Read Chapter 15: Names Whithered

The brig’s iron bars still smelled of powder smoke when Darrow’s man came for me at dawn. I rose from the straw, joints aching, and followed him up the ladder to the quarterdeck without a word. Darrow stood at the helm, his coat immaculate despite the stain of yesterday’s battle, and he watched me approach with the flat, patient look of a man reading a ledger.

“Mr. O’Malley,” he said. “You saved my ship. I’m not a man who forgets debts—or who ignores threats. There’s a spy among my crew. I want him found.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“You’ll have the run of the ship. Ask what you like. But if you come back empty-handed, I’ll assume you’re either incompetent or complicit. And I’ll treat you accordingly.”

He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. I touched my brow and turned away, and felt his gaze on my back all the way down the ladder.

The crew was scattered across the deck, mending lines and scrubbing blood from the planks. They looked up as I passed, then looked away. I was the gunner who’d saved them, but I was also Darrow’s errand now, and that made me a creature of the captain’s will.

I started with the forecastle, where the idle hands gathered to smoke and dice. A wiry man named Pettifer sat cross-legged against the bow, whittling a bit of bone. I sat down beside him.

“You were with the Spanish yesterday,” I said. “What’d you see?”

“Saw you blow their bowsprit to kindling,” he said, not looking up. “Saw their captain piss himself when the mast came down.”

“Before that. When the sloop first appeared. Anyone acting strange? Anyone who might’ve wanted us caught?”

Pettifer’s knife paused. He glanced at me sideways. “You’re hunting the compass man.”

“I’m hunting whoever sold us.”

He spat over the rail. “I was on the *Merry Dancer* before this. Captain Ashford. Fine ship, fair shares. Then one night we took a prize off Tortuga, and Ashford found a cask of wine in the hold that weren’t on the manifest. Someone’d been skimming. He never found who. But the boatswain, Groves—he was Ashford’s man, and Ashford threw him off for theft a month later, said he’d been in on it.”

I filed that away. “Groves ever speak of it?”

“Groves don’t speak of much.” Pettifer shrugged. “But he’s got a long memory. Way he looks at officers, you’d think they owed him money.”

I left him to his whittling and worked my way across the ship. I spoke to the riggers, the carpenters, the lads who hauled shot. Most gave me nothing—just the hollow, guarded answers of men who’ve learned that words have weight aboard a pirate ship. But I gathered scraps. A man named Halsey had been pressed into the navy and deserted. A cooper named Finch had once served a merchant captain who’d flogged him for a theft he didn’t commit. There was no shortage of men with grudges against authority. I was looking for one with a grudge sharp enough to sell his shipmates to the Spanish.

The afternoon sun was high when I found Thorne in the chart room. The navigator was a pale, precise man with ink-stained fingers and spectacles he was forever polishing. He looked up sharply when I entered, and something flickered in his face—not guilt, exactly. Fear.

“Mr. O’Malley,” he said. “I heard you were asking questions.”

“Just trying to clear the air,” I said. “You’ve been with Darrow long?”

“Two years.”

“You know his course well. Think you’d notice if someone tampered with your instruments?”

Thorne’s hand went to his spectacles, then stopped. “The compass was the first mate’s responsibility. Not mine.”

“But you navigate by it, don’t you? You’d have noticed if the bearing was off.”

He swallowed. “I was asleep when the Spanish found us. By the time I reached the deck, the damage was done. I only corrected course after you’d driven them off.”

“You’re afraid of something,” I said. “You’ve been afraid since we weighed anchor. Is it the captain?”

Thorne’s face went the color of old paper. He looked at the door, then back at me, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m not afraid of the captain. I’m afraid of what he’s carrying. We took a chest of gold from a French vessel three weeks ago—Darrow kept it in his cabin, didn’t log it, didn’t share it out. I was the one who charted the rendezvous with the French agent. He made me do it. Said if I refused, he’d feed me to the sharks and tell the crew I’d sold us out.”

“Isabelle?”

Thorne nodded quickly. “She’s not the only one. There’s another. Someone Darrow brought aboard in Kingston, before we sailed. I don’t know who. But I heard him talking to Isabelle once, when he thought I was below. He said, ‘When the gunner’s dead, we’ll have the whole crew in our pocket.’ I don’t know if he meant you, or if he meant someone else. But he said gunner.”

The word hit me like a cold wave. I kept my face still.

“When was this?”

“Three nights ago. The night before the Spanish attacked.”

I left Thorne trembling in the chart room and made my way aft, toward the galley. The cook, a massive black man named Osei who’d been with the crew for six years, was ladling salt pork into a pot. He saw me and grunted.

“Gunner. You look like a man who’s been told his mother’s dead.”

“Close enough.” I sat on an upturned cask. “Osei, you’ve been here longer than most. You know the crew.”

“I know their stomachs. That’s all a cook needs to know.”

“Is there another spy aboard? Someone besides Isabelle?”

Osei’s spoon stopped. He stared into the pot for a long moment, then set it down and wiped his hands on his apron. “I’ve seen things on this ship I don’t talk about,” he said quietly. “You want my counsel? Trust no one. Not the navigator, not the boatswain, not the man who shares your watch. There’s a whisper I catch sometimes, late at night, when the galley’s quiet. Two voices, not Isabelle’s. I’ve never seen their faces. But they know things they shouldn’t.”

“You think there’s a second agent?”

Osei looked at me with something like pity. “I think there was always more than one snake in this garden. And I think the captain knows it.”

He turned back to his pot, and I knew I’d get no more from him.

I climbed back to the main deck as the sun began to bleed into the sea. The crew was settling for the evening, and the rhythm of the ship had shifted from labor to watch. I stood at the rail, watching the water, and tried to piece together what I’d learned.

Groves, dismissed from the navy for theft, nursing a grievance against officers. Thorne, terrified and coerced, navigating for a captain who’d threatened his life. Osei’s whisper of a third presence, unknown even to him. And Darrow himself, hoarding gold and consorting with French agents, willing to murder his own gunner if it served his purpose.

I’d come aboard thinking the fight was simple—Darrow and Isabelle, French plot, English gold. But the more I turned it over, the more it felt like a web with too many spiders. Vincente was in the brig, an English agent with leverage over me. Groves could be anyone’s tool. Thorne was a coward who might confess anything to save his skin. And somewhere below, in the dark of the hold, there was a man who’d spoken of my death as a matter of timing.

I hadn’t found Darrow’s spy. I’d found something worse.

I’d found that I didn’t know who to trust.

No. That wasn’t right. I knew who to trust. I knew the only man on this ship who’d spoken true to me since I’d come aboard. The man who’d admitted he was an English agent and told me the truth of Isabelle’s plot. The man still in the brig, waiting for a destiny I might not be able to save him from.

I looked up at the captain’s cabin, where a lantern burned behind the stern windows. Darrow was in there, plotting his raid on the governor’s treasury, thinking he was the only spider in the web.

He was wrong. The web was bigger than any of us. And if I wasn’t careful, I’d be tangled in it before the night was out.