The common area had a table with a bright checkered tablecloth, built-in benches, and a leaf that could be unfolded to make room for company. On the port side, a tiny sideboard was wedged amid a wall of cabinets. The iron stove squatted there, its pipe traveling up through a hole in the ceiling. She was a simple boat, but she was shipshape.
Two fish, already gutted and filleted, lay on the sideboard. At the sight of them, a bolt of raw emotion shot through me. Pa had caught the fish this afternoon. We should have been eating supper together in the homey lamplight of the cabin.
I melted butter in the frying pan, sprinkled bread crumbs on the fish, and laid the limp strips in a row. The pan hissed.
Cormorant gave a wiggle, as if someone had joggled the arm of the person at the tiller. I gripped the edge of the sideboard. Fee was as good a helmsman as Pa. That wasn’t like her.
A frog chirp sounded from outside. Trouble. I snatched Pa’s extra pistol from the locker and lunged up the steps.
Moonlight shone on Fee’s round eyes. She silently lifted one long finger and pointed.
A ship, laid up alongside the bank on the starboard side. Her ghostly white sails were furled and lashed down for the night. Not a wherry—she was nearly twenty feet longer and her mast was set farther back, in the dead middle of the ship.
A cutter.
“Check,” Fee whispered, slinking forward. She padded around the edge of the cabin and disappeared.
My hand began to sweat on the tiller.
They might be asleep, or drinking and gaming belowdecks, but they would certainly have posted a watchman. Like any wherry traveling at night, we had hoisted a lantern up one of the stays. By a fantastic stroke of luck, our sail blocked it from the cutter’s view. If I changed course and hugged the port side of the river, perhaps the man standing watch wouldn’t notice us. On the other hand, we would look as if we were trying to avoid being seen. Which would give them a reason to chase after us.
I made my choice, angling to port. The overhanging trees cast long shadows on the water. A wherry, with her black sails and low profile, might drift by unnoticed among those shadows. We might sneak past and into Heron Water. It couldn’t be far now.
Fee slipped back along the deck. From her face I already knew what she had seen.
“Them,” she whispered.
I glanced to starboard. We had drawn even with the stern of the resting cutter. The wind gusted, causing our rigging to creak. I held my breath.
For a few long heartbeats I thought we were going to slip past them. I thought the man on watch hadn’t seen our white nose slicing through the water.
I was wrong.
“Sail, ho!” The shout rang clear across the water. A bell clanged, pealing over and over in the dark. “Wherry coming down! Wherry!”
“You there, up sails!” This voice was rough and commanding. I wondered if it was the notorious Captain Melanos. “To the cannons! Muskets!”
Everything on Cormorant was made of wood, canvas, or rope. If one of those fire rockets hit us, she’d go up like kindling. Just like Jolly Girl. Just like Jenny.
“Fee, take the tiller!” Crouching on the starboard deck, I loaded Pa’s old pistol.
A sharp crack rent the air. The noise rolled over me, and with it a wave of nervous excitement. For several seconds, I knelt in stunned stillness, before I realized they’d missed.
I aimed my pistol amidships and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked, its backlash reverberating up the bones of my arm. I didn’t think I’d hit anything. All I could see were the wraithlike shapes of the sails as the cutter’s crew worked to raise them.
Now I knew the silliness of Pa’s story about my grandpa. It might have been true or just a fish tale, growing bigger and longer in the telling, but it didn’t matter how bold I was—for fighting pirates, a pistol was far superior to a knife and a frying pan.
“Roll out those gods-blasted cannons and don’t be all night about it!”
Whirling across the cockpit, I took aim at the lantern swinging from Cormorant’s forestay. I shot it out with a bang on my first try. Broken glass tinkled as it hit the deck.
A real pity, that. Had our lives not been in dire danger, I would’ve paused to admire that shot.
The muskets rang out again, three in a row.
My right shoulder stung. “Ow!” I yelped, clapping my hand over the wound.
The wind shifted on my face as we went around a bend, out of sight of the cutter for the moment. I held my shoulder and tried to calculate in my head. How many minutes for them to get their sails raised? How long until they caught up? Blood ran hot and slippery through my fingers.
I turned to Fee. “Watch for Heron Water,” I said under my breath. “Maybe we can give them the slip.”
We were close. Usually I marked the way into the marshy lake by the line of trees and the white farmhouse squatting in the fields beyond. But it was so dark I was terrified we’d miss the turn. Or had already missed it. A mistake now would mean death.
The moonlight revealed a gap in the riverbank, where the fuzzy tops of cattails made dark spots against the reeds. Cool relief trickled through me. “There!”
Fee put the tiller hard over and we turned, bubbles rushing in a whirl against the rudder. Water slapped the hull. Above us tree branches hung low over the narrow dike. I leaned out and watched the bank slide by mere inches away.
Branches scraped the top of our sail as I hurried to haul in the mainsheet, forgetting my wound in my rush to gather in those handfuls of rope. The top spar lodged among the trees, and we lurched to a stop twenty feet from the main river. Broken clumps of leaves and twigs dropped to the deck.
Fee and I exchanged fearful glances. We were stuck.
“Hush,” she whispered, releasing her grip on the tiller. She slid to the floor of the cockpit. I did the same. The trees swallowed up our black sail, drenching us in shadow.
I heard the cutter first—the creak of her boom and the rattle of rope against wooden blocks and tackle. Then I saw her high bowsprit, pointing through the air like a finger. I sucked in a panicked breath. Now her hull was in sight, moving past us for what felt like forever, though it must only have been seconds. She couldn’t have been more than eighty feet long.
As the cutter’s bulk streamed away, moonlight flashed on the letters painted across its wide transom. In blue outlined with gold, they read, VICTORIANOS, and underneath in smaller print her home port, IANTIPOROS.
The ship passed that close. It seemed the thrum of beating drums accompanied it, a threatening rhythm. After the stern of the cutter had been swallowed by the dark, I realized it was just my own heart.
I was so badly shaken my teeth chattered. I peered up into the tree branches, which were hopelessly tangled with our mast and halyards.
Fee shrugged. “Mess.”
It was that.
“Well,” I said, “at least we’re not dead.”
“All right,” whispered Fee, nudging my uninjured arm.
“I know it’s all right.” I examined the bloody hole in my sweater. “It’s just they might have killed me.”
It was only a graze. Once when I was little, I’d tried to grab the anchor rope as it dropped and it had burned the skin clean off my hand. This seemed no worse. Already the pain was fading. As my panic receded, something else was rapidly taking its place.