by Masked Beekeeper
Fifty-one people reached the island alive. Forty-six left it. Captain Vekka Clink had not come for them. She sailed to Argentuth to collect a debt paid in goods and stored in a place she owns, and found forty-seven shipwreck survivors who had already burned most of it to stay alive. She offered passage at fifteen silver a head. When a woman said that an offer from the only captain with reason to visit the island was not an offer, Clink put a saber through her — and her crew said they had seen an attack, and the price went to twenty, charged to every account on that beach. The children's included. Forty-five contracts come ashore at Freepour. The yard is swept. Nobody is beaten. The seventeen children are fed better than the adults, because a child carries a balance until thirteen and a grown body off a wreck is worth very little. Sixteen-year-old Pippa Wren has kept a tally since she was eleven. She works out why.
