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Revenge ?”
    “Neither,” she said. “I was on a tour boat, I fell over by accident—”
    “And where did you get this?”
    “I found it on the beach. I was just walking and saw it in the sand.”
    “Found it—just lying there, you say? Then how did you end up in the water? We shouldn’t have found anyone, picking through Blane’s trash. Blane doesn’t give quarter.”
    “I don’t know,” she said weakly. “I don’t know how I ended up there. I don’t know who Blane is.”
    “Then you don’t know where this came from? Who it came from?”
    “No.” Jill pursed her lips and grit her teeth to keep from crying. Tried to stand straight until she realized her legs really were about to give out—they felt like rubber. She sat on the bench. “It probably washed ashore—how could I know where it came from? It’s old, hundreds of years old.”
    “Hundreds of years—” The captain sounded startled. “And where do you come from?”
    “The Bahamas. I’m on vacation. We were in a boat, I fell off—”
    “You must be addled.” The woman was pacing now, just a few steps back and forth across the cabin, and she wouldn’t look at Jill.
    “I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t know how I got here,” Jill said.
    Cooper held up the blade—just a broken scrap of metal. “You’re connected to him somehow. Through this.”
    “How do you even know what it is, how can you recognize it?”
    “I’m the one who broke it. It should have been lost forever, and now it’s back. Because of you.” She pointed the rusted scrap at Jill, who leaned away from it, her heart pounding. Which of them was crazy here?
    “But how—”
    Cooper shook her head. “No. No more. You aren’t making sense. Maybe you will after you’ve had some rest.”
    “But my family, the tour boat couldn’t have gone too far, I wasn’t in the water that long—”
    “Lass, there’s no other boat around for leagues. You lost your family, and you’re lucky to be alive.”
    “Then take me back to the island, they’re probably waiting for me—”
    Captain Cooper turned on her. “There’s naught but cutthroats and bloody pirates on that island. An’t no one’s family there, and if yours is then they’re fools and’ll soon be dead, like as not. You’ll stay here, where I can keep an eye on you.”
    That shut Jill up. It also made her mind stumble. The Bahamas, an island of pirates? All those stories come to life? Maybe she’d fallen a long ways off her family’s tour boat.
    So what did she do now?
     
     
    Captain Cooper kept the piece of rapier. Not that the thing had been much of a good luck charm for Jill. But the captain wouldn’t explain why it was important, why it wasn’t just a scrap of metal.
    She slept in the captain’s own bed—“Just for now, don’t be getting any pretty ideas”—a mattress in a wooden frame, with rough sheets and a heavy wool blanket. Jill thought she should have slept heavily for hours. But the ship’s movements kept her awake. Slow, arrhythmic swaying, rocking her one way and another on the hard mattress that might have been stuffed with straw. She started to feel nauseated and wasn’t sure it was all from the boat’s rocking. Shutting her eyes tight, she tried not to think of it.
     
     
    Jill slept lightly and with dreams of falling, of being underwater and not being able to swim. She was a good swimmer; nothing should have been able to keep her from the surface. But something was holding her down, anchoring her. And she thrashed awake; the dreaming sense of vertigo didn’t go away. She was still on a ship surrounded by strangers, uncertain of the place and time. She’d never felt so helpless.
    Well, she’d wanted to get away from everyone, hadn’t she?
    The motion of the ship had increased, rolling so much that the lantern hanging from the roof beam swung back and forth, and she would have slammed against the bed’s frame if she hadn’t braced herself. Nothing was loose