The Changer's Key

by Kent Davis

  The girl looked her up and down. “Keep up, Teach.”

  “Go!” came the call from above.

  Well, if that was how she wanted it. Ropes were Ruby’s friends. She had grown up on a ship after all. Three stories was a climb, but she had topped higher masts. She tore upward.

  The girl fell behind. She was trying, but maybe her arms were not strong enough, or she did not understand the technique. Ruby was just an arm’s length from the roof before she realized: they both had to get over the top. She cast a glance below her. The girl had stopped about five feet below, feet against the wall, arms wrapped in the rope.

  “Come on!” Ruby said.

  “I am!”

  But she wasn’t. The girl’s arms were shaking like a sail in a storm. It would not be long before she fell.

  Ruby cast her eyes up. Ward Cole peered over the edge, as did Ward Corson and the rest of the cadets. Why should she play their stupid game? It was an easy thing to climb to the top, leap over the edge, and spit in their eye.

  A cry sounded from below.

  The girl was yelling at her arms. Not words, just howls, her mouth inches from her forearms, as if trying to scare them back into motion. They did not seem interested in listening. It was a ridiculous sight, but fierce. Brave even.

  Before Ruby could think about it, she climbed back down, just a little bit below the girl. She steadied herself in the rope, a trick Gwath had taught her, wrapping it around her bum and her shoulders. Then she grabbed the other rope and hauled her body over, until her shoulder was right under the girl’s foot. “Here,” she gasped. “Put your foot here.”

  Fear gleamed in the white-haired girl’s eyes. She did it, though. She found purchase on Ruby’s shoulder, levering herself up. Ruby gritted her teeth, she stared at the wall, and she did not fall.

  That was how they climbed. Foot by foot, inch by inch, the two of them huffing and grunting like two beached sea lions.

  The girl climbed over the edge, and Ruby groaned in relief. Only then did she look up. Ward Cole’s hand was seamed and weathered, tough mahogany against the rough yellow twist of the rope. He hauled her up.

  The roof was empty, save for an open trapdoor and the girl with white hair. She gave Ruby a nod and disappeared down the trap.

  “Saved your skin. You’re right. Don’t make too much of a fuss,” Ruby panted.

  Ward Cole laughed. It was open laughter, though, no malice in it. “We train your body, Teach, but we train the mind, too. A reeve’s weapon is not only strength but guile.” He motioned over his shoulder to the empty trap. “The cadets do not know what to make of you, and until they do, they will keep their distance.”

  “What to make of me?” Was he serious? She waved her arm behind her. From their vantage on the roof, past the walls in every direction the trees and forest lay far below, uninterrupted by barns, houses, or the smallest sign of habitation. “What should I make of this place? Is it a prison? A school? A fortress?” Before he could answer, she pressed on. “And please do not tell me, sir, ‘It is what you make of it, my pupil.’ I have read my share of books, and that claptrap will not fly.”

  Ward Cole’s smile disappeared, a candle snuffed out. “I will not tell you that, Ruby Teach. I wager this place can be all of those things to you, but my money is on laboratory.”

  “Laboratory.”

  “Yes. You are a specimen. A fly under a magnifying lens. You will be examined until they have accomplished whatever purpose they wish.”

  “And then what?”

  His smile eased back into place. “I suppose that depends on your purpose here, does it not? What is it you wish to accomplish?”

  “You mean, there’s more to it than hopping about like a one-legged chicken?”

  He laughed.

  But he was right. It was a laboratory. Everyone was observing her. And who was that man on the walkway? Was that the doctor? What did Rool call him, Swedenborg? More important, what did she want out of this place? She had to decide, and quickly.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Tinker cannot afford fellow feeling.

  It clouds the eye and dulls the mind.

  —Foreman Ambrosius Jecked, MCS, GmSS,

  Boston Chapterhouse

  “Henry.” Something feathery brushed his face. “Henry.”

  Henry’s mind stuttered. What was it? Classify. Feathers. Owl? Strigiformes. Crow? Corvus. Feather duster? What was the Latin word for feather duster? He took a deep breath, setting off a chain reaction of coughs and then memories. Smoke, fire, the Thrift. “I’m alive.”

  A strong gloved hand covered his mouth, and the familiar, if not entirely welcome, voice of Athena Boyle whispered in his ear, “Quiet. You are in the King’s Bum, in a room upstairs, and the captain is downstairs, bargaining with the chief pirate or mayor or what-have-you of StiltTown, as well as the entirety of the populace. We are eavesdropping.”

  Henry opened his eyes a slit and immediately regretted it. Pain lanced into his head. Guttering chem pot light cast strange shadows on the pockmarked plaster wall and bisected the strong chin of Athena Boyle. Athena had somehow acquired a fur-lined tricorne hat, and her jeweled waistcoat glittered in the gloom. She placed her other index finger to her lips and pulled her hand from his mouth.

  Henry rolled onto his elbow. His stomach grumbled, and pain blossomed at his temples. Someone steadied him from behind. A scent of cheese lay on the air. He whispered, “Thank you, Cram.”

  “Professor,” came the whisper, and a cup snuck into Henry’s hands. He gulped half of it down before he realized it was the hard cider they called applejack.

  Luckily his coughing fit was masked by the sound of an argument filtering through the cracked door.

  An angry voice cried out, “Enough of this dillydally! Say your piece, Teach. Why should we let you stay?”

  A crowd called, “Mercy!” Others responded with “Out with him!”

  “Can you stand?” Athena asked.

  “I think so.” It turned out he could stand, barely. He refrained from reminding her that a push from her had broken his leg for him in the first place. Athena and Cram helped him over to the door, and all three peered through the gap.

  Henry had never seen the common room of the King’s Bum so full. The two-story hall was packed with pirates, filling the tables, standing against the walls, lined up along the balcony. A few even perched in the rafters. A tiny woman stood on the bar, legs wide and fists on her hips. She wore salt-crusted leathers, sported an empty rapier scabbard at her hip, and had her silver-streaked golden hair tucked into a little pink bonnet. She raised her hand, and the room fell quiet. “You know the question before us.” Her high-pitched scalpel of a voice cut to every corner of the room. “The fire was set by outsiders. Captain Teach and the Thrift are hunted, and we meet to decide if we should still offer them the protection of StiltTown or if the danger to us all is too great.”

  “That’s Precious Nel,” Cram whispered in Henry’s ear. “They say she’s killed more seafolk than the Royal Navy and the Reeve combined.”

  Wayland Teach also stood on the bar. In the almost a fortnight since they had escaped the Grail he had lost weight. There was a hollow, hungry look to the man. He had shaved away most of his beard, leaving only his bushy mustaches.

  “Wayland, speak your piece.” Precious Nel gave him a nod and then dropped to the floor.

  Where Nel’s voice was a scalpel, Teach’s was honey. “Mates. Captains. Chieftains of the Sanguine Seas. You know me, and you know my folk.” Jeers at that. Henry picked out Skillet and Frog Jerky in the corner. Skillet was frowning, and his sharpened frypan was nowhere to be seen. None of the Thrift’s crew had weapons.

  “You ain’t even a pirate anymore, Teach! You’re a taximan,” called a big fellow with a mouthful of tarnished tin teeth, glowering next to the door. Laughter and catcalls erupted.

  Teach nodded, genial. “That may be true, Dogsilver Sam, that may be true. You should give us a hulloo for a taxi ride t
he next time you run your ship aground. I reckon that happens about once every moon.” More laughter and pounding on the tables.

  Teach rode the wave. “Lads and lasses, my crew has fallen on hard times, and we have no other place to run.” He looked up to the rafters, then down at the floor. “Many of you know my girl, Ruby. She has been taken by the crown into the shadows.” Murmurs and whispers crossed the room. “We need a burrow to lie low and plan our next move. I had thought StiltTown a likely place, but we have brought danger down upon you. I beg you for a little more time, special since the Thrift, she is sorely wounded. We are at your mercy. I’ll leave it at that.”

  He hopped off the bar like a man half his size and strode, flanked by Skillet and Jerky, straight toward the door. Dogsilver Sam snarled and stepped aside.

  Memories of the two women on the balcony flooded back into Henry’s mind. “Come on,” he said.

  Athena whispered, “Wait. We can observe and report back.”

  The journal’s familiar weight comforted him as he pulled on his coat. “I have to get to the captain.” He hopped over to his crutches, stowed in the corner behind the door. The room spun for a moment, but he had to keep moving.

  “But we will miss the verdict!”

  “It does not matter.” He pushed through the door into a small crowd of Ottomans, their rich scarves tinkling with interwoven tiles. Athena and Cram trailed him as he clunked down the steps and out into the night. The cold mist chased away what little warmth he had gained from the room; but he had business to attend to, and that business would not wait. They found the captain with Skillet and Frog Jerky under the tavern sign, a painting of a monarch with his elegant robe up over his shoulders and his kingly breeches around his knees. King’s Bum indeed. The three smugglers were smoking pipes and looking gloomy.

  “Henry.” The captain gave him a huge bear hug, very different from the distant “Mister Collins” he had employed in the past. He was a big man, yet he still had to look up at Henry, as a brick wall might to a willow. “Good to see you fit and moving. We were worried for you.”

  The captain’s friendliness had caught Henry off guard. “I am well.”

  Captain Teach said, “You are more than well, lad. You saved our home, and I owe you a debt.”

  A pistol shot rang out from inside the Bum.

  Henry jumped. Guns put him on edge. Athena’s hand snapped to her hilt. Skillet tapped his pipe on the sole of his boot. “Calm yourselves, urchins. That’s the sound of pirate democracy in there, nothing more.” And indeed, the sound of a pitched battle rang out from inside the tavern: fists and grunts, kicks and clashes. Once a woman came sailing through the window to land on her back at their feet. She dusted herself off, spat out a tooth, and ran straight back in, yelling at the top of her lungs, “You mistake my premise!”

  Henry cleared his throat. “So, they fight over whether we stay or go?”

  Skillet quirked his mouth, squinting. He was always squinting. “That’s right,” he said. “How dear a body cares for a thing is how hard they’ll fight for it.”

  Frog Jerky nodded. “Thy vote be thy life.”

  He uncapped a leather bottle and handed it over to Henry. Whatever was inside tasted like sugared liquid tar.

  Henry kept it down, barely, and passed it on. “What is that?”

  “Lemonade.” Skillet made a face. “I know it. I ain’t no Gwath.”

  “Who?”

  “Long story.”

  The captain cocked his head at Skillet. “I hope that particular story hasn’t ended.”

  Cram coughed most of his “lemonade” into the air beside him and then delicately replaced the cap before passing the bottle along to Athena, who returned it to Skillet untouched.

  “Captain?” Henry asked.

  “Yes, Henry?”

  “Last night—”

  “Two nights ago.” Teach corrected him.

  “Oh,” Henry said. He had been unconscious for two days? “Two nights ago then”—he began again—“before I came to the Thrift—”

  Frog Jerky snorted. “Before you called down a sou-wester outa the sky and saved Fat Maggie?”

  “Yes, well.” The praise caught him flat-footed. He didn’t know what to do with it. “The fire was set as a distraction.”

  “What?” Athena said.

  Henry took a breath. “I was on the back balcony, studying Ruby’s journal, and I was attacked by two women.”

  Frog Jerky nodded. “You do cut a fine figure, sir.”

  “Listen to me, please.” Frog Jerky quieted. “Captain, one had already been in disguise here: the clever one who served in the bar.”

  “Jenny?”

  “Yes. The other one climbed up the side of the tavern to the balcony from the water, I think. She said she set the fire to draw you all out.”

  “They were coming for you?”

  “No, not me. For this.” Henry pulled the journal out of the pocket of his coat.

  Teach reached out a hand involuntarily. “What happened?”

  Henry told them about the ambush and his escape.

  “Where are they now?” Skillet scanned the darkness around them. He had drawn a smaller version of the sharpened cast-iron pan he usually wielded, summoned from some secret pocket. He flipped it absently by the handle.

  Cram pulled his eyes away from the shadows. “The potboy was saying the next morning they had a spider colony up on that balcony. A huge web the like he’d never seen before.”

  “But no woman?”

  “No, just all the strands hanging there,” Cram said. “No spiders, neither.”

  “So she escaped,” Henry said.

  “We need to move, Captain.” Athena’s eyes lit up. The girl fed on danger the way Cram fed on griddle cakes. “Someone is obviously hunting us, and we have been found.”

  “Who?” Henry asked.

  “Does it matter?” said Athena.

  “Well, I think it might,” said Henry.

  They all looked to Wayland Teach. “Patience, Lord Athen.” It had shocked Henry to see how easily the entire crew remembered to use her public face. Liars cottoned to lies, he supposed. The captain hooked his thumbs in his wide leather belt. “Let us concern ourselves with these hunters after we see what the rest of the night brings. Meanwhile, we keep a weather eye out for trouble and keep close with one another. Frog Jerky, spread the word among the crew.”

  “Aye, Cap’n.” He disappeared into the night.

  They clustered a bit closer under the chem pot after that, jumping at shadows.

  Just after moonrise the door creaked open, and the woman called Precious Nel stumbled out to the steps. Her bonnet hung stained and torn, and she held a haunch of raw meat over her left eye. She plunked down on the steps and looked them all over for a moment. “Sorry, Wayland,” she said. “I did my best, but the tide of discourse just wasn’t with ye. With the French and the British circling each other like mad killer whales out in the drink, the town won’t accept one more risk. They want ye out, by midnight tomorrow, and you’re not to come back.”

  “Banished.” Skillet spat.

  “Wait.” Nel smiled. “Not all. Only the captain there. The rest of you lunkheads have leave to sign on with another crew or scrap the Thrift or, Providence help you, try to salvage her.” She pulled herself up to standing by the railing. “Where will ye head?”

  Teach stroked his mustache. “The Wild, I reckon.”

  Nel spit. “Careful out there. It’s madness on dry land.” She held up her left hand, and the pinkie finger was gone.

  “I will take that under advisement.”

  “I always liked you, Captain Teach.”

  “And I always found you precious, Captain Nel.” He doffed his hat and bowed to his boots.

  She laughed and staggered back into the lit-up room. The door closed.

  A frog glorped somewhere.

  Wayland Teach scratched at his mustaches. “Well, Captain Skillet, I trust you will begin repairs immedia
tely on her jolly majesty the Thrift?”

  Skillet eyed Wayland Teach. “It is only for a man such as you, sir, that I would ever lower myself to join the slugs and ne’er-do-wells that do style theyselves Captain.”

  Teach laughed. It was the strangest thing. The man had just lost his ship and the rest of his family, and he laughed as though it were his birthday. He took in Henry, Athena, and Cram. “My friends, I have no ship to offer, but will you journey on with with me to search for one Ruby Teach, apprentice thief and daughter to scoundrels?”

  They exchanged glances. It was never really in doubt.

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said, “but you might be following me.”

  Teach blew out his mustaches. “Is that right?” Henry nodded. “And why is that, Henry Collins?”

  “Because I have solved the first two lines of the journal.”

  “Have you now?”

  “Yes. It is a set of directions.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The words we Say we cannot Unsay.

  The acts we Do we cannot Undo.

  —William Keith, governor, Pennswood Colony

  The girl with the chestnut hair sat down across from Ruby with a bold look. Skillet might have said she made the bench her own. And she had plenty of room. Ruby had come down the stairs to the dining hall to find the tables packed with cadets, save one, which was completely empty. She took the hint. The porridge tasted just like Gwath’s—if Gwath had thrown a pot of porridge into a pit filled with rabid weasels, ashes, and a snail.

  Ruby stared back and used all her will and cunning to down another spoonful of the stuff.

  “Avid Wake.” The girl said her name like a challenge, loud so the whole room could hear.

  Ruby pitched her voice to carry just a wee bit farther. “Ruby Teach.”

  Quiet fell so completely, Ruby could hear herself chewing. Eyes on her from all corners. No reeves or wards about at all. This was an interview. Well, Ruby had been sharping for folk since she was old enough to walk. Whatever this band of feral urchins was on the lookout for, she would give it to them. She let the world fall away and focused on her mark with the chestnut hair.