She had not yet set up her vendettas to expose our secrets if she ever vanished. We still had a chance. She could be drawn out alone and snapped up in silence.

Since the boy and I had agreed to cooperate on Baru’s removal—he providing the seizure which would give us medical pretext to threaten her—I had been working on a way to net Baru alone once she fled Helbride. Faham Execarne’s Morrow-men would provide clothes for the operation, which was to say insulation from local authorities, boats, money, muscle that could be trusted not to spill before or after. Iscend would be the sharpest tooth in our jaw, as clever as Baru and certainly quicker.

But I was more and more certain that we needed someone at Baru’s side. Someone who would lead us to her no matter where her madness and her narcissism brought her.

So in the creaking dark of star watch I left Iraji drowsing in my hammock (Svir had asked me to speak to him about his faints, and I’d exhausted him with talk: nothing else, for ill or weal) and padded through drowsing sailors to the ladder belowdecks.

The woman in the bilge would fit neatly into the gaping hole at Baru’s right. The beautiful woman Baru liked to dandle about, exploiting and deceiving, until she could be discarded. It would only be a matter of finally offering her that long-delayed Imperial pardon.

I shivered as the cool wet air touched my bare feet. In my memory Baru slumped on the wall of Svir’s cabin, the poison in full bloom, her roar and rattle seized away by the emptiness of convulsion.

She had fallen for the trap exactly as she always did. Arrogant. Proud. Conceited. Oblivious to the maneuvers of those around her, except where she was causing them.

Except—

There were moments, instants of instants, when I felt her watching me, and thought she knew—

And as she tipped back into that seizure I might have sworn before an ilykari, if pressed to oath, that I had seen her right eye wink at me.

*   *   *

HELBRIDE crossed into the northern edge of the Kraken Still. These were chaos waters where no gazetteer could predict the winds and no chart would ever save a ship from ruin.

But Captain Branne chose her course well, and the spring luck went their way.

Helbride passed through clear warm channels between volcanic islands, the water choked with thickets and heaps and bladdered mounds of ash-kelp, swarming with crustaceans and long worms. Mutinous Sulane stalked them at a careful distance, wary of mines or foulage. As a test of Helbride’s legal wards, Apparitor sent a group of wildlife enthusiasts out on a boat with an Oriati clerk. Sulane did not respond. Perhaps the Oriati clerk held Ormsment back, or perhaps she feared a trap.

Baru wondered what Tain Shir might be doing. But she did not show herself.