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👑 Between Kings & Corsairs Thread Tracker 🏴☠️
The longboat was still two cables off the dock when Leo saw him.
Or thought he did. The quay was crowded enough that he couldn't be certain, couldn't trust a single glimpse of a silhouette against the noise and movement of a working port. A short man, dark coat. Dozens of men looked like that. It meant nothing on its own.
Except.
The angle of the shoulder. The greasy shape of the salt and pepper hair and beard. The hook of the nose. Leo had watched that man cross the Queen Anne's deck for weeks, had catalogued his movement the way he catalogued everything, without deciding to.
"Ivan." He said it quietly, eyes forward, not pointing. "Spyglass. Far end of the quay. Short, dark coat, near the rope coils. Don't be obvious."
Ivan didn't ask questions. He was already reaching inside his coat. The glass extended with a soft click and Ivan raised it with the unhurried manner of a man checking the dock for a specific berth, sweeping slowly, not stopping too long.
Three seconds.
"Shit," Ivan said, and lowered the glass.
"Turn us around," Leo said.
Fang had the oar already. He'd been listening. "Smooth or fast?" Fang did ask questions.
"Smooth." Leo kept his gaze off the quay entirely now, fixed on the middle distance, the kind of unfocused look that registered as boredom from shore. "Nobody needs notice us."
The two oarsmen took the cue from Fang without a word spoken, the longboat curving away from the dock in a wide, lazy arc, the kind of course adjustment that looked like an argument over which bollard to use. No urgency. No snap in the oar strokes. The quay slid sideways in Leo's peripheral vision and he did not turn his head to track it.
He counted. If Izzy had seen them, the response would come before they cleared the harbor mouth. A shout. A boat. Something.
Nothing came.
The quay noise receded. The Queen Anne's hull grew ahead of them, solid and dark against the grey water.
"He didn't see us," Ivan said.
"We don't know that," Leo hissed.
Ivan accepted this without argument. He was right to. Not seeing a reaction wasn't the same as not being seen, and Izzy Hands had spent enough years as a first mate to know that showing your hand on a quayside was how you lost it. If he'd spotted them and stayed still, that was worse than a shout. A shout was a problem you could measure.
Leo watched the Queen Anne's rail come level with the longboat and put the thought aside. One thing at a time.
He was up the ladder before the bow line was secured, moving across the deck at a pace that wasn't quite running but carried the quality of it, the kind of walk that made men step aside without being asked. The crew felt it in them, a small adjustment that happened when someone came aboard looking like that. He didn't stop to address it.
The cabin door was closed. He opened it without knocking. @Edward Teach (Blackbeard) was at the chart table. The pencil was in his hand and the familiar section of coastline was in front of him and he looked up with a fond smile.
"Forget something?"
Leo closed the door behind him and put his back against it.
"Izzy is on the quay," he said in a hushed tone, not wanting to alarm the rest of the crew. "I don't think he saw us. Ed, he could ruin everything."
