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left Pella without getting paid, he must have, too. Think how much
that
cost him.”
    â€œSo what
does
he care about?” Kira asked.
    I spent almost a full day thinking about that as I worked the crank or lay splayed out, exhausted, between shifts.
    â€œHonor,” I said finally.
    â€œHonor?”
    â€œThat’s what Healy’s Code is all about—honor, and putting the good of your crew ahead of yourself. That one time he got angry with me, before the vote, it was because he thought I was being selfish and cowardly. So I’ve got to be the opposite of that. Selfless and brave. Helpful to others. Honorable.”
    Adonis snorted. “Want to be honorable, please ye thanks?
I
can tell ye how, please.”
    My brother had taken to heart our uncle’s advice about not being a fathead. He’d been on his best behavior ever since, and he’d started peppering his speech with strange words (for my brother, anyway) like
please
and
thank you,
because he knew using them was part of being respectful to people.
    He hadn’t quite gotten the hang of where to put them in a sentence, though. So they kept cropping up in odd places whenever he spoke.
    â€œHow’s that?” I asked him.
    â€œGo back to Deadweather thanks, help me run the plantation like ye promised please.”
    Before my father died, I’d promised him I’d get the plantation—which I’d handed over to the field pirates who worked it in exchange for their help against Pembroke—back on its feet again.
    But it was likely to be a near-impossible job. And I’d never much cared for the place to begin with. Going back to live there with Adonis and the field pirates was the last thing I wanted to do. Just thinking about it put a knot of dread in my gut.
    Even so, I knew I had that feeling of dread because Adonis was right. I’d made a promise. And holding myself to it was the honorable thing.
    It took a while for me to figure out a way around that.
    â€œI’ve got to avenge Dad’s death,” I told Adonis the next day.
    â€œThanks how?”
    â€œBy destroying Roger Pembroke.”
    It wasn’t just honorable because he’d killed my father. If Pembroke had his way, he’d turn the entire New Lands into a continent-sized version of Sunrise Island—a rich man’s paradise, rotten to the core and built by slave labor.
    If I could bring him down, it’d mean a better life for thousands of people in the New Lands. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.
    As bad at math as I was, I felt sure that if you added up all the good it would do for all those people, you’d get within spitting distance of ten million gold.
    And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me—although I couldn’t have told you why—that even if he wouldn’t do the job himself, my uncle would approve of it.
    Kira certainly approved. Not only was Pembroke responsible for her own father’s death, but destroying him meant stopping the slave trade that kept her people either under the thumb of Pembroke’s Moku allies on the mainland or imprisoned in his silver mine on Sunrise Island.
    Guts was fine with taking down Pembroke, too, “long’s we find that
pudda
treasure while we’re at it.”
    I had my doubts about the Fire King’s treasure. After seeing Pembroke blow up in a rage when he translated the map that supposedly led to it, I no longer believed the treasure and the Fist of Ka existed—at least, not in the way the legend promised.
    But Kira still had faith.
    â€œOf course we will find the treasure,” she told Guts. “If we can restore the Fist to my people, it will put an end to Pembroke’s evil.”
    I figured there was no point in arguing about the treasure for the moment. And we had to quit talking about the whole thing anyway, because it was making Adonis upset. He couldn’t come up with a good reason why I shouldn’t avenge