The Widening Morning

The admiral's first cut came out of the lamplight at Rusk's face, and Rusk got his hanger up to it with nothing to spare.

Steel rang on steel, and the shock went down his arm into the old cut from the Greyhaven wharf. He gave a step, and behind him the deck rose into the forecastle bulkhead, and he had no more steps to give.

Crown's tow deck was a broad raised platform in the fore part of the ship, forty feet across, with two great towing bitts standing up out of it like the stumps of felled oaks. Hawsers lay coiled between them, and heaving tackles hung from ringbolts in the bulwarks. A cable's length ahead burned the Kestrel's stern lanterns. Isobel had dropped her ahead before noon, and the Darn bridle ran from her taffrail back across the water and in through Crown's hawse.

Crown lay in the narrows on two anchors let go from her stern, with her head to the east and her stern settling. The flood ran east past her, weaker every minute, and under her the starboard vane cage labored on in it.

Vaust came on again. He was smaller than Rusk had pictured him, a compact, silver-haired man in a dark sea coat with the collar turned up, and he fought with a straight sword held low. There was no waste in his sword arm. All the heat was in his face. He fought with his teeth bared and swore under his breath at every parry, island oaths, by the Deep. His cuts came short and fast and from the wrist, and each one went somewhere Rusk would have to be.

Rusk parried at his knee, at his ribs, at his face again. Each time the hanger came round later. He had been fighting in Crown's passages for two hours, and his arms were heavy as wet canvas. Vaust was breathing hard too, and that was the only comfort in it.

All across the tow deck, Kestrel hands and Darn men were fighting the admiral's officers among the coils, a dozen of them. To Rusk's left, Lew Farrow and Sim Tolley had pinned two against the port bitt with boarding pikes. A third, with an axe, was Captain Harrow Quill, Crown's flag captain, and he was trying to get past them to the hawse and the bridle.

"Keep him off it, Lew," Rusk said.

"I'm keeping him," Lew said.

Vaust's point came in under his guard. Rusk turned it with the hilt and felt it score along his ribs through the coat, a hot thin line. He struck back, and Vaust stepped aside from the blow and let the hanger bite into the bitt. For a moment the blade stuck in the oak.

The ship moved. Ahead in the dark the Kestrel surged on her tow, and the bridle came taut. The hawse creaked, and the tackle that held the starboard leg against the bitt groaned. The hawser shifted a foot across the deck, like something alive under a blanket, and both men stepped clear of it without looking. Rusk wrenched the hanger free.

"You know a tow deck," Vaust said.

"I've stood on one," Rusk said.

"Osprey." He bit the name off as if it had been in his mouth for years. "The weather wing at Ember Roads. You came into the beach at Sallow with your topsails afire, and I watched you from the headland with eleven boats and no ship, and my sister's house burning behind me. Six years I'd been writing to your Admiralty." He moved to the right, round the curve of the hawser, and his point never left Rusk's chest. "One ship in six years, Rusk. You were the only one who ever came. I built all this so that nobody on this coast would ever have to wait for you again."

"You built it to drown the Basin."

"The tide takes a wage, and I pay it. Don't you preach drowning at me. I've pulled more drowned children out of Sallow harbor than your Admiralty ever wrote down." Vaust's blade dipped and came up. "I'm going to cut that bridle, and she'll settle where she lies, and the Throat can keep what's in her. You can have the rest."

He came in. Rusk took the cut and the next one and gave ground, and they circled the great post under the swinging lantern. The slack of the starboard leg lay across the deck between the bitt and the hawse port, with the heaving tackle hooked onto it by a chain strop. The tackle's fall ran back along the deck to a cleat by the forecastle ladder. Every rope in that space was hard as iron.

Quill shouted. Lew Farrow went down on one knee with his hand to his arm, and the flag captain was past him and going for the hawse port with his axe raised.

Sim Tolley threw his pike. It was a wild throw, and the shaft hit Quill across the shoulders and knocked him sprawling into the coils. The axe skidded away over the planks, and Sim went after it.

Vaust used the moment. He came over the hawser in a single step with his point low, and Rusk met it on the forte and slipped on the wet deck, and his shoulders struck the bitt. The back of his skull rang against the oak, and for a breath the lanterns doubled.

He had the hanger up, and nothing else. Vaust beat it aside and set his point against Rusk's chest, over the heart, through the coat.

"Yield, damn you," Vaust said.

Rusk looked past his shoulder. Joss Ambry was standing at the foot of the forecastle ladder. He had come back up from below with two of the Darn men behind him. Blood ran into one eye from the cut across his forehead, and he stood at the cleat where the tackle's fall was made fast. He had his ropewalk knife in his hand. His eyes went from the tackle to Vaust's feet and back again.

At Darn, before the launch, Rusk had made that boy tell him again and again where a block would go if the fall were let go under load. Where the line wants to be straight, Joss had said at last. Where the line wants to be.

The admiral was standing in the bight, in the angle between the heaving tackle and the hawser. If the tackle went, the hawser would snap straight for the hawse, and the block would go with it.

Rusk was against the bitt, on the far side of the line.

"Yield," Vaust said again. "You came for us once. Don't die on my deck for the Compact."

The Kestrel surged ahead in the dark, and the bridle groaned, and Joss cut the fall.

The tackle let go with a crack like a split mast. The starboard leg of the bridle leaped off the deck and went straight, the whole bight of it, toward the hawse port. The moving block went with it. It was a double block as big as a man's chest, with iron straps, and it came across the deck at the height of a man's thighs. It took Vaust behind the knees and lifted him and threw him against the bulwark beside the hawse.

His sword flew out of his hand, and Rusk heard it ring once on the planking. The hawser roared out through the hawse port, and the Darn men were shouting, Joss louder than any of them. The line ran out a dozen fathoms and jammed, with the chain strop caught in the port and the block wedged against the timber.

Vaust lay against the bulwark with his right leg bent under him in a way legs do not bend. His face shone wet in the lamplight, and he made no sound at all. He was trying to get up. Then he got a hand to the hawse port, and Rusk saw what he meant to do. The port was low and wide, and the Throat ran black beneath it, deep enough to carry Crown.

Rusk crossed the deck in three strides and got both hands in the admiral's collar as Vaust's shoulders went into the port. Rusk set his feet against the bulwark and hauled him back across the planks, and the admiral's broken leg dragged, and Vaust cried out at last.

"Let me go," he said through his teeth. "Let me go to them, damn you."

"No," Rusk said.

Vaust got his elbow onto the sill again. He said nothing more. He put what he had left into the pull.

"You'd drown within a mile of your fitting." Rusk was on his knees on the wet planks, breathing like a bellows, with his fists in the man's coat. "In ten minutes you'd be climbing back up this side with water in your eyes, and I'd have to break your neck on this deck. You know that better than I do. You built it."

Vaust lay looking up at him. His hand came off the sill.

"Joss," Rusk said. "Irons. And Hanne's people for his leg."

"Aye, Captain." Joss was white to the lips, and his knife hand shook. "Captain, I couldn't see if you were clear."

"I was clear," Rusk said. "You saw it."

"I thought so," Joss said.

"That's the same thing on a tow deck," Rusk said. "Now get that leg back in, before the Kestrel pulls our hawse out by the roots."

Quill yielded when he saw the admiral down, and asked quarter for his officers, and Rusk gave it. Joss and the Darn men got the starboard leg in again with a fresh tackle, and Rusk stood by and kept his mouth shut. When the strain came on, it came on the bitt and not on any man's legs.

"Good," Rusk said. "Stay here. Nothing comes on this deck that isn't ours."

He went aft along Crown's sloping deck in the dark. Two decks down, Dunning's marines held their barricade before the iron-strapped door of the frame compartment, and Nera Pell knelt beside it with Sorn and the drawings, in Orris's coat.

"The admiral?" she said.

"Taken," Rusk said. "Joss cut a loaded tackle on him."

"Did he." Nera's teeth showed in her dirty face. "Good. We'll need that boy."

"How long has she got?"

"Less than I said. She's down another foot, and the maintenance port's a foot above the water. Put her under tow and she'll squat by the stern, and once that port goes under I can't get at the frame from outside at all." She stood up. "There's twenty marines behind that door who won't come out. So we go both ways at once, as the Commander did on Mercy. Once she's clear of the Throat, I take a boat to the port with the Darn men and break it in, and Dunning hits this door when he hears it go. The fitting first, up the trunk. Then the wedges."

"And the cage," Rusk said. "Tow her, and the water goes past it faster."

"Every yard you drag her, you feed her," Nera said. "Abner Daw has one weighted hawser left. Once she's clear of the Throat, he lays it ahead of the starboard cage and she runs down onto it."

Sorn lifted her eyes from the drawings. "Her vane crew are aft of this room with spare vanes in the racks, like Northward's. If they clear that hawser, she feeds again, and by the time anyone fouls her a second time that port is under water."

"Then don't give them the time," Rusk said.

"I wasn't going to." Nera rolled the drawing and pushed it inside the coat. "And I want you in the boat, Captain."

"Me," Rusk said.

"Brockett and Lanyon will be on the bolts, and I'll be calling them," Nera said. "Her dead are all down that side. I want a sword in the boat that does what I tell it and doesn't stop to discuss it."

He thought of Isobel at the Kestrel's rail.

"Once she's clear of the narrows," he said. "Not before."

"That'll do," Nera said. "Slip her stern anchors at the Kestrel's bell?"

"Three strokes," Rusk said.

"Brockett has the maul for it." She was already turning for the ladder.

The Kestrel's quarterdeck was crowded and cold and smelled of tar and blood. Orris sat in his bolted chair beside the wheel with his splinted leg out on a coil and a boarding axe hanging off the arm. Isobel Wray stood at the rail beside him with her eyes on the dark ahead.

Rusk came up the side from the boat, with Vaust behind him on a stretcher in irons, and turned to Isobel. "Miss Wray. What's the water doing?"

"The flood's nearly done, Captain. High water at half past twelve, and then the tide turns and sets west against us, back into the Throat." Her gaze stayed on the black water ahead. "Mister Fen says that's the bad part."

"And he's right," said Orris. "Ansel told me the flood here sets north round the hulks, and I called him a fool." He said the name without a pause in it. "At the turn it'll come back the same road, and there's nothing bigger or slower in the world than that bitch astern of us."

"Then we go now," Rusk said, "while there's flood under her." Away to port Brightwater's lanterns waited with her hawser on Crown's port side forward, and far astern lay Halberd's, with a line on Crown's quarter to check her if she sheered. "Isobel has the tow."

He heard Isobel's breath go in, and Orris grinned under his whiskers.

"Captain," she said. "Mister Fen has handled tows for thirty years."

"He can't stand up. He'll tell you what the water's doing, and you'll tell the helm. I'll keep the dead off your deck till we're clear of the narrows, and after that she's yours till she takes the sand." He held her eye. "You took her over the Brindle Tails with no mainmast. You can take this one out of the Throat."

"Yes, Captain," Isobel said.

"Then do it," Rusk said.

She took a breath and called down the deck in her father's pilot voice.

"Make sail! Topsails and the main. Stand by the tow!"

The Kestrel's bell rang three times. Across the water a maul rang on iron at Crown's stern, and her anchor cables rumbled out through the ports. The Kestrel took the breeze on her beam and went ahead, and the bridle lifted from the sea astern in a long dripping curve. Rusk felt the dead weight of Crown come up through the bitts Nera had set in at Darn, and the Kestrel shuddered, and her masts groaned in their steps. Away to port, Brightwater's lanterns leaned as she put her weight on her hawser.

At first nothing moved. Then Crown came. Her lights crept against the black loom of Orra's cliffs. A yard, then a fathom, and the Throat let go of her.

"Steady," said Orris. "Steady as she goes, girl. Don't snatch her."

They had made four hundred yards when the dead came up the hawser.

Rusk saw the first one from the taffrail: something pale that rose from the sea astern, took hold of the bridle where it dipped, and began to climb hand over hand toward the Kestrel with the water streaming off it. Behind it, a second pair of hands came out of the sea.

They were Crown's dead now. With the other two fittings broken, everything that had risen in the strait that morning answered to her.

"Pikes aft!" Rusk shouted. "Pikes to the taffrail! Mind the bridle, don't touch the bridle!"

The first to reach the taffrail was a young man in a Compact seaman's jacket, who had been alive at eight o'clock that morning. Rusk put the butt of a pike into his white face, and the body dropped back into the sea. Along the Kestrel's side pale hands came out of the water and found the chains, and two seamen broke a dead man's knees with capstan bars on the lee rail and threw him back.

"Here's the turn," Orris said. He had his head cocked, listening to the water along the side. "Feel her? There she comes."

Rusk felt it through the deck. The flood died under them, and the water hung slack, and then it began to move the other way. Astern, Crown's lights were swinging as the turning tide took her stern and set it north and west, back toward the hulk ground.

"Starboard your helm," Isobel said. Her voice was steady. "More yet. Brightwater's losing her. Mister Fen?"

"Hold her up," Orris said. "Keep the Kestrel's head south of east and let Crown hang on the bridle. If you go with the tide she'll go with it too, and she'll take us both back onto the hulks."

"Starboard," Isobel said. "Hold her there. Hold her."

The Kestrel heeled, and the bridle came round on the quarter and stood out stiff and dripping. Behind Crown's swinging stern Rusk could hear the tide beginning to run back over the hulk ground, a long hollow sound in the dark, nearer than he liked.

"Halberd!" Orris roared through the trumpet, over the stern. "Halberd, haul! Haul her stern up, damn your eyes, haul!"

Far astern, Halberd's lanterns leaned, and Crown checked in her swing.

A dead woman came over the taffrail on the starboard quarter, an old fisherwoman in an oilskin, and her hands went for Isobel at the rail. Orris was faster than Rusk. He leaned out of his chair with the boarding axe and took her across the back of the knees, and Rusk broke her neck with the pike butt. Isobel never took her eyes off the water.

"Thank you, Mister Fen," she said.

"Don't thank me," Orris said. "Mind your tow."

The narrows were behind them.

The black loom of the Brack lay on the starboard quarter with the surf white along its foot, and the falling tide was trying to have Crown and failing.

"Miss Wray," Rusk said. "She's yours. Ring once for Daw when I'm in the boat."

He went down into the jolly boat with two oarsmen. They let Crown come down on them, a black cliff of lamps sliding east, and caught at her side as it went by.

Nera's boat lay under the engine's waist, keeping pace under oars beneath a square of seams that ran the wrong way in the planking: the maintenance port. Its sill stood a foot over the sea, and every time Crown rolled, the water climbed her side and slopped over the lowest bolt heads. Hal Brockett stood in the boat's waist with a drift and a maul, and Nat Lanyon beside him with another. Nera knelt in the prow with the lantern. She had no maul at all.

"Top bolts, Hal, from the left," she said. "Nat, from the right. Meet in the middle."

Rusk came over into her boat as the mauls began, and astern the Kestrel's bell rang once.

Daw's boat came down Crown's starboard side, so near that Nera's oarsmen fended her off, and a man in her stern heaved the weighted hawser over ahead of the cage. Crown ran down onto it. Something under her quarter shrieked, iron on iron, and the thunder under the boat stopped, and a red lantern went up in Daw's boat.

Rusk held his watch to Nera's lantern. "Thirty-one minutes past twelve."

"Don't stop, Hal," Nera said.

The dead came while they were on the middle bolts.

A hand rose from the sea beside Lanyon's knee and took hold of the rail. It was swollen and white and very strong, and the boat heeled to it. Rusk struck the wrist with the back of his hanger, and the hand slid away. Two more came up on the other side. A face rose between them, a western sailor with weed in his beard and his eyes open, and Rusk put his point into the throat and shoved him under.

Nera never turned her head. "Left of that one, Nat. No, the next. Good. Hal, two more. Now the bottom bolts, both together."

"I can't strike with her jumping," Lanyon said.

"Then strike between jumps," Nera said. "Captain, keep them off his side."

Rusk kept them off. He came down on one knee on the thwart with a dead woman's hands in his coat, and an oarsman broke her neck with the loom of his oar. The mauls rang on.

"That's the last," Brockett gasped.

"Then hit it," said Nera.

They hit it together. The port split down its middle and fell inward with a crash, and lamplight came out of the hole and lay on the water. Deep in the ship a roar went up, and a battering at iron. Dunning had heard it.

"Captain," Nera said. "In. Then me."

He went through first.

He came out on a narrow iron walkway at the height of the upper lattice. The frame filled the chamber round him, a cage of bronze and blackwood with pale ward-light moving through it in slow threads. It hummed, low and uneven, sagging and catching again. It was living on what it had.

Below him Crown's marines stood at their barricade facing the door, where Dunning's men were beating it in. Their officer turned at the crash of the port and shouted, and half of them turned with him.

Rusk dropped off the walkway onto the barricade. A marine came at him with a short sword, and Rusk took it on the hanger and bore him down among the chests. The door went in with a crack of split oak, and Dunning came through it at the head of his pikes. The marines were caught between, with the frame at their backs, and their officer threw his sword down, and the rest followed.

"Against the bulkhead," Rusk said. "Hold them there."

Nera came through the port with the lantern and dropped onto the grating beside the trunk. She never glanced at the marines.

"Nat, the tackle. You two, on the fall. Mistress Sorn, the hook."

The trunk was a square iron shaft beside the frame, with a hatch in the grating and a tackle hanging over it from the beams. Lanyon threw the hatch back. Below it the shaft went down into black water that rose and fell with the ship's roll.

Sorn guided the hook with a boathook until it caught, and said, "Haul."

They hauled. The tackle creaked, and something heavy came up the shaft, streaming: an iron basket no bigger than a bucket, and in it the fitting, a fist of black stone knotted round with warded metal.

Something was coming up the shaft after it.

A pale hand came over the lip of the trunk and took hold of the grating. Another came beside it, and a third. Crown's dead were climbing from the sea-chest, up the road the fitting had gone. A head rose into the lantern-light with its hair plastered over its face.

Nera had the maul. She had taken it out of Brockett's hands without thinking. Rusk saw her look down at it. She held it out to Brockett.

"Hal," she said.

Brockett set his feet beside the cage and brought the maul down once, with sixty years of shipwright's shoulders behind it, and the fitting flew apart across the iron in a spray of black shards.

The hands on the grating opened. The head sank. Down the shaft something fell away with a long, loose splash, and then another, and the water in the trunk heaved and lay quiet. Far above, men were shouting on Crown's upper deck that the dead had let go.

"The frame," Nera said.

Sorn was already on the walkway with the drawing held to the lattice. "Upper node, port side, where the four members cross. Middle, starboard. Low aft, under the walkway. Six wedges, three at a time."

The hum changed. It had been sagging all this while, and now it climbed into a full deep note that Rusk felt in his teeth, and the pale light in the lattice brightened and ran quicker. Under their feet the grinding thunder of the starboard cage came back.

"She's feeding," Sorn said.

From beyond the after bulkhead came the clank of iron and men shouting in the western-islands tongue. Crown's vane crew had cut Daw's hawser out of the cage and shipped the spares, and every fathom of sea the Kestrel dragged her through was feeding the frame.

"Sergeant," Nera said. "The vane room, aft. Take your marines and stop them if you can."

"And you, Mistress?" Dunning said.

"I keep Hal and Nat and the wedges," Nera said. "Go."

Rusk looked at the port. It went under on every roll now. The sea came over the sill green-black and ran round his ankles, and drew back, and came again. He had only to send one word to Isobel, and she would slip the tow, and Crown's cage would stop, and in twelve minutes the dark would fall without any of them. And Crown would settle in the falling tide off the Throat with her frame whole, where nobody could reach her, with the stream turning her cage for as long as there were tides.

"Keep the tow going," Nera said, with her eyes on the frame. "She has to reach the sand, or none of this matters. I'll have it."

Rusk held his tongue.

"Captain. Hold that." She put a wedge into his hands and set them on the lattice where the four members crossed and the light ran thickest. "Square to the joint. Don't let it twist when he strikes. Nat, here. Hal, middle starboard. On my word, the three of you."

The wedge was cold, and the ward-cuts on its face bit into his palms. Lanyon stood over him with the maul up and his teeth bared. Across the lattice Brockett had his wedge set, and a Darn man knelt in the water with the third, low aft, his maul ready.

Through the after bulkhead came the snap of crossbows and a man's scream, and Dunning roaring.

"Now," said Nera.

Three mauls struck at once. The frame gave a shriek that came into Rusk's skull through his hands, and the wedge leaped in his grip. The light ran away from it in every direction.

"Again. Now."

They struck again. The sea came in over the sill and swirled round Rusk's knees.

"Next three. Upper starboard, Nat. Captain, go with him."

He set the second wedge and held it, with the sea cold at his thighs and the hum in his chest. Lanyon stood over him at the walkway's edge with the maul up, between Rusk and the port.

"Now," Nera said.

The sea came in over the sill with the roll, green-black, and a hand came in with it.

It took Lanyon by the belt from behind. He had the maul up over his head for the stroke. The hand took him backward off the walkway and out through the port in one pull, with the maul still in his fists and the stroke still in his shoulders. The sea went out after him and left the sill bare. Rusk let go of the wedge and got a hand on his sleeve as he went. The sleeve ripped away at the shoulder and stayed in Rusk's fist.

"Nat!" Brockett said.

He was across the lattice with his wedge set and his maul up. He did not go to the port. He struck his wedge once, and came round the lattice through the water to Rusk's side with the maul.

"Hold it square," he said. "Hold it, Captain."

Rusk dropped the sleeve and set both hands to the iron.

"Now," said Nera. Her voice came out the same as before.

Brockett struck. Something deep in the lattice gave, and the hum dropped a full tone and went ragged. Nera called again, and the mauls fell again, Brockett's and the Darn man's low aft, and the frame came apart round them, member by member, with a noise like a mast going in a gale. Rusk's wedge went in to the head, and the bronze under his hands went cold and dark.

The humming stopped. Through the broken port, the sea turned green.

The square of the port went from black to a blaze of green water and white sky, and the light lay across the flooded grating and the split frame.

Rusk went to the port and put his head out of it. The sea was green and clear, and he could see down into it a fathom. Lanyon was there, under the run of the hull, face down with his arms out and one sleeve gone, going slowly astern along the ship's side as the tow carried her past him. He did not rise. Nothing in that water would rise now.

Rusk went up the ladders two at a time.

When he came out on Crown's upper deck, the sky was there. It was a pale November sky, high and blue, with long thin clouds drawn out across it from the west. The sun stood low in the south over the Brack, small and white and burning, and the light came down out of it onto the strait like water out of a bucket. Men stood blinking and cursing and laughing with their hands over their faces.

The sea was green. He had forgotten it. For weeks every sea had been black. Now it was a cold green under the sun, full of the dead floating face down, and full of wreckage. A cable ahead the Kestrel leaned to her tow with her patched sails white.

And the strait was full of ships.

To the north lay Orra, a great dark hump of rock with the sea white at its foot, and the broken glass of the lantern room glittered on its western crown. At the eastern mouth Mercy lay low in the water with boats round her like ducks round bread. Past Orra, Northward lay at anchor with Sabin's people on her deck, and far beyond her a wall of black stood on the sea, where Vigil and the others lay.

Rusk looked at his watch, because he had looked at it all morning. It said twenty minutes to one. Its face was white in the sun, and the hands threw thin black shadows across it. He put it away.

Dunning came up the ladder behind him, slowly, with blood on his sleeve that was not his.

"The vane room's ours," he said. "They had the spares in before we got the door down, and a crossbow on it. Four hurt, none dead." He looked at the sky and away from it. "Who was it went out of the port, sir? Brockett won't say."

"Lanyon," said Rusk. "The Darn boy."

Dunning took his hat off, and put it on again.

All across the strait the Pale Fleet's formation had come apart. The first flag came down on an escort off Mercy's quarter, and the island boats round her cheered, and another followed it. Soon Mercy's masthead was flying Compact flags from the book, with SALTGRASS under them. Commander Marr accepted the surrender of the transit force, and Brightwater, Halberd and Fulmar were to go west at once and join Leary. The dead in the water were down, but not finished. If Vigil or Bounty were towed within five miles of this strait, every one of those floating men would lift his head.

Brightwater slipped her hawser and went west, and Halberd cast off astern and followed. The Kestrel came round, and Crown came round behind her like an old cow on a halter, slowly, groaning. Isobel took her in by the color of the water, from green to pale green to the color of new rope, over the long low back of the Brack sandbar. There the Kestrel bore up and let Crown run on past her with her way on her.

Crown took the ground a few minutes before one. Rusk felt it through his boots, a long shuddering check. The great ship slid on, grinding over the sand with a sound like a cart on gravel, and settled. Her stern sank a foot and held, and her decks stayed in the sun.

"Cut the tow," Rusk called forward.

On the tow deck Joss cast off his stopper. The bridle went out through the hawse with a long hiss and into the sea.

The boats worked along Crown's side on the falling tide with hooks, taking the dead out of the water. A Holm Ennis lugger brought a boy in a Darn jerkin with one sleeve gone up over her rail, and laid him in her bottom boards under a sail, and pulled for the Kestrel.

Nera's boats came off Crown after one o'clock with the last of the living prisoners from her lower decks. Nera climbed the Kestrel's side ahead of Rusk in Orris's coat, soaked to the chest, and stood on the deck and looked up at the sky, and went on looking at it.

A Southwick gig came down from the east with Marr in the sternsheets, her face grimed with smoke and a bandage showing under her coat. She came up the Kestrel's side without waiting for a hand.

Marr looked at Vaust on his stretcher by the mainmast, with Hanne Webb's splints on his leg, before she turned to Rusk.

"You took him alive."

"Joss did," Rusk said. "I held on to his coat."

"Good." She glanced back at Vaust. "He'll answer under the sun, in front of everyone he harmed. I want him aboard Mercy."

"He's yours."

"He's the court's." She turned to Nera. "And Crown?"

"Done," Nera said. "All of it. I never touched a maul."

"And your people?" Marr asked.

"Hal Brockett broke her frame," Nera said. "Nat Lanyon stood over the wedge with the maul, and the sea took him out of the port with it."

Marr looked up at the sky and did not look down for some time. Then she turned and studied Rusk's face. "You're smiling, Captain."

"Am I, Commander?" Rusk asked.

"Yes," Marr said.

She went to see to her prisoner, and Rusk stood at the rail and let the sun lie on his face.

The strait was full of boats, coming in from everywhere across the green water under brown sails and white, towing the wounded and picking the living out of the sea. Every wave on the strait threw the low sun back.

North, on Orra, on the terrace below the broken tower, a shutter lamp had begun to flash. It went on and on, short and long, faster than any signal Rusk knew. He put up his glass. It was not in the book, and it never paused for a countersign. It went on, line after line, with no end to it that he could find.

"What's she saying?" Isobel asked.

Rusk lowered the glass.

"I've no idea," he said. "It's too long."