straddling the yard, pretending it was nothing but a branch above a pond.
“Leave it be!” yelled a sailor underneath her at the rail, and yet he sounded halfhearted, as if he hoped to see her try.
Bellying along was awkward in her skirts. She would have hiked them up if not for all the men.
“Kraken’s balls, get down from there!” Captain Veer yelled, having emerged from his cabin to discover her aloft.
In her startlement, she snatched the crab without really looking. Its pincer caught her thumb, slicing through the nail. Molly yelped and shook it off, the crab fluttered down, and then she tumbled off the yard and dangled by her hands. Blood made her grip dangerously slick. A fat gust of wind pressed the canvas to her body, threatening to bump her through the air like a ball.
Men shouted from below with contradictory advice. Molly scowled at her hands, commanding them to hold. Her bloody palm was slipping, so she swung herself hard toward the rope that ran between the mainsail and the foremast, high to low.
For a moment she was airborne, loose above the deck—a body in the wind between the broad white sails. She hooked the tether with her elbow and clamped on tight. Once she had a grip, she crossed her ankles over the stay and shimmied down, moving backward, hanging under like a sloth until she finally reached the foremast top and landed on the platform. From there the climb was simple, little harder than a ladder, and she snatched a final crab before she jumped on deck, bloody but intact, in front of Captain Veer.
She offered him the crab. He was tauter than the rigging and refused to take the gift. His eyes were black. He stared at her with murderous composure.
“Good morning, sir,” she said.
The crew turned to wood. Captain Veer didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. The only part of him that moved was his scraggly dark hair.
“I’ll go down to the cabin where I belong,” Molly said.
Was it guilt that made her say it, or the captain’s angry silence? Either way, she felt a mutinous desire to retract it, to climb another mast and see if he would shout.
Instead she dropped the crab and watched it flutter, briefly free, before it whirled toward the sails and tangled in the lines again. She looked at every sailor as she walked to the companionway but none of them, not even Mr. Knacker, raised his face to acknowledge her in front of Captain Veer. She sucked her thumb going down—it was bleeding unabated—and the gloom below deck was dungeonlike and heavy.
There was one other paying passenger aside from Molly and her brother: a chandler, who had spent the early days of the trip nearly as seasick as Nicholas. His name was Mr. Fen and he was taking his candle-making business to Floria, where materials were cheaper and demand was on the rise. Molly guessed that he was fifty. He had a suety complexion with a faintly moistened sheen, and he paid the captain handsomely for fresh-laid eggs, which he liked to suck raw by puncturing the shells. He was not so much shy as purposefully withdrawn, keeping to his books and rarely leaving his own private cabin.
Molly had engaged him with her usual tenacity. He humored her but asked more questions than he answered. This morning he lay in a hammock with a lantern overhead. The hammock and the lantern swayed together with the ship so that the light was always falling on his favorite book of ballads.
“I’ve done it again,” she told him now, sitting on his traveling chest, and gave him an account of her adventure with the crabs.
Mr. Fen didn’t speak until she finished. He stepped out of the hammock, leaving his book behind him, and approached her with an outstretched hand.
“Let me see your thumb,” he said.
Mr. Fen examined it, holding at the joint and squinting at the crab-cut nail. He guided her off the chest, opened the lid, and pulled out a tiny bottle of spirits.
“Be brave and this will cleanse it,” he said, addressing her, she felt, the way he might address a toddler. Molly looked away, determined not to wince. He popped the cork and poured. It felt like boiling water. Mr. Fen watched her face instead of her injured thumb. She ground her other hand’s knuckles on the corner of the chest, diverting her attention till the sting began to fade. He corked the bottle, blew gently