Mangos on Mount Eidhou would be ripe this time of year, a second crop turning the air sweet. Samina and the children would help sister Kyrie with the harvest. All the refugees and renegades helped. Quint must be nine, Bal a fierce fifteen, and Tessa a grown woman of eighteen, ready for husband and babies of her own. Djola was missing their lives. Samina would have to be mother and father. Kyrie’s towers were hot and dank, but Samina would fashion windcatchers and Lahesh wim-wom. She’d play talking books and her twenty-one-stringed kora harp till she melted stone mountain hearts.

Howling winds interrupted Djola’s drugged reverie. He focused again on the porthole. Kaharta, the southern harbor city the pirates had just raided, smoldered on the horizon: red, orange, and purple, like a setting sun. Pezarrat still torched the bigger cities. Seed and silk blunted Djola’s emotions, yet allowed him to focus on details at a distance—a good warrior drug. He peered out a porthole. A child on a shaky dock hugged a sooty goat and wailed. “Hush,” someone yelled, “nothing to be done.” Pezarrat raided Kaharta for Djola. “The best library outside the floating cities.” It was Djola yelling. He kicked useless books. Three years and he’d learned almost nothing.

“I’m scared,” someone blubbered at Djola. The wounded had arrived. Djola gathered a bloody pirate in his arms as the fellow gasped his last breaths: “My spirit debt, too high.” A boy of fifteen, nobody should blame him for his life so far. “Will I suffer in the death lands?”

“No.” Djola lifted his head so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood. “People say, ‘Living is free. No debts to pay at the end, just a legacy to leave behind.’” Djola repeated Zamanzi lies, excuses warriors invented for bad behavior. He wasn’t a proper healer like Vandana. She knew stories to ease a body into the death lands.

The boy shivered. “Who could believe such a thing?”

“Zamanzi—”

“Savages believe anything.” The boy came from a city like the one that burned, that had killed him. Kaharta was in a necklace of rich barbarian market centers around the Golden Gulf. A confederation of proud thief-lords, they’d seen better days.

The boy tugged Djola’s sleeve. “Do you believe we carry no debts at the end? You’re a Council master, a wise man—”

“Just a pirate like you and a savage even.”

“No.” The boy convulsed. “A wise man.”

Djola flinched and surveyed the wounded. This lot had been burned or hacked so badly, they were only ten breaths from—

“Death costs everything you’ve got,” the boy mumbled. “Nothing left to pay a spirit debt.” He expired. Djola might have saved him if he’d gotten to him sooner.