"Fine," she said.

"We talk. But if I don’t like what I hear—"

"Then we can go back to fighting," Jake said.

"But at least you’ll be fighting with full information instead of partial stories."

Elisabeth was already moving toward the Darkwhale’s interior, gesturing for them to follow, and after a moment’s hesitation, both Maureen and Jake followed her below deck to a cabin that was clearly the captain’s quarters—spacious by ship standards, well-furnished, with maps covering one wall and a large table dominating the center.

They sat around the table in an arrangement that was less a hostile meeting and more exhausted people taking a break from violence.

Elisabeth pulled out a bottle of something amber and three glasses without asking if they wanted it, pouring generous measures for all of them before settling into her chair with the weariness of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time.

"Tell me the story you were told," Elisabeth said to Maureen.

"Start to finish. I want to hear what you’ve been believing all these years."

Maureen took a drink before speaking, the alcohol seeming to steady her voice.

"When we were thirteen and fifteen," she said, "Father started taking you out of the house regularly. He’d say you were helping him with his work, that he was teaching you the trade, and that you were old enough to learn the family business."

She paused, her hands tight around the glass.

"You hated it. I could see it in your face when you came back, but you never said anything and I didn’t ask because I was twelve and I didn’t understand what questions to ask."

Elisabeth’s face was very still, but she nodded once, encouraging Maureen to continue.

"One day soldiers came to the house," Maureen continued, her voice carrying the flat quality of someone reciting something they’d memorized through repetition.

"They said Father had been killed. Stabbed multiple times in our home while Mother was there. They said Mother had killed him and you had run away, fleeing the house before they arrived. Mother was arrested. She never denied doing it. She went to trial and was sentenced to death, and they executed her three weeks later."

Maureen’s voice cracked slightly on the last part, and she took another drink before continuing.

"After she was gone, people talked. Neighbors said they’d seen you leaving the house that day covered in blood. They said Mother had been in a different room when Father died. They said it was obvious you’d killed him and Mother had taken the blame, but no one could prove it and you’d disappeared so thoroughly that the investigators couldn’t find you to question."

She looked at Elisabeth across the table.

"I spent the next five years believing my sister had murdered our father and let our mother die to protect her. I blamed you for both deaths.

I hated you for both deaths."

Elisabeth sat with this for a long moment, her fingers moving slowly around the rim of her glass, her face carrying the particular careful neutrality of someone who was processing old pain through a filter of decades of distance.

"Father was molesting me," she said finally, and the words fell into the cabin like stones dropped into still water.

"It started when I was eleven. The trips out of the house, the time alone teaching me the trade—that was cover for him taking me places where he could do what he wanted without Mother knowing. It went on for two years before I was strong enough and angry enough to stop it."

Maureen’s face went pale.

"That day," Elisabeth continued, her voice steady but her hands shaking slightly where they rested on the table, "he told me he was going to start taking you too. He said you were getting to the right age, that it was time to teach you the family business the way he’d taught me. He was planning to take you that evening."

She looked at Maureen directly, holding her sister’s horrified gaze.

"I couldn’t let that happen," Elisabeth said.

"I couldn’t let you go through what I’d been going through. So I waited until he was alone in the house that afternoon, and I killed him. I stabbed him with the kitchen knife until he stopped moving, and I was still standing over his body when Mother came home and found me."

The cabin was silent except for the distant sounds of the ship and the water outside.

"Mother knew," Elisabeth said quietly.

"She was sorry that it was happening to me but she couldn’t stop it because she feared Father, for what he would do if she stood against him."

"She looked at me and she looked at Father’s body and she looked at the blood and she knew exactly what had happened. She could see it in my face, in how I was holding the knife, in the fact that I wasn’t crying or panicking or doing any of the things an innocent person would do after accidentally killing someone."

Maureen made a small sound that might have been the beginning of a word, but Elisabeth continued before she could form it fully.

"She told me to run," Elisabeth said.

"She said soldiers were already on their way—someone had heard the commotion and reported it—and if they found me they’d execute me for murder regardless of why I’d done it, because I was fifteen and old enough to be tried as an adult, and patricide carried an automatic death sentence. She said she would take the blame. She said she would tell them she’d done it, that she’d killed him after years of abuse, and they might show leniency because she was his wife and had grounds for it that a court might recognize."

She stopped, took a drink, and when she spoke again, her voice was rougher.

"I didn’t want to go," Elisabeth said.

"I wanted to stay and tell them what he’d done to me, why I’d killed him, and what he was planning to do to you.