Read Chapter 9: Sails of Faith

The lookout’s cry came down from the crow’s nest like a gull’s shriek, thin and piercing over the wind. “Sail ho! Two points off the starboard bow!”

Aidan was at the quarterdeck rail before the words finished leaving the boy’s mouth, squinting into the morning haze that clung to the water like a shroud. The sun was still low, burning orange through the mist, and for a moment he saw nothing. Then the haze parted, and there she was—a frigate, her canvas spread wide and white as bone, cutting a wake straight for them.

Darrow appeared at his elbow, telescope already pressed to his eye. His face was carved from stillness, but Aidan saw the faint tightening at the corner of his mouth. “Royal Navy,” Darrow said, low enough that only Aidan could hear. “Thirty-six guns, I’d wager. She’s got the weather gauge on us.”

Aidan took the glass when Darrow offered it, and his blood went cold.

He knew those signal flags. Knew the cut of her jib, the particular shade of tar-stained black along her wales, the way her mizzen listed just a hair to port from a refit done in Jamaica two years back. He had served on her. He had bled on her decks, fed powder to her guns, watched men die at their stations while the sea turned red beneath them.

HMS Retribution.

His hands shook, and he lowered the glass before Darrow could see.

“She’s fast,” Aidan said, forcing his voice level. “But she’s running with the wind at her back. If we turn south, into the shallows, we might lose her in the reefs.”

Darrow considered this, then smiled—thin and knowing. “You know her.”

“I know her type,” Aidan said, watching the horizon. The lie sat sour on his tongue. “She’ll have a skeleton crew, prize-hunting. We can outrun her if we don’t try to fight.”

Darrow held his gaze a moment too long, then nodded and turned to bellow orders. “Hands to braces! Wear ship, steer south-southwest! Mr. Pearce, get below and make sure every gun is loaded but not run out—I don’t want her captain to think we’re spoiling for a fight until we have to.”

The crew scrambled, bare feet slapping against the deck. The Sea Wyvern answered her helm with a groan, canvas snapping as she came about, and the frigate’s masts swung across the horizon, still closing.

Aidan made his way to the mainmast, unhooking a line that had fouled its belaying pin, letting the work keep his hands busy. Retribution. God. He could name every officer aboard, every gunner’s mate, every boy who hauled powder for the great guns. He remembered the captain—Hartley, a stern man with bad teeth and a worse temper—standing on the quarterdeck while the court-martial read out Aidan’s sentence. Dishonorable discharge. Stripped of rank. The sound of his own name spoken in that hollow chamber had been the end of one life.

And now here he was, on a pirate ship, watching the flag of that life chase him down.

He could signal them. He knew the code—a particular pattern of flags, or even just the right arrangement of lights after dark, that would tell Retribution’s lookout that the Sea Wyvern carried a man who wanted rescue. A man who could give them Darrow, the powder, the map, the entire rotten scheme laid out like a feast.

If he could get to the signal locker without being seen. If he could time it right.

If he wanted to.

Aidan looked down at his hands, scarred from rope and powder burn. He had spent a year running from what he had become. And now, watching the English flag grow smaller on the horizon as the Sea Wyvern pulled away, he felt something he hadn’t expected.

Sorrow.

Not for the life he left behind, but for the one he was living now. The pirate’s life had a way of holding on to a man, sinking its hooks in deep, until one day you woke up and couldn’t imagine any other way.

“Gunner.” Vincente’s voice came from behind him, quiet as smoke. “Captain wants you.”

Aidan found Darrow in his cabin, poring over a chart with the Spanish widow standing at his shoulder. She looked up when Aidan entered, and again he was struck by the resemblance to the portrait in the locket—the same sharp bones, the same dark defiance. Her eyes lingered on him a moment too long, and Aidan felt his collar grow damp.

“The frigate’s holding a course parallel to ours,” Darrow said without preamble. “She’s not giving up. But if we push through the Culebra passage, we can lose her in the reefwork. The problem is the passage is shallow, and I don’t trust my charts.”

“You want me to take the bow,” Aidan said.

“I want you to earn your place.” Darrow slid the chart across the table. “You know these waters. You proved it in the storm, when you kept us off those rocks. So tell me—can we make the passage before dark?”

Aidan studied the chart. The Culebra passage was a narrow cut through a reef that thrust up like broken teeth from the water. It was navigable, barely, but only with a keen eye and a steady hand. And it would bring them close to Spanish waters, close to the patrols that hunted English privateers as eagerly as the Royal Navy hunted pirates.

“It’s madness,” Aidan said. “One wrong turn and we’re aground, and then Retribution will be on us like a shark on a wounded fish.”

“I didn’t ask if it was madness,” Darrow said. “I asked if we could make it.”

Aidan met his captain’s eye. “Yes. If I’m on the bow.”

Darrow nodded once, as if the matter were settled. “Then go. Don’t make me regret putting my faith in you.”

Aidan turned to leave, but the widow’s voice stopped him at the threshold.

“You served on that ship,” she said, not a question. “The one chasing us.”

Aidan froze. He could feel Darrow’s gaze on his back like a blade sliding between his ribs.

“I served on many ships,” Aidan said carefully. “A gunner’s trade takes him where the work is.”

“But that one—you knew her hull before Captain Darrow even confirmed her identity. You were afraid before you looked through the glass.” He turned, and her dark eyes held him. “Fear of a ship, not of a fight. What are you afraid of, Mr. O’Malley? Being caught, or being recognized?”

The question hung in the air like smoke. Aidan could feel Darrow watching him, measuring him, and he knew that any lie now would be a nail in his coffin.

“I’m afraid of dying in a fight we don’t need,” Aidan said, forcing his voice steady. “And I’m afraid of the men on that ship knowing my name. A disgraced gunner isn’t worth much to a pirate crew, but he’s worth a great deal to the Royal Navy—as a lesson in what happens to traitors.”

The widow’s lips curved, not quite a smile. “And are you a traitor, Mr. O’Malley?”

“I’m a gunner,” Aidan said. “I serve the ship I’m on. That’s the whole of my faith.”

He left before she could ask anything else.

On deck, the sun was beginning its slide toward the horizon, turning the water to hammered gold. Retribution was still there, a white speck on the western edge of the world. She had not given up. She would follow them into the reef, maybe, or wait for them on the other side.

Aidan climbed to the bow, settling himself behind the jib stay, and began to read the water.

The passage approached slowly, a millrace of green and white where the reef broke the surface. He called out directions, his voice carrying back through the wind to the helmsman, and the Sea Wyvern answered him like a living thing. In the shallows, he could see the coral beneath them, close enough to scrape, and he felt the ship shudder as her keel kissed sand once, twice, before the water deepened again.

Behind them, the frigate came on. She was braver than he expected, or more desperate—and as her hull cleared the first teeth of the reef, Aidan saw her list hard to port. A plume of white water erupted around her, the sound of grinding stone echoing across the distance.

She had struck.

Get the men to the mizzen, Aidan called out, but no one heard him, and no one needed to. The Sea Wyvern sailed on, leaving the crippled frigate to her fate.

Aidan watched until she was nothing but a speck of wreckage against the dying sun. Signal flags fluttered from her remaining mast, a pattern he knew by heart. *Gunner, to your station.*

But he had left that station long ago. And now he was watching his old ship bleed on the reef while he stood on the deck of a pirate vessel, feeling something he couldn’t name settle into his heart like a stone.

He could have signaled. He could have saved them.

He didn’t.

And as the last light bled from the sky, Aidan O’Malley understood what he had become. A man who watches the flag of his former life go down beneath the waves and feels nothing but the strange, quiet relief of a man who has stopped pretending there is a way home.

Jonas appeared at his elbow, silent as ever, holding a tin cup of rum.

“First chase is the hardest,” the cook said. “After that, they’re just ships.”

Aidan took the cup, but did not drink.

“He would have hanged me,” Aidan said. “Hartley. He had no mercy in him.”

“Maybe,” Jonas said. “Or maybe you just needed a reason.”

The old cook walked away, leaving Aidan alone with the darkening sea and the growing certainty that the life he had escaped was the only one that would ever have called him good.