“And how much am I paid for this nighttime jaunt? With Your Honor as shipmate? With these goods?”

“Twenty crowns as we leave, twenty crowns on the quayside when we come back; and no one the wiser,” James said.

Zachary tipped back his chair and put his sea boots on the barrel that served as a table. “No, I don’t think I’ll take it,” he said, smiling at James over the top of his cup. “It’s too much for ordinary smuggling and I’m no smuggler, I must tell you. And it’s too little for shipping the king off the island. If that’s your game, you’ll be hanged for it.”

“It’s what my other ship would have been paid,” James said coolly. “It’s the right price.”

“No, it isn’t. For—see? He wouldn’t do it for the price. Your fine friend didn’t appear. You don’t know why?” His sharp glance at James’s face told him that the handsome young man did not know why his ship had failed. “So, if he wouldn’t do it for the money, I don’t think that I will either.”

“I think you will,” James said. “For I can call the watch to arrest you, and I can tell the magistrate that you have abandoned a wife and thrown her children onto the parish at Sealsea. I can tell them that you deserted from the parliament navy and serve as a smuggler. I can tell them that you are an adulterer and possibly a bigamist. I can tell them that you are wanted on Sealsea Island, perhaps elsewhere. Your own son would give witness that his mother is waiting for you to come home and that the Sealsea church wardens want you for your tithes.”

“She is not!” Zachary slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “She’s not waiting! Damn you for all the rest of it, but don’t tell me that. She don’t miss me, she don’t want me. The boy might look for me, but she won’t.”

“I know that she does,” James said steadily, thinking of the white-faced woman waiting for this man’s ghost to speak to her on Midsummer Eve.

Zachary leaned forward confidingly. “Not her, because she’s a whore,” he said frankly. “One honest man to another: she’s a whore and a witch. They married me to her, though I had my doubts, but her mother—another witch—wanted my boat and my nets and my catch, and thought that I would keep her girl safe, in difficult times. Thought I would make a fortune. Maybe I swore that I would. Maybe I made all sorts of promises. I was so mad for her—and who do I blame for that, eh? I built our house right next door to her mother in the ferry-house so that they could carry on their trade as wisewomen together, and I looked aside when they did what they did. I brought home fish, I sent her to market for me, and I took the money she brought back. I had plans for another boat, but I was unlucky a few times. I was as good a husband as any on the island. I didn’t know what tricks that they would play on me. My wife and her mother, God curse them.

“One child we had: a daughter as beautiful as a faerie-born child. What did I know? Only that they had foisted a changeling on me from the moment that I saw her. Then came Rob—look at him! He could read as soon as he could walk, though I can’t spell my name. He knew the herbs as soon as he toddled into her garden. Used to name them by smell. Who smells leaves but a faerie child? They’re not my children. Nobody could ever have thought that they were my children! Look at them!”

“Then whose?” James demanded tightly.

“Ask her! She knows who she meets when she goes out into the full moon, when she goes out at Midsummer Eve, when she goes out to dance in the darkest of the nights of winter. She knows where she got these children. But I swear to you, it was not from me.”

James braced his shoulders against a superstitious shudder. He forced himself to speak steadily: “This is nonsense. Are you saying that you left her for no better reason than this?”

“Damn her to the deep! She left me!” Zachary exclaimed. “I may have been the one that was pulled out of the alehouse and thrown into the navy, but it was her who left me, years before that. She unmanned me; she can do it with a look. I could do nothing in her presence. I grabbed her once and was going to force her, but my hand went weak and my blood went like ice. I was going to make her do her duty by me—you know what I mean, a man has rights over his wife, whether she was willing or not—but I couldn’t. She looked at me with eyes like a curse, and I went as soft as a dead fish. I swear to you, she was killing me. I could do nothing with her: not beat her nor swive her. She was killing me from the cock up.”

“She was?”

“She drained me of life, I tell you. I could be no husband to her, and when I went with some drab I couldn’t do the act there either, for thinking of her. What is that but a curse on me? And after her mother died, it got worse. I thought that when her mother died her power would go, but it was as if she added the old witch’s power to her own. I was a baby in my own house. More of a baby than Rob, less of a voice than Alys. The press gang took me away, but by God I was glad to go!”

“Would you ever come back?” James asked.

“Never! Never! I’d rather die than go back to her. I’d rather drown. She’s a whore, I tell you. A whore to faerie folk. She’s a witch, I tell you. She can make a child without a man; she can prevent a child despite a man. She can kill a child in the womb and blast a man’s cock with one icy breath.”

“Dear God, what are you saying?” James could no longer hide his fear at the man’s words—the worst things a man could hear: a woman that could shrink his potency, kill his children. “I know her! This isn’t possible for a woman like her. It isn’t possible for any mortal woman!”

“You can say that, Priest,” the man said, his voice low. “You can say that who has never seen her naked, who has never touched her warm skin, who has never longed for her. But the taste of her mouth is like drinking henbane—she makes you thirsty for more and more, and then she drives you mad.”

“I’m no priest,” James said, quickly, ignoring what Alinor’s husband said about the woman he loved.

Zachary’s lip curled. “As you wish,” he said coldly. “But something stinks of incense here and it’s not me.”

There was a silence between the two men.

“Anyway,” James said, trying to recover his authority, trying to banish the image of Alinor whoring to a faerie lord, “I have no time for this nonsense. I am offering you a voyage or arrest. Which will it be?”

“Twenty crowns to take the trade out, to a meeting of your saying. Twenty crowns to bring you back?”

“Yes,” James said.

“And we never speak of this again, and you take that boy back to her and tell her that you never saw me?”

“I can’t make him lie, but I can make up some excuse.”

“So that she does not look for me?”

“She would not come looking for you.”

“She has the sight, fool. She can see me if she pleases, unless there is the deep sea between us. She cannot see me through deep water, I know that. She’s afraid of deep water because she has no power over it. But if I ever sail into Tidelands again the mire will boil beneath my keel and throw me up like sea wrack before her door, and she will destroy me with one look.”