Page 70 of Escaping Pirates
“Do you know where to hide on the ship so you can go days without being seen? Do you have a plan for getting onboard without being spotted?”
I shook my head. Gil stared at me for so long that I had an intense urge to shuffle my feet and apologize. How could someone so tiny make me feel so small?
“You really do need a fairy godmother,” she informed me. “A hundred things could go wrong before you even get started.”
“What do you suggest, then?” An indignant edge crept into my voice. True, I didn’t have the experience in bounty hunting or extracting people that Gil did, but she didn’thave to be so rude about it. “I’m a merchant’s daughter, not some cutthroat vigilante.”
“Here’s what we are going to do,” Gil said, starting to walk again. “Iwill go back aboard as if nothing happened. For a mission like this, we need another man.”
“No, we don’t need anyone else. We could?—”
“Yes, we do need another person. If you want my help, we do things my way, no questions asked. I know what I’m doing and you have no idea what you’re doing. Before we can hope to rescue anyone, we need to get ahold of those flares, and I can’t pick locks as well as needed for the time constraints we have. The first order of business is finding and hiding the flares or else there won’t be a bounty or reward to collect. And you can’t simply act like nothing happened; Tyrone will know you’re behind the flares disappearing, so you need to disappear too.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Hide.” Gil came to a halt outside a dimly lit tavern and pointed me toward a haystack next to a barn. “Right now, actually. I have a purchase to make.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Gil pulled the coin purse out of her jacket. “You can’t, nor should you. I’m not a trustworthy person.” She pushed open the door to the tavern, her boyish smile instantly and firmly back in place.
I crouched down behind the haystack, heart thumping madly inside my chest. It was utter insanity to put my life, and Harlan’s, in Gil’s hands, but what else could I do? If I tried to find someone else to take me to theKraken’s Revenge, dawn would come, Tyrone would discover that I was gone, and the flare would go up. Even if Gil was just as underhanded as Tyrone, I had no choice but to trust her.
Each minute that crawled by felt like an hour. Each timea horse pranced in its stall or an animal scurried past, I just about leapt out of my skin.
Finally, the door opened, spilling out a rectangle of light. Laughter followed Gil out of the tavern. She was rolling a large barrel and called as she left, “This is just the size of barrel that my mam needed. Thanks, gents!”
“Good luck getting it clean, son!” they hooted.
Gil rolled the barrel over to my hiding place and stood it upright. It smelled strongly of tar. “Still here, are you?” she asked. “If you were smarter, you might’ve run.”
“Lucky for you, I’m good at taking orders,” I told her. “What’s the barrel for?”
“Tar. Captain needs some, and this will be your ticket aboard. You aren’t afraid of getting a little dirty, are you?”
My mouth dropped. Gil expected me to hide in there? I’d drown in the pitch.
“Relax. It’s empty—mostly, anyway.” Gil took the lid off to show me.
I had to squint to see through the darkness. Sure enough, the majority of the tar was gone, but there was still enough to leave a solid coating around the interior and several inches on the bottom. It would be worse to clean off than the ashes that Blossom had kicked all over her quarters.
“So, I’m going to hide in that and you roll me aboard? How long will I stay in there?”
Gil patted the rim. “Until we reach theKraken’s Revenge.”
“But that could take ages,” I protested.
“No, it won’t. They aren’t far away.”
“How do you know?”
Gil fixed me with her penetrating stare. “I remember everything I see. The captain logged that he’s planning to meet up with his brother tomorrow evening. You’ll stay putuntil then.” She checked the moon’s position. “Correction, it will be tonight. We only have a few hours before dawn.”
“What about the flares? How do we get them?”
“We won’t. I have someone in mind, though.”
In mind? We only had a few hours before daybreak. How would we sneak back aboard, convince someone to help us, steal flares, then hide them and myself in time?
