Would the pain follow me when I left this place? I imagined it would, if I never saw Priest and Ashley again. I imagined the pain would be worse.

Hours felt like days, and I still couldn’t hear. The bells of the afternoon watch must have rung, for the watchmen changed. Unlike the dreary weather.

The fog around the ship seemed to thicken. We weren’t moving.

The wind had dropped off. The sails hung loose. I didn’t need my hearing to sense there were no waves. No tide. The ship wasn’t rocking. Were we close to land?

The pale, obscuring mist prevented visibility beyond the bows. I tilted my eyes up and focused on the crosstrees. If I could hear, I imagined I would be listening to my rattling teeth, whimpering gasps, and the dying pulsation of my heart. I could feel the latter like a thudding drum, slowly losing energy.

The decks lay quiet to my broken ears. The glow from a pipe, the flicker of a lantern… Nothing else caught my eye in the gloom. Another hour passed. Two. Still, I kept my gaze on the crosstrees.

The watch changed again.

I felt myself fading, my limbs chilling in the oppressive humidity. Fever setting in.

Then something fluttered overhead. Feathers. Wings. A flash of a red beak. And another.

I knew that species of seabird. They flocked to the low, rocky cliffs of the bird island.

My heart restarted, pushing through the exhaustion of stress and pain.

Madwulf had taken my bait.

Minutes later, in a fleeting moment of lucidity, I glimpsed a vessel breaching the fog off the starboard bow.

Her silhouette split a hole in the vapor and emerged from the haze like a phantom ship. The bank of mist flinched away from her hull as if shuddering in fear.

I pinned my lips together, trapping the flood of my frantic breaths.

Amid the sound of silence, the air didn’t stir, the wind chillingly dead. She slid across water that was as smooth as glass. Dew glistened along the lines of her rigging. Her decks bristled with armaments.

I would recognize her mighty masts anywhere.

Jade had arrived for a fight.

47

Jade crept in, stealthy and dark, sliding board-to-board with Blitz. Whorls of mist curled around her spars, her masts looming overhead like the tentacles of a giant monster slowly rising from the sea.

The fog, the sinister stillness, the promise of devastating retribution—all of it shook me to my soul, slaying me at my most tortured, vulnerable depths. I wanted to sob at the sight of her. At the same time, I’d never been so furiously hungry for bloodshed.

By the time Madwulf’s drunken rogues noticed her in the mist, it was too late for them.

Within seconds, my crew threw over pikes and planks and swarmed aboard, their eyes wild and mouths agape. I wished I could hear their unified roar.