Langlade and most of Algoma for dessert. He’s in prison in Shawano until he tells where it is, or dies, whichever comes first.”

“How do you know so much about him?”

She grinned triumphantly. “Because I’m the one who caught him.”

Chapter Five

Shawano was six days’ ride from Watchorn. For a guy looking for a pirate, I was spending an awful lot of time in the saddle.

Two nights we stayed at inns, but the rest we camped along the way. The third night I spotted another fire behind us, and crept back to check it out. Granted, it could have been anyone who happened to be going the same way, but the hackles on my neck told me otherwise. By the time I got there, the fire was out and the camp abandoned. Whoever it was didn’t show themselves again.

The prison outside Mosinee, capital city of Shawano, was known as “the pirates’ graveyard,” because if a pirate was captured and not executed, he ended up here. After a few weeks in this facility, most pirates would welcome being hanged, their tarred corpses displayed as a warning. The prison was smack in the middle of a stretch of desert, isolated by a range of low mountains. On the other side of these slopes stretched miles of verdant countryside leading down to Mosinee and the ocean. Here, though, there was nothing but heat, dryness, and death. For a man of the sea, there could be no closer approximation to hell.

Only one road led to the pirates’ graveyard, and it ran straight across the open desert. This made sense tactically, since no one could approach without being seen. I’d picked up a wide-brimmed straw hat for the occasion, but this early in the morning, it wasn’t needed. Some weird weather inversion had drawn moisture across the mountains and bathed the area in a heavy mist. It wouldn’t last, but while it did, the temperature was almost pleasant.

Queen Remy of Mosinee led the international co alition that supported and funded the Anti-Freebootery Guild. Her goal was to make it more lucrative for these sea bandits to turn honest than to keep raiding ships, and it worked for a lot of them. I didn’t know the exact circumstances that turned Jane from pirate to pirate hunter, but she became as legendary fighting on the right side as she had on the wrong. I also didn’t know what had caused her to leave the sea entirely and turn land- bound sword jockey, but I could accept that none of it was my business. She never asked where I’d come from, either.

The prison walls were twenty feet high, with guards stationed at each corner. The only thing that rose higher was a single round tower, stretching into the mist so that we couldn’t see the top. Jane looked up at the tower and sighed wistfully.

“Sentimental about prison?” I teased.

“About my old job. Rody Hawk was the toughest son of a bitch I ever crossed blades with. When they sent me out to find him, I almost peed my pants, both because I was excited and because it scared me to death. For the first three weeks I hunted him, I was afraid he might be a ghost, the way he’d appear and disappear, like he was taunting me. Which he was.”

She’d shared many stories of the man known as “the Sea Hawk” on our ride. By the time she finished, I was really glad they were about a man who was locked up. “He knew you were after him?”

“He knew everything about me,” she said distantly, then came back to the moment. “He was a mean bastard anyway, but he got much worse when he heard I was after him. Like he was trying to pack in all the evil he could while he still had time.”

“Really?” I said. Jane wasn’t above a little self-aggrandizement, but something in her tone told me she wasn’t doing that here. Her intensity sounded almost religious.

“Yeah. I found one ship he’d hit, a little merchant vessel carrying settlers along with a cargo of rum. He killed the crew, then tied all the civilian men together around the mast. He hung the women and children by their ankles and drilled tiny little holes in their foreheads, so they’d rain blood down on their husbands and fathers. We heard the screams across the water before we even sighted the sails.” She shook her head. “Not many of the hanging ones lived. And a lot of the men forced to watch died by their own hand before we reached port.”

“I’m glad you finally caught him,” I agreed. We were close enough now to see the archers along the wall, and the long curves of their bows. They watched us with the silent composure of men secure in their profession.

Jane said, “Do you know what the hardest thing about catching him was, though?”

“What?”

“Leaving him alive when I had him under my sword.” I knew that feeling for sure. The fact that she did leave him alive reinforced my opinion of her. “And now where do they keep him?”

She pointed at the tower. “Up there. Permanently. No way in, no way out, and no visitors until he tells where his treasure’s hidden, or dies.”

“Then how do we talk to him?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. But she didn’t explain. We tied our horses to the empty hitching post outside the gate. Behind us, only our tracks disturbed the sand. I couldn’t imagine they got many visitors. A guard in leather armor watched us through the gate’s thick iron bars.

“Hey, Louie,” Jane said as she shook dirt and sand from her cape. “How’s tricks?”

“Same as always, Captain Argo,” Louie the guard said. He spoke to her but kept his eyes on me.

“I’m not a captain anymore, Louie, just a plain Jane. But we are here to see the Hawk.”

Louie pondered this. “I’ll have to get the warden.”

“You do that,” she said.

The whole area was silent, except for a lone crow cawing somewhere in the mist overhead. Given the absence of trees, it must nest somewhere on the grounds. I asked quietly, “You ever been in prison?”

“Nope. If I get arrested, I try not to stick around for the trial.”

“Me, neither.” I’d been in jail on occasion, but never served a real sentence. Standing here in this ghostly silence, I suddenly wondered if I’d be man enough to handle it. I hoped never to find out.

Louie returned with another man, this one in an official uniform. “Good morning, Captain Argo,” the newcomer said. “I hadn’t heard you were coming.”

“There wasn’t time to send a message ahead. Hope that’s okay.”

“Well, we do have protocols for visiting the prisoners, especially him. ”

“I know. I came up with them, remember?”

“I do, but it puts me in an awkward position.”

Jane leaned casually on the iron bars. “Warden, really. You think I’m here to bust him out?”

“I think we have rules for a reason, Captain.”

“She’s not a captain anymore, sir,” Louie said helpfully.

“That’s true,” Jane agreed. “I’m just here to visit a friend.”

The warden smiled a little. “So he’s your friend now, is he?”

Jane laughed. “Warden, in some ways I’m closer to Rody Hawk than to just about anybody else in the world.”

The warden nodded at me. “Including him?”

I stepped forward. “Eddie LaCrosse. I’m a business associate of ex-Captain Argo.”

“Warden Jim Delvie,” he said as we shook hands through the bars. It was firm enough, but the skin was smooth. The warden had been pushing a quill so long that any sword calluses had faded.

“Warden, either let us in or send us on our way,” Jane said impatiently. “Which in my case will be straight to the court of Queen Remy to get permission to visit the Hawk. You know she’ll give it to me. And you know what she’ll say when I explain why I have to bother her with it.”

The warden thought this over, then turned to Louie. “Open up.”

“Yes, sir,” Louie said.

Through the gate there was nothing but more open space around the main jail building and celebrity tower. The ground was hard and cracked, with no grass anywhere. The building rose only one floor above the ground, well below the top edge of the outer walls. Most of its cells were deep under the hard- packed earth.

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