"What a Daughter Carries Down"

"Go alone," Tom said. "Your face is the key, not mine. Two of us draws steel. One of you draws a bow."

Isabeau studied him a long moment — the deckhand giving orders to the captain's daughter — and something in her father's eyes, set in her younger face, warmed by a degree.

"Hold the ridge, Mr. Pell. If you hear two shots, the bay is mine and you bring my father down. If you hear three —" she did not finish. She tucked the packet into her green coat, against her own ribs where Tom had carried it so long, and went down through the trees with the pistol low.

They waited.

Tom laid Marrow in a hollow of root and knelt with the cutlass across his knees. Mama Yves crouched with her paring knife. Sary pressed flat to the earth. Beñat sat bound against a trunk, head tilted, listening with a hunter's ear to a bay he could not see.

The drum had gone silent. The whole island seemed to hold its breath.

A long time passed. Long enough for Tom's hope to start its slow curdle into dread.

Then — a shot. Flat, far, rolling up the ridge off the water.

One.

Tom's heart climbed into his throat. Two means the bay is hers. Three means run. He counted his own pulse. Marrow's hand found his wrist, cold now, the grip gone to almost nothing.

The second shot did not come.

Instead, faint on the morning wind, a sound worse than any number of shots: Isabeau's voice, raised, calling a name that was not her own — calling "Hélène!" — up the slope, in warning or in fury Tom could not tell.

Hélène. Here. On the island after all.