The slice in Archer's palm provided him nothing but constant, searing pain. The curly-haired woman Denver had introduced as the Avourienne's doctor, Miller, crouched in front of him, examining his hand. She poked at it again, and he gritted his teeth as the hot feeling ran up his arm again.

"I think you'll heal fine without stitches," she decided, brow furrowing as she reached for the kit she'd brought with her. "I'll just wrap it and be out of your way, okay?"

Archer tried not to grimace as she cleaned it. "Thank you," he muttered, glancing to his left, where Silta slouched into the strategy room couch cushions. Her ankles were crossed on the table in front of her, quiet once more. She shifted, letting out a long sigh.

He glanced at her thigh, where a muscle flexed near her knee. He watched it relax, settling back into a harmless state. Genetics, Kingsley, Britter had said.

Genetically speaking, she had the body of a Siren, suited for ocean pressure with dense bones and a solid foundation for muscle. She had wicked speed and a sharp mind, but her punches would still fall short of Archer. She'd been weaker than Shiv, so what about Bardarian, who was surely twice her weight? How would she beat a man like him?

The door tossed open to his right. The doctor didn't look up as Bates sauntered into the room, Bardarian coming in behind him. In seconds, Silta was on her feet.

"Liar," she snapped, coming around the side of the table. Bates stepped in front of her, snarling like a guard dog.

The Captain shook his head and mumbled out a laugh. "Liar, sir," he corrected, glancing over at her as he walked for the desk at the back of the room. "Or Captain works, too."

"You knew there was money out for me," she said, stepping around Bates, that same muscle in her thigh flexing and relaxing. Maybe if they pissed her off enough, Archer would get to see exactly how she'd take down Bardarian.

"I hear things," the Captain said with a shrug. He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms. "Most rumours are just that."

"Oh?" It was almost sultry, the tone she took with him. "Is that your stance?" She kept coming closer, and Bates kept getting in her way. "Is that why you told Trippy not to let me go alone? Is that why you gave me a team full of duds?"

"Don't be dramatic, darling. I heard the Minnow was fine."

Fine. It was praise, and from a man like Bardarian, it was high praise. Archer focused on the doctor, wrapping his bandage. He shouldn't acknowledge those words had even been said.

"And if I picked Tanner?" Silta queried. With a growl of frustration, she shoved Bates into the wall with a loud thud, and the man stumbled to the floor. Her eyes were back on Bardarian in seconds, tone just as aggressive as before, "You would've had a dead deckhand, and I would've had a two-on-one."

The Captain settled into the chair behind the desk, ignoring his first mate slumped near the wall. He glanced up at her with a sly smile and said, "I've seen you occupy two men just fine." He leaned back.

Her eyes were clear and her words came sharp, but she didn't like his innuendos, didn't like how tactful he was at bringing her down. "Silly you," she said. "Forgot to mention the bounty, isn't that right?"

"Downright foolish," he admitted. "Old age, perhaps; I'm so forgetful these days, you know. Without you there to keep me young."

She nodded slowly, picking apart his act, searching his face. Without you there. Archer glanced from one of them to the other. What were they? A fling? A relationship of convenience? None of it made sense.

Bardarian tapped the desk with a thick finger. Her gaze made him uncomfortable, too, so Archer guessed that's why he chose to speak again, "I'm not known to be the brains of the ship. Isn't that supposed to be you?"

She hummed in agreement. "Captain Bardarian," she said, spreading her arms like it was some powerful declaration, a name that could stop the world from turning. "Forgetful and foolish." She barked out a laugh, bringing her hands to the desk. She narrowed her eyes, but her voice was cool, still just a hair shy of seductive. "You're none of those things," she said. "You doubted a contact's loyalty, so you sent in unsuspecting bait to test him."

Archer raised his brows, but neither the doctor nor Bates—getting up and dusting himself off—seemed to find her deduction unreasonable. And Bardarian, pursing his lips, was caught. He sighed once, loud and long, then got out of his chair, coming around the desk. He was a bad man, a killer of the innocent, but Archer liked his ability to make her look so small.

"You were never put in a position you weren't fully capable of handling," he said. "And now that we know my suspicions concerning Shiv were correct—"

"None of that has anything to do with—"

Bardarian brought a heavy hand down on her shoulder, a muscle in his jaw feathering. He had a thing against getting cut off, clearly, and it was hardly surprising that a man who'd never known hardship couldn't take what he dished out. The shocking thing about the whole ordeal was that when he took that sharp step forward, Silta stepped back.

Miller quickly pinned Archer's bandage, her hands becoming frantic. Bates just tossed his hat on the table in frustration and left the room. As the doctor got up to leave, too, Archer awkwardly stayed sitting. He wasn't a high enough rank to leave this kind of room without being told to, but he wasn't sure if they knew he was still there once everyone else left. He could clear his throat, he supposed. Make some sort of noise.

Bardarian took a breath to calm himself. "Everything turned out fine," he said, his voice completely different now that his doctor and first mate were gone. He went soft, kicked into a gentler gear immediately. Like hell Archer would be clearing his throat now.

"The outcome is irrelevant," Silta snapped, as hostile and guarded as before; she knew Archer was still there. "Your strategist was kept out of the loop, out of the full picture." Her tone turned sharp, and she lowered her voice, "She's still the kid you bend rules for in favour of getting—"

He held up his hand to stop her. "That's enough, Novari." He shuffled a hand through his hair, a white scar disappearing into the dark curls. Every aspect of his tone and stance pointed towards tension, to an ever-growing fear. Dread at the thought of upsetting her more, and a reluctance to push her further than he already had—but only now that it was just her in the room, now that there was no one else to impress.

Archer blinked as he searched the older man's face. Fling, convenience. Silta and Bardarian were none of that, at least not to the Captain. The glassy look, the way his shoulders curled in towards her and his forehead wrinkled with the weight of guilt and regret; it was a classic collection of symptoms for a sickness Archer knew all too well.

Bardarian was in love with her, utterly and completely.

And for some reason, the fact that Archer had been allowed to recognize it, that his captain was no longer untouchable and cold and all the things he wanted to present as, felt far too personal and far too uncomfortable. He shifted and finally spoke up, "Why is there a bounty on her, sir?"

Bardarian glanced over sharply, realizing they weren't alone. He shifted back instantly, entire demeanour reverting. "Countless possibilities," he said. He looked at Silta. "We'll keep you out of port for a while, until it calms down."

Silta didn't move her eyes from Bardarian, and Archer knew she had a far more concise understanding of this bounty, but she wasn't willing to share. Not now, probably not until it was most inconvenient for everyone else.

"Kingsley," Bardarian said, "heard you held your own."

"Thank you, sir."

"You're dismissed, lad."

Archer reached for the door, keeping his head down. He glanced behind him once he closed the door, debating on listening in.

"Archer!"

He jumped as he shot away from the handle.

"Damn, you really are that easy to spoke all the time." Lyra grinned as she came up the stairs. "I heard you kicked ass today."

He shook his head, passing by her to go back down the stairs. "Don't go up there."

"Ah," she said. "Are they fightin' or lovin'?"

"Fighting," he replied, tossing open the door to the deck. "But I have my doubts there's all that much of a line between either with them."

She laughed as she turned to face him. She probably knew tons about Silta and Bardarian, considering she'd been aboard for the entire length of their relationship. "I just wanted to say congrats," she said. "For gettin' everyone's attention the right way." She elbowed him as she left. "That's the way to do it."

Archer watched her go. A slightly confusing person, to say the least, but an ally was an ally. As the clouds above continued to clear, he felt his stomach twist in hunger. Right. He hadn't eaten anything more than a dried piece of meat.

He made his way to the common room. The smoke and liquor that engulfed the place last night was gone, replaced by an arid, easygoing feeling as sailors grabbed their lunches and settled somewhere to eat. Archer looked for Denver or Nelson or someone he knew, but they were likely all working. He should probably go see if he was needed once he'd eaten something.

The cook—a far-north man who went by Kourvourk but would answer to any semblance of the name as long as it had enough sharp letters in it—was shouting at someone behind the counter, pans and utensils clattering. His fingers were calloused but thick, his weathered face littered with burn spots. Archer swore he heard a little growl come from the man as he slid a bowl of something still steaming across the counter to him.

Hunger clawed at him as he chose somewhere to sit alone. He hadn't eaten in so long that nausea was starting to crawl up his throat, but he forced a few bites down. Properly salted, properly cooked—a far cry from Shark's creations. Still, Archer would've preferred to sit down in Orphano's only restaurant with Jeanne and Farley to eat something tasteless. The three of them used to put a good performance pretending it was the best meal they'd ever had.

He glanced out the window across the room as the waves dusted the glass. It was lunchtime on Orphano, too, so Farley would probably be sitting down to put on that performance himself. Archer was here, and Jeanne was...

His hand stilled on the spoon, halfway to his mouth. The Kingsland. That destination of his towards which he was no longer headed. He'd completely forgotten. The Avourienne was still cutting west, still far from the King.

Gently setting down his spoon, Archer put his head in his hands, trying to think. It couldn't just end like this. He wouldn't let it. There had to be a way to get where he needed to go, with or without the Avourienne.

The problem? There was a reason Farley and him had planned so meticulously for this ship: It was the only one that could get close enough to those infamous rock spires, the only one that could slip in undetected through the cover of darkness. This crew had the gall to think of doing it in the first place, as they had before.

He couldn't get off. This ship was still a way in, likely his only one, which presented a new problem: How does one deckhand change the course of an entire ship?

Archer lifted his head a little off the table, watching his reflection in the watery soup, suddenly not hungry anymore. He recalled the spark of cleverness in Silta's eyes as she'd picked apart his entire story in minutes, brought forth all the things he'd had to hide with nothing more than a good sense of observation and deduction. If she were in his position, she'd be able to turn this ship around—not with a weapon or brute force, but with a sleek, cunning plan of attack. She'd take all the faults of those around her and manipulate them into working to her favour, into forcing them down the route she wanted without them even knowing.

It sounded like could work, maybe, in theory, but the true wrench came in the form of who he'd have to convince: Captain Bardarian. The ship moved where he wanted, when he wanted. He didn't have to explain his decisions to anyone, which made him the perfect candidate for a master plan.

Archer searched the horizon through the window. A deckhand and a captain. A traitorous deckhand and a captain.

The waves kept sloshing by. Up until now, Archer hadn't truly done anything wrong. He'd known about the loyalty test, sure, and he'd deceived them into thinking he'd stumbled upon this life. Deception, yes. Disloyalty, though? Nothing he'd done so far could warrant his death.

But this would.

He'd have to do it eventually. When he went rogue in the Kingsland and left the ship against orders, that would be as mutinous an act as anything. So what did it matter if he resorted to that kind of thinking just a little sooner? He just wouldn't get caught.

He left his soup on the table. He jogged back out onto the deck, not bothering to stop in the navigation room before he took the stairs to the strategy room. If he was lucky, the Captain would still be in there. He took a moment when he got to the door, allowing himself a long, deep breath to stop his hands from shaking.

He knocked.

The door swung open fast, just an inch from Archer's nose. It slammed against the wall and bounced back, the sound jarring in the quiet hallway. Not Bardarian, but Silta. She rolled onto the balls of her feet, ready for a fight. There was blood on her jaw that Miller must've missed when she cleaned her up after Shiv.

She said nothing, a common practice of hers to wait impatiently for someone else to talk.

"I need to speak with the Captain," Archer said evenly.

"Deckhands don't speak to the Captain." From the bite in her voice and the tense way she was holding herself, she was abnormally high-strung. Hard to rile up, perhaps, but once she was already driven there, he guessed she'd be slow to come down.

Bardarian came around the corner, bracing a hand on the doorframe. He was nonchalant and calm again, but a muscle near Silta's eye twitched when the Captain's arm brushed her shoulder as he leaned over her to see who it was.

"What is it, lad?" he asked, cool blue eyes steady and sharp.

"Well, I—"

Silta interrupted, "He's a deckhand. You take an audience with a deckhand?"

Archer cut in before Bardarian could, "I'm sure he took an audience with you as a deckhand." A thoughtless jest to a fellow crew member, nothing more.

Bardarian raised his brows. A brave deckhand, this one must be. Amused, he looked to Silta for her reply.

"Yeah?" Her tone made a knife seem dull. "You want to do what I did to get his attention?"

"Excuse her," Bardarian said, lips curling in amusement. "She's a little restless." A template reply for his template personality; she made him less of a man, so of course he'd put her down to one of his own.

"May I speak with you, sir?" Archer asked. His shoulders were tense, and his fingers were itching to pat his knife should Silta choose to strike. "I know you wouldn't normally—"

Bardarian shrugged, nodding him in. Fault number one: A desperation to prove he didn't take her orders, to draw out the power façade whether it be at her expense or the brushing off of a usual rule.

Silta spun to face the Captain. She saw the danger in this, of course, of a wild card coming in and concocting things she couldn't control or inspect for foul play. "Vallin—" she started.

"Go on," he said, a hand on her shoulder as he ushered her from the room. She was right to urge him against speaking to Archer alone, but she was far too agitated and anxious to be accepted as genuine now. Even if Bardarian let her talk, he wouldn't take her seriously. He reduced her to nothing more than his definition of a woman, fuelled by unstable emotion. "Take a walk," the Captain offered.

She held tight to his forearm as he pushed her back. "Vallin, you don't understand—"

He pulled his arm from her grasp and shut the door on her. He turned, gesturing to the desk as he made his way to the chair he'd sat in before.

Archer glanced at the door, firmly closed. Somewhere on the other side, Silta was running through the conversation, inspecting how carefully the words had been chosen. She was realizing, without a doubt, that Archer had manufactured her getting pushed from the room, and she likely could deduce why: To stop her from blowing down the house of cards he was about to start building.

Shaking off the feelings of unease she brought, Archer tentatively followed Bardarian to the back of the room, where the Captain settled into his chair he'd sat in before. He looked up, afternoon light kind to the intensity of his features. "Please," he offered, gesturing to the chair strewn off near the corner.

Archer cleared his throat, reaching for the back of the chair and dragging it in front of the desk. He swallowed, then immediately regretted how dry it made his mouth. Mutinous, mutinous, mutinous. The word was running rampant in his mind. If this was just a matter of convincing Bardarian, it might've been straightforward; Archer knew the Captain's kind of man, so he'd be easy to play. But Silta? She had an unlimited number of opportunities to weasel her way into the situation before they arrived at the Kingsland.

"Kingsley, yes?" Bardarian asked, resting his thick forearms on the table and threading his hands together. Swathed across one of his knuckles was the unmistakeable crimson colour of fresh blood. Archer remembered the same colour on Silta's jaw earlier.

He raised his eyes to the Captain's. Not so simple a man after all. He had an inclusive look to him, an aura that induced a certain level of relaxation despite his reputation. It told Archer to take a deep breath, to get comfortable, to confess anything that bothered him.

"That's right, sir."

Bardarian tilted his head a little to the side. "Well, then. Go on."

Archer cleared his throat again, but he'd already planned his words down to the syllable. "When we were out, today, sir, I overheard something in the café the contact was at." He brought his hands to his lap, forcing himself not to fidget. "I didn't think it was a big deal at first, but since you mentioned the bounty, I wondered if they might be related. I figured it was a good idea to tell someone, but I'm not entirely certain what the hierarchy is yet, and I didn't want it in the wrong hands."

Bardarian leaned back, ocean eyes searching Archer's face in a way that felt awfully systematic. "Jackson serves as the link between the deckhands and myself," he said.

Archer blinked and scooted forward in his chair. "Then I won't bother you further—"

"Nonsense." Bardarian held up his hand to stop him from getting to his feet. "You're already here." Fault number two: curiosity. No man got as far as the Captain without a healthy dose of nosiness.

Archer nodded slowly. Hesitant, but not weak. "The men were gossiping about the King," he said. "They mentioned that he'd found the map to Myria's chest. I figured since Silta's got such good hearing that she'd heard it as well, but—"

Bardarian made a little movement with his fingers that told him to stop talking. "Myria's chest, you said?" The men's gossip might be fake, but the myth of Myria's chest was not, and any pirate would know it like the back of his hand. Said to grant immunity from the world's horrors should a crew place their beating hearts inside, it was supposed to be impossible to find without a certain map.

"Aye, sir." Archer found himself nervously picking at his nails and quickly drew his hands apart.

"And you're sure they were implying the King had the map?"

"Aye, sir." Archer held tight to his composure. To open Myria's chest, the myth claimed you had to spill over it the blood of a royal—a good five litres of which happened to be travelling on this very ship. "Is it possible the King put out that bounty to ensure you and Silta couldn't get the chest? To make sure she was dead before she could take the map from him? I mean, I know most people think the whole thing is just a myth in the first place, but what if it isn't?"

Bardarian's gaze screamed of secrecy, of a whole other world that existed beyond Archer's observation. His third and final fault: pride.

Without you there to keep me young. A thoughtless jest, at the time, but also a clue. Taken in context with the sheer coldness that had thrown Archer from guessing their relationship right off the bat, it was clear as clear could be; Silta and Bardarian were not on good terms right now, whether that be over the first mate argument or something else.

Maybe that wasn't a grand enough reason to keep this from her, to skip running this audacious change of plans by his strategists. But what about the fact that she knew about the King and his map—because if Archer had heard this, then of course her Siren ears had picked it up, too—and she'd kept it from him? In Bardarian's mind, it tied together quite neatly; she didn't want to sail to the Kingsland, so she'd abstained from giving him the information at all.

A house of cards indeed. Silta didn't hear the conversation in the café because it never happened. She wasn't keeping anything from Bardarian, but once she detected he was keeping something from her, she'd put two and two together and assume it had something to do with Archer. The whole thing rested on Bardarian's faults being strong enough to keep it the way it was, with Silta out of the loop.

"Quite the handy lad you've made yourself."

Archer swallowed again, heart thundering as the man searched his expression. "I've had you for"—Bardarian leaned back further, glancing out the window to the setting sun—"just a little more than a day, is it? You've surely found a way to make yourself important."

Archer blinked. He wouldn't put it together. Of course he wouldn't. If he knew that Archer had deceived him with Jeanne, then it would be far more plausible, but he couldn't build up the suspicions without having spoken to Silta about him. Archer hoped he hadn't.

"You can head off, Kingsley," Bardarian said.

Nodding politely, Archer got to his feet. Did he buy it? Or had the coincidences stacked up too many too fast? What if Bardarian had some sort of intelligence that the map was most definitely just a myth? What if his pirate greed wasn't strong enough—if Silta and him made up sooner rather than later? What if the actual reason for Silta's bounty came out before they set course for the Kingsland? What if he didn't buy it?

"Kingsley."

Archer turned around far too fast, his hand already on the doorknob. "Sir?"

"Keep this to yourself," Bardarian said. "Not a word of it to your deckhand friends or to that woman—I don't care how much she harasses you. You keep this to yourself, you understand me?"

Archer's chin dipped into a nod. "Of course, sir."

Archer shut the door behind him, Silta nowhere to be seen.

Oh, he bought it.