Chapter 4: The Chase Begins

Two days' sail remained to Keraven, and for those two days the Gray Current tore forward under every scrap of sail she could carry — Captain Darnveil seemed intent on outrunning the very night in which the last tremor had occurred. Mira scrubbed the deck, mended rigging, helped Barro in the galley — and the whole while felt eyes on her that had long since stopped being merely wary. Now they held plain, sticky fear, and the worst part was she couldn't entirely blame them for it.

On the second day, near noon, when the sun finally broke through the clouds, the lookout in the mast cried out so sharply that Mira nearly dropped her bucket.

"Sail on the horizon! Course to intercept!"

Captain Darnveil was up on the quarterdeck before anyone had time to blink, spyglass to his eye. Mira watched his knuckles whiten around the brass tube.

"Inquisition," he said — one word, and it was enough to freeze the whole deck.

"Captain?" Gretta was at his side almost instantly. "Heading?"

"Hold our course. For now, hold our course." Darnveil didn't lower the glass. "Might be about their own business."

Not a soul on deck believed that for a second, captain included, judging by his voice.

Mira went below, where Tobb had already pressed himself to the rail, peering through a gap in the bulwark planking at the distant white sail growing larger by the minute.

"Is it for you?" he asked quietly.

"How would I know."

"Inquisition ships don't usually chase merchant tubs for no reason," Tobb said grimly. "Means they've smelled something. Or someone tipped them off."

There'd been no one to tip them off — two days out, they hadn't put in at any port, hadn't crossed paths with a soul in open water. Which left only one explanation, and Mira didn't want to say it aloud, but she understood: if an Inquisition ship really was tracking them, they must somehow have sensed that night the water around the Gray Current had glowed and formed patterns. Which meant the sea had ears even where Mira couldn't see them.

The captain ordered a quarter-point change of course — small, but enough to test whether the foreign sail would follow. It followed.

"Well, there's our answer," Darnveil muttered, lowering the glass.

By evening the gap between the ships had closed enough to make out the flag on the pursuer's mainmast — a silver beacon on black, the sigil of the Royal Inquisition, which no one aboard the Gray Current wanted to see. Captain Darnveil gathered the entire crew on the main deck — for the first time in the whole voyage, Mira watched him address everyone at once rather than giving orders through Gretta.

"They'll catch us within the hour if the wind doesn't turn," he said without preamble. "I have one question for you, and I want an honest answer, not the one you think a captain wants to hear to his face. Does anyone here want me to hand the girl over?"

The silence stretched long enough that Mira mentally said goodbye to the ship, the sea, everything that had happened in these past weeks of her life. Then Dolf spoke — one of the brothers who'd been avoiding her gaze until now.

"I don't want trouble with the Inquisition, captain. But I don't want to hand over a kid who sang at the wrong time in the wrong place, either." He spat over the side with obvious disgust at his own softness. "So, no. I don't want that."

Gretta gave a short nod, as if that settled it for everyone, and judging by the exhale that ran through the deck, it did.

"Then it's decided," said Captain Darnveil. "Barro, bring up barrels from the salt-pork stores, the ones farthest from the hatch. Mira, listen closely…"

While the crew prepared for the worst, Boatswain Gretta pulled Mira aside, to the coiled rope on the fo'c'sle, out of earshot.

"Listen to me carefully, girl. Whatever happens next — stay silent. Don't explain yourself, don't argue, don't try to justify anything if the inquisitor puts a question to you directly. Silence won't prove your guilt, but one clumsy word very well might."

"And if he asks me directly?"

"Then let's hope it doesn't come to that." Gretta pressed her lips together, and Mira noticed for the first time that even this unshakeable woman, who'd seen it all, was more rattled than usual right now. "I've served with the captain twelve years, since the Gray Current's very first day. He's never once told me the whole story of his first ship — only enough that I'd keep the crew away from talk about singing at night. But I saw how he looked at you that first night, when the water glowed. He wasn't looking at you like a danger, girl. He was looking at you like something he was afraid to lose before he'd even had the chance to gain it. Don't disappoint him."

The plan he laid out over the next ten minutes was simple to the point of despair: hide Mira in a false bottom of one of the barrels, which Barro kept aboard for exactly this eventuality — fitted with stitched-in air holes disguised as cracks in the wood. The rest of the crew was to say nothing, whatever they were asked, and give no cause for a search of the hold.

"And if they insist on searching the whole ship anyway?" Mira asked, while Barro fussed anxiously around the barrel, checking that the lid hadn't warped.

"Then let's hope my reputation as an honest trader still counts for something," the captain said grimly. "It used to. We'll see about today."

Mira climbed into the barrel a few minutes before the Inquisition ship drew alongside within hailing distance. Before she stepped in, Tobb pressed a water flask into her hands — "in case you're stuck in there longer than we think" — and squeezed her shoulder awkwardly, at a loss for the words that usually came so easily to him.

"It'll be fine," he said, though his voice made it clear he didn't quite believe it himself.

"If it isn't — tell Barro his fish stew was the best on the whole coast," Mira tried to joke, and it unexpectedly worked: Tobb gave a short, nervous, but genuine laugh.

"I'll tell him — if we live to have dinner to discuss it."

Mira climbed into the barrel a few minutes before the Inquisition ship drew alongside. Barro shut the lid and stacked other, identical barrels around it, then threw old netting over the top — carelessly enough not to look suspiciously tidy, carefully enough to hide the seams. In the dark, wedged among boards that smelled of salt and old pork, Mira counted her own heartbeats to keep from losing her mind with dread, and heard — muffled, as if through a wall of water — the creak of both hulls, the splash of a lowered boat, and then voices. One belonged to Captain Darnveil. The other, polite and eerily calm, belonged to someone she'd never heard before, whose tone alone somehow made her heart pound harder than any storm had.