by H. N. Klett
“Well, you are persistent. I give you that,” he said.
“I should end you now.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Hailey drew her cutlass from its sheath and advanced on the prone Graver. She didn’t know much about swordsmanship, but if you stabbed someone enough times they would eventually die. And this man had killed her father.
She advanced and tried to thrust her blade at him, but his rapier had the longer reach and he batted each strike away. Graver took advantage of her imbalance and kicked out her leg, sending her crashing into the foul-smelling muck face-first. She could taste the grit of it in her mouth, and it made her spit. She looked up and rolled fast enough to escape Graver’s blade, which came down right where her head was.
Rolling away, she dropped her cutlass. She sat up, panicked, looking desperately for it. Her head felt heavy, for her long-braided hair seemed to have sucked up pounds of the sludge when she rolled. She was covered in the slick stuff. She was on her hands and knees, searching around and helpless, as Jacob Graver knelt over her and raised his blade to deliver the killing blow.
In that moment, Hailey’s heart sank. Was this it? Was this the end? Had all their struggles and losses been for nothing? The Queen would win, Hailey’s town would die, and no one would ever know anything different except the heavier and more repressive heel of the Queen on their necks.
The blade began its terminal arch towards her. She shut her eyes.
There was a thud and a scream of anger. Hailey opened her eyes to see Hadyn on top of Graver, the two wrestling in the muck.
Hadyn’s eyes found hers and he shouted, “Go!”
Hailey nodded quickly and began crawling her way past the two wrestling men.
“This isn’t over, young lady!” Hailey could hear Graver shouting. She found herself agreeing with him as she climbed the slope. It was far from being over between the two of them.
The Queen was well ahead of Hailey, having made it to firmer ground. The land was no longer covered in the smelly, slick muck, but instead was replaced with what looked and felt like an odd, gold-like metal.
At the edge of the muck lay a filthy crown with a veil attached to it. Hailey looked up to see the Queen just ahead, her back to them all. Her once black dress and raven-black hair was now slicked with the gray silt.
“Stop!” Hailey shouted at her, when she caught up. “Why are you doing this?”
The Queen stopped her slow advance. Hailey could see she was now barefoot. The Queen chuckled and said casually, “Because it is what a lady is expected to do, silly child.”
She turned and Hailey froze, her mouth hung open in disbelief.
“Mom?”
Chapter 20
They stood there silent. Hailey stared as the woman with her mother’s the face looked coldly back at her.
“No. I’m not your mother, you fool. I’m her sister. Her twin sister.” The Queen feigned a hurt look and cocked her head. “What, she never mentioned me?”
Hailey fumbled for words. Her mother had never talked about her past. Hailey hadn’t stopped to wonder why. It dawned on Hailey that this explained Graver’s odd looks. He knew she was related to the Queen. The Queen looked like an older, darker haired version of Hailey.
Hailey tried to say something, but no words came when she opened her mouth. She could only shake her head in reply.
The Queen gave a knowing chuckle and sneered. “Didn’t think so.” The Queen arched her eyebrows and began to pace back and forth on the edges of the path, cradling the book under her arm like a child. With each pass she grew more and more agitated.
“You want to know why she never mentioned me?” She spat the words like venom at Hailey. Hailey flinched.
“Because your mother was a disgrace!” she shouted.
The Queen began to pace more rapidly, growing more agitated. The more she talked, the louder her voice got. The woman was clearly unhinged.
“I tried to be the good daughter, tried to be a proper lady and advance us. And did my sister even try? No! She was too busy being independent and running off with some common merchant!” She tsked and continued her rapid pacing. “Even though they said I was the ‘special one,’ they talked about her endlessly after she was gone.”
Seeing how maniacal she was getting, Hailey wondered just what her grandparents had meant by ‘special.’
The Queen continued. “I grew to despise her. She broke the rules! She forgot the order of things, and look what it got her. Doomed to a common life, with a common merchant, and a common child.” She sneered at Hailey. “I clawed and I scraped my way up the social ladder and look at me now! I’m the Queen!” She leaned toward Hailey and pointed at herself, laughing and flashing a manic grin. Hailey was only a few feet away now. The Queen liked to talk. All Hailey had to do was keep her talking.
“S-so how did you know about the book?” Hailey quietly asked the maniacal figure before her.
The Queen held the book out to her. Hailey could feel its pull, as if pleading to take her away. “This?” The Queen bared her teeth. “I was the Navigator before you! Your mother stole that from me! She stole my book and sent it away. She and your father gave it to those pirates to hide it from me, but I knew it would eventually work its way to the next heir. So all I had to do was sit and wait until it got itself to you. Then I could take it back, and so I have! It is mine!”
The Queen’s eyes were wide and her face pulled back into a smile that almost resembled a scream.
“It is my right! I am the eldest daughter, by all rights it is mine! This book has been passed down in our family to the oldest daughter for hundreds of generations, long before even Rachel’s time.”
Hailey’s face betrayed the recognition of the name of the Pirate Queen. The first Pirate Queen.
“Yes, I see you know about her, too! Her’s was the first name I struck from the history books after I assumed the throne. I couldn’t have anyone upsetting the order of things, could I? I mean the very idea. Colonies rebelling? Sanctioning pirates? Crowning a queen that hadn’t earned her place?”
“So you subjugate women because you want order?”
“No. I manipulate and control with order. I subjugate both men and women with rules. Rules I made and, thanks to Jacob, the Church teaches and enforces. He’s such a jewel, Jacob Graver, but you have discovered that, haven’t you?”
She didn’t call him Bishop, she called him Jacob. She sounded far too familiar with him. Just how closely did they work together? The Crown and the Church had been collaborating for some time, but Hailey hadn’t suspected this intimately before now. The Queen looked down at the book and placed a hand on it, almost petting it. Hailey edged closer.
“Rules can be such cages, can’t they?” she breathed affectionately. “The rules on women affect men, too. Not many a man out there wants to displease his wife, now do they? My poor late husband didn’t. He died trying to please me. At least I have his throne. It’s what I wanted most in life, after all. That and this book. Now I have them both!”
The Queen didn’t need to say it. Hailey could see from the glint in her eye that her husband’s death had been no accident. The Queen had killed him, and given the means, she would kill Hailey, too.
The Queen held out the book and looked at it covetously, then embraced it. Hailey gritted her teeth at the sight of this evil woman hugging her book.
She blurted out, “Did my mother know it was you on the throne?”
The Queen resumed her pacing and thought for a moment before she spoke. “I’m sure she suspected. But she was too wrapped up in her new life to think about anyone in her old life. Like our family. Even our parents. You know she left them all alone?” The Queen shook her head and looked at her. “You see, it’s the duty of the youngest daughter to take care of the parents as they get older. Granted, I was only a few minutes older than my sister, but still I was the older one. That’s why I got the book and she was supposed to watch our parents, but she decided to change all that.
She stole the book and left me there to take care of our poor parents alone. I’m sure they were crushed.” A malevolent grin showed on her face. “I ended up taking care of our mother and father not too long after your mother left.” She looked away wistfully. “They died quietly…”
Hailey felt anger, hatred, bile rising up in her. “You killed them?” she said through gritted teeth.
“Yes.” Her icy grin didn’t waver.
“And the King?”
“Yes,” the word hissed out of the Queen’s lips like a serpent.
“You killed my mother, too.” Hailey balled her fists. Her anger rising.
“Yes, I did! At Cowl’s Ridge!” She licked her teeth, her face wide in glee. “When I found out she was in that rebellious little town, I thought it the perfect opportunity to try out one of the toys I had found in the vaults of the capitol. I had read about the plague in the book when I was younger and I was excited to see what would happen. I was going to do it anyway. Your mother was simply a wonderful bonus!”
“You murdered her! You murdered all those people!” Hailey screamed and lunged at her but she was stopped short. A hand grabbed her braid and held her back. It was Jacob Graver. Hadyn was on his back trying to pull him off, but still Graver held her fast. Hailey screamed in pain and frustration as the Queen turned and started up the path to the top of the spire.
Graver tried to pull Hailey back down the slope by her hair. Hadyn, still slick with muck, tried his best to pull Graver back down to the ground, but Graver’s long limbs planted him firmly, and he kneeled in place. In desperation, Hailey reached into her belt and grabbed her deck knife. Though the blade was short, it was sharp enough to slice through the thickest ropes. She quickly reached back behind her. Graver’s hand was too far away to stab. But she had to get free, to stop the Queen before she got to the top. Hailey did the only option she could—she sawed at her braid.
The hair quickly gave way to the sharp blade, jerking her head violently forward once she was free. Graver still clutched the braid of hair as he and Hadyn fell back into the muck and slid down the rise.
Hailey raced up the path and tackled the Queen from behind, sending the book sliding away. The steep slant took them all back down to the muck, where Hailey and the Queen wrestled. Hailey was smaller, but she had spent her entire life on a ship, not lounging at tea parties. Her muscles were long, lean, and powerful from her many years of climbing rigging and hauling lines. Hailey pinned the Queen’s shoulders and drew her fist back to punch her aunt in the face.
The Queen lifted her head up, spat a bit of the muck at Hailey and said, “Better hurry up! Everyone else you love is about to die.”
Hailey paused, her fist still hovering in the air. “What do you mean?”
The Queen rested her head back and started to laugh. The kind of laugh that made Hailey’s stomach hurt because she knew something was wrong. Then she felt something trickle from her nose. She reached up and wiped and saw that her fingers were covered in dark, rich blood.
“You are infected too!” the Queen said, laughing. “In fact I infected your whole town when I found out the book was headed there. They were serving more than just cocktails at your party in the colonial mansion!”
Hailey’s eyes widened in panic. The Queen continued laughing.
“You like that? Even better, all your pirate friends are infected and they’ll die too!”
“But I thought it takes several weeks to work?” Hailey looked at the Queen with horror.
“Is that what your pirate friends told you, sweetie?” the Queen said with a laugh. “Well, they were wrong.”
The sick feeling in Hailey’s stomach started to spread throughout her body. A dull throbbing ache seemed to radiate from her bones outward to her skin. Her body gave an involuntary shudder. The Queen suddenly stopped laughing and raised her head, her cold brown eyes locked with Hailey’s as she spoke.
“You can spend your last few minutes fighting with me or you can go get the cure. Which is it?”
Hailey wanted to end it, to end her. She felt sicker and sicker every second that passed. But did she stop there? How did the plague even spread? For all Hailey knew, everywhere she’d been and would go, a swath of death would trail behind her if she didn’t find a way to stop the plague. Everyone she touched, anyone she had ever been around could be wiped out.
Hailey punched the Queen hard in the face, knocking her out. Slowly, Hailey crawled on hands and knees to the book, which had slid into the muck a few feet away. Book in hand, she glanced back at Hadyn. He was still struggling with Graver, trying to keep him pinned on the ground. Hadyn’s face was almost as pale as his eyes, but his look implored her to go on.
Hailey tried to ascend the spiral path as quickly, but it was slow going. With every step, she felt more like her body was about to fall apart. Her ears rang, her nose bled, and her head felt like it was on fire. Still, she trudged up the path of the steep spire. Close to the top of the path was a large opening. All she had to do was reach it.
She was tired. Her legs were weakening. Her body kept telling her over and over again to stop. She put one foot after the other, but her feet felt full of lead. She fought onward. It wasn’t that far up, but in her condition it may as well have been miles.
Halfway up, she faltered and dropped to her knees. She couldn’t find the strength to stand anymore. She had tried her best, but the Queen had won. Her body was failing her. She had failed everyone. Hailey sunk her head to her chest and began to breathe heavily.
Behind Hailey, a hand reached around her and lifted her on her feet.
“Come on, girl. I’ve got you.”
It was Kyra. Her face was bruised and she was covered with muck and her bright red hair was plastered with the gray silt. She smelled like a latrine after fighting the marine in the muck and looked like hell, but Hailey knew she looked far better than the guy she had fought. There was no doubt that he was probably lying somewhere bleeding out.
“Come on, we have a treasure to find.” Kyra urged her slowly forward, up the steep grade. Hailey nodded her head loosely and set one foot in front of the other.
Hailey had no idea how to stop a plague that was killing her and her friends, but she had to get to the top there and try. The cure was up there. Somewhere.
The two slowly ascended the path of the spire to the top. Hailey glanced back from time to time, but no one followed. At the top, they found themselves at the mouth of what they thought was a cave, but upon closer inspection Hailey saw it more closely resembled a vault. Its giant face, though recessed, was smooth and metallic save for what looked like writing in some strange language carved into it. Only two large metal doors stood between them and salvation. Hailey and Kyra both tried to push them open, but neither was strong enough. They would not budge.
Hailey’s strength was quickly failing her. Her body began to sag. It took an amazing amount of energy just to turn her head and look at Kyra.
“How do we get in?” Hailey asked.
“I don’t know, ask your book!” Kyra’s breathing heaved and she sat down on the ground beside Hailey.
The book! In all of the excitement, she had forgotten that she was carrying it. Hailey’s arms were almost numb as well as the rest of her. She plopped to the ground with Kyra and placed the book on her lap. The latches fell away and she opened the cover.
Hailey asked between painful breaths, “How do I get in?”
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS ASK.
She looked up at the doors.
There was a deep rumbling and the crashing and clinking of metal that had not moved for a century. The doors parted and slid open silently. Inside it was cavernous and dark. From the front to the back, as in Pirate’s Cove, lights began to wink on one by one, illuminating a vast cave filled with treasures.
“You did it! We’re in!” Kyra shouted.
Hailey ignored her and continued talking to the book.
“How do I stop the plague?”
It was gett
ing harder for her to breathe. Her words came out in gasps.
Two words appeared on the pages blinking over and over again.
ONE MOMENT...
Hailey felt queasy and her head began to spin.
The page changed, and a drawing of a long cylindrical tube that looked almost like a pen or a small spyglass with several buttons on it appeared. Below the image was written,
LOOK FOR THIS DEVICE INSIDE.
IT SHOULD BE ONLY A FEW PACES INTO THE CAVE ON THE RIGHT.
RACHEL LEFT IT ON THE LECTERN.
ONLY THE NAVIGATOR HOLDING THE BOOK CAN ENTER THE CAVE FIRST. HURRY!
Only Hailey first? There must be some kind of a trap for anyone other than the Navigator. She would have to go alone.
Hailey didn’t have the energy to hurry, but she would try. She mustered up what was left of her strength and pulled herself up. Kyra tried to join her but Hailey waved her off. Kyra looked at her, puzzled, but Hailey turned and plodded into the mouth of the cave. She had to go alone.
Covered in sweat, eyes losing focus, Hailey urged her body to keep moving. Every step felt like an eternity. She searched the room. Piles and piles of gold, jewels, and gadgets lay sprawled all over. In the middle stood a lectern. She went to it and resting on the lip of it was a small cylinder that looked like the drawing in the book. She picked the device up and placed her book open on the lectern, hoping to read the next set of instructions, but she couldn’t. Her eyes refused to focus. She squinted and tried, but she couldn’t see the words. A low groan escaped her drawn-down mouth.
From somewhere in the lectern, a pleasantly calm male voice floated up to her. It startled her at first, but Hailey knew exactly who was talking to her. She had heard that voice before. It was the one she didn’t recognize in the square, the same voice she heard in her head every time she read the book. Now that voice spoke to her and said,
WELL DONE, HAILEY!
NOW PRESS THE SECOND BUTTON ON THE TUBE.
She couldn’t focus her eyes, so she fumbled her hands over the device, searching for the buttons. She could feel her pulse in her neck, and it was getting harder to breathe. She found the buttons along the cylinder and pressed the second button.
