Chapter Two: Knots and Nightwater

By the second sunrise, I knew the shape of every ache in my body. Sword drills and palace chores had taught me sweat, yes, but not this. It's not the kind that makes your bones feel like wet rope, and your knee refuses to lock when you need it most. Court work is ceremony even when it’s hard, it’s rehearsed. The Wraith’s work was a demand that changed its mind every heartbeat.

“Faster, Sprat,” Harp grunted, shoving a coil into my arms until my ribs creaked against their bindings. “Lines don’t care about your feelings.”

Neither did the men. They treated me like a bilge-water who had learned to stand. Elbows found my shoulders when we passed on narrow decks. Boots arrived where my fingers were almost out of the way. “Watch it, boy,” someone would grunt after using me to steady himself. Laughter followed like gulls.

“Hands,” Jas barked at me when I misjudged the give of a wet line and burned my palms. “You want them or not?”

“I’m still deciding,” I said, and he smirked without warmth.

Each day, new fire lit in different muscles—deep places between ribs, the hinge of my wrists, the narrow band down the outside of my thigh that holds you upright when the world won’t stay still. My knee, insulted by the constant flex of deck and mast, buckled at the worst times, halfway up the ratlines, mid-haul on a sheet. I learned to lock my jaw around a sound and keep moving. Royalty always taught that: do not let them see what hurts. Pirates enforced it.

I wasn’t useless. I’d trained. I could lift, carry, climb. I knew how to learn. But speed is its own knowledge, and the Wraith demanded answers before I knew the questions.

“Flemish the line,” Harp ordered.

I coiled it neatly.

“Not like a court rug,” he snapped, kicking my careful circle into an honest, useful snake. “You want it to spill clean, not impress guests.”

The crew tested me the way waves test a hull: constant, indifferent, sometimes cruel in the name of honesty. Rope-knucks rapped my forearm if my hitch was ugly. A boot nudged my ankle wider on the ratlines. A bucket of slop sloshed just when I’d balanced a coil high as my head.

“Still time to jump ship,” a freckled sailor called as he shouldered past. “We’ll even let you pick which side.”

They watched me close because I was new. He watched me closer because he was the captain.

Kade’s gaze could find me anywhere, anytime. I felt it like the press of a coin against skin, a weight that shouldn’t be heavy and somehow was. It sent a wire down my spine that thrummed when I did something right and stung when I failed. I pretended not to notice. Pretending is a thing I have a crown in.

On the fourth day, I failed loudly.

We were making a clean run in a cheeky wind. Jas shouted for more cloth, and Harp tossed me the order with a look that said, prove you’re worth your bread. I went aloft. hands sure, breath shallow, knee threatening mutiny and loosed, then bent on a new sail. My fingers had practised a hundred times in shadow; they knew the knot by name. But up there, with the deck a suggestion and the wind nosing under the canvas like a dog looking for trouble, I tied the last clove hitch sloppy.

It held until it didn’t.

The sheet jumped the cleat. The corner blew wild. In a heartbeat, the whole sail flogged, canvas snapping like a whip, a gunshot thunder that turned heads and hardened mouths. The mast shuddered in its bones. Men swore; not at the wind. At me.

“Sprat!” Harp’s voice was a thrown axe.

“I’ve got it!” I lied because lying fast is sometimes how you make a truth. I crawled spider-quick along the yard, knee screaming, hands grabbing for a corner that wanted to beat me senseless. The lash of canvas caught my shoulder and spun me into a bruise I would be proud of later if I lived to brag. Below, the deck ran to stations; above, the sky pretended innocence.

And through it all: his eyes. Kade’s. Not panicked, not angry. Measuring. Waiting to see if the coin would land heads or tails. The wire in my spine sang.

I caught the leech, hauled, and bit the rope to give my hands back to themselves. The knot came out with insulted ease. This time, I tied it clean. Muscle and memory agreed, and the canvas bellied like a held breath that had decided not to turn into a scream.

The noise eased. The ship stopped shuddering. Harp’s curse faded into a grumble. Someone laughed—but it was relief now, not mockery. Different taste.

When I made the deck, the men had that look men get when the worst thing didn’t happen, and they’re annoyed they don’t get to tell the story bigger. Jas glanced at my knot and grunted. “Frame it,” he said. “The first useful thing you’ve done today.”

“Second,” I shot back, but it came out thinner than I wanted.

Kade said nothing. He didn’t have to. His disappointment felt like a shadow across my ribs, and I hated how much air it took from me. I’d told myself I wanted no one’s approval again. The body is a traitor; it collects desires without permission.

By lantern-light, rubbing lanolin into the red maps of my palms, I let myself admit the thing I’d been avoiding: I could see why ships barred women. It wasn’t only superstition. Men like Harp were built like barrels bound with iron hoops; their strength arrived in slabs. Mine arrived in strands. They pissed over the rail without thought, slung shirts without shame, moved in a pack that smelled like salt and old jokes I wasn’t invited to. My body had corners they didn’t. My breath came shorter. My knee sulked. Every task took more from me than it took from them. The difference hummed in the air like a key I didn’t fit.

And yet. I kept. I tried. I tied until the knots lived in my fingers instead of only a book in my head. I hauled until the burn in my shoulders felt like a prayer answered cruelly and well. I climbed until my knee learned its place or I learned to carry it. I stayed up late because there weren’t enough hours to be new and become necessary.

After the watch changed and the deck went quiet—only the groan of timber, the hiss of water licking the hull—I bathed in stolen minutes. I unbound with hands that shook and washed in a bucket behind a coil of hawser where the lantern light didn’t pry. The first touch of cold water on skin gone purple with bruises made me bite a rag. Not for pain. For the mercy of it. To be clean, briefly, without anyone’s eyes.

I bound myself again, tight. Then, I found a loose length of rope and practised. Bowline. Clove hitch. Sheet bend. Two half hitches with a finishing bite that wouldn’t slip if the sea begged. I tied and untied until my fingers felt like they belonged to a person who wouldn’t drop a ship out from under her crew.

The moon wrote a silver road across the water. I stood at the rail and read it. Pain had its place, finally, and it wasn’t the centre. The sea was the only thing that had been honest with me since my mother’s last breath. It told me I might die, and it sang me to sleep anyway.

“Rye,” Jas’s voice came soft from the dark once, surprising me. “You planning to replace the stars one knot at a time?”

“If I could,” I said, “I’d tie them where they can’t fall.”

He snorted. “Sleep. We make weather tomorrow.”

“I’ll sleep when the water does,” I said.

“You’ll sleep when you fall over,” he countered and left me to my rope and the road the moon laid out.

Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, I felt him again: Kade’s gaze like a hand hovering above my shoulder, not touching, close enough the air noticed. A tingle down my spine that wasn’t only fear. It made me angry at my own skin. It made me feel…alive. That was worse.

“Idiot,” I whispered to myself. “Try harder.”

So I did. I failed small, then less. The men still pushed; they were supposed to. Each shove found a place I hadn’t shored up yet. Each bruise drew a map of where I was weak. I traced it, learned it, and tried again.

Peace came between the hurts. In the hush after scrub and sweat, with salt drying on my lips, the sea gave me something the palace hadn’t since the barrel: a quiet that wasn’t empty. A quiet that held.

I slept there, at the edge of it, rope in my hands like a promise I would not let slip again.