Read Chapter 23: Winds of Betrayal

The little sloop *Mercy* rode low in the chop, her patched sails straining. Aidan stood at the tiller beside the wounded Darrow, who had insisted on being lashed to the mast rather than left below to rot. Edmund sat at Aidan's feet, the boy's hands bound loosely in front of him, eyes fixed on the horizon as if he might will his father's ship into existence.

"Two points off the larboard quarter," called the lookout from the crosstrees. "French colors. Privateer, by the look of her."

Aidan cursed under his breath. They'd taken the governor's sloop and left the wreck of the Sea Wyvern burning behind them, hoping the smoke would blind the Royal Navy to their escape. A hope that now felt thin as a widow's purse. He turned to the French ship, a lean brigantine with cannon poking through her ports like the quills of an angry porcupine.

"She's gaining on us," Darrow rasped, his voice a ghost of its old thunder. "Outguns us, too. Twelve guns at least. We've four light pieces and half a crew to serve them."

Edmund spoke without looking at them, his voice careful and clear. "She's Captain Duval's ship. *Le Corbeau.* He preys on English supply ships but sells information to whoever pays. My father has paid him often."

Aidan looked down at the boy, at the brass key hanging from a cord around his neck that had been there since they'd found him in the vault. The boy knew more than he let on. Aidan had learned that much in two days.

"Can we outrun her?" Aidan asked.

Darrow coughed, spat blood over the rail. "In this tub? With the wind where it lies? She'll be on us within the hour unless we lose her in the shallows or make a fight of it."

The crew stirred behind them. Nine men now, half of them wounded, all of them looking to Aidan with the desperate trust of men who had traded one fall for another and hoped this one flew better.

"Then we fight," said Aidan.

But the words tasted wrong. He thought of his mother's face, of the letter from Landon tucked inside his shirt. Of the wrongs done to his family that he had only just begun to understand. Dying to a French privateer's broadside in the middle of nowhere was not the way to settle that account.

Or was it?

"Wait," he said slowly. "Did you say she sells information?"

Edmund nodded. "To the highest bidder. On any side. He fought for the Spanish at Cartagena, they say. Then for the English at Port Royal. He holds no loyalty but to gold."

Aidan clapped Darrow on the shoulder and turned to the crew. "Clear the gun ports. Show our teeth. But don't run out the guns yet. I want her to see what we are."

"And what are we?" asked a grizzled gunner named Taggart.

"We're bait." Aidan grinned, a thing that felt foreign on his face but seemed to settle the men. "We're a prize worth taking, and I mean to make a deal with the man who's taking us."

The French privateer closed the distance steadily, her hull cutting through the swell with an arrogance that spoke of years of successful hunting. Aidan watched her approach, gauging the distance to the shallow banks that dotted the channel toward Santo Domingo. The charts Edmund had been forced to draw showed deep water all the way in, but charts lied and men drowned.

Darrow watched him with sunken eyes. "You're going to parley."

"I'm going to offer him something he wants more than our skins."

"And what would that be?"

Aidan knelt beside the old captain and lowered his voice. "She's a cutthroat's ship. He'll be looking for easy plunder. But if I tell him what the governor has done—the treasury moved, the fort abandoned, a fortune waiting in Santo Domingo that belongs to no one because its rightful owner is trying to spend it through a third hand—"

"He'll want to loot it himself."

"Or he'll want to sell that information. Either way, he lands us where we need to go. On his ship, as his prisoners if he's the sort who prefers chains, or as his 'guests' if he thinks we're useful. I care not, so long as we get to Santo Domingo before the governor's trail goes cold."

Darrow looked at him for a long moment. The old man's breath came ragged, and the wound in his side had already soaked through its bandage twice. Yet there was a spark in his eyes that hadn't been there since they'd lost the Sea Wyvern.

"You'd sail into a privateer's hands on purpose?"

"To reach a man who owes my family a debt? Aye. I would." Aidan's hand went to the letter in his shirt. "But I want you to know, if this goes wrong, if you see a signal fire from the Jean—take the boy and run for the shallows. He's our map to the treasury."

"I know what the boy is." Darrow laughed, a wet, rattling sound. "I may be dying, but I'm not dead yet. You think I don't know why you keep him close and you keep him hungry? Because a full boy feels safe enough to lie, but a hungry boy remembers the promise of a full meal."

Aidan felt a flush creep up his neck. "I'm not—"

"I know." Darrow's hand found Aidan's, ancient and calloused. "I know what you are, O'Malley. I knew your father, and I know his son." The old man reached into his shirt and withdrew a leather cord with a small ring on it. The gold was worn smooth, but a deep green stone caught the light.

"Your mother gave this to Landon the night she died. He gave it to me for safekeeping, should anything happen to him." Darrow pressed it into Aidan's palm. "The governor knows this ring. He will know what it means. It was the pledge for a debt—a debt of honor that Thomas Blackwood, the man you call governor, owes your family. Whatever he owes, this ring calls it due."

Aidan stared at the ring. At the dull gleam of the gold, the deep green of the stone. He had never known his mother's face except in the drawings Landon left behind. He had never known his father's voice except in letters read to the crew after a victory. But here, in his hand, was proof that he had been loved. That a family had existed, before the exile, before the branding.

"They knew?" he asked. "Both of them?"

"They knew you would come." Darrow coughed, a spray of blood on his lips. "They knew you would need to claim what was yours."

The French brigantine was close now, close enough for Aidan to see the gun crews at their stations and the man in the captain's coat on her quarterdeck. She was lowering a boat. They would send a prize crew, or an officer to accept his surrender.

Aidan closed his fist around the ring. "Taggart!" he shouted. "Show them a white flag."

The gunner looked at him in disbelief. "Surrender?"

"No. A parley." Aidan stepped to the rail. "We're not giving up. We're buying time and passage. Hold your fire unless you see mine go." He glanced at Darrow, whose face had gone pale, whose hand clutched his side. "And if I fall, then you do what the captain said. You run."

"You're not going to fall," Darrow whispered.

But the old man's eyes were already too wide. Too unfocused.

Darkness was pulling at Darrow like the tide taking a fallen sailor.

The French boat reached them. A lean officer with a scarred cheek climbed over the rail, pistol in hand, two men behind him. He looked at the ragtag crew, at the wounded old captain, at the bound boy, and his lip curled.

"You're the ones who burned the fort?" he asked in English thick with a French coast accent.

"Those who burned it, no. Those who took what was in it?" Aidan smiled, holding up the brass key from Vane. "That's us. And I've something to sell."

The French officer's eyes latched onto the key.

That was all the confirmation Aidan needed.

He heard it then, a crack that wasn't powder or cannonfire. A sound like a dry branch breaking. Darrow slumped against the mast, the knife pinning his heart to the wood handle-deep, a small throwing blade that had somehow found use in the scramble of the boarding.

Edmund stood behind him, wrist bloodied from a slip of his bonds, his face white as sails. "He raised the alarm," the boy whispered. "He was going to warn the French about you. I saw him."

But Aidan was already catching Darrow as the old man crumpled. The ring was still in Aidan's palm. The last words were already leaving Darrow's mouth.

"Make it count, boy. Make it count."

The light went out of Darrow's eyes.

The French officer was speaking, but Aidan couldn't hear him over the roar in his ears. He looked at the ring, at Darrow's still face, then at the boy Edmund, who stood shivering with the small blade still in his hand.

Aidan drew his own knife. The French officer took a step back.

"Signal your captain," Aidan said, each word measured, cold as deep water. "Tell him a deal has changed. Tell him the price for our passage was death, and I've decided to pay in someone else's coin."

The boy Edmund took a step back, and Aidan let his eyes drift to Edmund. He slowly slid his blade back into its sheath and then knelt beside the old man. He gently closed Darrow's eyes.

He didn't need to avenge Darrow. He needed to honor him.

"Where's your captain going to meet us?" the French officer asked.

Aidan rose, Darrow's ring in his fist and another word on his lips. The one he had been waiting to say his entire life.