Chapter 13: A Message Carried in Smoke
It began with a flare—sharp, sudden, unmistakably deliberate. A signal fire. Not meant for Mira, and yet she saw it.
From the cliffs of Lyskar’s Maw, a curl of smoke rose into the twilight sky. Most would miss the pattern: the subtle rhythm of pause and release, the coded flickers of ember buried within the haze. But Mira knew the language. Devon Maddock’s ships were said to use a cipher system—flame and shadow, smoke and signal—an ancient sailor’s code that predated most navies.
She hadn’t seen it since… Kael.
Or rather, since the time Kael intercepted one of Maddock’s old rendezvous points and claimed the code as his own, thinking he could outmatch a ghost.
But Mira had watched, and Mira had learned.
She stood atop the rise in silence, her shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders as the coastal wind teased at her hair. She raised a small brass scope to her eye and focused on the shoreline below. A single ship. Sleek. Unadorned. Flagless.
But not anonymous.
The mast bore a small, deliberate etching—three intersecting crescent moons. A private mark. One not found in any charted registry, but whispered about in trade ports and taverns beneath the surface of conversation.
Maddock.
He was here.
Or near enough to be here. The ship lingered long enough to be noticed, then vanished with the tide, leaving behind only the lingering trail of smoke and the taste of salt and iron in the wind.
Mira didn’t follow. Not yet.
Instead, she went back inside, sat at her small writing table, and lit a single candle. She pulled a thick page from her journal and penned only a few words:
*You don’t know me yet. But I have your knife.
You don’t know me yet. But I was almost yours once—
Had he not stolen what he never could hold.
Come find me. I’ll know when it’s you.*
—M.*
She folded the page, rolled it tightly, and slid it into a black glass bottle sealed with wax. She walked to the cliff’s edge, where the tide below churned against jagged stone—and waited until the waves calmed just enough.
Then she threw it.
The bottle vanished into the sea like a whisper. Like a question.
If he found it, he would know she was watching.
And if he didn’t…
She would write again.