NICHOLAS LEANED BACK AGAINST THE CHAIR, lifting the wilting corner of his hat to survey the crowded scene at the Three Crowns Tavern again. The air in the establishment was sweltering, giving its rum-soaked patrons a look of fever. The proprietor, a former ship captain by the name of Paddington, was an eager participant in the merrymaking, leaving his sturdy wife behind the bar to coordinate the drinks and meager food service.

Neither seemed to have a care for the fact that the gaudy emerald paint was curling off the wall in clumps, as if eager to get away from the overpowering stench of men deep in their cups. A defaced portrait of George III loomed over them, the eyes and sensitive bits scratched out—likely by men of the Continental Navy and Marines, who had raided the island for munitions and supplies seven months before.

Nicholas weighed the odds, as he impatiently turned his now-warm pint of ale between his hands, that the “three crowns” in the tavern’s name referred to the three vices that seemed to reign over it: avarice, gluttony, and lust.

A lone fiddler huddled over his instrument in the corner, trying in vain to raise a tune over the bawdy singing of the men nearby. The knot in his throat tightened, aided by the knot of his stained cravat.

“Jolly mortals, fill your glasses; noble deeds are done by wine. Scorn the nymph and all her graces; who’d for love or beauty pine! Fa-la-la-la-la…!”

Nicholas jerked away from the sight of the bow gliding over the strings, lest his mind start chasing memories down that unhappy trail again. Each second was chipping at his resolve, and what patience he had left seemed as insubstantial as a feather.

Steady, he coaxed himself, steady.

How very difficult, though, when the temptation to claw at the table and walls to release the bottled-up storm in him had him so close to surrender. He forced himself to focus on the men hunched over their tables, slapping down cards in perfect ignorance of the onslaught of rain pounding against the windows. The dialects and languages were as varied as the ships out in the bay. There were no uniforms present, which was a welcome surprise to him and a boon to the men at the tables around him, as they shamelessly attempted to unload their contraband.

Little wonder that Rose Linden had chosen this place to meet. He was beginning to question whether the woman courted villainy, or if she merely felt at home in it. If nothing else, her choice ensured that the Ironwood guardians watching the hidden passage on the island would not be likely to step in—their sensibilities were too delicate to risk brushing up against the scruffy charm of the seamen.

Settle yourself.

Nicholas reached up to press his fingers against the cord of leather hidden beneath his linen shirt. Against the outline of the delicate earring he’d strung through it for safekeeping. He didn’t dare take it out; he’d seen the look of pity and disgust Sophia had fired his way last evening, when she’d caught him looking at it by the light of their small fire, studying the pale pearl, the gold leaves and blue beads attached to the gold hoop.

It was a safer thing by far to keep his eyes forward, rather than fixed on the evidence of his failures.

Etta would find this place agreeable. He could not catch the thought before it escaped, nor could he stop himself from picturing her here. She would have delighted in watching the room, soliciting whatever stories she could about the island’s sordid history as a pirate kingdom. He might have lost her, even, to an ill-fated treasure hunt or a smuggler’s crew.

Lost her all the same. Nicholas exhaled slowly, packing the ache away again.

On the worst of days, when the restlessness and fear turned his blood to squirming spiders and his inaction became unbearable, his thoughts turned to nightmares. Hurt. Gone. Dead. But the very simple truth, the one that remained when every doubt swirled around him, was that Etta was simply too clever and stubborn to die.

He’d purposefully extinguished the lantern hanging on the wall beside them, and he’d ordered just enough small plates of food and ale to allow them to keep their table without question. But his pockets had lightened as the hours wound down, and Nicholas knew that what little pay he’d scraped together from a morning’s work unloading cargo on the docks wouldn’t keep for much longer.

“She’s not showing,” Sophia growled at him from across the table.

Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to tamp down the swell of frustration before it carried him off.

“Patience,” he growled. The night wasn’t over yet. “We aren’t finished here.”

Sophia huffed, downing whatever was left in her pint before reaching over and snatching his, drawing appreciative looks from the next table over as she gulped the remainder of the ale.

“There,” she said, slamming the tankard down. “Now we can go.”

In his twenty-odd years of life, Nicholas never could have dreamt he’d see the day when an Ironwood looked so utterly disreputable. Owing to the presence of Ironwoods on the island, and owing even more greatly to the fact that the Grand Master himself had likely put a bounty on his and Sophia’s heads large enough to purchase said island, they were in disguise.

Sophia had sullenly—but willingly—sheared her long, dark, curling locks to her shoulders, and braided the remainder into a neat queue. He’d secured clothing from a sailor who shared, approximately, her small stature, and she wore it as comfortably as she did her own skin—unexpected, given her past proclivity for silk and lace.

Most surprising, however, was the leather patch over the now-empty socket of her left eye.

Nicholas’s fears of her losing her eye after the brutal beating she’d suffered in Palmyra had been well founded. By the time he and Hasan had brought her back to a hospital in Damascus, the wound had become infected, and her sight in that eye was already gone. Sophia had elected for slow death by rot and fever rather than willingly let any of the physicians remove it, no doubt for vanity’s sake.

Yet, when they at last had been forced to remove it, some part of her must have wanted to survive, because she had not retreated from life even in the fiercest clutches of agony. In fact, she had healed quickly, and he had to begrudgingly admit her force of will, once she had made a decision, was something to be feared.

It was a lucky thing, too. While she recovered in Damascus, Nicholas received an unexpected note from Rose, left inside Hasan’s home for him to find.

Circumstances prevent me from waiting the month out, as discussed. We will meet on October 13th in Nassau or not at all.

At some point during her ride back to Damascus from Palmyra, where they had agreed to their original meeting, something had clearly changed in Rose’s evaluation of these “circumstances.” Without details, however, Nicholas hadn’t the slightest idea if he should be afraid, or merely irritated she expected them to be able to travel so far, so quickly. As sympathetic as he was to Sophia’s wounds, the idea that her injuries might cause them to miss their opportunity to discover the last common year had ignited a sickening panic, and no small amount of resentment, in him.

But her bruises and cuts had faded over the nearly two weeks since her beating, until, three days past, she’d been strong enough to begin to navigate them through a series of passages. And, finally, after one short chartered voyage from Florida, they had arrived to find Rose…nowhere.

“She’s not bringing Etta with her, if that’s what’s got you looking like a puppy about to piddle on the floor,” Sophia said. “Don’t you think we would have seen them by now if that were the case?”

He hadn’t expected Rose to arrive with Etta, safe and healing from her own wound, in tow…at least, not since that morning. Hope, as it turned out, dwindled like sand through an hourglass.

Nicholas forced himself to take a steadying breath. Her hatred of him minced the air between them, and, over the past weeks, her feelings had scarred into something far uglier than he’d known before. It made sleeping near her at night somewhat…uncomfortable…to say the least.

But he…How bitter the word the word needed was, when it was attached to Sophia. He needed her assistance to find passages, and, in exchange, had promised to help her disappear from Ironwood’s reach once their ill-fated adventure was at an end. It seemed obvious enough to him that the true reason Sophia remained with him was because she had not fully given up her designs on the accursed object.

And he had to live with the knowledge of this, because he, God help him, needed her. Damn his pitiful scraps of a traveler’s education. Damn his luck. And damn all Ironwoods.

“So eager to go back out in this weather?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. She narrowed her one eye right back, then scowled, turning toward the tavern.

Nicholas ran his fingers along the edge of the table, feeling each groove in the wood. Even two days ago, the idea of abandoning his deal with Rose had been inconceivable. Yet, if she couldn’t honor their agreement, what tied him to it?

You know what, he thought. Discovering the last common year between the previous version of the timeline and whichever this one might be. Etta would have been shoved through the passages, through decades or centuries, until they’d ultimately tossed her out somewhere in that year, stranding her there hurt and alone. He should have fought to flip their aims, so Rose was searching for the astrolabe, and he Etta, but it had struck him, even exhausted and raw with emotion, that Rose would have the contacts needed to quickly sort out the timeline changes.

Nicholas was already preparing for her cold fury when she found out that he had not spent the two weeks searching for the blasted astrolabe, as she’d asked him to. He could start in earnest, once his mind was no longer haunted by his fears for Etta’s life. Until then, he would never be able to fully concentrate on the task at hand.

As much as he had, in the privacy of his own heart, toyed with the idea of playing the selfish bastard and disappearing from this story, his whole soul railed against the dishonor of it. Once the astrolabe was found and destroyed, and Etta’s future mended, he would be happy to leave Ironwood to his hell of knowing he’d never have it.

But more than honor, more than responsibility, was Etta. Finding her, helping her, sorting this disaster out with her, the way they were meant to. His partner.

My heart.

He would finish this, and make his own life, as he’d always intended. The traveler’s world had never belonged to him. He’d never been granted access to its secrets, or allowed to explore its depth. He’d never been anything other than a servant.

Even Etta’s future had been like a distant star to him; he’d marveled at what she’d told him of its progress and wars and discoveries, but it had remained too far away for him to seize, to hold in his heart as something truly real, not wild fiction. Never mind something he could lay claim to. But whether or not they’d go there, or find a home elsewhere, he wanted to restore that world she had known and loved.

The merrymaking in the tavern was occasionally punctuated by the bang of the door, battered both by the force of the storm’s winds and the poor wayward souls who stumbled in for shelter. Nicholas returned his gaze to that spot, waiting for the telltale flash of golden hair, the pale blue eyes.

“Can you at least make yourself useful and dispose of the degenerate in the corner?” Sophia grumbled, crossing her arms on the table and resting her head on them. “If he keeps staring at me, I’m going to start charging him by the minute.”

Nicholas blinked, swinging his gaze around to each corner in turn, then back at the girl in front of him. “What the devil are you talking about?”

The scorn rose from her like a tide of fire as Sophia sat up from her slouch, nodding toward the far side of the tavern, at a table in their direct line of sight. A man sat there, dressed in a dark cloak, a cocked hat jammed down over his wet wig, as if prepared to bolt out into the storm again at the first opportunity. Catching Nicholas’s gaze, he quickly turned back to stare at his pint, his fingers rapidly drumming on the table. It was only then that Nicholas noticed the sigil of the familiar tree stitched in gold thread on the back of his glove.

Something that had been clenched inside his gut finally relaxed. The derelict man was a Linden. A guardian, if he had to guess.

Or an Ironwood trying to lure us out.

No—the past month had made him suspicious, perhaps beyond reason. An Ironwood would have confronted them directly. While his father’s family suffered from a drought of subtlety, they were gifted with a rare love of lethality. Still, he felt for the knife he’d slid into the inside pocket of his jacket all the same.

“Stay here,” Nicholas said.

But of course Sophia followed him on stumbling, drunken feet. The man still didn’t look up as Nicholas and Sophia sat down in his table’s empty chairs.

“Those are taken,” the man grunted out. “Waiting fer company.”

“I believe it’s already arrived, sir,” Nicholas said. “We seem to have a mutual friend.”

“Do we now?” The man turned his pewter pint around in his hands. Turned it again. And again. And again. Until, finally, Sophia’s hand shot out and slammed down over it, beating Nicholas to it by a sliver of a second.

“Test my patience further tonight,” she bit out. “I dare you.”

The man recoiled at her crisp tone, blinking as he looked at her face—her eye patch—closely. “That a costume you’ve got, luv, or just…”

Nicholas cleared his throat, drawing the man off that dangerous path. “We were waiting for…someone else.”

The man’s skin looked as if it had been left beside a fire to dry out for several hours too long. It was a familiar texture to Nicholas, one that marked years of working by or on the sea. The man’s green eyes flickered across the room as he reached up to tug his hat off and his wig forward.

The man confirmed it as he said, “Saw some…let’s say I saw some faces I usually try to keep clear of. Scouring the beaches and town real close and the like. Gives a man some second thoughts about helping a lady out.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Nicholas agreed. “Where is this lady?”

The man ignored him, continuing in his tetchy way: “Said there’d only be one of you. You seem to fit.” His gaze shifted toward Sophia. “Don’t know about this one here.”

Sophia narrowed her eye.

“She’s an associate of mine,” Nicholas said, trying to move the conversation along. He could understand the necessity of secrecy, but each second that passed without searching for the astrolabe was a second too long. “Are you to take us to this lady, then?”

The man took a deep drink of his pint, coughing as he shook his head. With one more furtive glance around, his hand disappeared into his cloak. Nicholas’s own fingers jabbed inside his jacket again, curling around the hilt of his blade.

But instead of a pistol or knife, the man pulled out a folded sheet of parchment and set it on the table. Nicholas glanced down at the red wax seal, the sigil of the Linden family stamped into it, then back up at the man. Sophia snatched it up, turning it over and shaking the folded parchment as if expecting poison to trickle out.

“Our…flower,” the man said, emphasizing the word, “had other business to attend to. And now I’ve repaid her favor, and I’ll be off to see to my own—”

“Favor?” Sophia repeated, the ale making her even more brazen than usual. “Aren’t you supposed to be a guardian?”

The man pushed himself back from the table. “Used to be, before another family killed nearly the whole lot of them. Now I do as I please. Which, in this moment, is leaving.”

Nicholas stood at the moment the Linden guardian did, dogging him through the thick crowds until he was close enough to grab his arm. “What other business did she have? We’ve been waiting for her—”

The guardian wrenched his arm out of Nicholas’s grip, bumping into the back of another tavern patron. Ale sloshed over the edge of the pint and onto Nicholas’s shoes. “Do I look like the sort Rose Linden would tell her bleeding secrets to?”

Actually, given his rumpled state and the rather impressive scarring around his neck, which could only have come from surviving a hanging, he seemed like the exact sort.

“Did she give you any other information?” Nicholas pressed, annoyed he had to raise his voice to be heard over the squealing fiddle and the boisterous laughter of the men and women around him. “Is she still on the island?”

“Are we not speaking English, lad?” the guardian continued. “Do I need to be giving it to you in French, or—?”

A feminine shriek broke through the loud roll of deeper male voices. Nicholas spun, searching out the table he’d just left, only to find a serving girl frantically trying to pick up the pieces of several broken glasses that had smashed across their table. Another small figure in a navy coat helped mop up the liquid as it rushed over the edge onto the floor.

“You—you cow!” Sophia shouted, snatching a rag out of the flustered serving girl’s hand to mop down her front.

“An accident—so sorry—stumbled—” The poor girl could barely get a word out.

“Are you blind?” Sophia continued. “I’m the one with one eye!”

“Best of luck with that one,” he heard the guardian say, but by the time Nicholas turned back, the man was on the other side of the tavern, and a sea of bodies had filled the space between them. The wind caught the door and slammed it open as the guardian disappeared into the night. The Three Crowns proprietor was forced to abandon a tray of drinks to bolt it shut before the rain flooded in.

“What’s this about?” Nicholas asked, moving toward the table. Sophia dropped back into her seat, glowering as the serving girl swept up the last of the glass into her apron.

“Someone,” Sophia emphasized, as if that someone weren’t standing directly beside them, “decided to be a right and proper fool and waste perfectly good rum by making me bathe in it—”

Truthfully, the liquor had improved her smell.

“I’m not a fool!” The serving girl’s face reddened. “I was watching where I was going, sir, but something caught my foot!”

She stormed off before he could tell her it was all right. And, of course, Sophia only seemed further infuriated by her absence.

“What? She can’t take a hint of criticism?” she snapped, then yelled after her, “Stand up for yourself, you sodding—”

“Enough,” Nicholas said. “Let us have a look at the letter.”

Sophia crossed her arms over her chest, slumping back against her chair. “Hilarious. You couldn’t even let me hold on to it for a moment before you took it.”

“I don’t have time for your games,” he said. “Just give it to me.”

She returned his sharp look with a blank one. A cold prickling of unease raced down his spine.

“The letter,” he insisted, holding out his hand.

“I. Do. Not. Have. It.”

They stared at each other a moment more; Nicholas felt as though her gaze was slicing him to pieces as his mind raced. He stooped, searching the floor, the chairs, the area around them. The serving girl—no, he saw her kneeling, and surely she wouldn’t have hovered by the table if she’d just stolen something. She hadn’t swept it into her apron, either. He would have seen that. Which left—

The other man. The one who had wiped down the table.

“Where did the man go?” he said, spinning on his heel.

“What are you on about?” Sophia grumbled, pushing herself back up to her feet. As she spoke, he caught sight of the deep blue jacket he’d seen before, but the wide-brimmed hat did nothing to disguise the slight man’s distinct features. The Chinese man stood, watching them from the landing of the staircase leading to the private rooms above. Nicholas squinted through the tavern’s dim lighting and took a single, cautious step in his direction. A flicker of a movement, really, but the man bolted with all the ease and speed of a hare.

“Hell and damnation,” he groused. “You wait—”

Sophia slid a pistol he had never seen before out from under her jacket, aimed wide, and with a single, careless glance, fired in the general direction of the staircase. The ringing silence following her shot swung the attention of the room toward them. Pistols, knives, and the odd sword rang out and clattered as they were drawn. And with that small explosion of powder and spark, the fight Sophia had been looking for, the one she’d tried a dozen times to get from him, from the serving girl, from whoever so much as looked at her the wrong way, broke out in earnest.

One man, limbs clumsy with rum, elbowed another man in the back of the neck while trying to pull his own weapon out. With a strangled cry, that sailor swung his fist around, knocking the first clear across the nearest table, scattering cards, dice, food, and ale in every direction. The card players rose and charged into the nearest throng of gawking men, who were forced, of course, to push back lest they be trampled.

A sailor emerged from the fray, swinging a chair up from the floor, aiming at Sophia, who stood where she was, smirking.

Blind to it, he thought in horror, in that short instant before he bellowed, “On your left!”

Sophia’s hat flew off as she jerked around. Her foot rose instinctively, her aim true: the powerful kick landed directly on his bawbles. As the sailor crashed to the floor with a shriek, she relieved him of the chair and smashed it over his head.

The fiddle shrieked as the bow jumped off the strings. The fiddler himself dove to the floor, just in time to avoid a chair hurtling toward his head from a whiskey-soaked doxy trying to hit her rival across her rouge-smeared face.

One lone drunk seaman stood in the center of the chaos, eyes shut as he swayed around in some odd reel, holding out his rum bottle as if it were his dancing partner.

“Damn your eyes!” Nicholas hollered.

“I think you mean eye,” Sophia said, reloading the last of their powder into the pistol, pausing only to steal the half-empty rum bottle from the next table over when its occupant turned to the sprawling fight.

Nicholas shoved his way through the thrashing tangle of limbs, dodging to avoid a sword winging its way through the air. The proprietor climbed to the top of his counter, and, instead of stopping the fight with a well-timed shot into the room, leaped onto the back of the nearest man, tackling him to the floor with a loud cry.

Nicholas had seen more civilized tar-and-featherings than this.

He arrived at the stairs in time to see a man, while fleeing the fight, shove a doxy out of his way and send her tumbling in a mass of skirts down the stairs. He managed to catch her, narrowly preventing her from breaking her neck.

“Christ!” he gasped, coughing as he waved away a cloud of her wig powder.

“Thank ye—thank ye—!” The woman kissed whatever patch of skin she could find, moving to block his path up the stairs, even as he tried to gently push her away.

“Ma’am, please—”

“Move, wench!” Sophia stood at the bottom of the stairs, pistol aimed at the doxy’s face. “He doesn’t have two coins to rub together, let alone any to waste on you!”

At that the girl ceased her assault, turned in a huff, and marched down the stairs to join the fray.

“Did she kiss you senseless?” Sophia snarled. “Go! He’s getting away!”

Nicholas took the steps two at a time. He burst onto the second floor, his chest burning as he drew each heavy, uneven breath. Down the hall, at the very end of a length of worn rug, a bedroom door had been thrown wide open, and Nicholas strode toward it. Just inside, a dark-haired girl, wrapped in a knit blanket, leaned onto the shoulder of another girl who patted her back now and then as she spoke in rapid, almost nonsensical English.

“On me—the door—a mite—funny little man—waving his knife—out the window—”

“A funny little man?” Nicholas asked, just as Sophia repeated, “Out the window?”

The girl blinked at their sudden appearance. “Why—short, yes, very small, almost like a child. And he’s one of them—he’s, how do you say—”

“From the Far East? Chinese?” the other offered. The first nodded, then turned to him, clearly thinking she should be rewarded. But Sophia was right—he didn’t have two coins in his pocket. After their drinks and supper, he no longer had even one.

Sophia pushed past him into the room, Nicholas following at her heel. The room was choked with the scents of smoke from the blown-out candles and perfume reeking of flowers. Rain had blown in from the open window and soaked the carpet in dark splotches.

Sophia retrieved a torn piece of fabric stuck to the frame, and inspected it as Nicholas stuck his head out, searching the flooded streets for any sign of movement. He swung a leg over the window frame and climbed out through it, jumping from the ledge to the porch’s roof and, finally, dropping to the ground. A heavy thud and curse followed as Sophia landed behind him.

Nicholas ran forward, shielding his eyes against the tropical torrent. Water rushed along the dirt and cobblestone paths, carrying away, just for the night, the grime and filth of the island.

But the thief was gone, and Rose’s letter along with him.

“Carter!” Sophia stood a short distance away, at the edge of the tavern, rooted in place. A large dark lump leaning against the brightly painted wall suddenly took the shape of a man.

“What’s the…” The words shriveled in Nicholas’s throat as he took a step back.

The Linden man sat slumped, his eyes open and unseeing. His skin had taken on a white, waxy quality, as if the blood had been drained from it. Between the rain and the near complete dark, Nicholas could see no obvious mortal wound—no gunshot, cuts, marks of strangulation.

“What happened?” he asked Sophia as she knelt beside the body. She turned the dead man’s head to the side, where a rivulet of blood was working its way down from his ear and along his jawline.

“There they are!”

Nicholas looked up to where one of the doxies was leaning out of the window, pointing directly at them. Several men at her shoulder turned to run back down the stairs, through the tavern, at the sight of them.

“We need to run,” he told Sophia.

“No argument from me,” she said, and sprang forward, leading them deeper into the night’s storm.