"The Woman in the Green"

Tom set Marrow gently against the lightning-scarred root and stood.

"Show yourself," he called. His voice surprised him — steadier than it had any right to be, the voice of a man and not a boy. "You know my name. I'll have yours, and your face with it. I've run from voices long enough."

A long silence. The drum did not sound. The birds did not sound. Even Beñat's smile had thinned to something watchful.

Then she came down the slope.

She was younger than Tom had let himself imagine. Thirty, perhaps. A green riding-coat cut for the saddle and not for the jungle, mud to the knee. A pistol — twin to Marrow's, twin to the one Tom had fired on the beach — held loose at her side, uncocked. Her hair was the color of dark honey. Her eyes were Marrow's eyes.

Tom heard, very faintly, Mama Yves draw in her breath.

"Mr. Pell," the woman said. "My father chose well. He always did."

Marrow, against the root, opened his eyes. He looked at the woman in the green coat for a long moment, and then — God help Tom, for he would never unsee it — the captain wept. Two slow tears, no sound, the face of a man who had laid down a weight he had carried under his ribs for twenty years.

"Isabeau," Marrow whispered.

"Father."

She did not move closer. She did not lower the pistol entirely, either. Her eyes came back to Tom and the packet's outline beneath his shirt, and Tom understood, very suddenly, that the woman on Saint-Pierre who had paid for their deaths and the woman in the green coat before him were not the same woman at all.