Page 1 of Captive of the Pirate King
1
The floor skews wildly beneath my feet as I stagger along the narrow corridor belowdecks.
I slam a palm against the rough wood to brace myself. Seawater sloshes around my ankles, and a reek fills my nostrils—dead fish, salt, and the acrid sting of gunpowder and smoke. Somewhere overhead, the cannon cracks again—a futile measure, because the pirates will be boarding us any minute now.
These pirates fly the Crowned Skull-and-Bones, the symbol of the Pirate King. Which means they won’t take any women prisoner. They never do. They’ll slaughter the men or take them as slaves, and leave the women to go down with the ship.
Few women have survived being left adrift with a wreck. Not that many women sail the Shorn Seas anyway. Too dangerous.
I’m one of the few women stupid enough—or desperate enough—to pay for passage on a merchant vessel headed out of the safer coastal waters and into wilder seas.
And now I’m about to be left for chum in the shark-infested deep.
I stumble into my cabin, a tiny square with a short bunk and a miniscule washstand. As I scrabble under the bunk and drag my travel chest out, my fingernail snags on the wood and rips painfully.
I shuck off my dress, my shoes, my stockings, and my underthings. My brother’s old knife, the one he gave me years ago, is strapped inside the lid of the trunk; I disengage it quickly and set to work cutting the bedsheet into strips. When the ship rocks again, I nearly impale myself on the blade by accident, but thankfully the only damage is a bloody scratch down my arm. Not a bad idea to be a little bloodied if I want my ruse to work.
I wind the strips of the sheet around my chest, binding my breasts down as flat as I can. Despite the urgency, I make myself slow down and take the time to do the job right, because those telltale lumps of flesh are my passage to the bottom of the sea.
When I made this plan, I never thought I’d have to implement it. It was always sort of a hazy notion in my mind, a just-in-case thought. If I’d been smart, I’d have had cloth strips cut and waiting. But I didn’t. At least I had the forethought to stuff a loose brown shirt and a pair of coarse trousers in among my things.
I knot some cloth around my hips and crotch to make a very slight bulge at the front of my trousers. Pulling on the trousers and the shirt takes only a moment. And then there’s the matter of my hair.
I unwrap the braid from around my head and shear through it at the root. Then I saw off a few more chunks of hair, but the ship is groaning and canting perilously now, and I don’t dare bring the blade too near my head and face again.
After sheathing the knife, I jam it into my waistband. Next I wrap my head in some of the cloth strips, rubbing my bloodied arm over the ragged mess and streaking some blood along my face.
My features were a drawback at home—too pert and insolent, too thickly spotted with brown freckles. People complimented my pretty mouth and my stunning green eyes, rimmed with thick black lashes, and then they always added, “What a pity about her skin.”
My mother tried everything to lighten my freckles—a myriad concoctions purchased from peddlers and our local apothecary—but nothing worked. My skin was irrevocably plastered with the brown spots.
And now they just might save my life. Because what self-respecting lady of Ivris would have skin like mine?
But a ragged, bloodied cabin boy might have freckles as plentiful as the stars in the sky.
I can’t stay in my cabin much longer. Thumping boots, bellowed threats, and mocking laughter warn me that the pirates are aboard now, fighting hand to hand with the crew.
Wrenching open the porthole window in my cabin, I stuff all my female things through it. One by one the items plop into the undulating sea—everything, down to the last set of smallclothes, the last corset, the last hair comb. My heart shrinks to see all my possessions go—but life is more important.
But I clutch my family ring in my hand. I can’t throw it overboard. It’s the only thing I have to identify me to my brother when I finally find him.
I can't let the pirates see it—they won't believe that a mere cabin boy possesses such a treasure. I tuck it into the binding around my chest and pray it will stay there. If the pirates search me thoroughly, a family ring will be the least of my worries.
The ring is hidden not a moment too soon, because the shouts overhead are growing vehement, triumphant. A sharp order breaks through the din. "Let's get those valuables out of the hold, boys!"
The pirates will be descending the ladder any second, and I must not be found in a private cabin. As the self-appointed cabin boy, I need to be discovered in the galley.
I lurch out of the cabin and reel along the passage, stumbling into the galley.
Lucky for me, our cabin boy was lost to fever a week into the voyage. He was sequestered lest he infect others, and I volunteered to take him his meals and medicines until he passed. I kept a cloth tied over my mouth and doused my hands in liquor after every encounter with him, and somehow I escaped falling ill myself.
The sailors and the captain noted my act of kindness. They barely tolerated me before that, but ever since the boy’s death they have treated me with respect.
No one is in the galley when I stagger inside. The cook, a burly brawling man, is on deck fighting alongside everyone else.
I wedge myself between two barrels and wait, soaked and bloody, clasping my knees and shivering with a nervous panic I don’t have to fake.
There’s another secret I have to protect even more closely than my gender. A power that I hide deep within myself, one that only a handful of people know I have. A magic that neither the merchant sailors nor the pirates can know about.
