Anne Dray's Arc

Chapter 10 of 28

Two days south, the cove opened before them at dusk. Anne brought her ship in slow, sails half-furled. Kate's ship followed close behind. Anne held the brass key in her fist. Kate had told her to match it to a lock. But a lock needed a ship, and no stolen ship sat in these waters. Only a two-masted raider rode at anchor, weathered and hard-used, a snarling face carved at its prow. It was not Kate's ship. Anne stared at it and felt the key turn useless in her hand. Kate's boat drew alongside. Her voice came flat across the water. "That's not her." "Then the key means nothing," Anne said. "The key means the man," Kate said. "He's aboard that raider. He sold my ship or hid her. Either way he knows where she went." Anne climbed down to the surgeon's cramped berth to think. Dr. Sarah Caldwell was there, wiping a blade clean on her stained apron. She had kept the crew alive across two hard weeks, tracing sickness to bad meat and cutting where cutting was needed. Anne trusted her more than most. "You cook and you cut," Anne said. "Tell me how to open a man who won't talk." Caldwell set the blade down. "Same way I open bad pork." She looked at the key in Anne's hand. "You've been trying to fit that to the wrong hole. It's not for a lock. It's for a lie." "Say it plain." "Show him the key," Caldwell said. "Kate's key. He'll know she sent it. He'll know she knows. A guilty man talks when he thinks he's already caught." She turned back to her blade. "Words open him. Not iron." Anne went back up. She had Kate row across with her, the key held open in her palm. The thief met them at the raider's rail, thick-necked, sweating. His eyes dropped to the key at once. His face went gray. "Kate Blackwater sent this," Anne said. "She knows the man who spared it. That's you." The thief backed a step. "I didn't keep her. I couldn't hold a ship like that." "Then where is she?" His mouth worked. Kate stepped forward, hand on her belt, and that was enough. "A buyer," he said. "Crown coin. They wanted her hull for the reef trade. She's moored at a strait a week north. Under guard." Anne closed her hand over the key. It had opened nothing at the cove and everything in the thief. The ship was not lost. It was sold to the Crown, guarded, a week away. Kate's face went hard as stone. "The Crown," she said. "They took her." "Then we take her back," Anne said. But the fleet had come for a thief, not a Crown garrison. Getting Kate's ship now meant a fight against the men already hunting Anne's head.