One of the guilt-boys, its visage less lupine than the others, the brow more sophisticated, raised its head, turned as six women emerged from the nearby warehouse. Like Ingrid, they had the look of a mariner, complexions weathered and warm-toned, arms cabled with muscle. Between each pair of them, they held troughs brimming with cast-offs from the day’s catch: a stew of dying mackerel and withered shoggoths, the latter already calcifying into impotence, their pseudopods thickly rinded with salt.

“Be that as it may, they still need someone to hang. Otherwise, the gallow-birds will be callin’ for the king’s neck on the guillotine and where’s that going to leave the country?”

“In the competent arms of his queen, I guess.”

Jamie laughed, the sound velvet and slightly mocking. He scratched at the bristling of white coroneting his jaw, the hair on his head still resolutely black save for the silver flowering at his temples. “I heard he signed off on the ship’s plans, which means he’s complicit in those thirty deaths. Thirty deaths. You know what the barristers call that? Employer negligence. They need to do something. Otherwise, the country’s image will suffer.”

He spat at Henrik’s feet.

“I hope they leave the women alone, at least.” Henrik thought of the conclave of widows who had taken roost in the town, their relationship with each other become familial in the wake of shared loss. Since the tragedy, they’d pared themselves of colour and company that was not their own, spoke to no one save to facilitate their businesses, dressed in nothing but black like the throat of the sea.

And they made money.

Money, as the town had never seen. Not even while the warship gestated in the naval yards, when merchants thronged the docks in hopes of sighting a monarch, organizing week-long markets; first for the bourgeois, then for anyone who strayed close to their vividly-tinctured booths. The profits from that time were astounding, but a beggar’s ransom compared to the revenue the women were now engendering.

“Don’t see why they wouldn’t. Not when they’ve got better prey.” Jamie palmed his neck and rolled his head back, wincing as cartilage crackled percussively. He slanted a thoughtful expression at his friend, mouth steepling. “You’re going to be okay?”

“Unless they’ve given up on seeking out the guilty and plan on hanging the first fool that bores them, I’ll be fine.” Henrik watched as the women maneuvered their cargo to the guilt-boys, setting the troughs down in a half-moon fencing the queensmen’s mounts. He watched as the queensmen arrowed towards him, helmets sloughed, tucked under arms. At their head, a woman of tremendous beauty, tall and panther-like.