"One Heartbeat"

Tom did not move when the curtain stirred.

He stood behind Beñat with the cord still doubled at the man's throat and the cutlass low along his own thigh where the candlelight would not catch it. He let the hunter come down the last rung. Let him part the striped cloth with the muzzle of the fowling-piece. Let him see.

The hunter saw.

He saw his brother on his knees with a deckhand's cord biting under his jaw. He saw Mama Yves at the curtain's edge with a paring knife reversed in her small flour-dusted hand. He saw the captain on the cot, breathing, alive. He saw the child Sary peering up from behind the table with a face that did not flinch from him anymore.

For one heartbeat, his face did the arithmetic.

The fowling-piece began, very slowly, to lower.

Then Beñat spoke — quick, harsh, in the tongue Tom did not know — three words spat up at his own brother like a curse. The hunter's face hardened in a way Tom would remember as long as he lived. The barrel came up again.

Mama Yves was faster.

She did not throw the paring knife. She threw the candle — the blue-burning beeswax candle from its iron stand — and it struck the hunter full in the chest. The blue flame caught his oiled coat and went up his front like a sheet of summer lightning. He did not scream. He stepped back, calmly, into the curtain, and the curtain caught, and the small chamber filled with sudden blue-white light and the smell of burning wax and burning man.

Tom yanked Beñat sideways, away from the fire. The brother was weeping. Whether for grief or for what he had said, Tom could not tell.