The Pearl Under Pitch

About this book

Hormuz, 1521. On an island that grows nothing but salt, thirst, and profit, twenty-three-year-old Layla Ghalib wants one thing: to sell her dying father's last dhow and marry away from the water. She has a rigging-scar splitting her left palm, henna she scrubs pale before the Portuguese tax clerks see it, and an inheritance she never asked for — a black pearl sealed in pitch inside the keel-box, and the compact that comes with it. On moonless nights the heir bleeds into seawater and names a destination. The family's drowned push the ship. Someone living pays in dreams. When Captain-Major Diogo de Melo seizes every independent dhow for a punitive raid on the Arabian coast and takes Layla's devout sixteen-year-old sister as a translator, the only way to follow the fleet is the one thing she meant to sell, smash, or bury.