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“What about you?” Though she’d rather fling herself into his arms, she instead grabbed Daron Sutton’s arm and shook him awake.

Pen rolled up one sleeve of his linen shirt. “There’s the matter of my brother’s debt. I won’t leave until I’ve paid.”

“You can’t—” Gwen started to argue, but Anne Sutton grasped her arm.

“Gwen, can we please leave? Like he said?”

A series of explosions ripped through the hull. Pen’s eyes widened. The Hound clutched the table, dry heaving. “I—I didn’t harm them,” he gasped. “Leave the money and go.”

“Oh, I don’t have money.” Pen rolled up his other sleeve. His hands were filthy and he reeked as he stepped into the room.

Gwen slipped under Prunella’s arm as the woman sagged, close to another fainting spell. “Don’t get hurt,” she said to Pen. “I need you.”

His eyes met hers, and the flicker of heat, of promise, licked through her to her knees. “I’ll be there. Now go away, my love.”

Pedr and Minikin stood on the main deck, cranking up the yawl.

Minikin gestured wildly as the women ran toward him.

Another explosion rocked the boat, shouts of alarm following.

From shore came the whinny of a horse. Gwen glanced over the side and saw the pony cart from the King’s Head waiting on the beach, the tired old gelding she recognized in its traces.

It wasn’t an elegant carriage, but it would get them to safety before the entire boat blew up.

“Over the side with you now!” Minikin cried.

Pedr picked up Prunella and slung her over the rail of the brig into the waiting yawl as if she were a sack of grain.

Lydia slapped his hand away and tried to clamber over herself.

Anne gave her dazed brother to Gwen as she flung herself into Pedr’s arms, nearly sobbing in relief as they reached the boat.

“Gwen?” Daron Sutton sagged against her, blinking in confusion. “Where am I? What are we—God, my head.”

“You,” Gwen said furiously. “You put us all in a fine pickle, and you’ll pay for it, Daron Sutton. Get them to shore,” she ordered Minikin.

“His lordship?—”

“I’ll be back with him in a minute!” Lifting her skirts, she sped back toward the stairway.

“Gwen!” Evans shouted. He hauled himself up from the hatch that led belowdecks, throwing his crutch onto the deck before pulling his body up. “Worked a little too well. We blew more than we meant to. We all need to clear this ship, now.”

“Pen is with the Black Hound.” Gwen watched without surprise as Ross, equally filthy, hauled himself up behind Evans.

“Then get him and get out! We’ll hold the last boat for you.” She turned as Pedr and Minikin hopped into the boat with the women and Sutton, while Evans and Ross ran to the winch to lower them to safety.

Another explosion ripped through the hull, and part of the desk exploded behind her as Gwen ran for the captain’s quarters. With a huge groan the brig rolled, rigging creaking as the masts tilted and the sails shifted weight. Gwen regained her footing and flung herself down the stairs.

“Pen, my darling! Time to abandon ship!”

The two men were locked in combat amid the wreckage of the walnut dining table and upholstered chairs. The mullioned windows had blown out, and a jagged hole had appeared in the floor. Gwen smelled the flames before they danced through the opening. The rug caught fire at once.

“Pen!” she screamed through the boom of another explosion. The men weren’t setting bombs now; these were out of their control. The overhead chandelier with its burning candles swung precariously.

“That,” Pen roared, landing a punch, “is for Edwin. You killed my brother, you bastard. He never would have taken that bet if he hadn’t owed you!”

The Hound was larger and heavier by a stone, but the poison had clearly reached his guts, and Pen had trained for this. “For Prunella!” he shouted, landing a right jab to the man’s ribs. “For Lydia.” A left.

For a moment, from some deep and primitive part of herself, Gwen thrilled to his physical strength, his domination. The Hound gasped and staggered to his feet.

“Christ,” he croaked, “have mercy.”

“Mercy? The same mercy you showed me?” Some transfiguring rage had overtaken Pen. He began a flurry of punishing blows, shouting incoherently. “This is for the Jew. This is for Arwen. This is for Bowen—for Nelson’s arm—for every man at Tenerife who—should—be—here?—”

The Hound’s face had nearly disappeared under blood. Pen’s fist shot out again, fingers clenched around the man’s throat. “Do you know what you did to me?”

The Hound’s fingers weakly scrabbled at his arm. He couldn’t answer with his airway choked off. Gwen fought down her fear that she was about the lose the man she loved and ran forward over the pitching floor.

She laid a hand on Pen’s iron forearm. “Pen. Don’t kill him. We have to get out of here.”

“He doesn’t deserve to live.” This wasn’t a Pen she knew. This was a feral animal.

“Then let the courts hang him. Pen! Please!”

Her cry was lost in another explosion as the rest of the room disappeared.

Pen lurched against her, dropping the Hound and shielding her with his body as the ship came apart around them.

A beam crashed across the stairwell, narrowing their only avenue of escape.

The rest of the room was a wall of fire.

With one hand, Pen grabbed the collar of his enemy, and with the other he shielded Gwen as they fought their way up the stairs.

On the main deck one of the masts broke and fell, its huge cross beams swinging through the air.

They half-stumbled, half-crawled over the disintegrating deck toward the yawl where Evans and Ross gestured wildly.

Pen launched the Hound’s inert body over the side, then spread himself against Gwen as another explosion erupted.

His body lurched against hers as he took the hit.

Grasping her arms about him, Gwen threw herself against the rail as the deck tipped, tumbling both of them into the boat.

Evans and Ross heaved wildly at the ropes, letting them down as fast as possible, while the crossbeam of the mast followed them, plowing through splintering wood.

One last explosion filled the air with smoke and ash, and Gwen’s entire body jolted as the boat hit the ground.

She waved her hands before her face, choking, then reached for Pen.

Evans and Ross helped her haul him onto the sand.

Rockets of light from the exploding ship fell about them like streamers at a market fair.

“Argh!” Pen groaned as Gwen examined his shredded back. “Not as bad as canister shot. And the right side this time. Balances things out.”

“You.” Gwen swallowed a sob. “Didn’t I tell you the third time I found you like this, I’d roll you under a hedge and leave you there?” She searched his body for other wounds, wiping away blood and what appeared to be scorched manure.

Pen staggered to his feet and let Evans help him toward the cart, laden with the rescued.

“You can’t. I have your selkie skin. I found it and kept it, and now you are bound to me.

” He turned his head, his face changing expression.

The feral animal was gone, and he was her Pen again, only chagrined.

“But then I gave St. sodding Sefin’s to Dovey, and now you’ve no reason to stay with me. ”

“My love, I’ll never leave you. I’ll go anywhere you wish.”

“Is that Penrydd?” Sutton leaned forward from among the women seated in the back of the pony cart.

“You!” Pen limped to the side of the cart. Before Sutton could recoil, Pen grabbed his cravat in a bloodied hand. “You worthless son of a bitch. If you ever raise a hand against my wife—if you ever think about my wife?—”

“I won’t! I won’t,” Daron bleated, batting at Pen’s fist, his eyes huge.

Pen breathed through his teeth. “If you say one word about my wife, to anyone?—”

“She’s dead to me. Dead!”

“She never existed for you at all,” Pen snarled. He let go, and Sutton sat back, gasping for air.

“But the Hound?” Anne asked uncertainly.

A low roaring sound rose from the river, and as one they turned to see the dark, high wave, like the fin of some great water monster, rolling up the Usk.

It broke apart the last hulk of the brig, which fell into separate pieces that quietly burned themselves out in the water.

The wave lifted the yawl bearing the Hound’s unconscious body and carried it northward, toward Newport, toward Caerleon, toward places beyond, faster than a man could run.

“Well,” Evans said into a silence edged with the sound of burning wood and the smell of sulfur and ash. “A new moon tonight, isn’t it? So that’d be the Severn bore, with the high tide behind it.”

“Where’s he going?” Ross asked in a hushed tone.

“I don’t care.” Pen turned to haul himself into the plank seat of the cart. “Let’s to the King’s Head and see what Trett’s done with the men we sent him. I’m for Gwen’s nursing and a good stiff drink, so long as it isn’t rum.”

Gossett met them at the King’s Head with roughed-up knuckles and the report that, intoxicated on the darnel beer, the Hound’s men had been easily rounded up by the constable—with some coaxing by Gossett.

“The villains are mewed in the lock-up, which is the noise you hear yonder,” Trett added, looking pleased with the part he had played in bringing peace back to Newport. “Sir Robert’s clerk will have a busy morning, writing out all the charges.”

Pen grunted with satisfaction. “I am therefore allowed to say I told you so,” he said to Ross.

They left the Suttons to shift for themselves at the King’s Head, and Gwen took her people back to St. Sefin’s.

Lydia consented as, she said, her luggage was there, and Prunella for her part did not want to be parted from Gwen.

The dowager viscountess caught Gwen as she came to the kitchen for another basin of hot water and herbs for Pen.

“We owe you our thanks, Miss Carew. You saved our lives.”

“It was Penrydd—Rhydian, my lady.”

“And how uncharacteristic of him, too.” Lydia looked as if she were struggling to smile but was unsure how to move her mouth that way. “The old Rhydian didn’t care a sot for others. You’ve—changed him.”

“I can’t take credit, mum. ’Tis more that he’s become himself, I think.”

“The man he was meant to be,” Lydia murmured. “I believe I can live with that man. And—with you.”

It was very nearly a blessing. Gwen’s eyes smarted with tears as she hurried back to Pen’s room.

She found him struggling out of his shirt.

The candle in its holder on the high shelf showed the jagged cut in his back.

Another scar for his fine, splendid form.

Her heart burrowed into her throat, sealing off words.

He had survived so much. He had come to her, her fair unknown, her gift from the sea, and he had seen beneath her own scars to the woman hidden there, had called forth a love she hadn’t known she could feel.

Hadn’t known she was healed enough to ever be capable of feeling.

She was his, body and soul. Like that silly myth of Plato’s he mentioned.

She would be his mistress. She would be anything he wanted, just to be near him, in his life.

She’d been putting too much stake in all the things that wanted to separate them—their stations and birth, their countries, their pasts.

When the truth was simply this: his heart calling to hers, and hers responding.

“What happens next?” Gwen whispered.

“To the Hound? Let him wash up where he may, and let the mercy shown to him be the kind of mercy he’s shown to the other poor souls he’s left in torment.” Pen stretched out on his bed, turning his injured back her way.

“To us, my heart.” Gwen wrung out her cloth in the basin. The water turned filthy in an instant.

Pen caught her hand. “I thought we settled that.”

She moved to swabbing his neck and felt his fast pulse. He had over-exerted himself, or he was desperate for her answer.

“I thought you might want to reconsider,” she whispered. “If you’ve been blown to your senses, or some such.”

He bent his head and laid his forearm against her arm. The gesture of surrender flattened her as nothing else could.

“I came to my senses the minute you walked into my rooms at the Green Man,” he said. “Everything’s pig’s poo without you, Gwen. You make everything hurt less.”

She loosed a trembling laugh at his Welsh curse. Could that be enough, that they could simply try to shield each other from the hurts of the world?

She stroked his back. Everything she wanted was bound up in the shape of this man. Just him. As he was. And he needed her.

“Let me be clear, Pen. Rhydian.” She tried his name in her mouth, finding she liked the full, properly Cymric shape of it. “I don’t want to marry the viscount.”

He tensed, as if awaiting the killing blow. She dabbed her cloth against his wounded cheek. She didn’t know what their future held, any more than he did. But she trusted him completely.

“However,” she said, her breathing shaky, “I very much want to marry you .”

His eyes kindled with wonder, and his face transformed into the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen. He lifted his hand to cradle hers against his cheek. “Thank God.”