taciturn man. And they owned his ship.
She hit a wave amidships, and it splashed and slopped over the gunwale. It was a good idea keeping the relationship between the illegal cargoes that Captain Della Tomasso carried and the Casa Montescue as far apart as possible. The old devil would load a legal cargo of salt, beeswax, and hides at the Montescue warehouse not seventy-five yards from Kat’s bedroom tomorrow morning. Of course his coaster would be clean as a whistle while the Capi di Contrada were about at the warehouse. Of course they couldn’t chance passing incriminating parcels to-and-fro there. But Kat wished to hell—by her half-frozen hands—that she could meet him somewhere closer to the Casa.

Chapter 37
Old habits woke Marco with the first hint of dawn—he’d been so exhausted otherwise that he’d have managed to sleep through to the afternoon. He’d spent a good part of the night with his teeth chattering hard enough to splinter, until exhaustion put him to sleep for another hour or so. He stuck his head out from under the hideout, still shivering, and peered around in the gray light. No fog this morning, though the sky was going to be overcast. He pulled his head back in, and checked his clothes where he’d put them under his bottom blanket. As he’d hoped, they were reasonably dry, water driven out by the heat of his body. He beat the worst of the dried mud out of them, and pulled them on, wrapped a blanket around himself, pulled his cotte on over it all, and crawled back out into the day.
He hopped from the edge of his raft onto the edge of the ­islet—which was an exposed and weathered ledge of rock, and a lot more solid than many a landing back in town. He wriggled his way in to the center of the islet, having to carefully pull his blanket and clothing loose when branches snagged them, lest he leave tell-tale bits of yarn behind, or rip holes in clothing he didn’t have the wherewithal to repair. He was looking for a place where he would be well hidden by the reeds and rushes—at least hidden from the casual observer. He finally found a dry spot, one well padded by the accumulation