I peer over the side. The craggy shore is less than a hundred yards away, and we are headed straight for it.

“Can we swim?” I say. “Or prepare to?”

“Prepare to, oui.” He turns. “Andrés?”

I point. “He is here.”

“I am not abandoning you,” Nicolas says to the ghost. “I am leaving the ship, for obvious reasons, but I will return. Whatever happens, I will return and free you.”

“He is waving for you to stop talking and go.”

Nicolas gives a short laugh. “He is wise. Yes, I am going. I will find who did this to you and return. I promise you that.”

16

We debate leaving our swords on the ship. Mine is small enough to pose no encumbrance, so I will take it. Nicolas’s is longer and heavier, and it may impede swimming, but he is loath to be weaponless when we reach the shore. In the end, we keep both.

We lower ourselves on the rope we used to climb onto the ship. I am quite an avid swimmer, being fonder of physical activity than is good for any woman of childbearing years. Or that is conventional wisdom, which my father considered utter nonsense. As children, we were encouraged to be as active as we wished. My childhood veered between the extremes. Days spent running wild at a holiday house on the coast, gone from sunup to sundown, along with days spent never leaving my room, my mind traveling to the worlds I discovered in books. Yet there is a great difference between leaping twenty feet from a cliffside and plunging from a vessel the size of the Temerity.

The first problem is the wake. The ship is careening for the coast, and we risk being caught in her wake and sucked underneath. The second problem is my unfamiliarity with the water. My mother taught me to dive, and the cardinal rule there is to always understand the water into which you are diving. Know the depth. Know the conditions—rocks or kelp or any other hazards. That is impossible here. It is dark, and we are leaping into murky water, and we must jump from high enough to avoid the wake yet low enough that we do not dash ourselves on rocks.

Nicolas goes first. Please note that I do not agree to let him go first. He wisely doesn’t ask. He jumps while I am positioning myself to do so, and thus he takes the risk, and I will refrain from chiding him about that later, just as I will refrain from letting him know I find his chivalry unexpectedly charming.

He jumps into the water and lands easily, but the wake begins to pull him under. Every impulse in me screams to jump in and help. I know better. This, too, is a lesson from my mother. If someone is caught in an undertow, you cannot save them by jumping in after them—you’ll both drown. You need to stay on firm ground and throw something to pull them out.