hull. She stood in her stirrups for a glimpse of Captain Veer or Mr. Knacker, but the deck had been abandoned and the ship looked lifeless. The crew had come to port and flooded into the city. She could only hope that some of them had lingered on the docks.
They rode for several more minutes before Nicholas dismounted. He tied their horses to a post and offered a hand to guide her down. Molly barely noticed she had gotten off the saddle. She saw another vessel looming up before her. It was a double-masted merchant ship of moderate proportions, smaller than the Cleaver and far more decrepit. Its name, Dick’s Fortune, was nearly illegible under many seasons’ grime. The deck swarmed with sailors who were shouting, swearing, and laughing, a raggedy crew of several dozen souls, tightly packed. She smelled them on the breeze, waxy-eared and sweaty, even now with the unwashed voyage still ahead. Pleasant memories of the Cleaver, of adventure and camaraderie and sailing into life, sank beneath the memory of vile Mr. Fen. She stood as if in waterbreath, laboring for air.
“You cut it close,” said a man, walking up to meet them.
He was short, roughly Molly’s height, and muscularly dense. He wore a tarred straw hat and a thick, buttoned coat and she discovered it was he, not the sailors, she had smelled. Nicholas met the man indifferently but Molly backed away. He was eerily familiar—not his tan round face, nor his posture, nor his clothes. His voice, she thought: the phlegmatic rolling of his words.
“This is Grigory,” Nicholas said. “He will escort you back to Bruntland.”
“He’s a Maimer,” Molly said. “He wanted to break my teeth!”
She said it loud enough that people on the dock glanced around. Nicholas took her arm and led her between their horses.
“I’m sorry it must be him but I am short on reliable men. Grigory will treat you with the utmost care. On my orders,” Nicholas said. “On threat of painful death. He will take you overseas to Frances’s embrace.”
She looked beyond him to the ship again, its rigging a complexity of coils, nets, and knots, carefully prepared but chaotic from afar.
“Remember,” Nicholas said. “Frances cannot learn the truth of our estrangement. Tom Orange’s protection depends on your silence. And do not think his freedom will enable him to act, or that your traveling to Bruntland puts you safely out of reach.”
Molly’s eyes fought tears, as a jaw fights yawns. “I could scream right now.”
“And Tom would hang for murder.”
“How will you prove he’s innocent?” she asked. “You won’t confess.”
“There’s always someone to blame. Failing that, I have the circuit judge—a man who sent a letter that was grievously misplaced. It contained certain facts he would not wish exposed.”
“How can I believe you?” Molly said.
“Because you must.”
Her aches had grown far too familiar to acknowledge. She was weary from the ride and sore through and through. Someone’s laughter on the dock made her think of Davey Mun. He must have felt this, too: wounded past recovery, acknowledging his fate and sitting down to freeze. Her brother’s explanations flooded over her again, muddied by the many accusations he had made.
“I love you,” Nicholas said. “I understand if you despise me.”
He studied her and paused to see what she would say. The child in him showed, along with traces of their father. Molly felt a heart-deep frothing in her blood, a wild blaze of heat consuming everything around her. The glimpse of what he had been—her family and her friend—rippled in her thoughts as if her mind were truly fevered, but her pain went deeper to a vision of herself.
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t blink or cry. Nicholas lowered his head and Molly walked away, having beaten him at least in the contest of eyes, and took the gangplank to leave her life in Floria behind.
* * *
The ship left at dusk with the boisterous sailors hauling lines and spreading sails until they cleared the docks, tacked south-southwest, and made a steady four knots to the middle of the harbor. Molly stood at the taffrail. She had watched her brother shrink as they departed, his dark clothes blending with the shadows onshore until his face became a dot, a tiny fleck of white.
The sun was dead-fire orange. Molly watched it set and streak the clouds lavender-red. Grayport was lovely in the onset of night, vast and indiscernible aside from all the window lights, each of them distinct but forming, in