by Geoff Rodkey
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it.
Kira didn’t respond. She and Guts must have been pretty wiped out, because in spite of the noise from the crew, they were asleep within seconds.
I looked over at Adonis, expecting to see him nodding off, too. But his eyes were open, watching me.
“It’s sumpin’, innit? Burn Healy bein’ our uncle?”
He said it in a quiet sort of voice, without any of his usual dumb swagger. And it took me by surprise—in what little time I’d had to think about Burn Healy being my uncle, it hadn’t occurred to me that he was Adonis’s uncle, too.
And that when Roger Pembroke ordered Dad’s murder, Adonis had lost the same father I had.
“It’s something,” I agreed, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Figger he wants us to take the mark? Turn pirate, sail with ’im?”
I thought back to what Healy had told me about our mother.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he does.”
Adonis chewed on that for a while, scrunching up his face in the pained look he got whenever he tried to use his brain for actual thinking.
“Better that way,” he said, nodding to himself. “Gotta get back to Deadweather. Get the plantation goin’. Like Dad said.”
Something inside me recoiled. I thought back to what my life used to be like on Deadweather, before all the trouble started.
And how much I’d hated it. And how vile Adonis had always been to me.
Maybe he’s changed, I thought. After all, in the couple hours we’d spent together since I found him down in that pit, he hadn’t once taken a swing at me.
Maybe it’d be better between us now.
Or maybe it’d be worse.
“It can’t be like it was,” I told him.
“Wot ye mean?”
“I mean, if you don’t treat me proper, I’m not going back.”
“Ay!” Adonis sat up in his hammock, his lip curled in a snarl. “None o’ yer mouth! Gonna do yer job, or I’ll bust yer face. Dad said—”
“Dad’s gone.” I sat up, too, ready for a fight. “He’s not coming back. And I’m not, either, if you don’t treat me square.”
“Square how?”
“No more beating on me, pushing me around, blaming me for Mom being dead—”
He snorted. “Whose fault do ye think—?”
“Not mine! It’s a dirty lie. Tell it again, you can jump off a cliff. I’m through with you.”
He had six inches and at least fifty pounds on me, and for most of my life talking to him like that would have made me tremble.
It didn’t anymore.
I think nearly getting executed probably had something to do with that.
Adonis’s eyes were blazing. But to my surprise, he didn’t jump out of the hammock and take a swing at me.
“Look, you—ye got responsibility! To Dad! To me! As a brother! Gotta help me!”
“You want a brother?” I told him. “Start acting like one. Or I’ll never set foot on that plantation again.”
He stared at me in disbelief, his lip quivering.
Then the strangest thing happened. He started to cry.
“Ye gotta come back! Help me! Can’t do it meself!” Just like that, he was sobbing.
“Adonis, don’t…please…”
It was hard to watch. But he couldn’t stop. So I got off my hammock, stepped over to his, and put my hand on his arm.
“It’s okay…It’s going to be okay.”
“Dad’s gone…” He let out a snuffling wail. “Gone!”
“I know…I know…”
I reached over and gave him a clumsy hug. He hugged me back. It seemed to help.
“Ye gotta come back…be a brother…I’m all alone!”
“Will you treat me right?”
“Course! Yeh!”
He clutched me like he was drowning. I patted him on the back.
“Okay…I’ll come back…Just don’t cry.”
Of all the strange things that had happened that day, me consoling Adonis might have been the strangest.
He settled down eventually, and after some muttering about the plantation’s field pirates—at which I made him promise he’d treat them with respect, too—he fell into a sleep as heavy as Guts and Kira’s.
I wasn’t tired myself—lying in that cell for days had been rest enough—but I didn’t want to disturb the others. And I couldn’t get up for fear of getting in the crew’s way. So I lay in the hammock with my thoughts until well after the Grift cast off her lines and headed out into the bay.
There was plenty to think about. I watched Adonis’s face as he slept, and saw my father in it—and for the first time since Dad died, I cried for him.
I thought about how I’d always hated Adonis, and whether—after sixteen years of being almost perfectly horrible—he actually had it in him to become a decent person. And if he did…or even if he didn’t…whether I owed it to Dad to go back to the ugly fruit plantation and try to make it work.
I thought about my sister, raging crazy in that temple in the jungle, and wondered if what Kira had said about the Moku sacrificing her at the next storm was true—and if so, whether there was anything I could do to save her.
I thought about the map. It was still lodged in my head, its meaning no less of a mystery to me. I wondered if there was any point left in trying to translate it—if there was a chance that Kira was right, and the Fist had some kind of power after all. Or, even if it didn’t, whether the rest of the treasure—the Princess of the Dawn’s dowry, whatever that was—might be worth searching for.
I thought about the fact that the deadliest pirate on the Blue Sea had turned out to be my uncle—and that he was the first family I’d ever had who seemed like he was not only looking out for me, but didn’t mind doing it.
I shed some tears over that, too, but they were happy ones.
And as long as I’d gone to sloppy mush, I figured it was a good time to think about Guts and Kira—and how I cared for Guts like he was family, and Kira, too.
And then I thought about Millicent.
And how she told me she loved me.
But she’d also told me—funny how I’d managed to forget this all through those black days in the dungeon, and it was only coming back to me now—that she was going to marry that Cyril fellow.
And when I gave her a chance to take it back, she didn’t.
Both of those things couldn’t be true. She couldn’t love me and marry him.
I had to find her and make her tell me which was right. And if the answer came out wrong, I had to find a way to change it. Because I loved her fierce, and all I wanted in the world was to be with her.
But first, I had to deal with her father.
Way back when I first met Guts, I’d told him I was going to kill Roger Pembroke. But it was an empty boast, tossed off to make myself feel powerful. Back then, I didn’t know a lot of things that I knew now—about Pembroke, about myself, and about what a terrible, dark thing it was to end a man’s life when you had a choice in the matter.
But I had to do something. I had to stop him.
It wasn’t just that he’d killed my father, although that was more than enough. Pembroke had real power now. He ruled Sunrise, and now Pella Nonna, and if nobody stopped him, he was going to take over a whole continent and make slaves of everyone on it.
I couldn’t let that happen.
It was a tall order. I wasn’t sure I had the courage. And on my own, I knew I didn’t have the strength.
But I wasn’t on my own. I had friends.
And now I had family.
And one of them was a fearsome pirate captain, who seemed to not only know Pembroke well but to hate him. Who had serious firepower at his disposal—turn around in the hammock, Egg, and just count the cannon behind you—not to mention what seemed like the goodwill of all those Rovian soldiers who were supposed to be on Pembroke’s side.
&n
bsp; That roar of approval that went up in the square when Healy thanked the soldiers—it was an amazing thing. If someone asked those soldiers to choose between Burn Healy and a shifty snake who lied through his teeth…
Suddenly, taking down Roger Pembroke didn’t look quite so hard.
In fact, it seemed like all I had to do was convince my uncle it was a good idea.
I slipped out of the hammock and started for the ladder to the main deck. The chaos had settled down now that we were under way, and the gun deck was mostly quiet except for four men working some kind of giant crank next to the mainmast column. They were shirtless and drenched in sweat, grimacing as their upper bodies lurched in sync with every turn of the crank.
I was so preoccupied with the plan forming in my head that it didn’t occur to me to wonder what they were pumping, or why. I trotted past without a word, and by the time I was halfway up the steps of the companionway to the main deck, I’d forgotten all about them.
My uncle—Burn Healy! My uncle! Imagine that—was standing at the back of the quarterdeck with Spiggs, the first mate. They were deep in conversation, their backs to me.
“We could put in along the coast…”
“That’s a gamble on material as well as skills. Say it’s nothing but spongewood for fifty miles—”
Healy must have heard me approach, because he turned around in midsentence.
“Hello, Egg.”
“Hello, sir…Don’t mean to interrupt.”
“Not at all.” He turned to Spiggs. “Think it over.”
Spiggs nodded and walked off. I hesitated for a moment, trying to work out the best way to ask Healy to destroy Roger Pembroke for me. But before I could get the words out, Healy asked me something:
“Don’t suppose you’re trained as a carpenter?”
That was an odd question. “No, sir.”
“Your brother? Friends? Any carpentry skills in that bunch?”
“Sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. Let me ask you another one. You were in Pella for a while before the invasion, yes?”
“Yeah. Quite a while.”
“How long ago did you leave?”
I thought about it. The days were a blur. “Couple of weeks, maybe?”
“When you left…how many Cartager men-of-war were docked there? The big military ships. North of fifty guns.”
“Three.”
His eyebrows rose. “Are you quite certain?”
“Yes. Completely.”
Healy turned his head. Spiggs was halfway down the deck. “Spiggs! There’s two men-of-war still at large. I seriously doubt Li Homaya’s in the south.”
As Spiggs turned and started toward us, I thought back to the day Li Homaya returned.
“He was in the south,” I said. “But he came back. Just before they took us away.”
Then I remembered something else.
“Ripper Jones was there, too.”
Spiggs was back with us. At the mention of the Ripper’s name, both he and Healy leaned in toward me, deadly serious.
“What do you mean?”
“Some men from his crew went to the palace. They met with Li Homaya. When they came out, they said they were looking for you. And he was their new friend.”
Healy turned to Spiggs, his voice low and clipped. “Council in my cabin. Five minutes.”
Spiggs strode away. Healy took out a spyglass and began to scan the horizon. His mood had changed so fast I was afraid to open my mouth. But I couldn’t help myself.
“What’s wrong?”
He closed the spyglass. “If Ripper Jones made an alliance with Li Homaya…and there’s two Cartager men-of-war unaccounted for…it’s a safe bet they went looking for me together.”
“What for?”
“Revenge.”
“For the invasion?”
He shook his head. “No. Like as not, they don’t even know Pella fell to the Rovians. If they did, Li Homaya would’ve tried to retake it by now.”
“So what do they want revenge for?”
“For Li Homaya, it’s the loss of his honor. And his ship, which is the same thing.” He gestured toward the Grift with a wry smile. “I’m not the original owner, you see.
“As for the Ripper…it’s mutual. We had a falling-out over a business matter. And we’ve both concluded we’re better off with the other one dead.”
He looked out at the horizon and frowned.
“Either man alone is a problem. But the two of them together…that’s something of a crisis.”
“Not for you,” I blurted out. “You’re Burn Healy!”
He smirked. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. But it’s a tricky thing without a carpenter.”
“Why do you need a carpenter?”
“Because my ship is sinking.”
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ALSO BY GEOFF RODKEY
THE CHRONICLES OF EGG, BOOK ONE:
DEADWEATHER AND SUNRISE
