"Give it," Locke said, without pretense.
That night Jardena walked the cliffs until the moon hung like a pale coin. She opened the chest in her private room. Inside, beneath a scrap of leather, sat a small, blackened key and a strip of sea-glass engraved with the same constellation as the maps. When she pressed the glass to the blue rose, the petals trembled and the lights of the lighthouse through the glass refracted while a tide-song hummed in her ears as if the sea were singing from under the floorboards. mistress jardena
The captain lowered his gaze. "We were paid to find the chest," he said. "Paid well. But maps—my employer said the maps were trouble." "Give it," Locke said, without pretense
Locke drew his sword. "Then you stand between me and profit." Inside, beneath a scrap of leather, sat a
He laughed. "You think to take them by village order? The south pays well for new routes. I've sailed farther than your lighthouse sees."
"People are missing," Jardena said. "Old promises were broken. Your maps involve Halmar. Why?"
At the edge of the fight, a child—small, pale, with the same defiant chin Jardena wore—stepped forward and shouted for no one in particular: "Mistress Jardena! The maps—look!" The maps in Locke's satchel had come loose and unrolled in the rain, and as they hit the water they shimmered. The paper unlatched into the sea and revealed names hidden like coral: a hundred small coves whose tides still answered to Halmar's pact. As the maps spilled, the tide-roads above them answered, wrapping like bands and lifting men high. The hired men found their boots useless as their feet left the quay; currents moved them gently away, depositing them far down the shoreline where they could not regroup.