“It was nearly morning when I made it to the tavern, and when I found him, he was drunk. If he wasn’t, I don’t think I would have been able to…” He paused, his eyes moving over the floor as if he was seeing the memory. “He was sitting at a table alone. I didn’t even think about it. I wasn’t afraid. I just walked up to him and put my hands around his throat and this quiet came over me. It was like … it was so easy. He fell out of his chair and he was kicking and trying to pull my hands away. But I just kept squeezing. I kept squeezing even after he stopped moving.”

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to imagine him, maybe fourteen years old, strangling a grown man in the middle of an empty tavern. His pale waving hair in his face. His golden skin in the firelight.

“I don’t know how long it took me to realize he was dead. When I finally let him go, I just sat there, staring at him. And I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel bad about what I’d done.” He swallowed. “When I finally looked up, there was only one other person in the tavern sitting at the bar. I hadn’t noticed him until that moment. And he was watching me.” West met my eyes. “It was Saint.”

I could see him, too, sitting at the bar in his blue coat with a green glass in his hand. Wheels turning.

“I knew who he was. I recognized him. At first, he didn’t say anything. He just kept drinking his rye, and when he was finished, he offered me a place on his crew. Right there, on the spot. Of course, I took it. I thought that anything had to be better than the helmsman I was working for. And he was. Saint was fair to me. So, when he started asking me to do him favors, I did them.”

“What kind of favors?” I whispered.

He let out a deep breath. “We’d make port and sometimes, there was something that needed to be done. Sometimes there wasn’t. Carrying out punishments for unpaid debts. Hurting people who wouldn’t be intimidated. Sinking operations or sabotaging inventories. I did whatever he asked.”

“And Sowan?”

His eyes flashed. He didn’t want to talk about Sowan. “That was an accident.”

“But what happened?”

His voice was suddenly quieter. “Saint asked me to take care of a merchant there who was working against him. I set fire to his warehouse when we stopped there on our route. The crew didn’t know,” he said, almost to himself. But that was the part of the story he’d already told me. “When we made port in Dern, I found out someone was in the warehouse when I started the fire.”