“Sure you are,” Ivar said, “of a wee toy boat, with some wee toy sailors. You’re no match for the Dame Formue and definitely not for me. Now, because I’m a gentleman I’ll give you a chance to get off easy. You have something that was promised to me: a shard of bonekeel from the Conquest. Hand it over and that’ll be the end of your troubles. You run along home and I’ll go about my business. Otherwise, you end real messy.”

Marie stepped forward, two of her pistols already in hand, and raised her voice flat but forceful. “Before you act, be aware that I am Fellhand Marie of the Tall Clouds clan and my father is Jackhand Djordji. If you fight me you fight him, and there was never a sorcerer who stood against him, not even a Tidsskygge.”

Ivar’s eye narrowed to a slit. “I know all about the jackhand, missy. Wastrel and a cheat he is, good with a blade, but you’re not he. I see’s what’s coming and I’ll have those irons from your fists afore you can think about pulling the trigger, so mind your place.” He returned his attention to Isabelle. “Not that I have to touch you at all. I have it on good authority that you put some value in that reprobate Jean-Claude.”

Sedgwick winced at this, and Ivar went on. “Turns out he’s aboard the Potencia, right under Travers’s nose. Travers doesn’t know it yet, but I could let him.”

Fear flooded Isabelle’s mind, and anger like a ball of hot iron.

Call his bluff, Primus said. Threatening a hostage means that his position is otherwise weak. He means to make the hostage your problem. Make it his. He pulled her attention down into his memory, to a lonesome hill outside a burning town the name of which history had forgotten. There she stood as Capitana Falconé, and the man before her held a knife to her unfledged daughter’s throat.

“Throw down your weapons or she dies,” said the man.

Falconé’s pulse thrummed. She remembered fear and excitement, a gamble for the highest stakes.

She put ice water in her voice, cocked her head to one side, and said, “And then what?”

The man looked uncertain. “Did you hear me, I said—”

“She dies, I know,” Falconé said. “And then I kill you and your family, the whole nest of rats down to the last naked kit, and I leave them out for the crows. Do we have a bargain?”

Isabelle returned to herself as quickly as she’d left. The whole memory had come upon her and gone again as quickly as an eyeblink. She could not gamble with Jean-Claude’s life … yet if he were here, he’d hand her the dice.

She squared her shoulders, took a breath and said, “And then what?”