Chapter Nine
Unsurprisingly, Ethan’s familiar was a dragon.
More surprisingly, when he curled around the crow’s nest, glowing darkly, he appeared to be sulking. It was embarrassing.
And all because Briar was walking away from the ship.
Limping.
Ethan wasn’t sure if he was growling or if it was his dragon, flicking his tail like a giant whip made of knives. “Get yourself together,” he muttered.
The dragon’s glare was baleful and vengeful in response.
Erasmus took a healthy step away from the mast, frowning at the dragon.
The witch glass clinked together, as much part of the song of the sea as the steady waves and the creaking wood.
Spells had a way of waking up when you least wanted them to.
There were a dozen on his cross-belt alone, never mind the rest of the crew.
Or the many hexes and curses and evil eyes flung their way courtesy of Keepers, warlocks, other Iron Crows.
Pirates, highwaymen, spellsingers, cursebreakers, Fae kings, shifters. Once, notably, a vampire.
Iron Crows might be necessary, but no one much liked that fact.
They liked the Sea Dragons even less.
Ethan didn’t care if he was liked. He cared that Briar Foxglove was limping home alone.
He sighed and flicked a glance at his dragon, who immediately unfurled his scaled wings and flew off after the green witch.
Ethan was protecting his investment, that was all.
His way off this damned island. He had cargo waiting in the hull, filled with spell ingredients for a warlock.
There was a new bounty on his head that he had to go discourage.
Violently. And a hundred more reasons to want to be anywhere but here.
“Do you trust her?” Anais asked, climbing the steps to the quarterdeck. Her familiar, a white ferret, sat on her shoulder.
“Hell no.” Except that he did, which made no sense at all. Briar Foxglove was a green witch who was clearly keeping secrets, not to mention the twin sister to the bloody witch who had trapped them here.
And she had stabbed him.
After needling him so very gently to abduct her.
She was a mystery. With pockets full of flowers.
Fucking Haven.
He hadn’t met a single person in his life who wore flowers like daggers.
Not his mother before she died, his father before he left.
And Granny Gallows was as gentle as her name suggested.
He’d been all of ten years old, working as a cabin boy on a ship whose captain had even fewer scruples than the average Iron Crow.
He had grabbed a weather witch out of Padstow, right off the beach where she sold the winds knotted into cords to sailors.
One knot for a breeze, two for a storm, three for a gale.
There were only a few people still alive to tell tales about the fourth knot.
The captain had decided he was tired of buying knot charms and it would be much easier to steal an old woman along with heirlooms and gold from the locals.
No one came for Granny Gallows. She had one eye, a hagstone around her neck, and a single iron fingernail on her left hand no one dared ask about. When she wasn’t giving people the evil eye, she was knitting and drinking tea dark as bracken.
But she’d taken a shine to young Ethan, the only one brave enough to bring her salt cod and black tea where she hunched on the deck, spitting at the other sailors.
He could only imagine what she would have made of Briar, soft-hipped, with flowers in her hair, thorn-tangle scars on her fingers, and a fierce stubbornness under the sugar frosting of her.
Granny Gallows would have adored her recalcitrant swan, if nothing else.
Her own familiar was a gull who perched on the railing behind her and screeched until the captain downed a bottle of rum, his ears spotted with blood, and promised to return her to the next port.
But then Granny Gallows decided to stay.
She kept a sharp eye on Ethan and an even sharper eye on anyone who might give him trouble.
When the captain whipped Ethan for an infraction he could not even recall, she had called up a gale so fierce the ship tilted on its side and Ethan scooped salt water into his palms to cool the searing pain of his witch knot.
The captain had used an iron-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails smeared with rowanberry juice.
Granny Gallows threatened to capsize them all and drown every person on board (except for Ethan and the chickens the cook kept, because they amused her and it was hardly their fault they were on board) if the captain so much as touched Ethan again.
No one even looked at Ethan crossly after that.
A captain was never gainsaid on his own ship. But you angered a weather witch at your peril. They could drown you with a mouthful of water. Ethan learned that fear, wielded properly, did most of the work for you. As did rumors, and half-whispered horror stories.
If he had killed even half of the men he’d been accused of murdering, he would have been a monster.
Well, more of a monster. He had no illusions.
Even if Briar Foxglove made him wish he had.
“So what now?” Anais asked.
“Same as always. We take no quarter.” No matter how delicious that soft-looking flower witches might be. “Hunt the amulet,” he ordered her. Anais was best at hunting out magic. She would not get distracted by Briar licking the crumbs of a strawberry scone off her thumb like a bloody green lad.
“Aye, captain.”
“And Anais?”
She paused. “Captain?”
“Next time, find the sodding fork.”
“Oh, I knew it was there. I wanted to get her measure. To see what she was capable of.”
Ethan knew she was exactly as apologetic as she sounded: that was, not at all. He slanted her a glare.
She shrugged. “Now we know.”
Briar swung the door open to two Keepers wearing the jet-and-iron-nail wheel pendants of their station.
Also: daggers, a pistol, a sword. And beaver-crowned hats, proper frock coats, and Hessian boots.
The Keepers from Haven were fashionable, but the ones from the villages of Hallow and Holdfast tended more toward the thick sweaters and sturdy boots of fishermen.
But these men were clearly from London; she could tell by the quality of the gold threads around their buttons.
They had no doubt come for the festival before the shields dropped, and now they were as stuck as everyone else.
“About time,” Briar said, before they could say anything.
The one on the left blinked at her, the sky shaking with thunder over his head.
He was probably in his fifties, with dark skin and laugh lines at the corners of his mouth.
His red-haired companion was the exact opposite, exuding the pompous authority of the Order, pale as a fish belly.
“I hope you’ve come about that Iron Crow,” Briar added.
“Beg your pardon, miss?”
“He broke into the shop. And he shattered my favorite teapot.”
“Your teapot.”
“Yes, the one with the violets. It took me a long time to paint them, you know. The trick is in the right consistency for the paint.” She tilted her head.
Water dripped from their hair and under their collars.
“Speaking of violets, they are very good for calming the blood, and you do seem agitated,” she added to the younger Keeper.
“I have a syrup. I admit, it does taste a bit like soap, but it is very effective.”
“We were not speaking of violets,” he snapped in an agitated manner.
“I was,” Briar said mildly, hoping they did not see the way her knuckles whitened as she gripped her cane. “Can you track him or not?”
“Who?”
It might not be wise to irritate a self-important Keeper quite so thoroughly, but it was fun.
“The Iron Crow!” She turned to the older Keeper. “Is he new at his post?”
The sound of grinding teeth could be heard even over the rain. It was rather gratifying.
The older Keeper smiled. “No, miss. I’m Bear.”
His familiar was indeed a bear, glowing as though it were made of candlelight, ambling toward the garden.
Briar tried not to react. It would not find Petal—her familiar was sleeping too soundly, which was a different, equally urgent concern, but it would keep her from being spotted.
And as a shifter, Bramble did not have a familiar.
Her entire self shifted into rabbit form at will.
There was nothing to sniff out, nothing to hunt.
Just a wild tangle of branches and thick mud.
“This here is Mr. Oliver Dawson,” Bear continued.
“A pleasure,” Briar said. Oliver’s familiar was a nearly perfectly round bluebird, cheerful and rotund. It was lovely and Briar was quite certain the man did not deserve it. “I suppose you’d better come inside.”
She let them in despite the fact that every nerve in her body was shouting for her to slam the door shut and lock it. And add a circle of salt. Stinging nettles. Flying daggers. Anything to keep them far, far away from her sister.
She carried the oil lamp, casting light on the whitewashed walls, the woven rag rugs, the tin sconces patterned with roses.
The kitchen was on the left, opening to the small, private family parlor that had once been her mother’s bedroom.
On the right were the two parlor rooms turned into the teashop.
There was a wooden counter carved with roses, with shelves of jarred teas behind it, and iron tables, all painted white, of course.
Several chairs still lay on their sides.