"You need to decide now, Captain. Are you in or out?"
Roch didn't answer the baron. He looked at Rose Marie.
He always looked at her. Eight years of running, of stealing and fighting and sleeping in the cramped, leaky quarters of aging ships, and every time the world asked Roch Joubert a question that mattered, he turned to his wife first.
They would face danger together, or not at all.
It took her less than a heartbeat to give an answer.
"In," she said. "And when the time comes, I want Giston's head on my bowsprit."
"In," Roch said to the barons, and offered his hand.
The old baron clasped it first, then the big one. Then, after only the slightest hesitation, Baron Mervyn turned and offered his hand to her.
Rose Marie looked at it for a moment, then she shook it, hard, the way a man would.
"We should hurry," she said. "Fighting in the streets is forbidden, but when Giston hears the two of you are here, all bets are off."
