The burn behind my eyes was matched by the anger still boiling in my chest. If Clove had gone against Saint, then Zola was probably right. Clove wanted revenge for something, and he was using me to get it.

Voices shouted below and I turned back to the dock, where Soren had returned with a parchment. He unrolled it before Zola and he looked it over carefully. When he was finished, he took the feathered quill from Soren’s hand and signed. Beside him, a little boy dripped a pool of wax onto its corner and Zola pressed his merchant’s ring into it before it cooled. He was making a deal.

A moment later, a string of dredgers was lining up shoulder to shoulder behind them. My brow creased as I watched Zola walk down the row slowly, inspecting each of them. He stopped when he saw one of the younger ones hide a hand behind his back. Zola reached around him and yanked it free to reveal that the fingers on the boy’s right hand were bound in a bandage.

Zola dropped it before dismissing him, and the dredger’s place was taken by another who was waiting at the edge of the dock.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what he was doing. We weren’t stopping at Jeval for supplies or trade. Zola wasn’t here to buy pyre. He was here for dredgers.

“Make ready!” Clove shouted.

A deckhand shoved me back from the railing. “Out of the way,” he growled.

I moved around him, trying to see. But the crew was already lifting the anchor. Calla took the steps to the quarterdeck and I followed on her heel, watching over a stack of crates as Zola came back up over the side of the ship.

The dredgers from the docks spilled onto the deck behind him and the crew of the Luna stopped their work, every eye landing on the gold-skinned creatures climbing over the railing.

That’s why Zola needed me. He was headed for a dive. But he had at least two dredgers on his crew already, and I made three. There were at least eight Jevalis boarding the Luna, with even more coming up the ladder.

In the distance, the surface of the water roughened, the waves bristling as a cold north wind swept in from the sea. It sent a chill up my spine as the heaving lines were pulled up and I turned back to the deck. The last of the dredgers came up onto the ship and I froze when the sunlight hit a face I knew. One I’d feared almost every day I was on Jeval.

Koy stood almost a head taller than the other dredgers as he took his place in the line. And when his gaze fell on me, I could see the same wide look of recognition that I knew was in my own eyes.