Chapter 181: That’s My Girl

The wheel reply came too late, the canvas cracking half a beat after every correction he forced on her. Behind them, San Cristóbal’s topsails kept rising, coming toward them without room for mercy.

Around the deck, five people were doing the work of hundreds, which was a poor bargain for the five and an even poorer one for the crew that didn’t exist.

Sam hauled on a brace that refused to come that last hand’s width home while Jim fought a rope stiff with salt. Nearby, Milagros cursed a stubborn knot in two languages and got no better result in either one.

Between them Tomás moved as steady as a metronome, carrying twice the load that ought to have been his and making no speech about it. Kit hauled beside him, wincing sharply through his teeth whenever his ribs flared in pain, and waved away every offer to sit the work out.

Three masts. Five hands and a boy who had no business being on his feet.

Larboard was finished, starboard had five guns loaded and no more. The broadsides spent on the two dead sloops already behind them.

There was not a spare hand to reload either side before the frigate closed the remaining water.

No chance to run, either. The old lady was losing speed through a rig nobody had found the time to mend properly, and even whole, she would never have outrun a frigate forever.

There are ships built for war and ships built to run away, and the old lady leaned much more into one type than another.

Five guns, no crew to spare nor wind worth confidence.

James eyes stayed on the horizon, but his mind had gone somewhere else entirely.

There was a shop he had never properly checked. Intelligence, personnel, providence, whispers, and the one he had always left sitting untouched on the shelf.

Fateweaving.

He had bought bays with the shop. Rumors, too, and some mule once, guns and tools as well. He had never asked it for anything as foolish as luck itself.

Unfortunately, foolish was exactly what he needed now.

James reached for the voice the way a drowning man reaches for anything that floats.

"Can the shop sell luck itself?"

The words came no louder than the breath carrying them.

It took its own sweet time answering, which told him rather more than he liked.

How curious. Barely some days ago, the very man who resolved to rely less upon shelves stocked by a system that plainly enjoys watching him bleed had made that resolution with considerable confidence. Now he comes crawling back to the counter the instant the water is past his knees.

Before I answer, clarify precisely what you imagine you’re buying.

His hand tightened on the spokes. "Whatever help’s near enough to matter already, Marianne most of all. I want her findin’ her own way toward this water, and I want it before that frigate finishes closin’ the distance."

A pause, longer than the last.

Such a thing is possible. Understand what you’re purchasing, though. A tool is one matter, asking reality itself to bend its own knee is another. It costs accordingly.

The shimmer gathered before him, same as it always had.

⚓ [FATE SHOP - FATEWEAVING]

A Timely Coincidence

Somewhere within reach of these waters, help may already exist. This gives it a reason to find you exactly when it matters, and promises nothing beyond that.

Cost : 240 Fate (Dynamic)

Dynamic, in this instance, means precisely what you currently possess. I find the mathematics tidy, but you may find it considerably less so.

James stared at the number for one breath longer than he had any business spending.

"Bloody hell."

The words came out short and hard enough that Kit glanced over from the deck without the faintest idea what had brought them on.

"Aye. Take it, and be done arguin’."

James wouldn’t bother to spend another second pretending there was a decision to make.

Two hundred and forty Fate deducted. Balance is now a nice, round, zero.

Whatever he had just bought, he had bought with everything he possessed.

The wheel remained solid beneath his palms and the wind remained sharp against his face.

Then both seemed to thin at once, like a note kept too long just before it gives up and breaks. For one odd second, James felt less like a man standing at a wheel than the memory of one, a ghost standing half a step outside his own skin.

Reality, vast and patient, moved things around behind his back, shifting the pieces of the world like some stagehand working while the curtain was still down.

James could not have said how much time passed. Long enough to matter. Long enough that, when it ended, he was left wondering what in God’s name he had just paid for.

Then San Cristóbal occupied his sight again, closer than she had been a breath before, and there was no room left in his head for anything else.

"What in the devil did I just buy?"

The voice offered no answer. Whatever it owed him, it apparently preferred to keep it.

"Useless bloody thing."

He said that aloud, too, sharply, glaring at empty air as though it had personally cheated him.

"Cap’n!" Kit’s voice cracked clean in half.

He threw one arm toward the horizon.

"There! Look there!"

James followed his arm and saw two shadows where there had been nothing before.

One was small and quick, near enough certainly the Marianne by the cut of her.

Behind her came it bigger, broader, riding low and stubborn in the water the way only one ship in the whole ocean ever had.

James knew her the way a man knows his own hand in the dark.

Disbelief bust out from his chest, and it tipped clean over into an emotion dangerously close to joy.

Before anyone aboard the galleon had made sense of what they were seeing, the cry whistled high overhead.

It climbed in that peculiar way before it decides where it means to come down. Then it crashed in an explosion.

The impact found San Cristóbal’s foremast.

The canvas split open and caught, rigging snapped loose in whip-cracks, and the sailors working the yard above her deck vanished in the instant the spar broke apart around them.

The next punched down through her deck near midships, and that one was worse by half.

More splinters flew wide enough to see clearly even at that distance, and smoke boiled thick and sudden from somewhere below her rail. One stretch of her gunwale folded outward as though something considerably larger than iron had hit it.

The screaming came thin and late across the water, as cries will over that much open sea.

🏴 [PERK ACTIVATED] — True Shot

San Cristóbal staggered to a dead stop in the water, her rush broken clean in half.

Smoke poured off the frigate as though she had finally thought better of the chase and meant to apologize for having started it.

The whole deck staggered its breath for one prolonged beat.

Then it broke into noise, every voice aboard going off at once.

"THAT’S HER!"

Jim was already halfway up the rail, both fists in the air as though he meant to challenge the wind itself.

"That’s the Rose, lads! That’s the Bloody motherfuckin’ Rose!"

James threw his head back and laughed, loud and half out of his mind with it.

Both hands were still locked around a wheel that suddenly did not feel half so heavy.

"That’s my girl."

He said it again, louder, laughing straight through the words as though they were the finest things he had ever had the privilege to say.

"That’s my girl. That’s my beautiful, bloody girl, come to fetch her captain home."