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“When don’t we?”

“Ramsay,” he says sharply. “I’ve gotten word that the navy might be in these waters.”

I get up and saunter over to the rail, chucking the eaten apple overboard and gazing about for any sign of ships. “You’ve gotten word you say? From whom?” I ask, though there’s only one way to have word travel when you’re under sail. We’ve tried passenger pigeons but Skip, the ship’s cat, ate them more times than not.

“You know who,” he says, an edge to his tone.

“From your crystal ball? You know, the sooner you admit that magic exists, the sooner we can just come out with it.”

“I obviously know it—look here, it doesn’t matter. Yes. I used the ball.”

“And?”

“And I asked if there was any danger ahead and that’s when I saw the navy ship.”

I think about that for a moment. The ball isn’t always accurate. Yes, it can show you the future, but the images are often hazy with no time or space attached to them. Thane might have seen a navy ship, but to know when in our future we’ll come across it is harder to pin down.

The crystal ball itself was a gift from my wife Venla to him when she first married into the family. She was a witch, and she knew that my brother and my parents would be hard to win over. Indeed, it took me a very long time for them to even agree to meet her. Witches aren’t the most liked creatures in my family, or really anywhere else for that matter.

So Venla gave Thane a large crystal ball, a translucent quartz that turned an opaque shade of purple and pink when you used it with your own energy. Venla told Thane he could use it for manifesting what he wants, or that he could ask it to show him the future.

I have to admit, I was jealous when she first gave him that. It sounds petty, but I was so used to my older brother getting everything and it spurned me that he could use the ball and I couldn’t. Even if I held the ball and asked for the same things, it would never show me anything.

Venla would laugh when I complained about it and told me that marrying a witch gave me the upper hand. It did in many respects, including the wind in the sails, but now Thane has something of Venla’s and I don’t. It’s been a long time since Venla died, and I have come to terms with her death, but to have a part of her still would have been nice. I had Hilla, I had the book, but the sea witch took all of that from me.

“Ramsay?” Thane says, bringing me back on track.

“Do you know if any of the vessels you saw are Smith’s?” I ask, my voice automatically lowering over his name. The same name causes my brother’s nostrils to flare, his posturing stiffening even more than it was before.

He shakes his head. “If I knew, I’d have told ya.”

“Well, then we have no choice but to be prepared. I’ve already told the gunmen to go to their posts, Matisse and Sterling too.”

He nods and adjusts his hat, scanning the area. The sky is still a little hazy, the humidity clinging to my skin, and the air smells earthy and sweet with flowers as we pass close to land. On either side of the ship are islands, lush with palm trees that line the sugary white-sand beaches, the sea shifting through shades of azure and turquoise before it meets the shore. It’s a tropical paradise, a million miles away from the cold wet Scottish highlands that Thane and I grew up in. And yet people from our past, like Captain Ed Smith, can follow us here. They say the world is large and endless and uncharted, but in my opinion it’s very, very small.

“I heard you were asking if anyone had laid a hand on the princess,” Thane says.

“Who did you hear that from?”

He gives me a knowing look. The role of the quartermaster is to not just be second in command, ahead of the first mate, but to be the one the crew goes to for anything. Though Thane’s grizzled personality could make a crocodile seem charming, his studious and thoughtful nature invites others to seek his counsel. “Sam told me.”

Sam and everyone else, I’m sure.

“I didn’t actually expect any of the crew to have touched her, except for Sterling of course. I was just playing a game with her.”

“And what game was that, exactly?” he asks with a raised brow.

I chew on that for a pause. “I’m not sure, to be honest with you, brother. She compels me.”

My eyes are scanning the nearest coves as we pass but even so I can feel my brother’s focus on me. “It was your idea to take them hostage, mate. No good can come of this if this womancompelsyou.”

I shake my head. “Nay, it’s not like that. There’s just something different about her and I don’t know what it is. And the fact that she stays with an arse like the weasel-faced prince…”

Thane lets out a huff of dry amusement. “As if you are true gentleman yourself and not a dirty pirate.”

“Dirty?” I scoff. I hold out my hand. “You see these nails? Not a speck of dirt under them. We’re the cleanest group of pirates anyone’s ever met.”

“Yes. Perhaps we’d get a reputation if only we’d let people live long enough to spread the truth.” He leans back against the rail and tilts his head. A grave expression comes over his face, causing the lines around his eyes to deepen. “You know, one of these days there’s going to be a reckoning for us. For what we’ve done. For what we are. It ain’t going to be pretty.”