Chapter 12

In the dark of the Halifax’s hold, all Hailey could do was feel sorry for herself. She had awoken with her hands chained around a post. She didn’t know how long she had been out, but it must have been a while because the boat was well underway. Having traveled out of the port with her father so many times, it was easy to tell that the boat had made it past the calm cove and the breakwaters and was making its way out to the sea.

Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark and she saw that the hold of the ship was surprisingly empty—only a few crates and herself were on the floor. She sat up as much as she could, the length of chain long enough that she could sit up and even stand, but not much else. Her body ached; she stretched as best as she could, but the chains had little give. On her arm was a sticky patch with a tube that lead to a bag suspended from the top of the pole. She pulled the sticky patch from her forearm, and tossed it and the tube aside. She then checked her hair for pins to pick the locks, but they were gone. They had taken them all.

Hailey noticed that there were lights in the hold, the same globe style found in her room, but the crew must have shut them off when they set sail. She thought it must have been done more out of cruelty than to save energy.

She had heard her father talk several times about Crown ships, with their odd, dark conical sails. Those sails somehow helped produce a limitless magical power that gave them lights, navigation, even communication over long distances. They didn’t need large and cumbersome batteries like the devices that merchants had. The sails would just pull the energy out of the sky just the same as the wind that furled the sail.

He would rail for hours on how useful it would be if merchants had access to such things instead of just the Queen’s ships. Some of her father’s friends had secretly tried to figure out these devices, but they turned out to be far too complicated for them. Even some of the wisest of tinkerers couldn’t figure out what they were made of, for nothing like it existed in nature.

Her father! She gasped and began to panic. Bishop Graver said before she blacked out that he was going to have her father arrested for contraband and conspiracy as well. They were both hanging offenses.

She had no idea how long she had been asleep and on the ship. In the time she was away her father might have been tried, found guilty, and executed. Was her father still alive?

Large, bitter tears rolled off her cheeks and she began to sob.

After a while, the tears subsided and she resigned herself to her situation. There was nothing she could do to save her father, let alone herself. All she could do now was survive as long as she could and see what happened when she went before the Queen.

Above decks, she could hear the shuffle of feet and the voice of the captain booming over the ship, giving instructions for the midday routine. Before the announcements were finished, the lights in the hold began to burn brighter. Hailey’s eyes tried to adjust.

She heard the sound of keys rattling in a lock, and in the growing light she could make out a set of stairs just off to her left. A pair of large, ill-fitting boots descended them. They belonged to a short, portly, gray-bearded man who was carrying a tray of food. He waddled down the stairs and made his way over to her. He stood and looked at her for a long moment through his round, rimless glasses as she sat there on the floor glowering up at him.

“Ah, such a shame, seein’ such a lovely girl so sad.” He shook his head. “Touches me heart.”

His accent was rough and difficult to understand. He pronounced his words strangely, as though they were foreign to his tongue. It was as if he puzzled over the words as soon as he said them.

“Cap’n said you’d be awake by now, said I should bring yer something ta eat as yer might be hungry. Yer been asleep a good while now. I knows, Cap’n sen’ me to check on yer yesterday.”

“How long have I been asleep… Mr. uhhh…?” She looked at him, hoping that he would fill in the rest. He looked at her dumbly a moment, then nodded his head as though he got the message.

“Gibson, me name’s Gibson, though most folks call me Gibby. We left port three days ago. Yer quite the sound sleeper! Never seen anyone sleep li’ tha’ before.”

Three days. Her father could be long dead by now and she was a three days’ sail away. She felt a new rush of tears begin to well in her eyes, but she bit her lip to stifle them. She had given them enough tears already. Much to her distaste, Gibby noticed.

“Aww, no sense cryin’ abou’ it. We shouldn’t be in port after long.” The man placed the tray on the floor before her. “Here, have some food. I’m sure yer hungry.”

Hailey couldn’t even look at the tray.

“Suit yourself. Yer know it gets pretty dark an’ lonely down here in the hold. Maybe I should stay down here an’ keep yer company.”

He sat on the floor by her and the tray.

From up the stairs, a voice boomed throughout the ship.

“Gibby, please report to the quarterdeck. Gibby to the quarterdeck.”

Gibby sighed and rubbed both hands along his smooth, bald head. “Guess it’ll hafta be ‘nother time, little missy.”

He got up slowly, grunting as he negotiated his way off the floor around his round belly. Once back on his feet, he began to waddle back towards the stairs. Before he went up, he turned back to her and said with a smirk, “Bes’ eat that. It’s not like yer goin’ anywhere fer a while.”

He proceeded up the stairs and closed the door behind him. The lights dimmed back to the way they were before. Hailey was left to the solitude of the ship’s hold and her thoughts.

The first day, she did not touch the food, her guilt and sadness robbing her of her appetite, but the next day she leapt on the food and tore into it with her bare hands, devouring the small cuts of meat as though a savage. After not eating for four days, she was close to eating the tray itself. They were wise to not give her any utensils. Had they, she probably could have used one of them to work the locks around her wrists.

Sometime later—midday, Hailey guessed, from the shuffle on the upper decks—the man known as Gibby came and brought another tray of food, this time with a larger portion. Hailey was glad for this, for the lack of food left her weakened. Food would help her regain at least some of her strength.

Blessedly, his visit was brief, but not brief enough for Hailey’s liking. Though the man looked harmless and though he might have possibly been a little slow, there was something dark and wanting in his cold look at her. His eyes lingered just a bit too long. It made Hailey uneasy.

The days passed between sleeping, eating, and quiet contemplation. Thankfully, on one of his visits, Gibby had brought her a chamber pot so she didn’t have to behave like livestock and do her business on the floor.

Gibby was the only person she saw. She sat there for hours, days, staring off into the dim light of the cabin and thinking of how she had gotten there. What decisions had brought her to be chained in the hold of a ship on her way to stand before the Queen. Finding and taking the book. Deciding not to tell her father about it. Getting caught up in the mystery of it all instead of just getting rid of the stupid thing. She regretted most of all not listening to the book and her instincts. She should have escaped with the boy when she got the chance.

She let her mind play out the possibilities of what would have happened if she had done things differently. Like a good navigator, she plotted out the courses of every outcome, every decision. What if she had never taken the book? The Crown would have had the book and taken her father anyway. But they wouldn’t have taken her, would they? She would have been free to try to save her father.

She couldn’t get over the way Bishop Graver looked at her. She contemplated it for a long time, trying to figure it out, until it dawned on her what that look meant. Familiarity. He also said that the Queen knew her, knew that the book would come to her. Why would the book come to her? How? If so, did that mean that the Crown would have kidnapped her anyway?

Had she listened to the book or the young man and ran, she could have found any of a dozen ships putting out for distant ports that morning. Once underway, she could have gotten word to her father that she was safe and left instructions on how to join her. Her father’s merchant guild had contacts everywhere. Any one of them would have been glad to secretly pass along a message, if not hide them altogether. She would have been safe. Her father would have been safe. The book would have been safe, for the time being, at least.

Just thinking about the book made her brain itch. She felt the same panic a mother feels when she loses her child in the crowd at the market. Over and over in her head it called out to her, and Hailey could not go to it. Its cries went unanswered.

None of this would have happened if she had listened to the book and the young man. So why didn’t she do it? Why did she freeze in place when she should have been running away?

The answer came in the voice of her grandmother clucking in her head. The endless litany she would tell Hailey about the duties and the responsibilities of being a lady. To serve, to submit, both to their elders and to men of stature and status. Her grandmother, in sync with the Church and their schools and primers helping hammer in the virtues that forged the chains that bound her now. Rather than defying those virtues and being her own woman, she’d submitted to the things that she did not like or understand to make her grandmother and father happy.

She had seen so much sorrow in her family when her mother died, especially in her father. She recalled how he would sit there, hours at a time, silent and still, as if waiting for death. It had driven her to constantly try to make him and everyone around her happy. Now she hated that incessant need to please others.

Hailey also thought about the state of the world. It had not always been like this, no matter how hard the Crown and the Church tried to wipe away the record. She had read the histories of it from long before she was born. Men and women were equal and free, even the redheads, once. There was a republic and a senate, where men and women had an equal voice in the world in which they lived. That ended when the first king seized control some 250 years ago. And with each passing year and each passing monarch since, the Crown’s grip grew tighter and tighter.

There was a rebellion by the colonies some 50 years later after the Crown was established. They fought to restore everyone’s freedoms and abolish the Crown, but failed. Wanting to be sure to avoid another insurrection by the common folk, the Crown formed an alliance with the Church of the Ancestors to ensure that both remained in power, uncontested.

They designed a system that created a constant thirst for wealth and position that was woven through the very fabric of their society through the Church. The Church ran everything that the Queen did not. They printed the books, they ran the schools, and they ran the spiritual lives of everyone. The Queen may have control of their bodies and wealth, but the Church owned their hearts and minds.

One of the core beliefs the Church taught was that a lady’s place was to be a servant to men and her elders. They preached salvation through status and wealth. It was the litany of a system that supported the Crown—mind, body, and soul, all born in the time of the first Ancestors who fell from the sky.

Hailey thought of the book and one important thing it had told her. That she wasn’t alone. There was a pirate queen once, a captain on the high seas who defied the Crown and was their scourge. She made a difference. That book was proof of it. Even though she didn’t have the book with her, she had the knowledge of its existence. It was a small treasure within herself telling her that her heart wasn’t wrong. She could be something other than a wife. She could be the captain she always wanted to be someday if, like the Pirate Queen Rachel, she fought for it.

Hailey shifted and felt the shackles on her wrists pinch. Oddly the rattle of the chains brought back a memory she had forgotten. On one of their trade runs, her father was carrying a load of cattle in the hold of his ship. Hailey was fascinated with them. She had never been up close with cattle before. They never put up a fuss and went wherever they were led. She remembered how complacent those cows were, how calm.

Sitting there reflecting on it in the dark, Hailey found herself wondering if they knew they were being shipped to their slaughter. Until now, she’d never stopped to wonder if they cared.

They had been shackled to a pole just like she was.

The days went by slowly, only punctuated by the brief visits and leering looks of Gibby. He only came to feed her once a day, so it was easy to track the time, though difficult to keep up her energy.

On the tenth day, something seemed different about Gibby. He raised the light level a bit more than usual and he was much more conversational and more careless. He left the door open at the top of the stairs. As he placed the tray on the floor by Hailey, she could smell the tart smell of cheap wine on him.

“I get ta go off duty soon. For a few ‘ole days! Want ta celebrate wit me?”

He crashed to the floor and pulled out a small flagon of wine, showing it to her. She looked around the room. Though it looked brighter, the room suddenly felt colder.

He took a swig and offered it to her, and she shook her head.

“Right. Too good ta ‘ave a drink wit a common man, are ya?”

The words came out more mumbled and marked with more of a heavier accent than usual.

“Fine time ta take some leave. Yer think the cap’n would at least give me a good night ta be off. Fog so thick up ther yer can’ hardly see yer hand in front o’ yer face.”

The cold bite of a chill sunk onto the back of Hailey’s neck as she remembered what the book had told her. She looked up the stairs, eyes wide.

“The mists?” she murmured.

He looked at her and started laughing. “Yer afraid o’ the fog, love? Scared the mean nasty pirates goin’ ta get yer? Well, don’ worry, love. They ain’t real.” He leaned back and propped himself up on one arm. “I been on these seas since I was a lad and I can tell yer now, ther’ ain’t no such thing.” He leaned forward and patted her knee.

Hailey looked up the stairs again, and this time she noticed that the mists he spoke of had started to slowly descend the stairs. She turned back to him and noticed that he had slid a little closer to her. Too close.

“Yer know, we ‘ave a couple o’ days ta get ta know each other…”

He reached over and stroked the side of her cheek. Something inside of her screamed out. She wasn’t sure if it was the voice of her mother or herself way down inside, but she knew one thing: she had to fight.

“No!” She jerked her head away and kicked out with her feet, kicking him firmly on his soft round belly and sending him backwards. There was a commotion upstairs. The sound of hurried feet on the decks above. Gibby paid it no mind as his face darkened and he howled obscenities at Hailey while cradling his belly. Hailey stood up.

She was malnourished and weak, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. She was worth fighting for. She felt a volcano swell up in her. Its cauldron full of rage about her life, her situation, and her mother’s death. She hated those who had put her there, who took her mother away from her, and now her father. A scream escaped her as she lunged at the charging oaf.

Her hands were bound too close to the pole for her to be able to punch him, but her legs were free. She caught him again with her heel, this time in his chest. Gibby let out a whoosh of air and began to go down, grabbing her ankle as he fell. They both crashed to the ground and he began to climb closer to her, using her leg like a rope on the rigging. She screamed again, trying to push him off of her, but her strength was beginning to fail. He was close to her face now and she could smell the sweat and sour wine on his breath as he shouted at her to be still.

He punched her in the head and her vision swam. He tried to push his whole weight on her to pin her down, but she kept fighting, trying to twist away. She had just enough room to be able to land some blows with her fist on his head and neck, but the chains slowed her punches and they bounced off of him. She bit him hard on the cheek, hard enough to draw blood. The man cried out and hopped off of her. Gibby stood over her, screaming more obscenities at her while holding his bloody cheek.

She looked up at him defiantly, and spit at him. Hailey tried to catch her breath and steel herself for another attack. She was tiring quickly, but she had enough in her for one more round. Gibby waited too long and Hailey quickly sent a shoeless foot to his crotch, doubling him over.

He lay on the ground cursing at her and spitting. She wouldn’t be so lucky next time. Hailey watched as Gibby slowly pulled himself from the deck and produced a dagger.

Hailey’s eyes went wide and stayed transfixed on the blade.

“Cap’n says we ‘ave to ta yer to the Queen. ‘e didn’ say in one piece.”

He was only a few paces away. Hailey steeled herself for the attack, but it never came. He simply stopped mid-stride and stood there staring at her. Then from his chest, a bloom of blood rose across his dingy white shirt. He looked down at it in surprise and then fell to the ground, dead.

Behind his body stood two figures with bright glowing eyes. The tallest one held a black blade, wet with the blood of her assailant. Its large captain’s hat rested like a crown on its nest of hair, and the still face of the skull stared at her. In the figure’s other hand she could see the book, her book, its bright red eyes beckoning to her with the same glow as the pirate’s eyes.

At its side stood another figure, though not as tall and well developed as the giant captain. It pointed at her and said to the ghost captain.

“The Navigator.”

The pirate captain nodded and turned to the other figure and spoke.

“Bring her. Sink the ship.”

It sheathed its blade and turned and disappeared up the stairs. The other figure advanced on Hailey. She was too tired to fight. She didn’t know if it was the blow to her head or the lack of food, or the whole ordeal, but she felt woozy and knew she couldn’t get up. The mists had fully engulfed the room. The ghost pirate advanced on her, red eyes blazing through the mists. She lost consciousness just before the figure touched her.