‘ALL HANDS ON DECK!’ Prospero roared.

They did not need to go looking for trouble; Trouble had found them.

‘Now’s our chance to defeat the Troublemakers!’ Cordelia cried.

‘NO!’ Prospero yelled, charging to the wheel. ‘WE FLEE! COME ABOUT!’

‘I want to fight!’ Cordelia yelled back, throwing open the Weather Pantry doors.

‘Don’t you dare disobey me, Cordelia Hatmaker!’ Prospero barked. ‘You, Sam and Goose – get below NOW! STAY SAFE!’

He wrenched the wheel round, and the ship slewed sideways. Jars of weather tumbled on to Cordelia as she hit the deck. Anger at her father exploded in her chest.

‘You’re a coward!’ she screamed. ‘LET ME FIGHT!’

Her father’s face betrayed terror and pain as he wrestled the wheel.

Davey rammed a wad of storm-cloud into the muzzle of the Thunderclap cannon.

‘FIRE!’ Melchior roared.

There was the sizzle of flame gobbling a fuse, then a BOOM shook their bones. Little Bear’s cannon was designed to not sink ships, only to scare off attackers. But it did not scare these pirates.

A chorus of blood-curdling howls rose from the enemy ship. Goosebumps erupted over Cordelia’s skin. She grabbed rolling weather jars and flung them at the Trouble.

Lightning cracked like a whip between the ships. A twister went spiralling across the sea, causing a waterspout that nudged the Trouble off course. But the ship cut through the water, correcting its course and surging forward with unnatural speed.

Cordelia saw the flash of cutlasses on the enemy deck, grinning faces and bared teeth. Figures scurried like rats up the rigging. Something was hurled through the sky trailing a silver rope: a large brown thing the size of a mop head. It landed with a thud at Cordelia’s feet. For a moment she thought it was merely a hairy splat of seaweed. But it quickly picked itself up, scuttling on eight legs. It was a nightmarish creature, made of sharp angles and shiny eyes.

‘WHAT IS THAT?’ Goose shrieked, as it ran across the deck.

Davey dived for it, but the creature scuttled up the mast, the silver rope snaking behind it.

‘IT’S A HUGE SPIDER!’ Goose answered his own horrified question.

They were slowing down. Little Bear bucked like a wild horse that did not want to be harnessed, and Cordelia realized what the spider was doing: its web, thick as a cable, had joined the ships, mast to mast.

‘STOP THAT SPIDER!’ she yelled, scrambling after it.

But the spider sprang back to the Trouble, unspooling a second thread behind it and lashing the ships firmly together.

Prospero leaped down from the wheel, drawing his sword and slashing at the webs. But his sword bounced off: the spider’s thread was uncuttable.

The crew of Little Bear looked at each other. In that instant they all understood: it was useless to try to flee.

They would have to fight.

‘Cordelia, Sam, Goose!’ Captain Hatmaker barked. ‘I order you to hide!’

But Cordelia disobeyed the captain. She hurled jars wildly at the Trouble and a commotion of weather happened all at once: mist, thunder, hail and snow. Howls erupted from the Troublemakers as they were engulfed, their ghastly ship swallowed by the miniature storm.

However, as the last of the weather – the final, failed weapon – evaporated, the Troublemakers reappeared, grinning, through the mist.

In unison, the pirates stuffed their fingers in their ears. Before Cordelia could wonder why, someone uttered a high shriek, and a screech of scarlet parrots descended from the crow’s nest, wheeling through the air. The birds’ screams immobilized everybody on Little Bear’s deck.

Petrifying Parrots! Cordelia thought frantically, her mind the only part of her that could move. These birds were highly Menacing: their screech could stop a person in their tracks, while their feathers stunned whatever they touched.

As the parrots wheeled away across the sea, Cordelia’s bones loosened and her joints came unstuck. She looked around desperately for a weapon she could swing. But the iron mouths of cannons bristled from the Trouble’s hull.

BOOM!

Cordelia found herself swallowed up by thick purple smoke.

Puzzling Fug, she vaguely thought as she turned round slowly, trying to remember who she went and why she was. No, that’s not right. The questions is: where am why and how is me?

Something was going strange. She just couldn’t puzzle out what was wit.

A storm of war cries happened somewhere beyond the reach of her confusion, and as the fug cleared, so did her mind. Dark shapes wielding sharp knives were swinging aboard Little Bear, ragged nightmares sliding through the haze, using the spiderweb cables to swing aboard. The deck shuddered as their boots thudded down.

The Troublemakers were a gang of grinning villains, jagged and cackling. They loomed, terrifying, above the children.

Cordelia, Goose and Sam stumbled together, clutching each other, weaponless.

‘What do we do?’ Sam whimpered.

Before Cordelia could answer, a shape shot through the sky, bowling Sam over. To her other side, Goose splayed on to the deck, felled by a barrage of tiny grey cannonballs. As two wild-eyed pirates lunged for Cordelia, a silver-bladed saviour whirled between them: Prospero Hatmaker furiously clashing blades.

Cordelia turned to search for a weapon – anything she could use to help her father fight – and saw Melchior get swallowed by a large column of water spinning furiously across the deck.

Cordelia darted forward to help him, but fell over Davey, who was struggling through a moving mudslide. It trapped his ankles together, sticking him to the deck.

Davey pushed her out of the way. ‘Don’t let it get you too!’ he gasped.

Kicking a tendril of clinging mud off her foot, Cordelia crawled across the deck, to find Sam stuck to the planks with glowing gobs of sticky goo. Sam’s eyes were shut tight, and she moaned as though she was suffering a nightmare.

Cordelia shook her desperately. ‘Sam! Wake up!’ she begged.

Right beside Sam lay a boulder. It groaned and shifted.

‘Goose! Is that you?’

It was indeed Goose, covered with hundreds of stony grey creatures with pincers that clung to his clothes and skin. He was so heavy with them he couldn’t move.

‘GOOSE!’

But there was no time to help. A smirking pirate with wild hair and glinting eyes was coming after her.

She dodged under his arms, rushing to help her father – Prospero was their only hope. He was now fighting two pirates at once. One had flashing knives that slashed and stabbed; the other was covered from head to toe in shaggy black seaweed.

To Cordelia’s horror, the seaweed surged off the pirate, spiralling round her father and trapping his arms and legs in writhing slime.

‘NO!’ Cordelia yelled, scrambling to help him.

But she skidded to a stop as a terrifying figure smashed on to the deck in front of her.

This pirate wore boots like destruction and a hat like a thundercloud. Her clothes were stitched together with venom and revenge. Crackles of lightning sparked from her buttons, and her silver cutlass shone with bitterness.

She towered above Cordelia.

‘I am Thorn Lawless!’ she growled. ‘Pirate queen and leader of the Troublemakers.’

For a moment, Cordelia was awestruck by Thorn Lawless’s sheer awfulness. Then a weather jar rolled across the deck into her hand. It contained a crackling dagger of lightning! Cordelia flung it at the pirate, but Thorn Lawless was faster than lightning. Her sword flashed, and the lightning zigzagged away into the rigging.

‘Don’t play with fire, girl,’ the pirate queen sneered.

Now weaponless, Cordelia only had her mettle left with which to defend herself. She leaped to her feet, squared her shoulders and said, ‘I’m not afraid of you!’

It was a lie. Her knees were shaking.

All around her, infesting the deck of her beloved ship, the Troublemakers burst into laughter.

‘She’s brave!’

‘A bold girl!’

‘I told you she would be!’

‘DILLY, RUN!’ her father roared.

Cordelia turned and fled. She careered across the deck and scrabbled up the mizzenmast, out of reach of the pirates’ snatching hands.

‘IT’S YOU WE’VE COME FOR!’ the pirate queen roared in her blood-and-thunder voice. ‘CORDELIA HATMAKER!’

Cordelia was shocked to hear her own name in a pirate’s mouth.

‘Come with us and we’ll leave your friends unharmed,’ declared the pirate queen.

Cordelia clung to the mast, her mind tumbling over itself trying to understand. They had come for her? How did they even know who she was? How had they known where to find her?

At the bottom of the mast, the Troublemakers circled like hungry hyenas.

‘Come along – come with us, Cordelia!’ a sing-song voice, rough and nightmarish, sang gleefully.

‘You’ll leave the crew and the ship unharmed?’ Cordelia called, her mind racing. ‘They’ll be free to sail away if I come with you?’

‘Don’t believe them!’ Goose’s yells were muffled. ‘They’re PIRATES!’

Cordelia’s attention was caught by a shout from her father. Black tentacles of seaweed had wrapped all around him. His sword had been pulled from his hand, and his legs were lashed to the rigging. Worse, though, was the fact that the rigging was now crawling with flames.

‘Cordelia!’ he cried out, his eyes bright with despair as a tentacle snaked over his mouth. ‘Save yourself!’

Cordelia dizzily cast about for something – anything – that might help her save everyone aboard Little Bear. But there was nothing. The only thing she could do was escape on the borrowed rowing boat they had tied to the stern, which had bobbed along behind them valiantly through the storm. She looked across at it … If she was quick, she could reach it and get away –

‘Come with us, Hatmaker!’ Thorn Lawless called. ‘We asked you politely!’

‘No, you didn’t!’ Cordelia shouted. ‘If you think that was polite, you have absolutely no manners!’

‘Well, if you won’t come, we’ll have to do this the … definitely impolite way,’ Thorn’s voice drifted up to her.

Cordelia hugged the smooth mast of Little Bear. She pressed her nose to it. It smelled of the forests where the ship had grown as Fleetwood Trees. If she didn’t sacrifice herself, this ship and the people she loved most in the world would be swallowed whole by the hungry sea, sent down into the dark amid fire and destruction.

But she could save them. It just meant not saving herself.

Cordelia slowly slid down the mast. As her feet hit the deck, Thorn Lawless’s craggy hand closed over her arm.

The pirate queen’s eyes blazed triumphantly. Amid the Troublemakers’ victory howls, Cordelia heard her father sob, half choked in the grip of seaweed.

‘What about your side of the bargain?’ Cordelia demanded. ‘You said you’d free the crew and promise not to sink this ship! You’ve got to put out the fire!’

In answer, the pirate queen whistled a strange, high-pitched whistle. A shadow moved through the sky, swarming towards Little Bear.

‘W-what’s that?’ Cordelia stammered.

‘My side of the bargain.’ Thorn Lawless grinned at Cordelia, then dragged her across the deck.

Cordelia stared in horror at the shadow.

‘NO!’ She leaped forward, wrenching herself free, only to be stopped by the sharp point of a cutlass at her throat.

‘Little Maker, we had an agreement,’ Thorn Lawless hissed.

With a savage shove, the pirate queen pushed her. Cordelia lost her balance, staggered backwards and fell, flailing, over the side of the ship. Her belly left her, her voice unspooled, her legs went over her head, and she plummeted towards the sea.

Mid-air, there was a pull on her shoulders, her legs, her hair. It was as though the air was made of water and she was caught in an outgoing tide: a tide that was impossible to fight. She was tumbling – tumbling and rolling, but not falling – riding a tongue of air that was slurping her in.

She saw a blue blur of sea and a jumble of matchstick masts and a smear of molten sky. She was being pulled towards the Trouble! There was the yawning mouth of an enormous flower – its throat splodged with purple – growing closer.

FLUMP!

She landed in the wide leathery mouth and slipped down its throat.