(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Rysn pulls herself along the port rail of the Wandersail, the modified chair gliding a foot and a half off the deck. Rushu and Huio have rigged a swivel base from a spinning serving dish, and rigged a counterweight up the mast so Rysn can lift herself to the quarterdeck under her own power. There is no way yet to lower the chair back without help, and no way to lock it to the rail when she stops, but it is the first time she has moved herself across any space larger than her own cabin in two years. The sailors notice. One nods as she passes. Another raises a fist in encouragement. By the third she realises the deckhands are *rooting her on*, and feels for the first time something like belonging with a crew that prizes the same horizon-chasing she does.

She comes to rest beside Cord at the prow. The trap is set; she nods to Nikli and he slips below. Cord is staring at the cloud-wall on the horizon, the storm pattern that hides Akinah. Rysn switches them into Veden and offers Cord a graceful exit: a Thaylen watchpost on Aimia could drop her off. Cord refuses; she was hesitant but never forced. She came, she says, partly because she liked finding out she could survive frightening things, and partly — bluntly — for *treasure*. Akinah is rumoured in Horneater story to hide it. Rysn finds the answer prosaic and somehow disappointing on a woman this contemplative, but it is at least an honest one.

Nikli slips back up the stairs, gesturing urgently, and Rysn excuses herself. He shows her a small pouch — blackbane, he whispers, prepared at full strength, found tucked among Cord's things. The Urithiru party had been in port the night before Screech died, and blackbane is said to darken the skin of those it kills; the late pet had been discoloured. The Radiants, he says, are lying to them.

Rysn agrees with him that the situation is dire and waves her red handkerchief. Kstled is down the quarterdeck stairs in a heartbeat with two of his best armsmen, hand on his sword; Lopen and Huio drop to the deck from where they have been hovering off the side. *Yes*, Rysn tells Kstled. *Take him*. Nikli has no time to cry out. Kstled has him bound on the deck in seconds.

Nikli demands to know what she is doing — he revealed the traitor to her. *Yes*, Rysn says again, *you did*, and it hurts to say it because she had wanted to believe him. She had been certain, she explains, for days. He was the only person on the entire voyage who kept pushing her to turn back. When she ordered Cord's cabin thoroughly searched the previous day, there had been no poison in it; that Nikli could conveniently produce a pouch *and* expert knowledge of the poisoning method, all in the same breath, was a tell. Nikli sags, looks at her, and says with what is suddenly no accent at all: *I see you learned all of Vstim's lessons*. He will not be made to talk, he tells Kstled mildly. There is nothing the man-at-arms can do to him.

Rysn calls for Chiri-Chiri and holds the larkin up to him. The larkin clicks listlessly and accepts a sphere instead. If Nikli were hiding Stormlight or Voidlight, Chiri-Chiri would have drained it; she does not. Lopen tells her flatly that a Fused Lightweaver would fool both him and Rua; only Jasnah would know for sure. Cutting him would work on a regular singer — wrong-coloured blood — but a Lightweaver can dress that too. Rysn asks Cord to look him over for unfamiliar spren; Cord sees nothing she has not been seeing for weeks.

Kstled reports that Plamry has been taken in custody as a precaution. *He knew nothing of this*, Nikli mutters. Rysn pulls Cord aside and asks, quietly in Veden, whether there would be any way to recognise a servant of the Gods Who Sleep Not she had described the night before. Cord has no idea. The gods are powerful, terrible, eternal, bodiless, able to puppet cremling and insect. *Delightful*.

Rysn decides not to keep a possible enemy Lightweaver in the brig while her ship approaches the storm. Executing him is useless — a Fused would reclaim a new body at the next Everstorm — and if he is not one she still wants him alive to interrogate after the mission. She has Lopen and Huio fly the captives to the main island of Aimia, chain them to whatever rock-feature they can find, leave food and water, and send word of the location to the Thaylen watchpost. Plamry, who might be innocent, should not be left in the storm. She expects Nikli to have slipped his manacles before they come back, but at least he will be off her deck.

The search of Nikli's quarters comes up with a second bag of blackbane and an annotated Azish recipe book full of marginal notes — *humans prefer salt in abundance*, *cook longer than you think will be required*, and, beside a spicy dish, *this will cover the taste*. The implication is unambiguous: had the omens not turned the ship around, Cord would have been jailed, Nikli would have inherited the galley on the strength of his bragged-about cooking, and the crew would have eaten his last meal without knowing it. Rysn orders a few rats kept aside to taste each course before the sailors do, and stares across the water at the distant figure in chains, asking the question she cannot answer: *who are you really, and why do you want us so badly off this island?*