Crow left the tavern. Starr and his first mate walked out a minute later.
Starr and his men searched the docks, the warehouses, the shops, and the taverns, but no one had seen the mysterious man who claimed to be a ship’s captain. No one reported sighting an unfamiliar ship near Pyetra.
But that night, when I finally went up to bed, I found Captain Crow sitting on my windowsill.
I stared at him, shocked, before I considered what kind of work Mara would have me doing in the alley behind the tavern if someone spotted him and told her a man had been in my room.
“Get away from there,” I whispered fiercely. “You’ll be seen!”
He stood, stepped to the side, then leaned against the wall. “Better?”
He sounded amused, and that amusement turned my fear into fury. If Mara came upstairs now... Worse, if my father came upstairs to deliver the beating Starr had implied I deserved...
“How did you get up here?”
“The window was open.”
“It wasn’t.” I was sure I had closed it.
“Open a crack,” he amended. “It was enough. Why did you free the pony?”
“I don’t know you.” Couldn’t trust him is what I meant. “Is Crow your real name?”
“It is when I captain the ship.”
“And when you’re not captaining the ship?”
“My name is Corvo Sanguinati.”
Sanguinati. Blood drinker. One of theterra indigene.
It seemed there was some truth in the stories about the dark ship.
“What do you want from me?”
He regarded me calmly. “I want to know why you freed the pony.”
“It was caught in the net. Starr’s men would have killed it.”
“They would have killed you too if they’d seen you.” He paused. “ ‘One of us should be free.’ That’s what you said.”
He’dheardthat?
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Vedette. But everyone calls me Dett.” I smiled bitterly. “Mara always says I owe her and my father for letting me live. If she’d been able to have a child of her own, she would have dragged me down to the sea on a moonless night and drowned me years ago.”
“If you were free, what would you do? Where would you go?” Corvo asked.
I shrugged and attempted a sassy answer. “I would stow away on a dark ship that was headed anywhere but here.”
“Dangerous to be a stowaway on any ship. Especially dangerous to stow away on that one. But paying for your passage? That might be possible.”
No, it wasn’t. I had no money and nothing to barter except my body, and I doubted Corvo Sanguinati would accept as payment what most other men would take—as long as they could turn one side of my face to the wall while they lifted my skirt.
Corvo rubbed his chin. “How did you know the pony would be on the beach?”
We were back to the pony?
