Page 23 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“Is that all, then?” Nore asked.

“That is all.” Sparrow moved to leave, their hand on the door. Then: “She has been pleased with you thus far, Finch. Remember the value of that.”

Nore’s eyes slipped shut and she did not think of Caspian. She did not think of the throbbing ache in her chest. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

When Nore opened her eyes, Sparrow was gone.

That night, Nore dined with the captain. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman called Kitzen, who kept tidy quarters and honored Nore with a full spread. It was a shame, though; it always took Nore’s stomach a few days to acclimate to the sea, so she could barely do more than poke at the pork and applesauce and roasted vegetables with a face of grim discontent.

“You should eat up while you can,” Kitzen said, suppressing a smirk at Nore’s green face. If Kitzen was ill, there was no sign of discoloration on her ivory skin. “It’s mostly rice and peas from here on out.”

Nore nodded, took a small bite of pork, chewed—and forced herself to swallow. She set her fork down. “How long is the voyage?”

“Four or five days if the weather is good.”

“And if it’s not?”

Kitzen shrugged. She was on her second helping, and Nore couldn’t help the pulse of jealousy.

“Do you come this way often?” Nore asked, trying a bit of carrot. She chewed for longer than was necessary.

“It’s my normal route,” Kitzen said. She took a swig of water and checked her pocket watch. “This is a rough time of year to predict. Things start freezing when it gets this cold—it’s one of the last easy runs we’ll have this season.”

“Ah.” Nore pushed the cut-up bits around her plate and finally relented. If she was to spend the night retching, she didn’t want to have that much to bring back up. It was a foolish way to think about it, her mother used to tell her when she was younger, but she hated eating when she was ill. The only thing she’d been able to stomach when she was sick was Caspian’s recipe for—

No. Nore cut that thought off at the root. It was too much to think about, too much to let herself remember.

“Have you visited your prisoner?” Kitzen asked, as if she could tell the direction of Nore’s thoughts.

Nore regarded her calmly. “I have not,” she admitted. “I haven’t yet found his cabin.”

“I can show you if you’d like.”

Nore nodded stiffly, feeling the crackling of anxiety in her stomach mixing even worse with the seasickness. Kitzen threw her napkin on the table and pushed her chair back with a hearty scrape. Nore followed the other woman out of the room and down the hall, half listening as Kitzen rattled off the important rooms Nore may need to know but mostly admiring the captain’s oilskin coat—it was to protect her from the seawater when she was working on deck, Kitzen told her.

They walked down into the bowels of the ship and Nore felt the bite of cold in the air. She did not often sail north at this time of year and found the experience uncomfortable, to say the least. There was an extra pile of blankets in her cabin, delivered by a sailor earlier in the afternoon with the warning that hypothermia could come fast if she wasn’t careful. It was a good thing, Nore thought, she was always careful.

Caspian was in a cabin near the bow of the ship. Kitzen led her to the top of the hall, waved vaguely to the end, and said, “Last door on the right. He won’t be comfortable there, but we’ll make sure he’s fed. I’ve left Driggs, my first mate, in charge of him.”

“Thank you,” Nore said. She waited until Kitzen left her to complete other tasks, then Nore set off down the hall. She felt her dread growing with every step—and she hesitated.

It wasn’t that far from her own cabin. A few floors below and maybe closer to the bow, if she had to guess based on her underdeveloped understanding of the ship’s geography.

She touched the polished metal of the doorknob. Felt the cold against her skin. The burnished gold of the metal was the same color as the wedding ring she once wore.

Nore leaned her forehead against the wood, letting her eyes slip shut.

On their wedding day, she wore an emerald green dress and a crown of wildflowers in her hair. Caspian had presented her with the crown in the morning, then spent half the day picking errant petals from her hair.

She remembered it all now, in one rush: Being so nervous she looked down at her scuffed boots as she walked into the room where Caspian waited with the magistrate’s clerk. He wore his hair long back then and had it tied up away from his face. When she finally looked at him, she felt the rush of blood to her cheeks and an odd solemness, the importance of that moment in which she had chosen to pledge the rest of her life to him.

They were both twenty when they married; Nore, three months older than Caspian, teased him about his youth relentlessly.

Children. They’d both been children, at the start.

That night, when the door was shut behind her, Caspian looked at her with indescribable awe, his eyes soft and gentle, like she was a miracle.

She remembered the look on his face, years later, blood on his hands as he—