“Sheriff Carter,” a high-pitched voice called breathlessly, tearing straight through the framework of thoughts he’d been painstakingly holding together.

Daf spun, his empty hand landing on his gun as the other tightened around Sundance’s lead rope. A young woman was running to catch up behind him; he wondered how he hadn’t heard her shoes crunching the dirt.

He waited impatiently as she skidded to a stop about ten feet away from him. She took a second to catch her breath, then announced, “Sheriff Brown is ready to meet with you, Sir.”

Daf pursed his lips, pulling the small watch from his pocket and flipping it open. “Tell him I’ll be there in half an hour.”

The girl frowned. “Should I tell him there was a delay, Sir?”

“Tell him I’m walking my horse.”

She glanced between Daf and the aforementioned horse, nodded to herself, and jogged back toward the town limit.

Daf let out a sigh, stroking Sundance’s tan fur as he tried to catch the tail end of his train of thought before it escaped him entirely.

The windows. They’d gone out the fucking windows.

As he started forward again, he imagined rushing through the bar’s upstairs hallway, turning into that empty room, and sitting down with the window open next to him. It seemed so obvious now. How different would things be if he’d bothered to look outside?

And did that mean Buck had genuinely tried to help him? He didn’t know if that was better or worse.

Sundance tossed her head, bright white mane smacking his ear, and Daf realized he’d been tugging on her leadrope as he thought. He forced himself to relax, letting the sunlight soak through his hair and the heat of the black gravel soak through his boots.

He wanted to talk to Clara. The Deputy—Sheriff, now, he reminded himself—had a way of organizing his sporadic thoughts into something sensical. But she was fifty miles away, doing his job for him while he failed to catch a bunch of pirates.

There wasn’t an option to fail a third time. He needed to change his approach, to somehow back Arrokas Rhotar into a corner he couldn’t trick his way out of. But before that, he had to catch up to the Starwatch wherever it had chosen to go next.

‘Boat’s a lot faster than a horse,’ he could hear Wyatt’s voice saying.

Even if he could guess their heading, chasing the pirates on horseback was a losing game. He needed a boat.

Exactly half an hour later, Daf reached the top of a small hill overlooking the rest of Tarriva, handed Sundance over to an officer stationed outside the single small building, and knocked once on the door.

There was muttering and scuffling inside, before it swung open to reveal Brown’s Deputy. The man did a double take when he saw Daf, bowing awkwardly at the waist in a way that had never been fashionable anywhere on this continent. “Sheriff Carter.”

Daf nodded to him, trying to contain his impatience. “James. It’s been a while.”

“Yes, Sir, it has.” A grin slipped onto the man’s face and slipped off just as fast. “The Sheriff is ready to meet with you.”

Wyatt had once described Brown’s office as ‘cozier’ than Daf’s. It was a single room, with no windows and a low ceiling that crushed the heat and humidity down onto its inhabitants. A small desk had been pushed into one corner at an odd angle to collect equal amounts of black dust and precipitation, making room for four heavy cushioned chairs that now absorbed the majority of the space. Daf hated every inch of the place.

Sheriff Brown was slouched in one such cushioned chair, a scowl on his face and a fresh bandage on his injured shoulder. When he saw Daf, he muttered, “They attacked one of my shipping boats, Sheriff.”

“I’m not Sh-” Daf started, before the man’s words registered. “The same pirates?”

“Ain’t that many pirates out here.” Brown shifted his weight with a wince. “Called themselves the Starwatch, if that rings a bell?”

Daf made his way to the chair opposite the Sheriff, agitatedly swiping a hand over the foreign floral pattern before sitting at the edge. “It does. Was this before or after they robbed the town?”

“After.” Brown shook his head. “They we’re going to torture the poor Captain. Torture. In the end, they just decided to kill him.” He scoffed in disgust.

Daf gritted his teeth as anger surged through his chest and down to his clenched fists. It wasn’t like he’d never dealt with wicked people, but something about the calculated structure of the pirates was uniquely sickening. He couldn’t fathom how anyone so intelligent and organized would turn to a life of evil.

“There’s one funny bit,” Brown noted, sounding anything but amused.

“What’s that?”

“Some of the crew disagree on what exactly happened—you know how sailors like their stories—but most of them say that one pirate actually disobeyed his Captain and refused to do the torturing.” He looked Daf straight in the eye and finished, “That particular pirate was called Rhotar.”

Daf stared at him.

“Isn’t that the same one who-” the Sheriff coughed.

“Yes.” One emotion too many had built up inside him, and the fire collapsed in on itself until all that came out was a quiet snort. “I’d sort of assumed he was the Captain.”

“Isn’t he young for that?” James spoke up. “He looked twenty at most, maybe twenty-one.”

“Carter here was made Sheriff at twenty-one,” Brown pointed out. “And he’s made a damn good one.”

“I’m not Sheriff anymore,” Daf said quietly.

Silence.

He stood, crossing the room to the desk. “That's why I’m out here chasing pirates. I lost them, I lost my job.” He grabbed a stack of books from the wood surface and swept his forearm underneath to clear the dust; it clung to his skin in a sticky black streak.

Brown coughed again. “That hardly seems reasonable. I mean, to lose your job after a single such mishap…”

Daf set the books upright on the desk, then began sliding them so their spines sat flush with each other. Half of him wanted to argue that it was perfectly reasonable and that the same logic ought to be applied to the rest of the men in this room. “I’m not here to debate reason,” he said instead. “I’d like information on the pirates. Anything that might tell me where they’re headed next.”

“Right.” Shuffling. “I don’t know much else, other than the names of a few crewmembers I heard as they…” More shuffling.

James spoke up next. “You could talk to some of the sailors from that shipping boat. Some are at the doctor’s, but some hopped right back into work. You could probably find them at the docks—you know how sailors are.”

Daf nodded, turning around to face the two men again. He was going to combust if he spent one more fucking second in this ‘office’. “I’ll ask around down there. You two, keep an ear out for any new information.”

“Yes, Sir,” the Deputy agreed, earning a side glance from Brown. The older man said nothing, giving Daf a nod as he headed back to the door.

The air outside was fresh and cool compared to the stuff indoors. The sun was almost directly overhead now, painting a clear picture of the town’s few streets, the sloping hills that enveloped them, and the expanse of calm water beyond all of it. If there was one thing Daf liked about Tarriva, it was the greenery; leafy bushes stubbornly pushed out of the rock and climbed over each other toward the sun and moisture, coating the hills in a color that was much sparser back in Hashton.

If there was one thing Daf didn’t like about Tarriva, it was the utter lack of organization. The docks were a flurry of motion this time of day, and when he got there, most of the people were eager to stare at him in awe and just as eager to ignore his questions in favor of their own. “Is it true that a pirate beat you in a fist fight?” “Is it true that a pirate killed a whole ship full of people?” “Did you know they took twenty-two feet of lumber from me?” “Billy, nobody cares how much they took from you in particular-”

Finally, Daf stopped, yanking the hurricane of movement around him to a halt as if it was tied to him on a leadrope. He took a second to breathe in the quiet, then said, “A pirate named Arrokas Rhotar successfully stalled me while the rest of his crew robbed your lumber stores. He then escaped with the help-”

An onslaught of questions cut him off again. He held up a hand, and they died away.

“He escaped with the help of his crew. Later, the same crew attacked a shipping boat not far from here. I intend to find the pirates before they can harm anyone else, so if anyone has information, please come forward.”

“I was on the ship!” a large man called, pushing his way through the crowd with an eager look on his face.

Daf met the man’s eyes. He kept his hand in the air, holding back the mayhem that threatened to burst out around him. “The one that was attacked?”

The man nodded. “It was terrifying, Sir. Barely escaped with my life.”

“What exactly happened?”

“They attacked us, Sir. Huge crew, all armed, and there was evil in their eyes, I tell you. Nearly killed us before we fought them off. But I managed to scare them away when I opened fire.” He puffed out his chest.

Daf squinted at him. “You waited until they nearly killed you to fire?”

The man faltered. “Well…I had to wait for the right moment, you see…”

He took a very long breath, then asked, “Are you making all this up?”

The man swallowed, looking sheepish.

Daf ground his teeth, turning away before he could blow up at the liar. “Is there anyone here who was actually on that ship?”

A hand half-tapped half-slapped his shoulder, and a voice declared, “You’ve got the name wrong.”

Daf turned to find the woman who’d spoken. She was nearly a foot shorter than him. “What name?” he prompted.

“Rhotar. They aren’t pirates. They’re a Chrysanthean noble house.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Are you absolutely certain?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve only delivered their gunpowder shipments half a dozen times now. Usually to the tip of the peninsula, but recently they’ve been trying to make connections further out. So here I am.” She spread her arms, forcing a hurried sailor to dodge her reach and nearly run over the cluster of people trying to hear the conversation.

“No, it was definitely Rhotar,” someone else spoke up—a short man with fluffy blonde hair. “I was there.” At Daf’s skeptical glance, he added, “Really, I was. They attacked in the dead of night, and it was Rhotar who dragged our Captain out of hiding at gunpoint. Then he went against his own Captain’s orders and tried to end the fight peacefully. I’d say Rhotar showed more guts than either of our Captains did.”

The sailor sounded almost…respectful, in a way that sent a whole new surge of anger through Daf. But he couldn’t afford to cut off a conversation that might actually be going somewhere. “What did Rhotar look like?”

“Long black hair, tied in a ponytail. And…” He glanced around at the crowd and leaned in. “He had your gun, Sheriff. The fancy golden one.”

That got a stir out of the crowd. “Did you really lose your gun?” “Did he take it in the fist fight?” “Are you using Sheriff Brown’s now?” “Was that gun worth more than twenty-two feet of lumber?” “Billy, would you shut up about the lumber?”

When the noise didn’t die down, Daf pointed to the two people who seemed to have actual information, said, “With me,” and turned back toward the town at a brisk pace.

As he led the two he’d invited—and several more he hadn’t—up the rough path, an idea began to form in Daf’s mind. It was incredibly unlikely that both of these people were telling the truth. There was no reason for a nobleman to join a crew of pirates, and even less reason for him to end up on a whole different continent. But if both were telling the truth, there might be a way to not only catch the pirates, but to permanently remove them from the continent entirely.

This idea had the potential to change a lot of things, some in his favor and some decidedly not. But the more he considered it, the less of a choice he really had.

He needed a boat.

And now he knew how to get one.

An hour later, he pressed the seal he’d borrowed from Sheriff Brown into the fresh wax on an envelope. Then he walked his letter back down to the dock and gave it to a Captain overseeing a lumber shipment. He explained the message’s urgency, gave the man a few coins, and an hour after that, the letter was on its way to Chrysanthes.