet voice washing up against the windows, seeping through the cracks into the still black night.

  His father had struck him. More than once.

  More than twice.

  The pain had spread across his cheek, his back, the side of his head, like the splatter of water on flagstone.

  Eventually his father’s anger eroded, as it always did, into drunken sleep. So it was quiet when Reed left.

  His footsteps were drenched with dew.

  His heart was filled with the sounds of the ocean.

  He didn’t look back.

  In Kelanna, folks said you’d never been home until you’d been to sea. At sixteen, however, Reed had never even seen the ocean. His father had forbidden it. Reed’s mother had left his father for it, or for a Gormani sailor—the stories differed depending on who you asked—and for Cannek the water had always been out of reach beyond the ridges that insulated his country from the Central Sea.

  But he’d felt the water calling to him his whole life—streams, brooks, little rivers—chattering to him as they ran down to the sea.