soil of the coven, but she had never agreed that they could torture her as she tried to find her way home.
She could have died. Rose, Captain Cage, Wil, and Cedar, all could have died. She didn’t know if the sisters intentions were to kill others, but they had clearly not cared if they killed her.
The travelers had spent the last week at the coven, resting. The sisters had left them mostly alone, though warm meals were provided.
She, however, was an outsider. Feared.
Mae had spent the last week trying to find forgiveness in her heart. But this place that she had always thought would be home to her was spoiled now. Closed. They did not want her here.
She didn’t want to remain.
A woman’s soft laughter and a man’s low tone echoed from the hallway connecting the gathering hall to the guest rooms.
Rose and Captain Cage had been nearly inseparable.
Mae smiled despite her sour mood. She had to admit their courtship made her happy for both of them, but most especially for Rose.
“Mae,” Rose said, walking into the room. “We hoped we’d find you here.” Rose was moving slowly, as if her feet dragged a great weight behind them. But her color was better, the tin having faded from her face and neck, though there was still a sheen of silver to her skin and hair.
The sisters had very few guesses as to how to help Rose. It wasn’t magic, exactly, that was plaguing her, nor exactly a physical ailment.
Strangeworked devices were well outside the realms of their spell craft.
“Where else would I be?” Mae meant it to be teasing, as she’d found herself here, by the fire at all hours of the day and night. But her words came out with the bitterness of someone sentenced to pace the same cell for the rest of her life.
“Well, it’s a lovely place, and everyone has been so pleasant,” Rose said. “You could be almost anywhere.” She was leaning on Hink’s arm pretty heavily as she made her way across the room.
Hink had recovered from most of his injuries to the point that he was moving smoothly. All, that is, except for his broken arm and missing eye. He wore a soft cloth over the eye, with a bandage messing up his hair a bit as it held the patch in place and covered the burn on his forehead. Once both the eye wound and the brand on his forehead were less sensitive, they’d fashion a patch, which he would wear for the rest of his life.
There was nothing they could do to hide the five-pointed star branded into his forehead, other than see it healed properly. He would carry that scar to his grave.
While he hadn’t exactly taken his injuries gracefully, after spending three days drinking and coming up with new cuss words for Alabaster Saint’s damned soul—an activity that his crew, and the Madder brothers, had joined in quite readily—he had shouldered the fact that he would never have his full eyesight again. Nor go unnoticed as the president’s man.
As for having Rose at his side, leaning on him, well, he didn’t look one bit upset about that.
“Are you sure you don’t need me to support you a bit more, Rose?” he asked. “Perhaps my arm around your waist?”
“Like yesterday?” Rose asked.
“Yesterday?” he asked glibly.
“Yesterday. When you helped me,” she said. “If you thought you were putting your hands on my waist, you need a refresher on body parts, Paisley.”
He stopped cold and Rose was forced to stop too. “What?” she said, searching his face. “Are you all right? Your eye. Is it hurting again? The scar? Do you need the medicine?”
“Who,” he bit off, “told you my name is Paisley?”
Rose’s look of concern slid into one of wide-eyed innocence, though she was having a hard time keeping a smile off her face. “I’m not sure I recall. It must have been one of the crew.”
“Seldom,” Hink groused. “That man talks too much.”
“It’s a lovely name,” Rose continued as they got back to walking. “And a lovely fabric. Why I’ve always admired paisley dresses, haven’t you, Mae? They’re so…frilly.”
“Yes,” Mae agreed. “Very pretty.”
“My mother,” he said through his teeth, “happened to like paisley. She had this one dress, given to her by a man who—” He shut his mouth.
“A man who what?” Rose asked.
“A man who—” Hink narrowed his eye as if just figuring her game. “Never mind what the man did, all right now? I prefer you use ‘Lee’ when you address me.”
“What? Not ‘Captain’ or ‘Marshal’ or perhaps ‘lord king of all the land’?”
“Well, I’d never stop a woman from calling me king.”
“King Paisley,” Rose mused. “Certainly has a ring to it.”
“Forget it,” he said, blowing out his breath. “You may call me Captain Hink. And not a syllable more.”
“Didn’t mean for you to get all flustered,” Rose continued mercilessly. “It’s just so difficult to sort through all your names. And you’re sure there aren’t some other things you’d like me to call you?”
“I can think of several things I’d like to hear on your lips,” he said with a wicked grin, holding her gaze as he helped her sit in the other chair near the fire. “But not in polite company, my dear.”
Rose’s cheeks flamed red. “Oh,” she managed.
Hink walked over to the fire, looking pleased as punch at securing Rose’s silence.
“Were you looking for me?” Mae asked.
“Yes,” Rose said, jumping on the change of subject. “We were. I know it hasn’t been very long since we’ve been here, and the road was…hard.”
Hink crouched down at the hearth and used the poker to rearrange the wood and ashes. Molly’s death weighed heavily on him. He had refused to talk about it, or her.
“Hard on all of us,” Rose amended. “This”—she waved toward her left side, where the Holder still capped her shoulder beneath her dress—“it’s not the most worrisome thing that’s happened, but I don’t want to carry it all my life. It’s a part of a weapon an awful lot of folk want their hands on. I’d rather be quit of it, if I can.”
“We don’t know what will happen if we try to remove it, Rose,” Mae said. “Even the Madders aren’t sure what will happen.”
“I know,” Rose said, pulling a small hook and yarn out of her pocket and stitching along the row to keep her fingers busy. It looked like she was crocheting a soft rope. Maybe an eye patch for the captain. “But I also know we won’t find out what’s going to happen unless we try. There isn’t anyone in the world who’s ever had a thing like this.”
“So what are you asking, Rose?”
“I’m asking you to help remove it.” She pulled on the yarn and rewound the thread through her fingers, stitching on again. “I don’t know what else to do,” she said softly. “You can bind things, join things. I was hoping you could unbind the Holder from me.”
Mae wanted to tell her no. That asking the sisters for help with magic might come at too high a cost. But there simply wasn’t anyone else, and certainly not anyone here, who could even attempt to unbind the Holder.
And it wasn’t the only magic that Mae needed to do. She had bound Hink to his ship, so much so that the damage the ship received echoed through him. In a very real way, he shared the
She had also promised Cedar and Wil that she would try to break the curse the native gods had placed upon them.
She hadn’t been strong enough to attempt that alone, back in Hallelujah. But now she was home, surrounded by twenty-five women skilled in magic. She would see that it was done, no matter what Miss Adaline wanted from her.
Rose waited, letting Mae think it through.
Hink leaned his good elbow on the mantel above the hearth, and let his gaze shift between Rose and the windows on the far side of the room, caught in his own thoughts. He was much quieter these days.
“I’ll do what I can,” Mae said. And at Rose’s obvious relief she added, “We’ll find a way to free you of it. There’s no need for you to fret.”
