Chapter Fifteen
ANATOLE
The weather turned wrong three days after the mate ceremony.
Not a storm. Anatole knew storms, had sailed through every fury the Crimson Sea could produce, and this wasn't natural. This was something older. The sky took on a greenish cast that didn't correspond to any weather pattern he'd charted in twenty years at sea. The wind shifted four times in an hour, swinging compass points like a pendulum, and the sea itself developed a chop that ran against the current, waves slapping the hull from directions that made no nautical sense.
His wolf knew what it meant before his mind caught up.
"We're near her island," Luc said, confirming what the hair rising on Anatole's arms already told him. His first mate stood at the chart table, one finger pressed to a spot in the Scattered Isles where the cartographer had drawn nothing. No name. No depth soundings. Just empty space surrounded by warnings in faded ink:here the sea obeys no captain.
"That's impossible. I plotted our course to avoid the Scattered Isles entirely. We should be sixty leagues south of Morvenna's waters."
"We were. Check the charts."
Anatole checked. Luc was right. Their position, confirmed by star readings and current measurements, placed the Barbe-Bleue squarely in the channel between the Scattered Isles and the open sea. They had drifted north overnight, against thecurrent, against the wind, against every navigational force that should have kept them on course.
As if the sea itself had carried them here.
"The witch," Anatole said.
"The witch." Luc's voice was grim. "She heard your mate claim. Or the curse told her. Either way, she knows about Jeanne, and she's pulled us into range."
Anatole's hands curled on the chart table. The greenish light from the sky filtered through the navigation room's porthole, turning everything sickly. Below, he could hear the crew growing restless, their wolves sensing the wrongness in the water. Seawolves trusted the sea the way they trusted the ground beneath their paws. When the sea stopped behaving like the sea, it unsettled them on a level that went deeper than thought.
"Change course," he said. "Hard south. Get us out of her waters."
"Already tried. The helmsman's been fighting the current for an hour. We're not moving south. The water won't let us."
Anatole swore. Took the stairs two at a time to the helm, seized the wheel himself, and threw his weight against it. The Barbe-Bleue groaned. Her timbers protested. The sails caught wind from three different directions, the canvas snapping and cracking overhead, and for a long, straining moment the ship fought against whatever held her.
Then the wheel went slack in his hands, spinning freely, and the ship drifted back to her original heading. Toward the island. Toward Morvenna.
"She's holding us," Anatole said. "The witch has the ship."
The crew had gathered on deck. All of them were watching the sky, the water, their captain. He could smell their unease layered beneath their loyalty, the sharp tang of wolves who trusted their alpha but didn't trust what was happening to the sea around them.
"Captain." Gris's voice, quiet and steady in the way that only the oldest member of a pack could manage. "There's something you should see."
The cook held out a bird. A gull, gray-feathered, stiff with death. Its wings were folded against its body as if it had simply stopped flying and dropped from the sky. Rigor had set its claws in a curled grip around a scrap of parchment.
Anatole pried the parchment free. The handwriting was elegant, precise, written in ink that smelled of salt and something rotten underneath.
You will lose her too.
He crushed the parchment in his fist.
