“How do you know that’s from the Flying Dutchman?” Monty asks.
“It’s engraved on the side,” I say quietly.
Monty scoffs. “Anyone could have done that. Anyone can label anything. I could get Flying Dutchman tattooed on my ass; doesn’t mean I’m also its property.”
“Your ass is getting rather crowded.” Basira runs her finger along the lens, pausing at the sharp cracked edge, then examining her finger as if looking for blood. “The Dutchman was an ordinary ship once, before the captain made a bargain with the devil. Now, it’s a cursed vessel that carries only ghosts.” She sets the spyglass onto the dais beside her, and perhaps it’s my imagination, but I swear the droplets of water collected on the stone skitter away from it, as though repelled. “Nothing taken from the Dutchman would come without a price. Perhaps one paid by the thief. Perhaps by her children.”
Basira stares at the spyglass in a way that makes me think I’m not the only one who saw the water dance away from it. “Did your mother die at sea?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“She was in a shipwreck. When she was rescued, she had that with her.”
“Well then. She must have been a brave woman to rob the captain.”
“I don’t think she robbed anyone,” I say.
“That does not mean she wasn’t brave.”
The words settle upon me like a fine down of snow and I twitch, trying to dispel the cold. I drop my gaze, unable to look at her any longer. I feel like I need to defend my mother—against what? A compliment? She wasn’t a brave woman. Not remotely. She was pulled from the ocean with only this spyglass and never set foot near the sea again.
Until she drowned in it, alone on a seaside cliff in Scotland.
Before I can speak, Basira pulls her hair over her shoulder and wrings it out. It’s so long that when she takes hold of the end, she can stretch her arm out straight without sacrificing her grip. “I will release you.”
Monty lets out an audible sigh of relief and cranes his neck, searching the room for either the guards approaching to unshackle us or where he left his trousers.
But then Basira adds, “On a condition.”
“We’ll hear it first,” I say.
She snorts. “You think you are in a position to make demands of me?”
“I know: it’s very typically English of me.”
To my surprise, she laughs, waggling a finger. “I like you.” Her eyes glance off Monty, but she doesn’t offer him the same praise. “Leave my court and return to England,” she says, then adds, “And give me your spyglass.”
“No,” I say at the exact moment Monty says, far too gratefully, “God, yes, take it.”
“Why do you want it?” I say, fighting to keep my voice even. Be Edward. Be a politician. Never show your hand.
But she’s keeping her cards equally close to her chest. “If you think the Dutchman is just a story, then all you have is a family heirloom. Leave it with me as a show of your loyalty to my fleet and how sorry you are for your associations with Felicity Montague.”
“No.”
“Adrian,” Monty says quietly. I have a sense that, were we not incapacitated, he would kick me. I don’t look at him.
Basira arches an eyebrow. “No?”
“That spyglass is mine,” I say. “And I owe your fleet nothing. I have no loyalty to you or your company. From my perspective, all that has happened here today was that I came to find my sister, was assaulted, robbed, and imprisoned by strangers, and then extorted into giving up the last possession I have of my dead mother’s.”
“It’s not fair, is it?” She bends over, hands on her knees so she’s peering into my face. When I meet her eyes, she gives me a wide smile like one a nanny might give a child after teaching them an important lesson about growing up.
“If you truly value loyalty,” I say, my tone quavering, “then you’ll respect the loyalty I have to my family. And my mother, and what she left behind for me. I’m not going to leave it with you, no matter where it came from. It was hers—now it’s mine, but it was . . . it was hers! You can’t take it from me! I realize that’s almost the literal definition of piracy but—”
“Adrian,” Monty says again, and I realize I’m growing agitated. My face is hot, and I’m suddenly aware of the manacle over my neck as the cage that it is. I fight the urge to thrash it off.
It’s just a spyglass. It’s just a trinket. It’s not her, it’s not your memory of her, it’s just a spyglass. So why does the thought of being without it feel akin to being asked to leave a limb behind? I keep thinking of what my father said, that the spyglass had made my mother sicker. I did not say that. Had he? I can’t remember now, but I can hear those words in his voice so clearly.
Basira straightens, watching me with what I assume must be disgust. But when she speaks, her tone is gentler. “Don’t lose your head. I won’t take it.” She snorts, like this was all a joke. Maybe it was until I started to burst apart at the seams. “I don’t give a damn about your telescope and I don’t have time to waste a cell on you. I want you gone. You will both be on the next passenger ship north—I’ll personally make sure your names are added to the log, and my men will escort you. Where are you staying?” I can’t remember, so Monty gives her the name of the lodging. Basira tosses back the sleeves of her kaftan, then says, “The seas are in enough disarray without any interference from the English. Leave Salé and stay away from the Crown and Cleaver. Do you agree?”
But what about my sister and our ship to Portugal? What about the Flying Dutchman? What about the fact that we came halfway around the world and I refuse to turn back without answers? What about this spyglass and my mother and my broken family scattered across the world, from a marooner’s island to a lonely cliff in Scotland?
Before I can answer, Basira bends down so our faces are level. She puts her hands on my cheeks, and though I am generally averse to physical touch when it is both from a stranger and unexpected, I don’t flinch. Her skin is dewy, and she smells of nuts and citrus, a warm summer aroma.
“Go home, little ghost,” she says quietly, and I’m not sure if anyone but me can hear her. “You don’t want to tangle with the Dutchman.”
I hadn’t been planning to. I only learned of this storified ship a few minutes ago; the idea of pursuing it, or any reason why I might, had never entered my mind. But all I say is, “I’m not a ghost.”
She smiles, stroking my temples with her index fingers. “There’s something about you, though. Just like that spyglass. Something in you about to overflow.” When her hands leave my face, I can still smell the oil from her palms. “You aren’t enough to contain it.”
Monty and I are escorted from the palace by Basira’s guards and dumped onto the city streets, Monty still trouserless and me rattled and jumpy. I keep compulsively reaching for the spyglass, once again in my pocket, certain I’m going to drop it or lose it without realizing. Sometimes, even with my fingers wrapped around it, I doubt it’s there.
“Do you know what she was talking about?” I ask Monty before the guards are even out of sight. “The Flying Dutchman—what is that? What’s the story? You knew what it was—I know you do! Do you know why she’d think our spyglass—”