Chapter Three: Salt Enough for Tomorrow

By the fifth dawn, the aches had settled into their rooms. The fire along my forearms meant I’d hauled clean; the grind in my back meant I’d leaned wrong; the sharp complaint in my knee meant the deck had rolled when my breath didn’t. I failed less. I still failed.

“Haul!” Harp bellowed, and six men made a beast of themselves around the sheet. I threw in my weight and felt the line shift a grudging inch, the way nobles shift when you ask them for truth. Their strength arrived in slabs; mine arrived in strands steady, but always a step behind.

“Sing at it, Sprat,” the freckled sailor jeered, sweat bright on his brow. “Maybe it’ll feel sorry for you.”

“Already humming,” I said, breath short, and earned a snort that wasn’t quite unkind.

Up the ratlines for the topmast stays’l, I moved with the now-familiar bargain between muscle and mind. Halfway, my knee quivered, the deck fell away, and the world tilted. A hand caught my forearm hard, sure, exactly where I needed it and nowhere else.

“Eyes,” Kade said. One word. Not gentle, not cruel. The kind of command that assumes you’ll obey because it knows you can. His fingers let go the instant I found the next rung, as if skin were a hot coal and reputation the burn. He was gone before my thank-you could find my mouth.

I climbed on, annoyed at the tremor that ran from the place he’d gripped to somewhere too near my heart. Not fear. Not safety. Something that made my spine remember it was a fuse.

Day made its demands, and I tried to meet them before they turned to debts. I coiled lines looser than court rugs and tighter than my first day. Harp’s knuckles found my wrist when I took a wrong turn on a cleat, sharp correction, not cruelty. I swallowed the sting and tied it right. Berrit sent me for onions, then for a knife he’d hidden as a test and laughed when I returned with both and no curses. Dr. Luth poked my healing leg and called me “less boring,” which, from him, was nearly affection.

By midday, the wind changed its mind without telling the clouds, and Jas had us shifting canvas before the sky could decide to scold us.

“Brace to starboard!” he snapped. We moved. I moved slower. The older hands turned the yard with a rhythm that made my lungs jealous; I arrived with my push half a beat late.

A shout from the foredeck, someone’s foot went where the deck wasn’t. A coil I’d stowed wiggled at the wrong time, and the man’s balance followed it over the edge of sense. Kade’s growl hit the air first: low, rough, a sound that made the ship’s bones listen.

“Hold!” It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. The crew froze on the fulcrum of that voice. The stumble righted. The yard eased into its new line. The growl eased from my spine a moment after the danger did, leaving a shudder in my chest that had nothing to do with fear.

Harp glanced at my coil. I nodded once, already fixing it. He said nothing. I said less.

I failed less as the day wore on. I even managed a small victory spotting the sheen on the water that meant a squall would slap us from an angle Old Noll pretended he’d predicted all along.

“Reef down,” Jas called. “No heroics. Pride’s for port.”

No sail flogged; no mast screamed. The memory of my bad knot, that thunder-crack humiliation, burned behind my ears. This time, the canvas took the wind like a promise kept.

Toward evening, the deck tilted hard; my knee followed it. My boot slid. The rail loomed up with a promise to break ribs or send me to the moon. Another hand on me, same grip, the same precision. Kade again, appearing from a seam the eye doesn’t see. He arrested my fall, all strength and no touch beyond what was necessary, then released me so quickly the air rushed back like surprise.

“Pay attention to your feet,” he said, already moving away, already another command somewhere else. “They’ll lie to you when the deck does.”

“Yes, Captain,” I said to his back. I hated that the part of me that had learned to be invisible wanted to be seen by exactly that voice.

At night, after the watch changed and the ship turned its louder creaks into murmurs, I bathed behind a coil with a bucket and a rag and the kind of care that kept secrets alive The water’s first cold kiss on bruises made my breath jump; I caught it before it could draw eyes. Unbind, wash, bind again—looser, like his unspoken advice had taught me to. It helped. It made me angry that it helped.

I practised knots in the hush. Bowline. Sheet bend. Two half hitches and a stopper that wouldn’t slip if shame begged. Rope rasped against rope in a rhythm that felt like prayer. The moon laid a road on the water, and I walked it with my eyes because feet weren’t allowed.

Peace lived here in the work after the work, in the honest sting of salt and the way the sea didn’t lie about what it wanted. I hadn’t felt that since a barrel had tried to teach me how to breathe in the dark.

Later, hunting a star to swear on from the quarterdeck’s shadow, I heard voices already above.

“Captain,” Jas said, low, the way he talked when joking would lose him teeth. “We’ve given him a fair go.”

“A week of fair goes,” Harp agreed, voice like a slammed lid. “He’s slow. He’s small, he’s winded. He’ll get himself or someone else killed when it matters.”

“Bilge-worthy,” the freckled sailor muttered. “Not weather-worthy.”

A plank sighed under my foot. I froze in shadow, the dark making itself useful around me.

“Dump him at the next stop,” Jas said. Practical, not cruel. “Caul’s Point, Black-Shoal, any rock with a skiff. No hard feelings. He’s not crew.”

Kade’s answer didn’t come. The sea filled the pause, licking the hull like a warning. Somewhere in that quiet, he made a sound, a low, sandpaper growl that I felt more than heard; not anger, exactly. Decision thinking itself through muscle.

“Captain,” Harp pressed, softer than I’d expected. “We can’t pull dead weight. Not with the crown sniffing. Not with Morcant spending coin on our heads like water.”

My hand went to my mouth before it could betray me another way. Not to stop a sob, I wouldn’t give them that but to keep the sound bruised hope makes trapped behind my teeth.

I didn’t wait to hear more. I didn’t want the word yes or the word no to change me in a way I couldn’t hide. I slipped back down the ladder like a tide pulling from shore, found my hammock by muscle memory and stubbornness, and lay there while the ship breathed.

My eyes burned. I did not cry. I pressed my knuckles against my lips until the sting steadied me.

Tomorrow, I told myself, rope rough against my palm. You tie faster. You haul cleaner. You move before they say your name. You make yourself necessary in a way that can not be tossed over a gunwale.

I didn’t know what Kade said after I left. I didn’t know when the next stop would open its hungry mouth or what the next days would wring from me. I knew only the moon’s road on the water and the knots my fingers could tie in the dark.

I tied a bowline. Untied it. Tied it again.

Salt enough for tomorrow, I promised myself. Then the next day. Then the next.