Miya Black, Pirate Princess I: Adventure Dawns (16 page)

"Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon."

Grace stopped laughing and looked up sharply, as Miya repeated her name flatly:

"Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon."

"What are you doing?" Grace demanded, her voice low, almost a growl.

"Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon."

Grace glared up at Miya, who gazed impassively back.

"Grace Morgon. Grace Morgon."

Miya paused for just a moment. Then, "Grace—"

"Stop that!"

Miya smiled, a small, thin, entirely humourless smile.

"Just making sure I remember your name, Grace Morgon."

Grace drew her cutlass, slowly, making the blade scrape against the scabbard as she did so, the loud, ugly noise this produced cutting through the stillness of dawn.

"Get her down here," she growled.

Miya gripped her knife tightly as several of Grace's crew begin clambering up the mast. She took a step towards them, kicked the first pirate in the head, then turned and sheathed her knife in one movement, running along the crossbeam, focusing on the end, counting her steps; judged, breathed, and then leapt.

Time seemed to slow as Miya launched herself through the air, arms and legs flailing, flashes of the deck below, angry faces, the ocean coming up to meet her fast, too fast, and then a sharp, painful impact as she hit the surface at a bad angle, and then weightlessness, the grey-green of water all around her, that instant of panicked disorientation, then Miya breathed out and followed the bubbles up, breaking the surface of the water and gulping in a lungful of air as time began to flow normally once more, a dull roar in Miya's ears almost drowning out the shouts and jeers and yelled commands from the ship above. She didn't wait around to see what Grace's response to her action would be, instead dived back underwater and swam for as long as she could, away from the ship, breaking the surface only for air, her boots slowing her down but she was a good swimmer, a great swimmer, and then for a while there was nothing but swimming and the ocean around her and remembering to come up for air, and then she broke the surface and Sola's voice pierced the roaring in her head, even if she couldn't make out any actual words, and she bobbed there for a moment, looking for him, shouting "Move, Sola, so I can see you!", then strong hands had her and she was being lifted, dripping and cold, teeth chattering, onto the deck of her beloved ship, and a thick blanket was being placed around her shoulders which she clutched at gratefully, and she said, quite clearly, "I think I may be in shock, my Dad told me about this but it's never happened to me before," and then, for a little while at least, there was nothing.

*

Miya's mother was trying to wake her. It must be a book lesson day, Miya thought. But it's still too early!

"What are you doing," she murmured, turning over in her bed, pulling the blanket in tighter. "It's too early for books."

"Miya, I don't understand the rigging."

"You don't study rigging in books," muttered Miya.

"We're not going fast enough, the other ship will catch us."

"Whose? Dad's?"

"The other ship! Miya, wake!"

All of a sudden Miya realised that she wasn't lying in her bed, in her bedroom, on Clover Island, and that her mother wasn't here, and that she was very cold and quite wet, and her boots were filled with water (which she
hated
), and Sola was saying something about another ship chasing them.

"We have to get away!" Miya shouted, staggering to her feet and then losing her balance, Sola catching her and putting her upright again before she could fall.

"Thanks," she said. "Phew. Wow. Gosh, that water was cold!"

"Are you okay?"

"Yes. Well, no, I'm cold and wet and kind of dizzy—"

"Can you set the sails?"

"Of course, I could sail the Black Swan in my sleep. Just point me towards the right mast," said Miya.

"There's only one."

"I knew that," she snapped. "Okay. Let's try to focus or something here."

Miya rubbed her forehead, then cried out in protest as Sola picked her up and put her on his shoulder, turned towards the pursuing ship.

"Hey! Don't just—wow, that's really close," said Miya. "Is this what it's like to be tall? Dad used to put me on his shoulder when I was littler but I haven't—wait, isn't that Grace Morgon's ship?"

"It's the ship you just escaped from," said Sola, his usually calm voice just a little strained.

"That's Grace Morgon's ship! The Boundaries None!" Miya cried. She jumped down from Sola's shoulder and turned to face him. "Sola, we have to get away, why aren't we getting away? That fat old frigate shouldn't be able to catch us!"

"The rigging on this ship is complicated, it's not like the book said—"

"Of course it's not!" yelled Miya, heading for the mast and starting to climb. "It's MY ship! No one can sail her but ME! Man the wheel, Sola, and look sharp!"

Miya tied ropes and adjusted sails, let some out and pulled others in, climbing quickly amidst the rigging, calling out to Sola as she did so.

"Hard to port! HARD! Hard as you can! Now straighten her out a bit, don't let her list!"

She glared at the pursuing ship. "Trying to catch me with that fat pig of a frigate? I don't think so. See you later, Grace Morgon."

Miya untied a rope and let it loose, feeling a thrill as the main sail filled with wind.

"Sola, let go of the wheel a moment, let her find the way! Now hold, hold it tight, tight as you can!"

Sola gripped the wheel and held it steady, his strong hands not letting it move an inch.

"Good! Let's see that phoney little madam catch us now! Hah!"

Miya climbed further up the mast, into the little crow's nest, shouting and shaking her fist at the pursuing vessel:

"You'll never catch me! I'm Miya Black of Clover Island, and there's not a ship built that can outsail the Swan!"

The bow of the Black Swan began to lift from the water as it picked up speed, the sails full, Miya dancing in the crow's nest as they began outrunning the Boundaries None.

"Sola, adjust to starboard, just a little! We're away now, oh, we're SO away now! Haha!"

Miya grabbed a rope and swung down from the crow's nest, letting go of the rope to grab at the netting on the mast, then climbing quickly down to the deck. She jumped on Sola at the wheel and hugged him, grinning wildly.

"What a team!" she said, releasing him. "She'll never catch us now! Okay, let me have the wheel a moment."

Sola smiled and stepped back, letting Miya take the wheel in her hands.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?" she said, squeezing the wheel. "Yeah, me too. Woo! Okay. That was fun. Right, now all that excitement's over with I'd better change out of these wet clothes."

"Do you need help?"

"Um, I think I can probably manage to change by myself."

"No, I didn't mean ..." Sola trailed off, obviously embarrassed.

"I'm just kidding with ya, see you in a bit."

Miya disappeared into her cabin and emerged a few minutes later, wearing a white woollen jersey and black trousers, and leather sandals instead of her wet boots. She tied a thin rope to one of the railings on the stern deck, then tied the other end to the mast. Then she spent a few minutes hanging up her wet clothes, whistling happily, using wooden pegs to make sure they wouldn't fly off the line.

"Grace won't even be a sail on the horizon soon," Miya said, as she pegged her bandanna to the line. "Well done us. Well done, my loving ship."

"I have a question," said Sola. Miya hung her wet boots upside down on two of the mast's climbing pegs, then skipped up to Sola and grinned at him, hands on hips.

"What's up?" she asked.

"Were there islanders on that ship?"

Miya's grin disappeared. "Yes," she said. "A lot."

Sola made a short, low, discontented noise. "As crew?"

Miya nodded. "I didn't see any prisoners. But I didn't get the chance to explore all the ship. Actually I couldn't even find the powder keg before I, y'know, got spotted." Miya pursed her lips. "It was one of the islanders that did it. I ran into them on the crew deck and they ratted me out. I thought they'd be happy to see me! I mean, I tried to explain why I was there, but ..."

Sola nodded. "Think of what they have at risk—"

"I know, I know ... all their families ... I probably would've raised the alarm too. I ... this is going to be harder than we thought, isn't it?"

Sola didn't move or speak for a moment, then he grunted. "I never thought it would be easy."

"I guess I had kind of an unrealistic idea of how things would go. And, oh ... my dinghy," said Miya, suddenly remembering what had happened. "I learnt to row in that. Mum and Dad used to take me out in it, we'd row around the island and look for nice picnic spots ... what a thing to do, hacking up a person's beloved dinghy and sinking it! What kind of a person does that, I ask you? That Grace Morgon ... I'm gonna meet her again."

"The captain of that ship?"

"Yes. She said she was Badger Pete's daughter."

"Do you believe her?"

Miya narrowed her eyes.

"Absolutely," she said.

They sailed on, leaving Grace's ship behind—within an hour they couldn't see it even with Miya's spyglass. Sola found a sextant in Miya's cabin she hadn't even known was there, and after experimenting with it for half an hour he figured out where they were. He and Miya studied the chart together, and after some calculations (well, Sola had done the calculations, Miya had watched) they figured they were around a day and a half away from Biscuit Cove.

"Grace is probably still following us," Miya said, as she looked at the chart. "We're faster than she is, but I don't think we can risk stopping. Not with her behind us."

"If we continue on our present course, with the wind we have enjoyed so far, we should reach Biscuit Cove shortly before tomorrow morning—that is if we continue sailing throughout the day and through the night."

Miya chewed her lip. The escape from Grace's ship had taken a lot out of her, although she didn't want to admit that out loud. Sailing through the night held very little appeal.

"Change course," she said, after a moment. "We'll head into the Trinket Chain. It should throw Grace off our trail, although we'll have to be careful not to hit anything."

"I travelled along the western edge of this chain on my journey to Clover Island. It did not seem particularly dangerous."

"We should still be careful. Dad never let me sail into the chain before, even though technically we kind of own part of it."

Sola frowned. "How can you 'own' it?"

"I know, it's weird. Mum forced me to study the whole thing, quite frankly it seems ridiculous and COMPLETELY unnecessary to me."

Sola made a kind of annoyed grunt. "This kind of idea ... I don't like it," he said.

"I don't either. But I guess it doesn't really change anything, us owning it, I mean it's not like anyone wants to live there, and even if they did ... oh, wait a minute, maybe that's part of the reason ... actually I'm kind of remembering some stuff now." Miya frowned for a moment as she tried to remember what her mother had painstakingly taught her. "It's like ... we're not going to do anything there, with the islands I mean. But unless we 'own' them, then someone else, someone bad—someone like the Highland—could come along and take them? It's something like that, it's like ... like protection."

Sola considered this. "I suppose if I had to entrust these islands to anyone, it would be to people such as your parents." He thought for a moment longer, then shook his head. "Even so."

"I know, I guess it's one of those 'this is how the world works' things. You can't just leave an island uninhabited without saying something like 'by the way this is ours', because otherwise bad guys could come along and grab it, like 'just because nobody's using this doesn't mean you can use it for something bad'." Miya let out an irritated breath. "Anyway, let's stop talking about that, it's starting to make me annoyed."

Sola nodded. "We should consider our course through the chain—"

"Oh yeah! Okay, so, I figure we can head through like this," Miya said, tracing a route on the chart, "then pop out here, head north-east for a bit, and we should reach Biscuit Cove without any problems. Sound good?"

Sola nodded. "I'll chart the course," he said. Miya beamed.

"You're so
useful
," she said. "I'm gonna head up to the crow's nest and play with my spyglass for a while."

Sola nodded, already measuring and writing coordinates in a notebook. Miya paused in the doorway, her hand on the frame.

"Do you, y'know, actually enjoy all this kind of stuff?"

Sola paused and raised his head. "It's ... satisfying," he said, after a moment. "Yes, I enjoy it."

Miya nodded, then pointed out to the deck. "Be out here. Just call when you need me."

"I will."

Sola returned to his calculations as Miya walked out onto the deck of her ship. It had turned into a fine, clear day, the sun shining brightly across the deep blue ocean, the waves high but even, a strong wind blowing from the south. Above there was barely a cloud to be seen, although a few seagulls cried in the distance. Miya looked at them.

"Hm," she said, before slipping the spyglass's strap over her shoulder. She climbed easily to the crow's nest then extended the spyglass and raised it to her eye, looking in the direction of the gulls. The small black speck of an island in the distance confirmed her guess; they were already near the Trinket Chain. She smiled and looked in other directions, but didn't see anything interesting. After spending a while trying to track the seagulls as they flew, with varying degrees of success, Miya lowered the spyglass and leaned against the mast with a happy sigh, then hugged herself, grinning.

"Adventure!"

*

As Sola finished plotting their new course, Miya sailed the ship into the Trinket Chain. The islands here were small but beautiful, formed of light grey rock and covered in lush green foliage, the water around them a brilliant blue, lighter than it had been outside of the chain. Although the ocean was fairly shallow, only a few metres deep in some places, the Black Swan had a small draft and there didn't seem to be any danger of grounding—there were no sand bars or submerged rocks, the only 'obstacles' being the islands themselves, which were well-spaced and easily avoided with a minimum of vigilance.