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countless numbers unable to leave their cots.
    Then, one by one, the dying had begun. Soon, the news came that twenty-seven people had perished. What had seemed a stunning death toll at first was now just another event in a wretchedness that left the living numb. Bodies were thrown overboard with little ceremony—those left alive hadn’t the strength or spirit for formalities. The worst had been a pregnant woman unable to deliver her baby. After she and the child died, the crew didn’t even bother carrying the heavy body to the deck. Instead, she was pushed through a porthole to her watery grave.
    Drake curled inside himself, shunning the others in their close quarters. His fellow shipmates soon learned not to bother him unless they wanted a snarling return. He had honed the skill of verbal cuts and scornful glares long before, now it was as natural as his scowl. And as necessary.
    He couldn’t let them see his fear.
    Each evening, as dusk approached, Drake gritted his teeth and resisted the panic. The deep of night, the pitch black, when the creaking of the old ship ruled them—that was the worst. He was afraid to sleep; for when he lost the fight, the nightmares came. It wasn’t as if he’d never had a nightmare. As a boy he’d suffered them often, waking, sweat soaked, from skeletons of dead animals or fiery-eyed demons haunting him. Such nights he’d rear up, panting among his pile of blankets.
    But those nightmares were nothing compared to what haunted his nights in this place.
    The same and yet varied enough to never lose their terror’s strength, they had the ability to wake him and leave him lying like a corpse, stilled with fear. His father, fiendishly laughed at him from the grave. Or worse, the man he’d let fall haunted him, crying from a bloody pool on the stone terrace below. Once, it was his father killing him, and another time it was his father who had pushed the man over the railing. Always the images were ghastly and Drake felt, little by little, his sanity slip away with each one.
    Sleep became a dreaded thing, darkness his enemy.
    When awake, Drake’s mind traveled its own paths, paths his battered will could no longer resist. His memory revisited encounters he’d had with the man he’d always believed was his father. Now he doubted everything. The gossip about his mother haunted him. What he knew for certain was the hateful stares of Ivor, the contempt he’d never understood, the impotent rage underlying his actions, so incomprehensible to Drake. The questions still lingered, rearing heads that chipped away a little more and then more at Drake’s identity.
    Had it been Ivor’s plan all along to dangle a true son’s inheritance and then rip it away when the truth of Drake’s lineage was revealed?
    Weak, his father called him. Any show of emotion ridiculed. Any fear belittled. It hadn’t taken Drake long to learn the value of becoming a shadow in any setting, as still and quiet as a piece of furniture in the castle, a ghostly form during a hunt where he secretly abhorred the killing. A silent presence at an auction of horseflesh or valuable artifacts. He was expected to watch and soak in the play of power. And he had learned his lessons well.
    Then, at twelve years of age, something changed. His father began grooming him as heir. It was right and expected and everyone around them breathed a sigh of relief. Life finally took on

a comforting though severe routine.
    Looking back, Drake now wondered . . . Was it then that his father turned bitterness into revenge? It seemed obvious, looking back. Ivor had set upon his master plan—treat Drake as the son he’d always longed to be, waiting for the day, when he would snatch it all away.
    The plotting gave his father new energy, excitement even. The subtle promises, the unequaled education, the single-minded building together of a financial empire to rival any king’s—it all lead to that fateful day when father would destroy son from the