A Swift and Savage Tide (A Captain Kit Brightling Novel Book 2)

The gendarmes led Kit and Cooper at bayonet point back through town in relative silence, only occasionally murmuring things to each other that Kit couldn’t hear, but which resulted in curious glances at the women.

At least the bayonets were rusty. New guns would have been a different kind of threat to Kit, Cooper, and the Isles. Proof of funds and a supply line equipping Gerard’s army with new weapons. Instead, they’d only worry of lockjaw.

“Right into the sea,” Kit muttered.

“What was that?” the guard asked.

“I said, you’ll make us miss our ship.” Kit threw up her hands. “We’ve done nothing but spend coins while waiting to sail. Ungrateful curs,” she muttered, and managed to look angry instead of afraid.

But they made no response, which made Kit more nervous than if they’d made retorts about nosy women. Silence meant they were serious—and controlled. That would make them harder to fool.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Cooper whispered. “It was the damned cobblestones.”

“I know,” Kit said. “Are you hurt?”

“Only a sore knee, and that’s nothing. More a bit embarrassed.”

“No need for embarrassment or guilt. What’s done is done. We’ve survived this far, and we’ll keep doing it.”

They were pushed toward a central square and toward a long building of pale stone with small, high windows. A gaol, she guessed, given the uniformed gendarmes hanging about outside it. At least it wasn’t a prison ship, which was exactly as described: old and unseaworthy hulks anchored just offshore to hold prisoners too dangerous to keep on land, or because those prisons were already overfull. She’d anchored at a Gallic prison ship before—escorting diplomats who’d sought the release of Islish sailors during the war. She hadn’t been inside, but her impression from the Diana had been more than enough. The hull was pockmarked and covered with barnacles and algae, and the entire thing stank of humans, waste, and fetid water. Calling them “ships” was an injustice to every other vessel that floated. They were misery made physical.

Two great wooden doors at the entrance were pushed open, scratched and squeaking. Kit and Cooper walked in behind their captors.

“Left,” one of the guards said, and another old door was opened. Kit and Cooper were shoved through it.

This room was large, with plank floors that were pale with age and want of oiling, except where they were stained with gods only knew what. The walls were pale stone in the same condition, and two dozen prisoners, most presenting as males, sat or squatted on the floor or leaned against the walls in clumps of two or three.

If she admitted they were Islish officers, they might be handled more carefully. Separated from the other prisoners, held in private homes rather than gaol. Or they’d be immediately executed as spies. Gerard had never been one for diplomacy; little cause for it when you’d named yourself the emperor.

“It’s not so bad,” Cooper whispered in Gallic, careful enough not to forget her character. “I’ve never been in gaol before.”

The guard snickered. “This isn’t the gaol. This is just temporary barracks until you’re removed to the ship.”

Kit cursed again.

“The ship?” Cooper asked.

The guard’s smile was wide and poorly maintained. With a bit of what appeared to be spinach for decoration. “Prison ship up the coast. It’s anchored there ’cause of the . . . smell.”

But they weren’t there yet. They weren’t wholly without hope. Just more or less so.

The guard closed the door behind them, engaged the bolt. Several of the men on the floor rose; those on the walls pushed off, moved closer. Maybe a bit less hope now.

“No worries,” Kit whispered to Cooper. “Show no fear.”

“I’m not afraid, sir.”

Kit glanced at her, saw the gleam in her eyes, watched as she rolled up her sleeves. Her knuckles, Kit belatedly realized, were bruised.

“You’re a bit terrifying, Cooper,” Kit said, with no small approval.

Cooper tried for a grin. “I enjoy a bit of sparring now and again,” she said, and looked over the crowd. A few of the prisoners looked interested in a bout. Others took their seats again. Most looked lean and a little on the hungry side, but their shirts and trousers of homespun were worn but clean. Definitely not as bad as a prison hulk.

“Over there,” Kit said, and they moved to a sidewall beneath a window, kept the wall at their backs. Cooper cracked her knuckles.

They needed a way out, Kit thought, and considered the windows opposite, the door, the floor. All of them seemed secure, so they’d need assistance from the outside. Jin would send help. At least when their time was up. They just had to stay off the hulk until then.

Since they were stuck here for now, she might as well discover what they knew.

“La Boucher,” Kit said, and continued in Gallic. “Who can give us information?”

That question was met with curses that put Cooper’s bit about the goat to shame. Kit pulled a copper from the slot in the lining of her coat.

“Best information gets a coin,” she said, and the avarice in their eyes all but lit up the room. A copper wouldn’t be enough to buy the prisoners’ freedom, she suspected, but might get them a cup of wine.

“He’s a conjurer,” one shouted out. “Not just Aligned, but touched by the gods.”

“He has the blood of the old gods in him,” another agreed. “Can work spells, can’t he?”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Kit redirected. “He didn’t die at Contra Costa.”

“No.” A man on the floor, legs crossed and pale feet bare, shook his head. “Only injured. But took him a year to recover, so they say. He crawled out of the debris and wandered away from the battlefield, broken and burned. Story goes, he lived with a farmer five miles away.”

“No,” said a man with light brown skin who stood nearby. He hobbled toward them, using a cane to cross the floor. “Was with a local clerk. I’ve a sister who worked as a maid near the village he stumbled into. He didn’t remember a thing of the battle for months.”

“Was a year,” said the man on the floor. “And another yet before he could walk again.”

And then found his way back into the arms of the loyalists, Kit surmised, who were undoubtedly thrilled to find him alive. Contra Costa had occurred in 1812; Gerard abdicated in April 1814.

Kit tossed them both coins. “How long has he been here?”

The man with the cane held out his hand, but Kit was done with negotiation.

“You’ll all get your pay if the information’s correct,” she said. “How long?”

“Saw him first about a fortnight ago,” he said.

So longer than the Fidelity. Kit would bet a handful of coppers the ship had landed here because of Doucette’s presence, or he’d come here specifically to meet the ship. There’d be no coincidence. “Have you seen the emperor?”

The curses that followed the question shouldn’t have surprised her; she was in a gaol, after all, and it was a good bet they weren’t wealthy Gerard loyalists able to buy or cajole their way out of shackles.

“ ‘The emperor,’ ” said the man on the floor, “ain’t shown his face here.”

Given the sneer, she expected he was no loyalist, and was telling the truth. She pulled out another copper, tossed it to the man who’d answered the question.

Before she could ask anything else, a crack split the air, and the building itself shuddered. Cooper jumped, and Kit held out her arms to keep her balance, but the vibration stopped as quickly as it had started.

Kit felt a new kind of unease. She’d experienced an earthshock before, and this wasn’t that. It was magic, irritated enough that even she—Aligned to the sea—could feel it roiling beneath the surface, as if angered to have been disturbed. And when she realized none of the other prisoners so much as flinched at the sound, her discomfort increased.

“You want to see how he uses his power?” the man with the cane asked, and gestured to the window. “Look there.”

Kit looked back at the window that had been cut into the stone behind them, set-in with small iron bars. She stood on tiptoes, craning upward to see, and could just make out a man standing in a courtyard of scrubby grass that lay between the prison and the building behind it.

It was Doucette. And he wasn’t alone. A man stood some yards away. Another officer, perhaps, although he wore no waistcoat or tailcoat. His linen was untucked, his dark hair unkempt. And his skin looked pale as death, his eyes hard-set and grim, as if he knew what was coming.

Another crack, another shock hard enough to rattle the door on its hinges, and it appeared. A glow of blue, like the phosphorescence that sometimes rode ocean waves, a cloud of faint green that glowed as the Diana moved through it. But while that color was beautiful, diffuse and soft, there was something sharper here, as if the magic had physical form.

This was the bright edge of the current, she thought with horror, pulled from the rock below to the surface it should never see.

Hard edges or no, it was . . . beautiful, with swirls of darker colors intermingling with lighter, and shocks of brightness at the edges, like lightning in miniature. She’d never really seen the current; her perception of it was altogether different. Her Alignment was more like a sixth sense. Probably a good thing, because its beauty, its dance, was hypnotic . . .

Kit shook her head to snap herself out of her thrall. This wasn’t a pretty sunset or a well-hewn figurehead. It wasn’t something to be admired, and she shouldn’t be seeing it at all. No human should be able to effect so much power, to manipulate something so dangerous, without apocalyptic results. Manipulating the current was banned for a reason.

As if to prove he didn’t care a whit for law or morality, Doucette reached out a hand toward his quarry, palm raised. His glove was gone now, but she saw no scars, at least from this distance. His chin firmed as he concentrated on his task, arm shaking with apparent effort.

Before Kit could blink, the current snapped forward like a whip and struck the man in the chest with a crack loud enough to vibrate the walls of the cell.

The man fell to the ground, body jerking, bowing, from the shock of the power unleashed against him. He made no sound, no scream, but his fingers dug into the soft earth, grasping for purchase or weapon or . . . release.

Kit grabbed the window’s bars, trying in vain to pull them free—and apparently thinking she might fly toward the man and shield him from the current, take some of it herself, add to the scars on her palms. And then the man stopped moving. One final jerk, and his body went loose. His head lolled to face her, eyes wide but unseeing.

He was dead.

Her belly went cold with fear.

Doucette had used the current to kill a man. He’d pulled it from the ground and aimed it, just as he might a musket or rifle. And he’d taken a life.

Kit gripped the bars harder, heart pounding. She’d seen death before, had caused it herself. War was the ugliest business of humanity, after all. But this was different, even as it pained her to admit it. She had no power that could match this. No knowledge or ability that would allow her to fight it. And she didn’t know anyone in the world who could.

Doucette’s arm dropped, his shoulders slumping, as he released his grip on the current. The earth trembled again as the current slipped back into place, out of sight of human eyes.

Despite what he’d done, Doucette didn’t look pained or injured and bore no scars other than those already visible. There was no inferno or splitting of the ground; no indication at all but for the initial sound and shudder—perhaps the shock of magic breaching the earth—that he’d done anything.

Was there no cost he must bear? she thought with frustration.

Suddenly, he turned and looked toward the gaol. And for an instant, with death and the lingering haze of magic between them, their eyes met.

He’d been literally scarred by his experience at Contra Costa, by what he’d done. But his suffering—and the suffering of countless others—hadn’t dissuaded him from magic. Far from it—he hadn’t been able to do this at Contra Costa. He must have spent some portion of the interim learning how to do more. How to kill in a manner that required no matériel—no shot, no powder, no flame. It would have taken time, dedication, and possibly more scars than she could see.

But his eyes remained empty and hard. Devoid of emotion.

Kit dropped back from the window, repelled by the possibility that he’d seen her face. And loath as she was to admit it . . . afraid. If he could do this at will and without consequence or apparent conscience, what could he not do? How could the Isles—how could anyone—stand against this?

“Captain,” Cooper said quietly.

Kit merely shook her head, working to control that creeping fear and, more, to shield her subordinate from it. That, at least, was something within her control.

So she squared her shoulders, looked back at the others in the room. “You’ve seen him kill before.”

More than half of them nodded.

“How many?” she asked, fear transmuting into fury.

“A dozen, maybe,” said the man with the cane. “A guard who brought an extra ration. A soldier he sailed with failed to find the number of horses he wanted, another his quota of shot.”

“It’s how he gets information,” said the man on the floor.

Kit lifted her brows. “What information is he seeking?”

The men looked at each other.

“Loyalties,” the man on the floor continued. “Magic.”

Something here, Kit thought. Something she needed to dig out. “What about magic? Is he looking for more like him? More Aligned? Or something related to technique?”

“All,” the man said, the word punctuated by the rattle of the door that held them inside, and the jangling of metal.

Coming for her and Cooper, Kit expected. Fear was a bright star rising again, but Kit ignored it. She pulled a few more coins from her pocket, tossed them to the prisoners.

“If you have an opportunity,” she told Cooper in the resulting scramble, “take it. Get out and get back to the Diana.”

Cooper’s cheeks were a bit wan, but her voice was steady. “All due respect, sir, bollocks to that.”

Kit was beginning to wonder if any of her crew understood what obedience meant. “When we were on the street, you said you’d go back to the ship.”

“I did, sir. I assumed you meant to go with me. Do you remember what I told you on Forstadt?”

That was the island where Gerard’s Frisian supporters had been building a warship in his name; the ship he’d intended to use magic to fuel, and which had damaged the magical ecosystem of the Northern Sea.

“You said several things, I recall,” Kit said, bracing herself as the door was pushed open.

“That I did, Captain. And at no little risk to myself, given my former captain was, pardon my Islish, a horse’s ass. I’m not about to go cowardly now.”

“ ‘War doesn’t need heroes,’ ” Kit quoted. “ ‘It needs good sailors.’ ”

Cooper grinned unabashedly. “Cox’s Seamanship. I’m not one to disagree with the sailor’s bible, but I think the Isles deserve a bit of both.”

“Are you always cheerful?” Kit asked, as the door was shoved open and the guard walked inside.

Cooper seemed to actually consider it. “Fairly often, sir.”

“You there,” the guard said, pointing at Kit. “Let’s go.”

Kit slipped a gold coin into Cooper’s hand. “If all else fails, buy your safety.” And then she was led away.

Her wrists were tied with rough hemp rope, and she was pushed down a corridor toward the back of the building, then outside to the courtyard where the man had been executed mere minutes ago.

His body had already been removed, but there was a sharp scent in the air, as if the current had singed it.

Cold sweat dripped down her spine, but she forced herself to stay calm, to think, even while looking as baffled and afraid as an innocent might. She was relieved when they made it to the edge of the courtyard but uneasy again when they reached a small, grimy shed with a single fogged window.

The door was opened. Dirt floor, rutted plaster walls, spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling. And in the middle, an aged wooden chair.

She was marched to it, pushed down, and the door was closed again.

There were three men in the room: two of the gendarmes who’d chased her, and the man from the dock. Doucette wasn’t among them.

She had to stop her breath from hitching, but she played her part again. “Oh, good,” she said. “More fancy men to ask more rude questions.”

“I am Marcel Beauvoir,” said one of the gendarmes in Gallic. He had tidy hair and a small mustache. “What is your name?”

“Clémentine Lafaille,” Kit said. It had been the name of her sister’s favorite childhood doll. Hetta had obtained it in Gallia for Jane during one of her own visits on behalf of the Isles’ former king, and Jane had given it the very grand name. And she’d kept that name until Jane decided Clémentine was interested in science. And then Clémentine, spirited as she was, got too close to a flame Jane hadn’t, at that age, been allowed to light. That was the end of Clémentine, who was treated to a very solemn funeral in the garden.

Kit held tight to that memory, used it as a shield against her fear.

“And where are you from?” Dock Man asked.

“Beaulieu-sur-Mer.” It was on the southern coast, beautiful and warm, and she’d have been happy to call it home. Again, but for the Gallians.

“What’s your business here?” Beauvoir asked.

“As I’ve already told this one,” she said, using a shoulder to gesture to Dock Man, “we’re to sail on the Simone. I’m a sailmaker.”

Dock Man’s expression didn’t change. “The Simone lifted anchor an hour ago.”

Kit cursed. Not quite as inventively as Cooper, but as bitterly as she could manage. And threw in a bit about a goat. And when she raised her gaze to him, let her jaw shake a bit in anger.

“I was to sail on the Simone,” she said again, insult clear in her voice. “Have you any idea how much coin they pay? I have obligations.”

“Debts?” Beauvoir asked, moving closer. He smelled like garlic.

Kit worked up a faint blush. “Obligations,” she said again. “I needed the pay.”

“You were asking questions about a boat.”

She made her expression exceedingly dry. “I’m a sailor, aye? Of course I was.”

“A particular boat,” Beauvoir said. “Anchored at the dock.”

“The Simone?” Kit asked, brow knit.

“They call it the Intrepid,” Dock Man said. “The blue ship.”

“Ah,” Kit said with a snort. “The ship with the wide arse.”

Kit saw the blow coming and braced herself, but Dock Man’s backhand was harder than she’d anticipated. Pain surged across her face, her cheekbone throbbing from the impact of his signet ring. She tasted blood, bright and coppery, but a poke with her tongue said none of her teeth were loose. That was some victory, at least.

She mustered her courage, looked him in the eye. “Ow,” she said mildly, and spat blood on the floor. And the pain in her jaw was faintly eased by imagining the look of horror Mrs. Eaves, the Brightlings’ very stuffy housekeeper, might have worn if she’d seen Kit do that.

“The ship,” Beauvoir prompted, while glaring at Dock Man.

“It’s an ugly bastard, but big and fancy. I thought, if the captain was hiring on, might be more coin in it.”

“We know there are spies from the Isles in Gallia. You say you are Gallic, but no one knows you here.”

“Why would they?” Kit asked. “I’m from the south. And I’m no more from the Isles than you are.”

“You have the look of an Islishwoman about you.”

“Do I?” she asked blandly, swiveling in her chair and using her bound hands to make a very Gallic gesture that questioned his parentage.

Dock Man came forward, bared his teeth. “Talk, you little bitch.” He reached out a hand, and she braced for the second blow. But the gendarme stepped forward, grabbed his wrist.

“No,” he said. “You do not have authority for this. And we dare not overstep—not when he is in town.”

Kit wondered which “he” they meant—Gerard or Doucette?—and which scared them more.

“Are we done then?” Kit asked, relieved they’d asked only about the ship. They apparently hadn’t realized she and Cooper had followed Doucette through town, or heard of his plans. All the better.

Beauvoir looked back at her, and the chill in his eyes had her swallowing hard. “Oh, you’ll talk, one way or the other. Send for Fouché,” he said. “He’ll find out what there is to know.”

Silence fell across the space, heavy and cold, as the other gendarme, apparently of lower rank, looked at Beauvoir. “You are certain?”

He might have faked the hesitation in his voice, but it sounded earnest to Kit. Which had her pulling at her wrists, trying to loosen the knots tied there.

“Go ahead and struggle,” said the man from the dock, and kicked a leg of her chair. “You’ll get yours soon enough.”

Kit sat in the shed for what she thought was an hour, based on the shifting shadows on the far wall. One guard had been stationed outside, but otherwise she’d been left alone.

She had to get out—and she had to get Cooper out—before this turned any uglier. And not just because Jin would have her hide. Although that was a consideration.

She continued to work the ropes, trying to pick at the hemp with her fingernails. She’d already torn two to the quick, and for little enough progress. But the pain kept her from worrying over who this Fouché was and what he might do.

As she worked the rope, she strained to hear any developments outside—movement toward the shed, discussions by the guards. It wasn’t until the hour waned that footsteps approached. Two men, by the sound of it, coming from different directions. The glass in the sole window was dirty enough that she could only see their shadows.

“Where is Fouché?” Beauvoir asked in Gallic, his frustration clear.

“Respectfully,” said the other man, “he cannot simply appear at your command, Beauvoir. He has his own obligations to the governor. He asked that I come first to consider the . . . quarry.”

When the door opened, she braced for whatever would come next.

Sunlight streamed into the room, putting the man who walked in in silhouette. Broad shoulders in tailcoat and strong legs in boots, his hair dark brown with streaks of sunlight.

He turned to her, and she stared at the face she hadn’t seen in weeks.

The man who’d come to interrogate her . . . was Rian Grant.