Garrick went into the soak trough the way a man walks into a church he has sworn never to enter again.
He did not complain. That was the worst part. He waded the nine paces with his jaw set and his scarred hands held high above the gray water, and when he reached the end he took the fistful of cooling glue that Lucian held out and rubbed it into his beard without a word.
“You’ve missed a spot,” Lucian said.
“Say one more thing.”
“Behind your left ear. I’m only trying to help.”
Garrick looked at him for a long moment, then scooped another handful and slapped it against the back of his own neck so hard that the vat men turned around.
They left the glue works at dusk, the way the vat men did, in a slow shuffle of tired bodies heading for the gin shops along the tannery road. Nobody looked twice at two more men who stank. Everybody stank. It was the uniform of the place.
Behind them, somewhere past the lime pits, the hounds barked themselves hoarse at a soak trough and could not understand why the world had stopped making sense.
“Where are we going?” Garrick asked, once the road bent away from the last houses.
“Somewhere warm.”
“It’s going to rain.”
“Then somewhere warm with a roof.”
Lucian led them along the shoreline, past the black ribs of a burned fishing shed and a row of beached skiffs that hadn’t seen water in years. The road became a path, the path became a ledge of crumbled limestone, and at the end of the ledge, half dug into the cliff, stood the old lime kiln.
It was a squat stone tower with a round mouth at the bottom, the kind of place where they used to burn shells and rock into quicklime before the works moved closer to town. The fire had been out for a decade. The stones had not forgotten it. When Lucian put his palm flat against the inner wall, it was faintly warm, holding the last of the afternoon sun.
“How do you know about this place?” Garrick said.
“I know about a lot of places.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have that doesn’t involve a woman’s husband.” Lucian ducked through the mouth and sat down on the ash-soft floor. “Come in. Mind your head. It’s lower than your opinion of me.”
Garrick folded himself inside with a grunt. The kiln was barely wide enough for both of them. Through the arch they could see the whole harbor spread below, the walls of Crimson Bay black against a darkening sky, the water beyond them dotted with the small lights of patrol boats.
Lucian counted them. Seven. Last night there had been nine.
“You’re doing the thing,” Garrick said.
“What thing?”
“The counting. You used to do it on the quarterdeck. Stand there with your hands behind your back, looking at nothing, and then tell me how many hours until the weather turned.” He wiped glue off his knuckles onto the stone. “Drove the crew mad. They thought you were praying.”
“I was doing arithmetic. It looks the same from a distance.”
The rain came an hour later, soft at first, then steady. Garrick found a pile of driftwood someone had stacked against the back wall years ago, dry as paper, and Lucian struck the flint from the kiln’s old iron fire box until a spark caught.
It took four tries. On the fifth, a thread of smoke rose from the shavings, and Garrick cupped his huge burned hands around it and blew so gently that it surprised them both.
The little fire bloomed. Sparks drifted up the chimney of the kiln and vanished into the rain.
For a while neither of them said anything.
Then Garrick nodded at the front of Lucian’s shirt, where the outline of the oilcloth packet pressed against the wool.
“That’s what this is about,” he said. “Isn’t it? Not the Oath. That.”
“It’s about both.”
“What is it?”
Lucian turned his hands toward the fire. “Paper.”
“Luce.”
“Paper that someone in the Admiralty wanted badly enough to keep in a locked drawer, inside a locked room, inside a building with forty marines and a moat.” He watched the flames. “Paper that made a commander’s face go very still when I called it a shipping log.”
“Did you read it?”
“Some of it.”
“And?”
Lucian was quiet for long enough that the fire popped twice.
“And I’ll tell you when I’m sure,” he said. His voice had gone low and flat, the way it never did when he was joking. “Not before. If I’m wrong, it’s just paper, and you never knew. If I’m right, knowing it is the kind of thing that gets a man put in the harbor with stones in his pockets.”
Garrick studied him over the fire. Whatever he saw in Lucian’s face, he didn’t push.
“You always did that,” he said finally. “Carried the heavy end and called it nothing.”
“I’m lazy. Carrying it myself means I don’t have to explain it to anyone.”
“Liar.”
“Frequently.”
Lucian didn’t sleep. Around midnight he left Garrick snoring beside the coals and went to crouch in the mouth of the kiln, watching the harbor.
The patrol boats moved in slow lines across the black water. Each one carried a pair of lanterns at its stern, one high and one low, and every so often a boat would cover its high lantern and uncover it again. Short. Long. Short. A pause. Then another boat across the harbor answered.
Lucian watched them talk to each other for an hour.
He didn’t need to write anything down. He had learned this alphabet a long time ago, at a long table, in a room with tall windows and a view of a sea much calmer than this one. He had learned it next to someone who had always finished the exercises a little faster than he did and never once let him forget it.
He rubbed his thumb along the notch on the die and made himself stop thinking about the room.
Short. Long. Long. The boat nearest the harbor mouth was asking for something. Two answers came back, one from the inner harbor, one from far out past the breakwater, where no patrol boat should have been.
Lucian leaned forward.
Out past the breakwater, a new light showed. Larger than the patrol lanterns. Three in a vertical line, red over white over white.
He knew that pattern too. A navy vessel under orders, carrying stores. Not a warship. Not a patrol. A supply ship, coming to feed seven hungry patrol boats that had been circling the same water for three days and nights.
He watched it for a long time. It didn’t come in. It held position off the breakwater, rocking in the swell, and its lanterns spoke to the harbor boats in a slow, patient rhythm.
Holding. Holding. West channel at first light. Holding.
Behind him, Garrick shifted in his sleep and muttered something about rope.
“West channel,” Lucian said under his breath.
He’d sailed it twice. It was the narrow back passage on the far side of the harbor, between the old seawall and a sandbar that moved every season. Deep enough at high tide for a ship drawing ten feet. Not much more. A big vessel would have to come through it slowly, with a man in the bow calling soundings, and while it came through it would have nowhere to go but straight ahead.
He sat back on his heels. In the dark, alone, he allowed himself one small grin.
“No,” Garrick said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’ve got your face on.”
It was still dark, the rain thinning to a drizzle, the fire down to a low red glow. Lucian had woken him with a hand on his shoulder and then sat across from him without speaking, which was apparently enough.
“There’s a supply ship off the breakwater,” Lucian said. “Navy. Stores for the blockade. It’s coming in through the west channel at first light.”
“And?”
“And I’d like to have it.”
Garrick stared at him. Then he laughed, a real laugh, short and helpless, the first one Lucian had heard from him in two years.
“You’d like to have it.”
“Very much.”
“You’ve got no crew. No weapons. No money. You don’t have shoes.”
“I have a boatswain.”
The laughter stopped.
Garrick looked down at his hands in the firelight. The burn scars crossed his palms like the grain in old wood. He turned them over, then back again.
“You don’t,” he said quietly. “You have a man who used to be one.”
“Same thing.”
“It isn’t. A boatswain has a ship. A captain. A crew that didn’t open the rail for thirty knives at midnight.” He closed his hands into fists. “I don’t know what I am now. I know what I was. I know what I’ve been since. I don’t know if there’s anything left in between.”
Lucian didn’t answer right away. He reached into the embers with a stick and turned over a coal, and a spray of sparks lifted toward the chimney and went out one by one in the dark above them.
“You blew on the fire,” he said.
“What?”
“Last night. I couldn’t get it to catch. You cupped your hands around it and blew on it like it was the last fire in the world.” He set the stick down. “A man who has nothing left in between doesn’t do that.”
Garrick said nothing.
“I’m going to the west channel,” Lucian said. “With you or without you. I’d rather it was with you. But I’m not going to ask again, because I’ve already cost you your room and your name and your blanket, and I won’t cost you your choice too.”
He stood, ducked under the arch, and climbed the crumbled steps cut into the side of the kiln, up to the flat stone crown, where the drizzle and the wind off the water covered every other sound. From there he could watch the supply ship’s lanterns.
He stood there for a long time.
When he finally climbed down, the fire was banked and the kiln was empty.
There were wide boot prints in the wet ash at the mouth of the kiln. They went down the ledge toward the shore, and around the bend, and out of sight.
Lucian looked at them for a while. Then he looked out at the harbor again, where the three lanterns of the supply ship still hung off the breakwater, red over white over white.
He took the die out of his pocket and rolled it once across his knuckles.
It came up six.