"The Two Who Wore One Face"

Tom was moving before he had decided to move.

"Keep him breathing," he told Mama Yves, and pressed the cutlass-hilt once against the captain's cold hand so Marrow would know the shape of his going. Then he was down the slope, through the wet green, the ferns whipping his shins, the packet's old warmth gone from his shirt now and a colder thing in its place.

He broke from the trees onto a shelf of black rock above the bay and there they were.

Two women in green riding-coats, mud to the knee, dark-honey hair — so alike that for one reeling heartbeat Tom could not tell which was the one he had trusted. Isabeau stood with her back to the water, her father's pistol up and level. Hélène faced her from the rocks above, a long fowling-piece in her hands — the dead hunter's twin, or the dead hunter's master's — and four of her sloop's men spread behind her in a loose, patient crescent. The single shot Tom had heard had gone wide; a white scar of lead shone on the rock between the sisters. A warning. A held breath made of powder.

"You gave it to a deckhand," Hélène was saying, soft and venomous. "Eleven years I bought every man who ever sailed with our father, and you hand his name to a drowned boy off the beach."

"I handed it to the only honest man on this island," Isabeau said. "Which is why you'll never hold it, sister. You can kill us both and you'll still be what you were born — first, and unwanted, and never once chosen."

Hélène's knuckle whitened on the trigger.

Tom did the only thing a deckhand with nothing in his hands could do. He shouted — wordless, ragged, the full of his lungs — and threw himself flat as the fowling-piece swung toward the new noise and roared. The ball took the rock where his head had been. And in the half-second her great gun was spent, Isabeau fired.

She did not fire at her sister.

She fired into the powder-flask on the nearest man's hip, and it went up in a gout of orange that flung two of them screaming down the rocks, and then the morning was all smoke and shouting and Beñat's voice — Beñat, who had slipped his cord and come down behind Tom unbidden — bellowing in that underneath-tongue at men who had been his brother's crew, three harsh words that broke them where they stood.

A debt's a debt. He had said it on the beach over a dead man left for crabs. He paid it now, with his hands, on the rocks above the bay.

When the smoke thinned, Hélène stood alone. Her men were down or fled to the boat. The empty fowling-piece hung from her grip like a dead bird.

"You have nothing," Isabeau told her, not unkindly. "No men, no claim, and a sister with a loaded pistol and every reason. Father chose. The choosing is done." She lowered the gun. "Go back to Saint-Pierre, Hélène. Live small. It's more than you'd have left me."

For a long moment Tom thought it would end in blood after all. Then Hélène turned, and walked down to the abandoned boat, and rowed herself out alone across the grey water — a woman with her own face vanishing into the mist.

They carried Marrow down at noon.

He died on the deck of his daughter's sloop with the sun on his face and Tom's hand in his, somewhere past the headland where the island sank from sight. He did not speak at the end. He only looked at Tom, and at Isabeau, and closed his eyes the way a man closes a ledger he has finally squared.

They buried him at sea. Mama Yves said the words; Sary, scrubbed and fed, dropped the flowers. Beñat stood bareheaded at the rail, a free man on a ship that owed him nothing now.

Tom Pell watched the canvas-wrapped shape slip under, and felt the boy he had been go down with it. He turned the cutlass — Marrow's gift, the one thing the sea had let him keep — and lashed it new to his belt.

"Where do we sail, Mr. Pell?" Isabeau asked him.

He looked at the open water, and was not afraid of it.

"Anywhere with a tavern," he said. "I've a powerful need of one."