“No!” Anna tried to push his hand away, and her anguished cry drowned in the tumult of falling bodies and fired shots.

“Annie, give it to me!”

“No! No, it’s mine, you can’t take it from me! Why do you want to take it from me? Why?” Just that one word, why. Why, she asked him. Why. The Pirate King fell to his knees, his hands flying briefly to his face, then landing back on her small shoulders.

“Because they won’t have you, Annie! They won’t have you!” Dawn broke through the smoke and the heavy clouds. Anna felt a horror grip her heart. Her father was crying. She reached a trembling hand to his face, felt just one tear graze her fingers before falling down into the wet sand.

The Pirate King took his daughter’s face in both gnarled and sun-browned hands. Anna smelled blood and violence, as though these things were only a morbid perfume and not an inevitable truth. “They won’t have you, Annie...” The whisper was as hoarse as her own, as though it battled with something that could not be seen. “They’ll take you back, they’ll find you and you’ll leave us. But I won’t let them! You are my daughter, my own, I raised you, you are my own...” And there the voice broke, a wave on a desolate shore.

“Who? Who will take me away? Father...I don’t understand...”

Lee could not aim for a clear throw. There were too many jostling bodies, too many chances to miss. And he would not miss, this time. There was no more room for error. He could see a crazed fighter in the midst of the fighting, a cutlass flashing in the growing rays of sun. But to see more than that, he would have to fight through the small but violent crowd. Refusing to take any risks, Lee dove into the deadly mass of men and weapons.

The ground was shaking. One of the ships still had a cannon left. Anna gripped the sides of the boat and felt the splinters digging into her palms. Still, the Pirate King held her face in his hands, still his eyes were filled with something akin to defeat. She sat as though transfixed, trying to understand what he was saying. But she could find no meaning in his words. Anna could hear Jesse’s roars as he fought to hold his ground, as Lee emerged from the crush of bodies and struck him head-on, and it only added to the noise already building in her head. She did not feel Luke stirring, and was startled considerably when a weak hand brushed her elbow.

Luke nearly spent all his energy in trying to sit up. He had heard everything. And now his fragmented memories were suddenly making sense. He knew now. He knew the truth now. His father’s shadow in the doorway, the smoke and the static crackle of lightning as it rent the night sky. The rocking of a ship and the groan of its timbers as a storm crashed outside a porthole that let the strange silver light in. A little girl, huddled in an exhausted, tear-stained sleep in a corner of the darkened cabin. Anna. Why had this been the only memory of Anna he had ever had? Why couldn’t he remember the day she was born, as he remembered the day Jesse was? Why could he never recall holding a baby sister in his arms, or his mother bending over a cradle?

And so suddenly Anna was assailed by a storm of voices, all crying out the same thing, all pounding into her the same message. The images would stay with her for years: her father’s lined face, her brother’s chest heaving as he clutched his wound and tried to speak at the same time, the flash of Jesse’s cutlass, a blood red sky.

“Anna...”

“Annie...”

“You’re not–”

“...took you from your family...”

“–our sister...”

“Raised you as my own–”

“...don’t remember...”

“You’re not–”

“But you’re not...you can’t be...”

“A pirate...”

And she was shaking her head, and the tears were flying out, small pearls scattered everywhere in the swell of a tide choked by the blackened remains of ships and sailors. Someone was holding her wrists, but she was still thrashing, still shaking, unwilling now to listen. Because she knew it was the truth. Perhaps she had known it in the instant that the locket had first opened, that night in the lagoon. Perhaps she had known it all her life, even before she saw the name engraved in the beaten gold.