“What about Mother?” Karigan demanded. “Did she know?”

“This has nothing to do with her.”

It has everything to do with her! Karigan wanted to scream.

But her father simply walked away. Walked away and out of the stable, and out into the snow.

What had she expected?

She expected a lot, actually, especially of her father. Expected him to honor her mother, to be truthful and upright. Not a ... a patron of brothels. Not a pirate. It felt like he’d lived a whole secret life without her. If he kept those secrets, what else might he be hiding?

Her father had become a stranger to her.

With a sigh, she tossed off the horse blanket and shivered in the cold. With one last pat on Condor’s neck, she grabbed both lanterns and left the stable. To her surprise, the pitch black of night was lightening to dusky gray, and the wind had died almost to a whisper. Fat flurries descended in lazy swirls from the sky, nothing like the earlier squalls.

She used the trail her father had broken between the stable and house, thinking they needed to talk things out, not avoid one another. So when she entered the house, she lit a lamp and looked for him in the kitchen and his office; went from room to room, finding only darkness and silence. Upstairs, she heard snoring from behind the doors of her aunts. She halted at her father’s door, which stood ajar. No light shone from within, and she heard nothing.

Hesitantly she pushed the door open and peered inside, thrusting the lamp before her. The blankets on his bed were rumpled, but he was not in it. Where could he be?

She stepped inside, letting the lamplight fill the room. Her father’s bedchamber was spare and neat, just as she always remembered. There were a couple paintings of maritime scenes hanging on the wall, and a ship model was displayed on the mantel. It was not the Gold Hunter, but the river cog Venture, the first vessel he’d built as the primary investor.

A few faint embers glowed on the hearth, and Karigan threw some kindling on them and fanned the fire back to life. Once she had a satisfactory blaze going, she glanced around the room again.

Had it always been this spare? Was it like this when her mother was alive? She found she could not remember.

Her gaze fell upon the chest pushed against the far wall, beneath the window. Her mother’s dowry chest. There had been, in fact, no dowry, for Kariny’s father had not approved of Stevic G’ladheon as a husband, and so the couple ran off sometime after his voyages on the Gold Hunter.

Her father commissioned the chest so her mother would at least have a sense of coming into the marriage with the goods a bride needed to begin housekeeping. Karigan remembered the chest as filled with fine linens. She had not looked in it since she was a child.

Now she took tentative steps toward it, setting her lamp on a bedside table. She knelt beside the chest and passed her hand over the mahogany, running her fingers over carvings of seashells and ships. To either side of the latch stood a man and woman with hands joined, seabirds circling overhead, and clouds billowing in the sky, a sunburst rayed behind them.

The latch was not locked and Karigan lifted the lid, inhaling the strong scent of cedar.

She found inside not only the expected linens, but other unexpected items, as well. There was a large conch shell as one would find on the beaches in the Cloud Islands. Karigan had some, too, that her father brought back from his voyages, and they were displayed on the mantel in her bedchamber. This one, however, was enormous. She took it out and carefully set it aside.

Beneath it was an infant’s gown, crisp and white, with a blue and yellow needlework design around the hem. Begun, but not finished.

“Oh, gods,” Karigan murmured. This had not been one of hers, but one her mother made for her forthcoming child, the babe that had never been born.

As she continued to explore the contents of her mother’s chest, she found dresses, some let out to accommodate pregnancy. Beneath them, she found an elegant gown of ivory silk. She could almost feel her mother’s presence there with her, and she crushed the dress to her as though hugging her mother. They’d had so little time together.

Karigan sat on her father’s bed, trying to imagine her mother wearing the dress, meeting her father at the altar of Aeryc, reciting their devotions before the moon priest and witnesses.

She sighed and pressed her face into the silk, perhaps trying to feel some essence of her mother in it, but only inhaling the scent of cedar clinging to a garment left long in storage.

She curled upon the bed with the gown, and finally, exhausted, she dropped into sleep.

Karigan awoke to daylight filling the room. For a moment she forgot where she was and sat up shaking her head. She pushed aside her blanket. No, it was her mother’s gown. Then it came back to her—she was in her father’s room. She rubbed sleep from her eyes.

“Well,” Aunt Stace said in an acerbic tone from beside the fireplace, startling Karigan. She held a poker, and was hale and quite wide awake. “Good morning to you. It is the tenth hour of the day.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Karigan mumbled.

“I imagine not. It seems both you and your father kept late hours.”

“Where is he?” Karigan asked, wondering why he’d not evicted her from his room.

“Out and about on his snowshoes. He came in briefly at eight hour for tea and a muffin, then headed straight back out.” Aunt Stace shook her head in bemusement. “Said he was out checking the grounds and roads.”

Karigan raised her eyebrows in incredulity. “Why?”