But there was a slip of paper among the cards.

“Please let me know how long it took you to discover the swap. I thought within the first three days. Grinwoody bet me five danars it would be closer to two weeks.” There was no doubt whom it was from, and it wasn’t Verity.

Andross had known Kip was leaving with Tisis.

Andross had known which boat Tisis was taking.

Andross had put a man on the boat.

It had taken Kip more than two weeks.

Totally defeated by this dung-smear of a day, Kip flopped back onto his blankets, defeated. He landed across Tisis’s long hair, tugging it painfully.

“Ow!” she said. “What’d you do that for?”

There wasn’t a big enough sigh in the world.

Chapter 26

~Gunner~

“It’s not for sale,” I says.

“Who said anything about a sale?” the wrapped man asks.

“It’s a holly trust.”

That one was apurpose, and he don’t correct me, so he knows about Cap’n Gunner. Ergot, he’s crafty. I’ll have to hold my coins a-foursquare in my fists around this ’un.

But I know how to deal with conners. He’s all swattled like a babe, like he’s got the skin-sloughing disease maybe, but I think he’s well after all. He’s accosted me here, outside Lee Lee’s watering hole, my favorite tavern on the swollen teat that is Big Jasper. He was waiting for me, and I’m feeling a bit too boozy for this.

“I don’t believe in holy or unholy,” says he. “I believe in having the best.”

“What’s that to me?” I asks.

“I want to show you a ship. Best girl on the Cerulean Sea or any other.”

“Every captain or owner selling a ship says the same,” I says.

“Everyone says it. Some of them believe it. But one of them’s right.”

“The odds that one is you are blinky indeed,” I say, but I can’t help being intrigued.

“Take a look for yourself,” he says. “I’ll let you come aboard armed as you will, and you can examine it as you will.”

“What’s the hook?” I asks.

“No hook. A game. I’ll tell you more after you decide if she’s worth your time. Though there’s not been a sailor worth his salt yet who’s scorned the Golden Mean.”

There’s his bait. I’ve heard of this boat. The breathless wonder and slobbering are enough to turn a man’s stomach. And his eyes.

“I’ll take a looksie.” I wouldn’t mind being the man to disprove the silliness and lies about what a wonder she is.

It’s not long to her place at the dock. She’s a new Ilytian galleass, but I see the stories were true. She’s bone white, but with a golden sheen to her skin, like a pale Blood Forester lady riding your hips sweaty at sunset.

“Abornean teak?” I ask.

“Lightweight and stronger than any other wood known to man.”

“Too porous for decking. Your ship is shite. She’ll warp and sink ’fore Long Night.”

But I don’t leave, and he don’t defend her.

“She’s really imbibed with brightwater?” I asks.

“Just enough to fill the pores in the wood, and just on the hull. No need to add weight where it’s unnecessary. The yellow luxin imbuing the wood is segmented, though, so the wood can still flex. I’ll warn you, it does mean you have to hire a brightwater drafter every ten years. A good one. They told me twenty years, but shipwrights…”

“Would swear their own mother was a virgin, before selling her to be a poxy cap’n’s buttboy,” I agree.

He says, “I’m untrusting myself, so I hired my own yellow drafter to look her over. She estimated ten years. Bonus is that with the yellow luxin coating, barnacles won’t grow on the hull, which makes it faster still.”

“Eh. Means you can’t keelhaul a man.” Of course, you still could, but with no barnacles, he might actually live through it. Which has its own advantages.

He says nothing again.

No barnacles means you don’t have to clean the barnacles off, and that’s one of the more time intensive and costly bits of maintenance for any ship.

“How many guns?”

He laughs, and it makes his bandages slide some. I can see he’s almost as night-skinned as me. Older man, though, from how he moves at times. Skinny. “You’re familiar with the work of Phineas Vecchini?”

Here’s where his lies are gonna get his lines wrapped round his legs. I know Phin well. “Some,” I says. “This from his workshop, or stamped by his hand?”

“Master Vecchini has quit working,” the man says. “He let his daughters take over his shop.”

Everyone knows that. Guess that’s not the lie to trip him, then. “They’re good, but others are their equals,” I grumble. “Maybe one day the youngest will be her father’s rival. Maybe. Guns from his daughters ain’t quite the braggery you’d like to claim, though.”

He adjusts his wrappings patiently. “I’m not bragging of guns from his daughters. I convinced Phin to go back to work, one last time. The girls didn’t want him to, said he’d ruin his health, and he may well have done so. He spent a year on this.”

“Pah. How’d you do that? I heard he swore to that harpy he wedded he’d never—”

“His wife passed on two years back. His daughters were as adamant he not take the work, but then I offered him something he couldn’t resist.”

“And what’s that?” I ask. “That old goat rogerer weren’t swayed by neither women, wealth, nor wine. What could you offer him?”

Like the insidious stench of wine shits after shore leave, a smug aura surrounds the bandaged man. “I told him the cannons were for you.”

Phin had spent a year, with all his forgers and smiths and cast-iron men and engravers and potboys and apprentices, his workshop belching smoke day and night? For me?

It knocks my knees a bit weak, to be forthright.

It’s one thing to shout at the world that you’re the best. I been doin’ that since it warn’t true. It’s a whole ’nother fish for the best in the world to acknowledge you as the best, too.

It’s like finding another barrel a’ brandy in the hold two days after you run dry and got the shakes.