The problem with this peculiar power, apart from the fact that he didn’t understand or trust it, was that it gave him ice-pick headaches whenever he relied on it, and he could hardly keep his left eye open for more than a few minutes in the dark. The pain, and the odd awareness of edges and hardness, disappeared whenever he had light to work with.

Fortunately, his stowaway status had given him time to slow down and think on the problem. Whatever had affected his vision had happened between the time Hasdrubal had knocked him off the Thunderclap’s launch and the time he’d woken up with greasy vision on Ivar’s ship.

So was this thing through which he was seeing really his eye?

Ivar had Sedgwick working for him, a Goldentongue glamour weaver who could make anything look and sound and feel like anything else. He said that his job aboard the Dame Formue was to keep it concealed, but why volunteer that information? He certainly didn’t expect Jean-Claude to be impressed by his particular contribution to piracy. Yet as misdirection, the revelation worked. Jean-Claude hadn’t thought to question what else he might be up to.

Saints, but Jean-Claude prayed the dwarf had carried through on his promise to deliver his hat and his message to Isabelle. More lives than his depended on it.

Jean-Claude waited for night to fall and the ship to go quiet. There was never a time when a ship under sail truly slept, but the night watch was quieter than the day.

He crept out of his shelter into the narrow confines of the hold. Every muscle he owned ached from being cooped up all day. He sparked a hooded lantern to life, shortening the wick until it gave off no more glow than a candle. He worked his way through the stacks of stores and sneaked up to the orlop deck. Muffled conversations came from the quartermaster’s office toward the stern, and the surgeon was asleep in his own bay, but there by the companionway was a water barrel.

If Sedgwick had put some sort of glamour on him to conceal whatever had been done to his eye, water should reveal it. The barrel had a hole in its lid for dipping a ladle, but it wasn’t big enough to show his reflection.

Jean-Claude tested the fit of the lid and pulled it carefully away, gritting his teeth when the sodden wood scraped and squeaked. With a last recalcitrant groan, the lid came away.

Jean-Claude leaned over to take a look at his reflection.