Read Chapter 20: The Sacrifice

The lugger’s deck tilted hard to port, and Elias heard the crack of timber before the spray of seawater hit his face. The French cutter had found its range. Another ball screamed overhead, tearing through the patched canvas of the mainmast, and the whole rigging groaned like a dying animal.

“Thorne!” Hale’s voice cut through the smoke. “We’ve got maybe five minutes before she’s under.”

Elias wiped brine from his eyes and looked at the deck. The decoy lugger—a cheap, borrowed hull with stolen colors—was already listing. They’d managed to pull three of the convoy’s escorts away from the main column, but the warning had spread faster than Grey had promised. The French had been waiting. Not for a decoy, but for something just like it.

The cutter came about, her bowsprit pointed directly at them, oars flashing in the dusk light. Behind her, the second escort was closing, a corvette with her gunports open.

“René!” Elias shouted. “Cut the anchor free. Give us anything we can use as a turn of speed.”

René was already at the tiller, his face ashen. “The engine’s seized. The lugger’s hull was rotten from the start—we’re lucky she floated this long.”

Elias looked past him, toward the horizon. The Vagabond had been left at a drift two miles north, hidden in the shadow of a low cliff, her repairs incomplete. He’d hoped the decoy would be done in an hour, then he’d slip back aboard and vanish into the deep lanes. Instead, the French had baited him. They’d sent the convoy’s position weeks ahead, and the escorts had been stationed to catch anyone coming from Le Havre.

The leak wasn’t just in the Admiralty. It was everywhere.

“She’s not going to make it,” Cora said, appearing at his side with a coil of rope. Her jaw was set, but her hands shook as she worked. “The lugger’s taking water faster than we can bail.”

“I know.”

The cutter fired again. The ball struck the stern rail, and the impact threw Elias to the deck. When he pushed himself up, he saw half a dozen of the crew already in the water, clinging to splintered planks. The lugger’s bow was sinking, driven under by her own weight.

“We have to abandon ship,” Hale said, moving close, his voice low. “The cutters will pick us up. They won’t hang us—not yet. Prisoners, maybe.”

Elias shook his head. “They’ll take us to Le Havre. That’s where LaRoche will be waiting for me. Or worse, they’ll use the crew to force the Vagabond’s position out of René.”

“Then we let them take us. We buy time.”

“No.” Elias rose, unsteady, and looked at the cutter. She was close now, close enough that he could see the French officer on her quarterdeck, arm raised to signal the next volley. The corvette had also closed, filling the channel to their south.

There was no escape. Not in the lugger. Not in the lifeboats.

But there was the Vagabond.

He turned to René. “The coordinates Cora gave you. The deep lanes. You know the path?”

René’s eyes widened. “Captain—no. You can’t be thinking—”

“The Vagabond is two miles north. If I can get aboard her, I can draw them away. Give you all time to reach the shore, scatter, regroup.”

Cora grabbed his arm, her grip fierce. “You’ll be outgunned. The engine’s not fixed—she’ll never outrun a cutter, let alone a corvette.”

“She doesn’t have to outrun them.” Elias looked at the cutter, measuring the distance. “She just has to hit them.”

The silence that followed was thick as smoke. Hale stared at him, jaw working, but said nothing. René’s hands had gone still on the tiller.

“You’d sacrifice her,” Cora said. “The Vagabond. The only ship you have. For what?”

“For a chance to clear the name Grey wants me to clear.” Elias pulled the chronometer from his coat—the sealed glass case, the ticking mechanism that had survived the Dauntless, the court-martial, and every since. He pressed it into Cora’s hands. “Keep this. If I don’t make it, find a way to get it to my sister in Portsmouth. She’ll know what to do.”

“Elias.” Her voice cracked. “I said I’d destroy your ore cache if you didn’t come back. I meant it.”

“I know you did. But if I don’t come back, the ore won’t matter. LaRoche will have the meteor, and Grey’s scheme will be buried with me.”

He turned to René. “Get to the lifeboat. Take the crew. Follow the deep lanes south until you hit the neutral shipping channels. Wait three days. If I’m not there, go to Admiral Grey and tell him everything: the leak, the convoy, LaRoche. Burn the letter I gave you if you think he’s compromised.”

René’s mouth opened, then closed. He nodded. The crew was already moving toward the port side, where the lifeboat was being lowered into the chop.

Elias climbed to the lugger’s highest remaining point, a broken section of the quarterdeck, and pulled the line that connected the lugger to the small skiff bobbing in the water. The skiff was barely more than a rowboat, but it was fast enough to carry one man two miles if the current cooperated.

“You have a plan?” Hale had climbed up beside him, his face unreadable.

“A desperate one.” Elias tested the line, then looked north. The Vagabond was a dark shape against the fading sky, her silhouette still barely visible. “I need to get aboard her before the French realize where I’m going.”

“They’ll see you the moment you’re in the water.”

“That’s the point. I want them to see me. I want them to follow.”

Hale stared at him, and for a moment, Elias saw the old midshipman he’d wronged on the Dauntless—the one who had believed in Elias’s false charts, who had followed him into the reef and lost his shipmates because of it. Then Hale’s face hardened, and he nodded.

“I’ll make sure the crew gets clear,” Hale said. “But you owe me, Thorne. When this is over, you owe me the truth about the Dauntless. Not the version you told the Admiralty. The real one.”

Elias returned the nod. “You’ll have it.”

He dropped into the skiff, clumsy in his haste, and pushed off from the lugger’s side. The sea was cold, and the current pulled at the little boat, but Elias bent to the oars with a fury he hadn’t felt since his first command. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t afford to see the lifeboat shrink behind him, or the crew’s faces as they watched him row toward his doom.

The cutter spotted him almost immediately. He heard the shout in French, then the rattle of the bow chaser being brought to bear. The first ball landed short, sending a plume of water over his head. The second clipped the skiff’s gunwale, splintering the wood, but Elias kept pulling, his arms burning, the Vagabond’s hull growing larger with each stroke.

He reached her just as the cutter’s third shot tore through the skiff, flipping him into the sea. His hands found the anchor chain, and he hauled himself up, gasping, boots slipping on the wet hull until he rolled over the side and onto the deck of the Vagabond.

She was quiet. Her engines ticked, repaired enough to hold a charge but not to run for long. Her sails were furled, her guns empty. She was a ghost of the ship she’d been.

But she still had weight. And weight was all he needed.

Elias staggered to the helm and pushed the throttle lever forward. The engines coughed, sputtered, then caught, and the Vagabond began to move—slowly, painfully, her bow swinging toward the cutter.

The French officer on the cutter saw him coming. Elias imagined the realization spreading across his face—the mad privateer, alone in a dying ship, sailing straight at him with no guns and no crew. The cutter’s helm went hard over, trying to escape the metal-sheathed bow of the Vagabond.

It wasn’t enough.

The Vagabond struck the cutter amidships with a sound like thunder and splintering oak. Elias was thrown from the helm as the hull groaned and split, and he gripped the deck rail as the cutter rolled under the Vagabond’s keel, her masts snapping like twigs.

Elias didn’t wait to see the damage. He ran for the port side, where the lifeboat he’d prepared the day before was already waiting, its tarp still covering the supplies and water. He cut the line as the Vagabond started to sink, her bow dipping down, the cutter beneath her pulling them both into the deep.

He hit the water in the lifeboat, the cold stealing his breath, and rowed away from the wreckage. The corvette was already turning, her guns swinging toward him, but she had to navigate the debris of her sister ship, and that bought him precious seconds.

Behind him, the Vagabond’s stern rose into the air, then slid beneath the waves.

She was gone. And with her, Elias knew, went any pretense that he was still a privateer with a ship and a crew to command. He was a man in a rowboat now, with a damaged chronometer in his coat pocket and a debt growing heavier by the hour.

The corvette fired again, but her aim was wild, and the ball landed far to his left. He kept rowing, his course set for the deep lanes, where the current would pull him toward the neutral shipping channels.

He had no ship. No crew. No money.

But he was alive.

He pulled the chronometer from his coat, cracked the case with his thumb. It was still ticking—faint, irregular, but ticking.

That was something.

He looked south, toward the point where the lifeboat had disappeared behind the cliffs. Somewhere out there, his crew would be waiting.

He hoped they wouldn’t wait too long.