"The Hush Above the Stone"

They laid him down.

The cot was narrow and clean, a straw tick under sailcloth, and Mama Yves drew a curtain of striped linen aside to receive him. She had the captain's coat unbuttoned before Tom had finished settling his weight. She did not look up.

But Tom did.

He tilted his head to the vaulted stone and made his breathing small, the way a hunter makes himself small in a blind. Above the chamber the world was muffled by feet of earth and root and rock — but not silent. Not entirely. Somewhere, somewhere far above and to the left, a sound that might have been a boot. Might have been a branch. Might have been nothing.

He looked at Mama Yves.

She was threading a curved needle by candlelight, calm as a woman mending a sleeve. Too calm. Her hands did not tremble. Her shoulders did not lift toward her ears the way a hunted woman's shoulders lift without her knowing.

"You hear him," Tom said quietly.

"I have heard him for an hour, Mr. Pell." She did not raise her eyes. "Long before you came down my ladder. He walks the ridge above us most mornings. He does not know the way in. He looks for it, and he does not find it, and he goes back to her on Saint-Pierre with empty hands. That is the bargain."

"The bargain."

"Mine with the island. His with the woman who pays him." She tied the thread. "Neither of us breaks it lightly. Now. Hold the captain's shoulders. He will wake when I begin, and he will fight me, and I will need both your hands to keep him still."

Above them, very faint, the drum sounded once.