Molly paced a stone-walled room in Scabbard Island’s quarantine hospital, a long, gray building with a straight central corridor, which owing to its bolted doors and iron-barred windows might have been mistaken for a derelict prison. The island itself appeared pestilential. It was three square miles of craggy land and wind-twisted trees, situated in the north of Grayport Harbor and inhabited by enough rats and fleas to sicken all of Floria. Half a decade had passed since Grayport had suffered a serious outbreak of contagious disease; the hospital was poorly funded even during emergencies, and virtually abandoned in prolonged seasons of health. Physicians stayed on the mainland, and the caretaker and his assistants were quick to lock Molly and Grigory in isolated quarters—both to be examined, the latter to be arrested. They had failed to keep the jolly boat’s sailors on the island: a disastrous breach of protocol in the case of actual disease, now disastrous to Molly if the story reached her brother. A doctor wouldn’t be summoned till the morning, she believed, and she needed those hours. She had gone from trap to trap.
But although her solitude seemed to last a great deal longer, she had been in the room for less than three hours when a door banged open up the hall and she heard a familiar, belligerent baritone say:
“It isn’t pox, you good-for-nothing clod, although I’ll see you sacked and whipped for letting those sailors row away. What if they’d been sick? And they were witnesses, to boot, against the man who tried to kill her. Where the blazes have you put her?”
“Here, sir,” the caretaker said.
“God’s sake, quit trembling,” Pitt told him at the door. “I said it isn’t pox. Open up. She won’t infect you.”
Molly retreated to the inmost corner of the room, anxiously amazed by the unexpected rescue, if rescue it could properly be called. They opened the door. The caretaker shrank to the side too quickly to be seen, and then instead of Sheriff Pitt, whose voice had filled the hall, in walked Tom with an expression of relief—urgent, high-colored, ravenous relief.
Molly rushed to him with a gasp and hugged him like a wife. Tom squeezed back; they didn’t come apart. She turned her head as she was holding him and looked to Sheriff Pitt, his wind-burned face wonderful to see, and she was startled when he winked at her and smiled with affection.
He was followed by a priestly-looking man of middle age, his shoulders lightly dusted from an overpowdered wig. His cheeks were clearly mottled with the lingering marks of bloodpox. He introduced himself as Dr. Antickson and rolled up Molly’s sleeves, examining her arms as Pitt raised a lantern and allowing her, throughout, to keep holding Tom.
“It is not the disease,” he said, nevertheless concerned and squinting at the punctures.
“I did it with a pin,” Molly said.
The doctor frowned.
Tom stepped back—how it ached to lose his warmth!—and licked his thumb to clean a portion of the blood from Molly’s wrist. She kissed him to apologize for leaving him behind, and he forgave her with a nod and a drawn-out sigh.
“You can marry up later,” Pitt said, sending the doctor away with the caretaker to wait at the end of the hall and closing the door for privacy.
Tom and Pitt had slipped away from Root, ridden all day, and found a constable in Grayport shortly after dark. They had only hoped to learn the address of James Smith and instead had heard a story of the ship Dick’s Fortune. Bloodpox panic had indeed reached the docks. One of the rowers from the jolly boat had drowned his fear in rum and spoken, in his drunkenness, of everything he’d witnessed. The rumor spread quickly, authorities were summoned, and the sailors were arrested and returned to Scabbard Island. Sheriff Pitt volunteered to accompany the prisoners; the pox-dreading constable was happy to allow it.
“Pitt knows about your brother,” Tom said to Molly, “but we haven’t told anybody else what we know.”
“Strictly secret,” Pitt said. “What the deuce happened?”
Molly told about the note, her flight from Root, and Shepherd’s Inn; how her brother had killed Lem to compromise Tom; how he had forced her onto the ship; and how she had managed to escape. It chimed with what they knew and already suspected, but she stunned them by revealing that her brother led the Maimers.
“This Grigory up the hall,” Pitt said. “He’s a Maimer?”
Molly nodded. Pitt responded with a dark-lit grin: to have caught one alive was more than he had hoped.
“He’s all yours,” Tom said. “Get your name in the Grayport Gazette.”
“And Nicholas?” Molly asked.
Tom’s heat had left her body and the cold felt deathly, worse than dampness and depletion, worse than ordinary fear. The warm cooperation that had unified the men was suddenly replaced by an unforeseen chill.
Pitt massaged his hands and said to Tom, “You didn’t tell me he was heading up the Maimers.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s a new cast of light. I might consider our agreement null and void, to catch the leader. Might be worth it if you let me take him in.”
Tom inhaled so fully that he seemed about to levitate. He turned away from Molly, failing to conceal his unexplained euphoria, and searched Pitt’s face as if he couldn’t quite believe the overture his lifelong enemy had made. Molly stood alone and didn’t understand. She was picturing her brother’s neck snapping at the gallows.
“Nothing’s changed,” Tom said. “It’s still for Molly to decide.”
Pitt addressed her softly with a hand upon her shoulder, reminding her how thoroughly he fathomed what was coming. “He’s your brother. It’s a damned hard thing either way.”
“Don’t arrest him,” Molly said, unsure if that was even what the two of them were offering. “Tom and I will go.”
Tom suppressed whatever emotion he had felt and squeezed her hand, joining them together for the task that lay ahead. Molly turned to Pitt and kissed him on the cheek, much to his uncomfortable delight, Tom’s pique, and her own bright sense of putting things right.
* * *
Nicholas slept in his spartan room over the Grayport office and woke before light the next morning, initially convinced, owing to exhaustion and the nighttime cold, that he was still in the winter cabin, that Molly had tried to shoot him the previous day, and that he had lost her in the onrushing waters of the creek.
The present returned in a flash. She was alive. He had found her. He had sent her back to Bruntland.
Yet the gnawing, tightening grief did not relax but rather sharpened as he thought of her at sea, suffering and hating him. A burden to be borne, he thought. Another chronic illness. What could he have done, aside from sending her away? Nevertheless he clamped his mouth and wept against his pillow—half a minute, maybe less, of pressurized rue. It was all that he allowed himself, all that he could hazard if he meant to carry on. He rose from bed and dressed in the dark, ignoring his cough, his chill, his hunger and fatigue, and straightened his clothes by feel, resigned to solving the myriad complications of the day with the same force of will he might have used to ice a fever.
He felt a premonition: something wrong about the morning. The mind, he knew, was capable of clandestine perceptions—of learning in the night, of discovering clues and patterns under the noise of conscious thought. Revelations bubbled up, masquerading as emotions, like the subtle voice of God or nature’s finer instincts.
He left the room in dread and lingered in the staircase leading to the parlor, fearing an informant would be waiting outside to bring him news of trouble.
If only Molly could see beyond the things he had taken. He had given her more, much more than she had earned, and although he couldn’t expect to win her gratitude or love, he prayed that she would keep her word of secrecy with Frances. Dear Frances, now the only soul alive left to love him. He admitted it was foolish, or at any rate a weakness, to let himself dwell on such a sentimental hope. Frances knew what he had told her—complicated lies—and she believed him to be upright, delicate, and pure. Had he ever been an innocent? He truly couldn’t say. Still, he cherished such a vision of himself through her eyes and wouldn’t have it slashed, maudlin as it was, any more than he would slash a real, living child.
But the fact was already clear: Molly would expose him, maybe inadvertently but certainly, inevitably. Bewailing it was meaningless. In time she’d write to Root—how could he prevent it?—and discover Tom had been hanged. There was no one watching Root to see that Tom complied. Nicholas had trusted that a bluff would do the trick; but eventually, he knew, the man would come to Grayport. Tom had to die. He would see to that today; judges could be swayed in more than one direction.
Nonetheless, he suspected that the worst was still to come. He had bought them a reprieve and forced his sister to accept it, but reprieves, like everything else, were destined to expire.
He continued downstairs and opened the parlor door. A candle lit the room. Molly stood before him. Nicholas’s heart surged up and then collapsed, and for the first time in months, he doubted his resolve. She was flicker-lit and beautiful, a small bedraggled imp. Both her clothing and her hair had the haphazard look of having swirled undersea and dried however they fell. Nicholas wondered, reaching subtly for the knife inside his coat, if she had swum the harbor’s length without being seen.
She didn’t speak. Her eyes were terrible and dark as little onyxes. Never had he entertained a suicidal urge and yet he felt one now, entwined with her appearance. If he drew the blade and killed her—intimately, swiftly—his succeeding act would surely be to turn it on himself.
“Give me the ruddy fucking knife before I shoot you in the knee.”
Tom Orange aimed a pistol from a shadow at his side.
Nicholas handed him the knife, sagging with relief. The feeling didn’t last. He calcified and burned.
“Sit,” Molly said.
Nicholas didn’t move. Tom grabbed his neck and crammed him into a chair. The force hurt his clavicle and throbbed down his arm. Molly stood calmly in the center of the room while Tom stayed beside him with the pistol to his knee. A fine deterrent, he admitted, more reliable than aiming willy-nilly at his chest, and yet it told him they were not beyond a measure of restraint.
He met Tom’s face and there it was—that marvelous temper again—but now it looked contained: a cannon packed and primed. Nicholas smiled at his knuckles, just enough for Tom to notice. Then he emptied his expression, knitted his fingers in his lap, raised his chin toward the candlelight, and asked his sister, “How?”
* * *
“You said it last night. I’m good at wriggling out.”
The parlor, by and large, was just as Molly remembered. It was small, somewhat narrower in width than in length, with a ceiling she could touch by reaching overhead, bone-colored wainscot, and dark red walls. Nicholas had added ferns and books, which added richness, but had kept the same chairs and round mahogany table. The table bore a candle near the unlit hearth. Nicholas’s chair was in the middle of the rug. They had sat right here when she’d agreed to marry John, and it was strange, and reassuring, and inevitably chilling to be standing here with Tom for another confrontation.
Molly had warned Tom that Nicholas was good at spotting weaknesses and turning them, abruptly, into precious opportunities. She’d asked him not to speak unless necessity compelled him.
“You love her,” said her brother. “That was instantly apparent.”
Tom neither blinked nor contradicted the assessment. Molly’s heart became an orange, nourishing and bright, and she was eager to be done before her brother got to squeeze it.
“I warned you not to come,” Nicholas continued. “What if she had died because you tried to interfere?”
“She was managing without me,” Tom said.
“All her life.”
“I’m a harder man to hurt when I’m standing here awake.”
“The same cannot be said about your uncle,” Nicholas answered. “Did your cousin take it badly? Did she blame you, even briefly? What a wound: to be severed from the graces of your family.”
“I wonder how a bullet in the knee measures up.”
“Tom,” Molly said.
“Dead matter,” said her brother, having toyed and grown bored. He looked at her instead and then the light was in his eyes. The flutter in his irises reminded her of wasps. “You were stronger after all and now you have me in your power. Let me clarify your options. One: let me go, and both of you are dead within the hour. Two: have me arrested for my crimes and see me hanged. Three: kill me now. The third choice is cleanest.”
“You seem content that one of us should die,” Molly said.
“Resignation,” he replied, “differs from contentment.”
“Were you equally resigned the night you killed my daughter?”
She walked toward Tom and grabbed the pistol in his hand. Tom was in her shadow with the candlelight behind her but she felt his rising temperature, the tension in his arm, his panic that the gun had left her brother’s knee. He wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t turn from Nicholas, who watched them with an eggsnake’s tireless attention. They had agreed upon the plan—Tom restrained him, Molly talked—but now her move had overturned it, leaving both of them uncertain. Tom released the gun and quickly raised the knife.
Molly backed away and aimed the pistol at the floor.
“Explain to me again the necessity you felt,” she said. “Tell me all the reasons you devised. Do you dare?”
She calmed her trembling hand by tightening her grip. First the gun shook more. Then she raised it and it steadied. Nicholas seemed to follow her example with his features, tautening his brow and narrowing his mouth, though what he meant to govern—his defiance or his fear—was impossible to tell.
“Given the chance,” Nicholas said, “I will steal, and maim, and hurt your loved ones again. You would be right to kill me now. Even God wouldn’t blame you.”
She glimpsed his broken tooth and thought of the locket she was wearing. Tom raised a cautionary hand but didn’t speak.
“Tell me where your instinct leans,” Nicholas said.
“Kill you,” Molly answered.
“Trust it.”
“Let you live.”
“Choose,” Nicholas told her, creaking forward in the chair.
The emptiness inside her bloomed and filled the parlor, blotting out her memory, and certainty, and hope until the pistol in her hand and Nicholas in the chair became the only two things that were holding her together.
Tom had seen her indecision and begun to drop his guard. He seemed prepared to block the shot—a shot she might regret—and stepped toward her with an outstretched arm to take the gun. Nicholas faced the candle. It was close enough, she realized, that he might blow it out and plunge them into darkness.
Nicholas inhaled and focused on the flame. “Consider the possibility that Cora is alive.”
Molly’s vision flared. She almost pulled the trigger in surprise. Nicholas exhaled and made the candlelight wobble, and the furniture and walls swayed with bending shadows.
“Where?” she asked, choked.
“If she were,” Nicholas said, neither venomous nor kind, “telling you would cost me my advantage.”
“Then I’ll shoot you.”
“Yet there may come a time, assuming I’m alive, when I have no need of my advantage anymore.”
Visions filled her mind—wispy hair, dimpled elbows. Caramel skin. She’d have given up her tongue or any of her limbs, anything, to hold her. Anything but this. Was she out there now in the city or beyond, parentless and wholly undefended with a stranger? Had another mother nursed her? Would she ever know the difference?
“Molly,” Tom said. He interposed himself, forcing her to look at him instead. “Will he tell you if I hurt him?”
“No,” Molly whispered.
Tom put the knife away and turned around to Nicholas. “Shoot you, don’t shoot you. Bargaining and bluffs. My head was hammer and tongs before you started talking.”
Tom punched him in the nose: a good, damp thump. Nicholas bled and held his face, too surprised to offer resistance when Tom yanked him up by his hair, produced a rope from under his coat, and tied his wrists behind his back. Molly used a second length of rope to bind his ankles. Tom bumped the backs of Nicholas’s knees, bending both legs and causing him to kneel, and then he joined the wrist and ankle knots together into a hogtie and stood beside Molly, nodding at their handiwork. Nicholas’s nose dribbled down his shirt.
Tom took a three-inch bottle from his pocket, uncorked the top, and said, “Dr. Benjamin Knox sends his regards.”
“It’s to be ironic punishment, then,” Nicholas said. “Will you chop my hand, as well?”
“No,” Molly said. “You’re sailing off whole.”
“Where am I going?”
“New employment,” Tom said. “It’ll suit you.”
“Wherever it is,” Nicholas told Molly, speaking through the blood flowing over his lips, “I will see you again.”
“But you won’t kill me.”
“How do you know?”
“It isn’t in your nature,” Molly said.
Nicholas smiled.
Tom handed her the bottle, pinched her brother’s nose, and moved to open his jaw.
“Stop,” Nicholas said with nasal irritation.
Molly touched Tom’s arm and he released her brother’s face. Nicholas looked at her with bottomless, profoundly earnest eyes and tipped his head back. She placed the bottle’s rim upon his lip and poured the fluid into his mouth. It had a dream-heavy scent. He let it trickle in and swallowed with a blink.
There was a long and awkward silence, not a word for several minutes, while they waited for the potion to deliver its effect.
“I might kill you,” Nicholas said to Tom.
“Ruddy hell,” Tom said. “You told me he was stoical.”
Molly stuck her pinky into the freshly drained bottle. She removed it with a pop and sucked the moisture off her fingertip, savoring the hint of salty-sweet cherry.
Nicholas tried to say, “Are you sure the doctor’s formula was properly prepared?” Instead he slurred, “Formula prepared the doctor proper?”
“Aye,” Tom said.
Nicholas drooled and gibbered. In another half minute, he collapsed upon the floor.
Sleeping like a baby, Molly thought. She didn’t cry. Instead she used a handkerchief to clean his bloody face, wondered whether he had lied, and prayed that he had not.
* * *
Four hours later, Molly and Tom stood on the dock in the overcast, pewter-lit morning and watched the Lady’s Way spread her sails and cut across Grayport Harbor. She carried an unmarked crate deep within her hold, delivered and received shortly after dawn, and once she was safely in the open sea, certain members of the crew planned to discover a man packed inside, overlook the ropes that bound his feet and hands, and arrest him as a stowaway on their voyage to the prison colony of Exanica, which lay across the ocean to the distant south of Bruntland and always had a place for fresh criminal laborers. The captain knew Tom’s brother Winward—they had served together in the navy—and had asked few questions while agreeing to assist. He had been warned, nonetheless, to overestimate the prisoner.
The docks were crowded but subdued, owing to the bloodpox rumor from the night. Molly kept her hood up, fearing that one of the passing sailors or merchants might recognize her face from her Grayport days. She watched the Lady’s Way becoming smaller in the harbor till it looked like a toy she could carry in her palm.
Tom held her waist as if expecting her to fall. He wore his tricorne and had the bearing of a general who had ridden all night but couldn’t afford to rest. Molly held him, too, sensing it was he who needed the support.
“How are your arms?” Tom asked.
“They hurt. You look good in that hat. I fancy one myself.”
He smiled at the sea but seemed to be preoccupied. Molly couldn’t read him and was too fatigued to try.
Pitt approached them from the far end of the dockyard, where he had just stepped off a cutter from Scabbard Island. His authoritative swagger was belied by his shortness, and by the cavalier seamen who refused to clear a path. They made him step around or bumped him moving past, until at very long last he reached Tom and Molly with little more authority than a messenger boy.
He sniffed to stop a trickle, then again with more intention.
“Grigory is dead,” he said. “The caretaker left him unguarded while I interrogated the jolly boat sailors. He swears that nobody else came to the island, but how would he know? The bastard was hiding in his room, still afraid of pox.”
Tom removed his hat as if its weight had grown oppressive. “How did he die?”
“Someone cut his throat. The room was locked and there was no sign of struggle. He was lying on the floor like his neck just opened on its own.”
Pitt said it thickly with a marble-eyed stare, turning his gaze from Tom to Molly without seeming to recognize the difference. Molly held her neck and felt herself swallow. Was it odd to pity Grigory, a Maimer and a fiend, for failing in his mission to convey her overseas?
“Your brother…,” Pitt said, blinking in the wind.
Molly swung her arm, rigid as a weathervane, and pointed at the vessel far across the harbor.
“He’s nailed inside a crate,” Tom said.
They fell into grim silence, looking at the ship and huddled, all three with Molly in the middle, while the overcrowded dock made their worries more anonymous but left them more exposed, in the wake of Grigory’s death, to whatever secret forces had achieved his execution. Life went on around them, full of hidden threats. They watched the barrels being loaded, ropes being tied, a thousand machinations following their courses.
“How do we explain this?” Pitt eventually asked.
“We can’t tell the truth,” Tom said to Molly. “Your own brother, the leader of the Maimers, sent away without a trial—people will think the worst.”
“We have to tell them something,” Pitt said. “At the very least, we need to explain Lem’s murder.”
Molly dropped her hood and scruffed her matted hair.
“We blame Grigory for everything,” she said. “He was the one with murderers and thieves at his disposal. My well-respected brother, Jacob Smith, sent me away for safety while he worked against Grigory’s network in Grayport. Last spring, Grigory kidnapped me for advantage. I escaped by jumping into the flooded creek, and then I stayed in Root—and kept my past a secret—so Grigory wouldn’t find me. But he did. He came to Root when you and Tom stopped the Maimers. He murdered Lem and framed Tom to keep the two of you occupied while he tried to steal me off again. I fled to Grayport and hoped to find my brother for protection, but Grigory caught me on the road. You and Tom,” she said, “worked enough of it out in Root and followed me to Grayport, where you rescued me and had Grigory arrested. He killed himself in jail. My brother disappeared, probably murdered by Grigory’s supporters.”
It was a lie that might suffice, being very close to the truth, with no one to oppose it now that Grigory was dead.
“But people here thought you and Nicholas—you and Jacob,” Tom said, “were married.”
“We had enemies abroad and changed our identities to hide.”
“What did you really fake a marriage for?” Pitt asked.
“That’s my secret to keep. So is my daughter,” Molly said.
The eastern clouds began to fracture and the Lady’s Way passed through a clear band of sun. It lit the sails with splendor, giving the distant ship a gold-spangled light before it sank back to shadow, gone toward the sea, with Nicholas and everything he knew inside its hold.
“People will think your brother died fighting the Maimers,” Tom said. “If he ever makes it back, he’ll be a hero.”
“Makes it back!” Pitt said, scorching at the thought. His reputation—and the lie they meant to foist upon the town—depended on the fact that Nicholas was gone. “You said the two of you would handle— It’s the only reason I didn’t arrest the son of a bitch myself!”
“Not the only reason,” Tom said. “But no one comes back from Exanica anyway.”
The blood-drop potion might have killed him already. Benjamin had failed to tell Tom the proper dosage; they had decided they were better off emptying the bottle, guaranteeing that he slept as long as they required. Molly had seen him almost die of seasickness alone. She thought of how debilitated he had grown doing Mrs. Wickware’s chores; even if he reached the prison colony alive, it seemed impossible that he would survive a year, a month, a solitary week of hard physical labor.
The Lady’s Way dipped and vanished out of sight.
“He isn’t coming back,” she said, knowing he would come.