“You don’t seem surprised to be here.”

“Of course not. The whole purpose of freeing you from the Council was to reunite you with your cabal. Why should you let anything, including a bullet, delay you from returning to Thibodaux’s side?”

“I didn’t so much mean that you don’t sound surprised to be going to Inselgrau, but that you don’t sound surprised to find yourself aboard a ship. With me.”

“From the moment I agreed to undertake your rescue mission, I knew it was pointless to try predicting what would happen after you were freed. Once your Magic was restored, anything was possible.”

“And you haven’t tried preparing for those possibilities?”

I smirked at him. “I’m honored that you think I could.”

“I didn’t say you’d be successful at it.” He sniffed. “But I know you better than you think I do. You wouldn’t have risked freeing me unless you’d taken steps to protect yourself first.”

I blanked my face, giving nothing away. The gold chain around my neck felt warm, as if he’d evoked its power when he talked about me making preparations. “Is it even possible to protect myself against you?” Brigette’s necklace was supposed to have shielded me against Jackie’s Magic, but somehow he’d managed to take me from the basilica to this ship without my awareness. I feared what that meant about the strength of Brigette’s Magic compared to Jackie’s.

A muscle under his eye jumped. “You give me too much credit. Your lightning is formidable, my queen. Your power has grown. It’s”—he closed his eyes and inhaled—“intoxicating.”

I appreciated the irony of my situation: I’d survived tremendous tortures and suffering to escape Jackie’s control. I’d trained hard with the Fantazikes to master my powers and make myself less vulnerable. In the end, all I’d done was make myself more alluring to him.

“Before we go any further,” I said, “I want to make a few things clear.”

He arched a single eyebrow.

“I’m going along with you, for now, because our goals are complementary. We both want to get to Inselgrau. We both want to reach Le Poing Fermé. However, I won’t abide being treated as either your slave or your hostage. The moment you try to shackle me or Magically manipulate my free will, all bets are off.”

“My, my.” He clicked his tongue. “You’ve grown to be a fierce one, haven’t you?”

“Don’t tell me fierce women intimidate you.”

His eyebrow twitched. “Quite the opposite.”

“What happened at the end, Jackie? Before we escaped the basilica, what did you do to Gideon?”

Jackie’s jaw worked as he gritted his teeth. “He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. Or at least, I didn’t kill him. Who’s to say what happened after our... departure.”

His answer left me unsatisfied, but I suspected he’d given me as much information as I was going to get from him. I drained the rest of my cup, set it aside, and stood. “I hope you’ve arranged provisions for me.”

“Provisions?”

I motioned to my salt-stained clothes and bird’s-nest hair. “A wardrobe or at least a clean change of clothes. Toiletries, perhaps?”

He bobbed his chin toward the room’s corner where a steamer trunk hunkered in the shadows. “You should find everything you need in there.”

I opened the trunk and bit my lip before I could gasp at the pile of sumptuous fabrics folded and stacked to the brim. He treated me like his doll, picking out the things he preferred to see me in rather than considering my own tastes. I shook out a white muslin mull dress embroidered in intricate patterns. “You’ve been planning this getaway for a while, haven’t you?”

Instead of confirming my guess, he asked for another cup of water. By the time I returned with refilled mugs, he had dozed off again. I let him sleep, careful not to wake him as I slipped Brigette’s thin gold necklace around his neck. I whispered the Magic words she’d given me, and the necklace disappeared—not merely invisible but insubstantial as well. “Well, that part of the plan went easier than expected.”

Don’t let your guard down, Grandfather said. The rest won’t be so simple.

Don’t you think I already know that?

You think he won’t sense you using Magic against him?

If Brigette is as good of a Magician as she seems to be, perhaps he won’t. There’s no guarantee.

If you can’t control him, then what?

Then there’s always the lightning, I guess. As long as I have you, Jackie can’t cut me off from it again.

You’re sure he doesn’t know about me?

He suspects something. I recalled the look of horror on Jackie’s face when he encountered me on our battlefield in Barsava and discovered my wound. He’d sensed Svieta’s Magic inside me and had called it foul, but I didn’t know how much he understood about what Svieta had done to save my life. I’m not inclined to give him details or confirm any of his guesses. The less he knows about us, the better.

After bumbling along a dark, narrow hallway, I arrived at a short door near the boat’s bow. I knocked, and when no one replied, I stepped into the head, a tiny cubby barely wide enough for a rudimentary toilet and a barrel of water. On its lid sat a pitcher, a ewer, and a round cake of soap that made my eyes water when I sniffed it. The bathroom wasn’t much to speak of, but at least it smelled and looked bearably clean.

I stripped, bathed, and fastened my knife to the inside of my knee, looping my length of rope to secure it in place. I combed and braided my hair and refused to think about how the man I loathed most in the world had picked out my undergarments. Slipping into silk and lace, I tried not to shudder.

***

I avoided Jackie for the rest of the afternoon, preferring to laze away the day on deck, sitting alone on a bench in the sail’s shade, inhaling fresh air and letting the breeze do its best to blow away my anxiety. As the sun dropped, I joined the crew for supper in the galley—stewed, salted-beef with potatoes and carrots cooked to mush. Not having much of an appetite, I didn’t complain, and Ambrose seemed surprised when I offered to scrub the dishes after everyone had eaten.

“You would risk running your dress?” he asked in his deep booming voice.

“I don’t give a damn about this dress.”

He arched his thick eyebrows but handed me a scrub brush and a cake of soap and left without arguing.

Later that night, I returned to the cabin I was forced to share with Jackie and found him flushed and red faced. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and chest. He moaned as if in pain but was otherwise listless. I peeled back his bandage and discovered enflamed and swollen flesh around his wound. His skin felt warm to the touch.

“Looks like you’ve gone and gotten yourself an infection.” I set my hands on my hips, examining him again. For the first time, an inkling of pity stirred in my heart, but a dark urge to let him fester warred against it. I wasn’t a killer, though, not even a passive one. I loathed Jackie, but if it was his fate to die, it wouldn’t be at the hands of some ordinary illness.

Remembering my own experience with bad fever as a child and the treatments Gerda had used to ease my symptoms, I hurried to the deck and found Ambrose standing at the helm alone. His huge figure loomed, tall, dark, and imposing. “I need your assistance, if you could spare a moment.”

He tilted his head in a curious way, encouraging me to explain.

“Master Faercourt has developed a fever. I need someone to bring him to the deck.”

He recoiled. “Why the deck?”

“The cabin is stifling. He needs fresh air, a cool breeze, and lots of water.”

He waved at the flat sails. “Not much of a breeze tonight.”

“There will be if the gods want him to live.”

“Then you better start praying, miss.”

By the time I returned with supplies, Ambrose and Leo, another crewman, had arranged Jackie on a pallet near the starboard rail at the center of the ship, away from where we might impede the ship’s workflow. I thanked them, and they left me to play nursemaid alone. I dunked rags in a pail of water drawn straight from the cool night ocean and plastered compresses over Jackie’s brow and chest. Slipping an arm under his shoulders, I raised his head enough to poor cool peppermint tea down his throat.