CHAPTER 35

Captain of the Black Beauty

Captain Reed heard about the Black Beauty long before he laid eyes on her: a black ship with a charging horse for a figurehead and a speed matched only by the Current. While he was still swabbing decks, she was racing sea monsters, outpacing storms, and committing sundry acts of piracy in the southeast, robbing shipments of bullets and gunpowder coming out of Roku.

She was the only ship who’d sailed into the ever-present rains of Zhuelin Bay, raised a flag in the ruined, waterlogged city of Ashrim, and gotten out again.

The day Reed met her captain, she was chasing dragons through the volcanic Rokuine islands, harpoons glinting at her prow. When he and the Current interrupted her hunt, she was livid. He remembered her standing on deck, her black hair all a-tangle, and her voice, furious, ordering the Beauty to fire on the Current.

They’d crossed paths many times in the years since—during high-stakes games of chance and skirmishes between pirates; she’d even been the one to fish him off that island where Dimarion had abandoned him nearly six years ago—and to Reed, the Black Beauty was everything an outlaw should be: too wild to be tamed, too big in legend to be contained.

Ships like that didn’t belong in a shrinking sea.

After meeting with Adeline and Isabella, Captain Reed and the Current of Faith spent months scouring the Central Sea for other outlaws. Some refused Haven. Others, chased out of the east by the Alliance, gladly came. They brought in the Crux, Captain Bee and the One Bad Eye, mercenaries, treasure hunters, and merchant brigs that had taken one illegal job too many to remain among civilized folk.

Some, they were too late to save, sailing in upon the wreckage of outlaws who had died fighting back. They collected the stories of survivors and the names of ships that had been lost.

The Current went out again and again, but it wasn’t until mid-autumn that they finally found the Beauty.

The fear that had been knotting in Reed’s gut since they’d started the search for outlaws eased. The Black Beauty was intact. She wasn’t moldering somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

But when her captain boarded the Current, leaving her lieutenant Escalia aboard the Beauty, Reed almost didn’t recognize her. She was thinner, paler than he remembered, her silvery gaze wandering over the decks. She blinked too often to be sure of herself.

For a moment she knelt, pressing her palm to the deck.

Over her shoulder, the chief mate shrugged.

When she stood again, she offered no explanation. That, at least, was familiar.

In the great cabin, she paced along the shelves of relics Reed had spent his life collecting. She reminded him of an animal, probing the bars of her cage for weaknesses.

While he poured her a few fingers of whiskey, she laid a slim hand against the case that held the Thunder Gong, which he’d fished out of that maelstrom nearly six years before.

“You ever get this to work?” she whispered.

“Nah.” He offered her a glass. “Reckon it’s broke.”

Like your voice, he thought. Once smooth and strong as steel, now it was harsh as brushfire and quiet as ash.

She ignored the proffered glass, relieving him of the crystal decanter instead. Prowling past him, she swigged directly from the bottle and flung herself into one of his armchairs, sprawling out in a way that was both perfectly poised and totally nonchalant at once.

“The world’s broke, if you ask me,” she declared.

Reed raised his glass. “That’s why I been lookin’ for you. Where you been, Tan? Dimarion and I expected you on our tails months ago.”

Captain Tan removed the scarf at her throat, revealing a thin scar that curved across her throat like a scythe. “I ran into a couple problems in Oxscini,” she whispered. “And Jahara, once I got there.”

In one smooth movement, Reed set his glass down and bent to examine her neck. “Who did this?”

To his surprise, tears beaded at the corners of her eyes.

He almost stepped back. The captain of the Black Beauty didn’t cry.

“What happened out there?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” she said, pushing him away, “and not one I’m willin’ to tell.” She took another drink from the decanter.

Reed took a seat opposite her on one of the benches. “Lemme spin you a yarn, then, unbelievable but true,” he said, and began to tell her about the Alliance between Everica and Liccaro, the Crux, Haven.

Tan didn’t look impressed. Then again, he hadn’t thought she would be. He’d seen her load five bullets into a revolver and spin the chamber before turning the gun on herself. Folks like her didn’t play it safe.

“That mean you found the Trove?” she asked. He felt her searching his skin for new tattoos.

“This seemed more important.”

She lifted from the chair so gracefully it was like she was floating. “That’s all well and noble of you, Cannek, but you don’t just give up a lifetime of chasin’ adventure to settle down and raise hogs. That isn’t—that ain’t you.” Hooking her finger into his collar, she tugged his shirt down so hard he nearly fell forward.

“This is you,” she whispered. Her gaze traveled over his neck and down his tattooed chest. “You got more of these since I last saw you shirtless.”

Heat flowered in his face. A long time ago, they’d been lovers for a night. When he awoke in the morning, Tan was gone and the rudder chain on his ship had been cut.

“Lettin’ you get me naked is a mistake I’m never makin’ again,” he said, detaching her fingers from his shirt.

Captain Tan scowled. “Don’t flatter yourself. Seein’ you naked was a mistake I ain’t fixin’ to repeat either.”

He grinned as she flopped down beside him on the bench, her legs stretched out before her. For a few minutes, they drank in silence.

Finally, she said, “You been workin’ your whole life to get yourself a little bit of immortality.” She waved the bottle of whiskey at his tattooed arms. “Don’t know why you’d give up when you were so close.”

Reed shrugged. “I let that dream die when Jules did.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Dreams don’t die, Reed. Family, friends, lovers . . . they rot like anything else. But not dreams.”

“I tried, Tan.” He sighed. “No one can say I didn’t try.”

“Then why are you givin’ up when you’ve almost got it?”

Low though it was, the tone of her voice made him sit a little straighter. “It?” he asked.

“The Resurrection Amulet.”

Resurrection. The word called to him. Immortality.

“The what?”

“The Resurrection Amulet.” Tan pronounced the words slowly, as if he’d misheard her. “It’s supposed to be hidden somewhere in the Trove. One of the king’s most precious treasures.”

A treasure that could cheat death. The cursed diamonds of Lady Delune had been a bust. Just like everything else he’d ever tried. But maybe . . . Maybe he could escape the fate that awaited him—that awaited them all—at the edge of the world. Maybe he didn’t have to end up like that. Maybe he could live forever, and not just in name.

Reed narrowed his eyes at her. “Why’re you tellin’ me this? What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” She shrugged, though she couldn’t hide the bitterness in her voice. “But some of us oughta get what we always wanted.”

Immortality.

He’d told himself he didn’t need it.

Didn’t want it.

But Tan was right. Dreams didn’t die. Dreams were always there, deep inside you like a flame in the dark, waiting for fuel.

“You ain’t kiddin’ me,” he said, still afraid to hope.

Captain Tan plunked the crystal decanter on the table. “Do I look like I’m in a kidding mood?”

And as she spun Reed a tale of death and ancient creatures made of stars, of desperate smiths and something called a soul, the flame inside him roared into a blazing fire. Hot enough to burn all thoughts of Haven to ash. Bright enough to light the way, no matter where this adventure took him.

He was Captain Reed.

He’d find a way to cheat death—or die, gloriously, trying.