The wind had gotten no colder, but had grown much stronger. Anna ran breathlessly down to the shore, where the cove jutted out like a moonlit sickle into a sea draped in fog. Matanza bobbed on the tide, sailed as far into the shallows as possible to make loading cargo easier. Gangplanks, some hastily mended and some clearly about to crack, had been lowered into the cold water. It was almost like that summer day so very long ago...except this time, the ships were leaving, and this time there was no knowing when they would come back.

But they had always left without her.

Anna halted abruptly and tipped her head back to the sky. Tears were coming, she could feel their familiar sting. Forcing herself not to cry, she kept on running. Somewhere on the beach, her brothers were waiting. Somewhere on the beach, they would have to say goodbye. She thought of all the times she had watched them go, cried out to them as they waved from decks or called back to her from atop a mast. She remembered swimming out as far as she could go, just to stay near them for as long as she could. Just to keep them with her a moment longer.

It seemed an eternity before she found them. Luke was sitting on a pile of crates that had yet to be loaded, and together he and Jesse were poring over an old map of their father’s. Anna found that she stumbled, then, just as she was about to keep running to them. She could not bring herself to keep going. For some reason, her feet now felt like boulders. And so she stood there, choking on her own heart. But she did not need to stand for long.

Jesse just knew. He just knew that Anna had come. He looked up and saw her there, standing in the fog. He thought that she looked too small, and yet somehow so brave, with the heavy scimitar belted to her waist and their father’s old captain’s jacket hanging limply from her shoulders. It seemed to engulf her small frame, swallow her in a swath of fabric and an aura of tobacco smoke. He remembered that their father used to call her Little Bird. “Little Bird,” he would sing out, “Why must ye fly so far from home?”

“Sis,” he said, but his voice could not prevail over the breaking of his heart. And she ran to him, slammed right into his arms, and he felt Luke catching her too. They huddled together, the three, clinging to one another but also to everything that had once been...to everything they would now leave behind. Anna felt that the crying would never stop, that the pain would never abate. She was lost in the arms of her brothers, who were not crying...and yet she could feel the sorrow like a current flowing between them, from fingertip to fingertip.

Jesse rubbed roughly at his eyes with an arm, and Luke’s face was set in an expression bordering on stone. His brother and sister knew it was the face he wore when he was too upset to say anything. Anna looked from one face to another, lingering on them, memorizing as much as she could: the ghosts of a thousand grins on Jesse’s face...the small ringing sound as the gold earring in Luke’s ear shifted with his movements. She felt Jesse wrap the jacket even closer about her, heard him mutter something about the cold. She burst even further into tears.

A call rang out across the dunes. The ships were ready to leave. They must set sail before the tide went out, to catch the swiftest current out to sea. The King’s ships were fast approaching. There was a scramble of feet and the slightest sound of sand flying as the pirates jostled their way aboard, and some yelled for the captain while some simply stood on deck and stared up at the dim outline of the island. A few wives had begun to cry.

Once again, Anna was dwarfed in the arms of her brothers. It was the last hug.

“Be good, Little Bird,” murmured Luke. His smile was as warm as he could muster under the circumstances. He took her by the shoulders and looked into her tear-stained face. Anna sobbed and sobbed, nodding as she watched him unfasten his earring and then one of hers. He switched the two, solemnly, and she tried to give him her bravest smile but all she could manage was a compromise between sobbing and hugging him so hard that he complained, gamely, of not being able to breathe. “Fight to the last,” he said, and then he gave her the smile once more before he had to turn away.

Anna knew what was next, and she hid her face in her hands. Jesse pried them away gently. He caught her tears with a thumb. “Don’t cry, Sis.” She almost laughed then, as he fished in his pockets for something. Jesse and his bottomless pockets. At last he pulled out what he was looking for: a silver coin. He pressed it into her palm. “It’s the same one, I think. Keep it with you, it’s good luck. You see this?” He pointed to the long scar he had returned from sea with, that ran from his elbow to the wrist. “It would’ve been worse, if I hadn’t seen ‘em coming. Know how I saw? Cause I was holding this up...” And he held the coin up, pretending he was on the rolling deck of a ship. “...and the sun was shining on it, like so, and I turned it to see what it had on the back, but all I saw was an ugly mug and a sword looking to hack my whole arm off. The blighter. Got him pretty good though, Sis.” He shot her a true grin, then. The kind of grin he had once flashed to her as he rocketed out of the kitchen with a stolen cookie.

Anna took the coin from him and looked at it. The letter G, tangled in flowering vines. “G,” she whispered. “For ‘goodbye’.”

“No. See? On the other side...?” Jesse turned it over. The emblem of a shield had been painstakingly stamped into it. He drew her attention to the tiny letters scrolling across it. They spelled out a motto in what she assumed to be the Guillarean alphabet. “Know what it says, Sis? I remember I asked father once. It was funny, he didn’t even thrash me for nicking the coin. He only said what it meant, like he’d memorized it.”

Jesse closed her fingers over the coin, just as the last calls came from the ship and the snap of the lines being cut echoed out over the cove.

“G,” he said, returning her gaze just as he always did. “To guard and guide.” Jesse hugged Anna hard, and she hugged him back just as fiercely. “Always with you, Sis,” he said, and then he too turned and ran. But he looked back, just once. Just once, before he was gone, and the ships disappeared into the night.

Anna sank slowly to the sand. The tide was rolling out, the air so cold that it hurt her lungs. But she welcomed it, she welcomed the pain, because at least it told her she had survived. The horrible sickness welling up in her heart, the hollow spaces now making themselves known...she welcomed it all. It meant she had managed to keep on going, even now that she had lost everything. She buried herself in her father’s jacket, her cheek against the fine, cold grains of sand.

That was where Lee found her, in the morning.