Captain Barnaby Saltwind's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Barnaby came up the path at a hard walk, breath ragged, the silent music box still heavy in his coat. The bungalow door stood open. Yari met him on the porch, the curved cutlass loose in her hand, her knuckles scraped. He looked at her eyes and knew. The girl who learned knots last spring was gone. Something steadier had taken her place, and it would not give her back. "Are you all right?" he asked. She nodded once. He cupped her shoulder, then moved past her inside. The widow lay on the cot, breathing shallow, a bruise blooming dark along her jaw. He knelt and checked her pulse. She needed a doctor. She would not survive the cart ride down to one. He pressed his forehead briefly to her hand and stood. "Come outside," he told Yari. "There are things I should have told you a long time ago." He led her to the old bench under the two huge laki trees, where moss crept up the legs and the wind moved high in the leaves. He sat. He pulled a faded photograph from his satchel and laid it flat between them. A younger man stood beside a great stone cat on a jungle slope. "That was me," he said. "Before I was tired." He told her about the Cat's Eye pearl. About the cutlass in her hand, and a gauntlet, and an amulet — four relics that were never meant to sit together. Apart, they were dangerous. Joined, they were worse. He told her about a younger Barnaby who slipped aboard a wolf crew's ship the night the haul was being gathered, who cut a rope and ran a deck and dropped into black water with the chest under one arm. He told her the wolves had crossed an ocean to take it back. "The pearl is under our floor," he said. "The blade is in your hand. That is why they came. That is why they will keep coming." Yari did not cry. She turned the cutlass slowly in her lap and looked at the eye carved into the pommel. "Then we don't let them have it," she said. "Any of it." Barnaby nodded. Inside the bungalow, the widow's breathing grew thinner. The truth was out, and the quiet life he had wanted was further from him than it had ever been. But for the first time, he was not carrying it alone.