She looked back at him. “I’m Aligned, you know. I can feel the sea, the rise and fall, like an echo of my heartbeat. I hear a tune just for you, ready to call you home.” She took a step closer. “Would you like to be called home?”

She wasn’t normally so poetic, or so full of nonsense, but she found getting into character useful in times like this. And it had the man swallowing hard. But he still wasn’t talking.

She glanced up at Jin, got his nod. And then he braced an arm against the hull. Behind him, Sampson did the same. They knew what was coming. Knew what she was capable of.

She had to be careful; there was a line that couldn’t be crossed, a threshold that couldn’t be breached. But before that border, there was power. Potential.

Using her magic, Kit reached out for the current, for the heat and energy, for the ley line that shimmered below them in the waters. She touched it—as carefully as a violinist pressing a string—and the Amelie shuddered around them, oak creaking in the wake.

Her trick wasn’t familiar to the prisoner. “Gods preserve us,” he said, stumbling forward, face gone pale. Jin caught him by the collar, kept him upright, and when he gained his footing again, his eyes had gone huge.

“More?” Kit asked pleasantly.

“I don’t know where it came from,” the man blurted out, “and that’s the gods’ truth. I’m in the—I only make the deliveries.”

“You’re a smuggler,” Kit said again, tone flat.

“If we’re not being fine about it, yes. I pick up the goods in Fort de la Mer, and I get a fee for delivering them. I don’t ask what’s in the cargo.”

Fort de la Mer was a Gallic village perched on the edge of the Narrow Sea in the thin strait that ran between the Isles and Gallia. It was a busy port for merchants and smugglers alike.

“Delivered to whom?”

“I don’t know.”

Kit cast her glance to the window, to the ocean that swelled outside.

“All right, all right. There’s a pub in Pencester,” he sputtered. “The Cork and Barrel. I’m to drop it there.”

Pencester was directly across the sea and strait from Fort de la Mer. “To whom?” Kit asked again.

“Not to somebody,” he said. “To something. I mean, there’s a spot I’m to leave it. A table in the back. I’m to leave the box beneath the bench. That’s all I know,” he added as Kit lifted a dubious brow. “I deliver, and that’s all.”

Kit watched him for a moment, debated the likelihood he’d told the entire truth. And decided the Crown Command could wring any remaining information out of him in New London.

“Sampson, put him with the others.”

The smuggler blustered as he was led away, muttering about prisoners’ rights.

She glanced back, found Jin looking at her with amusement. “ ‘I hear a tune just for you,’ ” he intoned, voice high and musical, “ ‘ready to call you home.’ That’s a new one. And very effective.”