Chapter Fifteen
ANATOLE
The weather turned wrong three days after the mate ceremony.
Not a storm. Anatole knew storms, had sailed through every fury the Crimson Sea could produce, and this wasn't natural.
This was something older. The sky took on a greenish cast that didn't correspond to any weather pattern he'd charted in twenty years at sea.
The wind shifted four times in an hour, swinging compass points like a pendulum, and the sea itself developed a chop that ran against the current, waves slapping the hull from directions that made no nautical sense.
His wolf knew what it meant before his mind caught up.
"We're near her island," Luc said, confirming what the hair rising on Anatole's arms already told him.
His first mate stood at the chart table, one finger pressed to a spot in the Scattered Isles where the cartographer had drawn nothing.
No name. No depth soundings. Just empty space surrounded by warnings in faded ink: here the sea obeys no captain.
"That's impossible. I plotted our course to avoid the Scattered Isles entirely. We should be sixty leagues south of Morvenna's waters."
"We were. Check the charts."
Anatole checked. Luc was right. Their position, confirmed by star readings and current measurements, placed the Barbe-Bleue squarely in the channel between the Scattered Isles and the open sea.
They had drifted north overnight, against the current, against the wind, against every navigational force that should have kept them on course.
As if the sea itself had carried them here.
"The witch," Anatole said.
"The witch." Luc's voice was grim. "She heard your mate claim. Or the curse told her. Either way, she knows about Jeanne, and she's pulled us into range."
Anatole's hands curled on the chart table.
The greenish light from the sky filtered through the navigation room's porthole, turning everything sickly.
Below, he could hear the crew growing restless, their wolves sensing the wrongness in the water.
Seawolves trusted the sea the way they trusted the ground beneath their paws.
When the sea stopped behaving like the sea, it unsettled them on a level that went deeper than thought.
"Change course," he said. "Hard south. Get us out of her waters."
"Already tried. The helmsman's been fighting the current for an hour. We're not moving south. The water won't let us."
Anatole swore. Took the stairs two at a time to the helm, seized the wheel himself, and threw his weight against it.
The Barbe-Bleue groaned. Her timbers protested.
The sails caught wind from three different directions, the canvas snapping and cracking overhead, and for a long, straining moment the ship fought against whatever held her.
Then the wheel went slack in his hands, spinning freely, and the ship drifted back to her original heading. Toward the island. Toward Morvenna.
"She's holding us," Anatole said. "The witch has the ship."
The crew had gathered on deck. All of them were watching the sky, the water, their captain. He could smell their unease layered beneath their loyalty, the sharp tang of wolves who trusted their alpha but didn't trust what was happening to the sea around them.
"Captain." Gris's voice, quiet and steady in the way that only the oldest member of a pack could manage. "There's something you should see."
The cook held out a bird. A gull, gray-feathered, stiff with death. Its wings were folded against its body as if it had simply stopped flying and dropped from the sky. Rigor had set its claws in a curled grip around a scrap of parchment.
Anatole pried the parchment free. The handwriting was elegant, precise, written in ink that smelled of salt and something rotten underneath.
You will lose her too.
He crushed the parchment in his fist.
"Double the watch on the lowest deck," he said. "Two wolves at all times, stationed at the corridor entrance. No one goes down there. No one. And if the omega approaches, you hold her. Physically. I don't care if she fights you. You do not let her near that door."
"Captain," Luc said carefully, "she's pack now. Laying hands on the captain's mate..."
"Is better than burying her." Anatole's voice came out stripped to the bone. "Post the guard, Luc. And keep trying to push south. The witch can't hold us forever."
He didn't know if that was true. But the alternative was admitting that Morvenna had won before the fight had even started, and Anatole had never surrendered anything in his life.
He pocketed the dead bird's message and went below to find Jeanne.
JEANNE
SHE KNEW SOMETHING was wrong before Anatole reached the cabin.
The pull had changed. It had been a constant ache, tugging her toward the lowest deck with steady, predictable force. This morning, the fishing line had become a chain.
Not gradual. Not the slow escalation she'd been tracking.
Between one breath and the next, the pull doubled in strength, as if someone had grabbed the other end and yanked.
She'd been sitting at the desk reviewing the star charts Anatole had given her to study when it hit, and she'd gasped, both hands flying to her chest, the charts scattering to the floor.
The hum from the lowest deck was audible now. Not just in dreams, not just in the twilight between sleeping and waking. She could hear it through the floorboards of the cabin, a low resonance that vibrated in her fillings and made her eyes water.
And underneath the hum, a voice that was older and colder than the dead brides' whispers.
The door is singing for you.
The cabin door opened. Anatole filled the frame.
"What’s wrong? What’s happening?” she asked.
He told her about the drifting course, the unnatural weather, the dead bird and its message. She listened with her hand on her chest, trying to ease that maddening pull.
"How close is her island?" she asked.
"Close enough that her magic can hold the ship.
We can't steer south. The current is carrying us in a slow circle around the Scattered Isles.
The closer we are to Morvenna, the stronger her magic.
The room was made from her power. When we're near her, the door's pull on you.
.." He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
"Gets worse. Yes. I noticed." She forced a smile that had no humor in it. "So we're trapped in a witch's current with a magic door that wants to eat me. What's the plan, Captain?"
"The plan is to keep you as far from that door as possible while the crew works on breaking free of whatever she's done to the water.
" He crossed the cabin and took her hands, pulling them away from her chest. His grip was firm.
Grounding. "You stay above decks. You stay with me, Luc or Gris. Don’t go below the main deck for any reason. And don't go anywhere alone."
"Okay,” she said shakily.
He brought her hands to his mouth, kissed her knuckles. "I've posted guards at the corridor, just in case."
The pull was so strong now, a physical force dragging at her ribs, and the hum was so loud, and somewhere in the lowest deck a door was singing her name with a voice that sounded like love and tasted like death.
"I’ll fight her with everything I have," she said. She hoped it would be enough.
He pulled her against his chest and held her there, his chin on top of her head. She could feel the tension in his body, the coiled readiness of a wolf who sensed a threat he couldn't fight with teeth or strategy or the raw force of an apex alpha's will.
Morvenna wasn't a rival pack captain who could be scared off with a territorial display. She was the source of the curse itself, and she was close, and she was angry, and she wanted Jeanne dead.
ANATOLE
NOTHING WORKED.
He tried everything in the three days that followed.
Practical measures first: the guards at the corridor, and the course changes that the sea refused to honor.
He moved Jeanne’s belongings to a hammock rigged on the main deck, giving her a sleeping space as far from the forbidden door as the ship's geography allowed.
She lasted one night in the hammock before the dreams drove her out of it.
He woke to find her standing at the top of the stairs that led below, barefoot, her eyes open but unfocused, her hand reaching for the rail.
The watch had stopped her, a young beta named Thierry who'd planted himself in her path and spoken her name until she blinked and came back to herself.
She didn't remember getting out of the hammock. Didn't remember crossing the deck. The last thing she recalled was lying down and closing her eyes.
After that, Anatole didn’t bother sleeping anymore. So he laid down beside in the hammock and held her at night, while the crew tried every anti-magic ritual they could think of to break free from Morvenna.
The second night, she woke him by trying to climb over him.
Not aggressive, not frantic. Just a calm, deliberate attempt to remove his arm and get to her feet, her body moving with a sleepwalker's eerie purpose while her eyes stared at nothing.
He'd caught her, pulled her back, held her against his chest while she gasped her way back to consciousness.
"I was there," she said, shaking in his arms. "In the dream. I was standing in front of the door.” She gave a breath that was close to a sob. "Anatole, I was opening it. In the dream, I was opening it and it felt right. Like coming home."
He tried distraction. Filled her days with activity, with lessons and work and anything that might occupy her mind enough to give the curse less purchase.
He taught her to splice rope, to read weather by the shape of the clouds, to handle a cutlass.
Gris taught her to cook the crew’s favorite recipes.
Sébastien walked her through the ship's inventory, explaining how to keep a crew fed, armed and sailing.