The bucket missed his ear by the width of a playing card.
It hit the doorframe, burst, and showered Lucian with cheap gin. He stood very still on the top step and let it run down his face. After a night of seawater, it was almost a relief to smell like something else.
“Evening, Garrick,” he said.
The man in the doorway filled it. He had always filled doorways. He was half a head taller than Lucian and twice as wide, with a beard gone to gray at the edges and a shirt that had been white the year the Empire changed its flag. His hands hung at his sides, and both of them were scarred from the knuckles to the wrists, the skin ridged and shiny and pink, like wax that had melted and set again.
He looked at Lucian for a long time. His eyes were red-rimmed and very clear.
“I said,” Garrick said slowly, “that if I ever saw your face again, I’d break it.”
“You did say that. I remember thinking it was a very specific threat.”
“I meant it.”
“I know you did.” Lucian wiped gin out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “That’s why I came up the stairs instead of through the window. Seemed polite.”
Garrick hit him.
Lucian had known it was coming, and he had decided, somewhere around the lime pits, that he was going to let it.
He had not fully appreciated what that would feel like.
The punch caught him on the cheekbone and the world went white and ringing. The stairs disappeared from under him. He went down them backward, all fourteen, in a long, graceless tumble that ended in the yard below, flat on his back in a slurry of tannery mud that smelled worse than anything he had smelled all night, and he had spent part of that night inside a sewer.
He lay there and looked up at the sky. It was starting to go gray at the edges.
Garrick came down the stairs after him. Not fast. He took each step deliberately, the way a big man does when he has been drinking and knows it.
“Get up.”
“I’m considering my options.”
“Get up, Luce.”
That was the first time anyone had called him that in two years. Lucian found that it landed harder than the fist.
He got up. He wiped mud off his face with a hand that was also covered in mud, which accomplished nothing. His cheek was already swelling. He could feel his pulse in it.
“You’ve gotten slow,” he said. “I saw that one coming from the stairwell.”
Garrick swung again. Lucian stepped inside it this time, let the big arm sail past his head, and tapped Garrick on the chest with two fingers.
“See? Slow.”
The third swing he ducked. The fourth he caught on his forearm and felt down to his heels. The fifth, Garrick didn’t bother swinging. He just lowered his shoulder and ran into Lucian like a falling mast, and they both went down into the mud together, Garrick on top, his weight driving the breath out of Lucian’s lungs.
A burned hand closed on Lucian’s collar. The other one drew back.
Lucian did not raise his arms. He did not try to roll away. He lay in the mud with three hundred pounds of furious former bosun on his chest, looked up into that red-rimmed face, and said, very quietly, “Go on, then.”
The fist hung there.
“If it helps,” Lucian said. “Hit me until it helps. Then I need you to listen.”
Somewhere over in the tenements, a rooster started up. A shutter banged. The sky over the lime pits had gone from black to the color of ash.
Garrick’s fist stayed where it was for a long time. Then, slowly, the fingers opened. The hand came down and pressed flat against the mud beside Lucian’s head as Garrick pushed himself up and away, breathing hard.
He sat down in the muck with his back against the glue works wall. He didn’t seem to notice where he was.
“Two years,” he said.
Lucian sat up. Everything hurt. He did a quick inventory and decided nothing was broken except possibly his dignity, which had been cracked for some time.
He pressed a hand to his ribs. The packet was still there. Of course it was.
“Two years,” he agreed.
“Two years, and not a word. Not one. Then you climb my stairs at dawn, soaked through, no coat, stinking of sewer, with the whole Bay ringing like a church—” Garrick jerked his chin toward the harbor, where the bell had finally fallen silent, “—and you say ‘evening’ like you’ve been out for a pint.”
“I’d have brought a pint. I was low on funds.”
“Don’t.” Garrick’s voice cracked like a split board. “Don’t do that. Don’t make a joke.”
Lucian stopped.
He looked at the big man sitting in the mud. At the bucket-shaped dent in the doorframe above. At the gin bottles, a dozen of them, lined up empty along the top step like soldiers. At the burned hands, resting palm-up on Garrick’s knees as if they belonged to someone else.
“All right,” he said. “No jokes.”
Garrick looked at him, then. Really looked.
“When they took the Oath,” he said, “I was on the quarterdeck. You know that? They came over the rail at midnight, thirty of them, and half our own lads standing aside to let them in. I held the wheel. Held it till the deck was burning under me and the spokes were too hot to touch, and I held it anyway.” He turned his hands over. “Couldn’t let go. Skin wouldn’t let me. Had to tear them off.”
Lucian said nothing.
“And I kept thinking, he’ll come. Captain’ll come up through the smoke any second with some mad plan, and we’ll all live to laugh about it.” Garrick’s mouth twisted. “You didn’t come. Nobody’s seen you since. Not a word. Not a letter. Not a coin for the widows. Then I hear you’re back in Crimson Bay, buying drinks for every pretty face in town and losing at dice and wearing velvet, like none of it ever happened.”
“Garrick—”
“Where were you?”
The question sat in the yard between them, heavy as an anchor.
Lucian opened his mouth. Closed it. In his pocket, his fingers found the die, and his thumb went to the notch, and stayed there.
There was an answer. He had carried it for two years. He was not going to give it to anyone, not tonight, not in this yard. Not even to this man, who had more right to it than anyone alive.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
His voice came out low. Short. Garrick heard the change in it and looked up sharply, the way men who’ve served a long time on one ship learn to hear a change in the wind.
“Can’t,” Garrick said. “Or won’t?”
“Both.”
For a moment, Lucian thought he would be hit again. He would have understood.
Instead, Garrick laughed. It was not a good laugh. It went on too long and ended in a cough.
“Course,” he said. “Course you can’t. Always one more card in your sleeve. Always some reason that’s too clever for the rest of us.” He spat into the mud. “So why are you here?”
“I’m taking her back.”
Garrick stopped laughing.
“The Oath,” Lucian said. “I’m going to find her, and I’m going to take her back, and I’m going to put a crew on her that won’t stand aside when someone comes over the rail. I need a bosun for that. I need the best one I ever sailed with.” He paused. “I need you.”
Garrick stared at him. Then at his shirt, transparent and filthy. Then at his empty hands, his bruised face, his bare head with mud drying in the hair.
“With what?” he said. “You don’t own a coat.”
“Details.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
“Not yet.”
“You don’t have a ship to go looking in, or a crew to sail it, or money to pay them.” Garrick’s voice rose. “The Navy’s turning the Bay upside down for you. Half the cutthroats in this town would sell you for a bottle. And you want me to put my hands back on a wheel for you?”
“Yes.”
The flatness of it made Garrick blink.
“Go away, Luce,” he said at last. He pushed himself up the wall, swaying, and started back toward the stairs. “Go away and get yourself killed somewhere I don’t have to hear about it.”
He climbed the fourteen steps. He went inside. The door slammed hard enough to shake loose a shower of dust from the eaves.
Lucian sat in the mud and looked at the closed door.
Then he got up, walked to the foot of the stairs, and sat down again on the bottom step with his back against the rail.
He must have dozed. When he opened his eyes, the sky was the pale, dirty yellow of a tannery morning, and someone was shouting at the far end of the yard.
He didn’t move. He only turned his head.
Four marines were coming through the gate by the lime pits. Fresh ones, dry uniforms, the kind who’d been sleeping in a barracks while the others ran around in the rain. The one in front had a roll of paper under his arm and a pot of paste in his other hand. As Lucian watched, he slapped a sheet against the tannery wall and smoothed it flat.
Even from forty yards, Lucian could read the largest word on it.
WANTED.
Below it was a drawing. He had to admit it was a decent likeness. Someone had given him a sneer he didn’t think he deserved.
So she’d done it, then. The cordon inside the wall hadn’t caught him, so she was throwing a wider net outside it. By noon, his face would be on every wall from here to the outer docks. By evening, every cutthroat Garrick had mentioned would be squinting at strangers in the street and doing sums.
The marines were moving down the row now. Pasting. Knocking on doors.
Lucian stayed exactly where he was. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t open yard, and running would only make him interesting. He leaned back against the rail, crossed his ankles, and arranged his face into the expression of a man too drunk and too poor to be worth a second look.
The lead marine was two doors away when the door at the top of the stairs creaked open behind him.
Lucian didn’t look up. He heard the heavy tread on the landing. Felt the long pause.
Then a burned hand closed on the back of his collar and hauled him up the first three steps like a sack of grain.
“Inside,” Garrick growled. “Before I change my mind.”