Miya sat on the deck of her ship, knees tucked into her chest, her chin resting between them. She was staring into the water, watching as the dark waves warped and twisted the light of the moon. After several minutes of this Miya took a slightly shuddery breath, then she sighed, long and deep and heartfelt.
Things had not gone quite as well as she had hoped. In fact, she could safely say that it had been one of the worst days she’d ever had. It had all started off so great, too, what with figuring out Pete’s plans and having her great idea with Sola, where did it all go wrong?
Well, Miya thought, to begin with, telling Dad about the plan could definitely have gone better.
“Dad! Dad. I had an amazing idea—”
“Can it wait, Miya? I’m about to meet with the other captains,” said Tomas, hurriedly pulling a tight black boot onto his foot.
“Oh, can I come?” Miya asked automatically, then shook her head. “No, wait, I have an idea, your parents!”
“What?”
“Your parents, my grandparents, they’re legendary pirates! If we could find them and tell them about Badger Pete I’m sure they’d come and help us defeat him—”
“Miya, I don’t have time for this.”
“But don’t you see? It’s perfect! We’ve been saying all the way through ‘if only someone could help us’, well they’re the someone! Someones, even! And I know you must have some idea where they are, right? Right?”
“Miya, my darling, I’m sorry. I don’t know where you got this idea but it … you have to understand, my parents … their way of doing things, the way they … we just have to find ways to solve our problems ourselves. Do you understand?”
“No. Aren’t you going to go fight Badger Pete? Isn’t that what this meeting is about?”
“Miya—”
“So how’s it different? Grandma and Grandad were great pirates, legends! They’d wipe their noses with an upstart like Badger Pete, I know they would. And, plus, it’s like that saying, ‘fight fire with fire’, right? Set a pirate to catch a pirate, let monkeys fight monkeys, the left sock will overcome the right—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Badger Pete’s a pirate! A bad pirate! I don’t mean bad like he’s not good at pirating because obviously he’s doing pretty well, but bad like … wrong! Right?”
“My darling, I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know where my parents are or even if they’re still alive. We parted on bad terms and I haven’t seen them for many, many years. They’re not a part of my life here with you and your mother, and sadly they never will be. It’s a choice they made a long time ago. So please, Miya, my darling, my Coconut, just forget about them. Leave them in the storybooks. That’s where they belong.”
Tomas tightened his sword belt around his waist, and put his favourite tricorn hat on his head.
“Now I really have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Huh.”
“I love you, my darling Miya.”
“Huh.”
Tomas looked at his daughter, indecision in his eyes, then he turned and left her alone.
“He didn’t understand,” Miya muttered to herself. “Why couldn’t I make him understand?”
She was lying down now, on her stomach, on the stern deck of her ship. She idly flicked a stone into the water, making a little cannon noise as she did so.
“Pow. Take that, Badger Pete. Oh, whoops? Did I just sink your flagship? With you on board? Captain going down with his ship? How noble. Well, that’s that problem solved, thanks once again to Miya Black, pirate.”
Miya laid her head down, feeling the wooden deck beneath her cheek, the coolness soothing.
“Miya Black, pirate,” she repeated. “Pirate,” she said again, louder this time, pushing herself up from the deck. “Pirate! PIRATE! PIRATE PIRATE PIRATE!”
Miya stood as she yelled, fists clenched at her sides, screaming her frustration at the night ocean. She glared at the water, then turned her back on it.
“I AM a pirate,” she muttered. “And everyone would know that, if I had half a chance to show what I can do.”
In an instant she had her sword out, pointed at an imaginary Badger Pete.
“Oops,” she said, as her sword flashed in the moonlight. “Was that your belt-buckle? Just a little too quick for you, am I? How’s your grip, Badger Pete?”
Miya’s sword flashed again, then again, quicker and quicker as she advanced on her enemy.
“There goes your cutlass. There goes your dagger. There goes your shirt, you really should sew your buttons on better.”
Miya stood over the downed Badger Pete, her sword pointed at his heart.
“Yield,” she said. “Or you’ll taste the steel of my sword. Of my father’s sword,” she corrected herself. “The sword of a pirate king.”
Miya held the position a moment, then laughed a little and sheathed her weapon.
“Whatever,” she said, flopping back onto the hard wood of the deck. She flicked another pebble into the water.
“Why don’t they understand?” she muttered, idly looking for another pebble. “And where did all these pebbles come from?”
Miya rolled over to see if there were any pebbles to her left. As she rolled she heard the crinkle of paper from her shirt pocket, which brought a sudden heavy feeling of guilt to her chest. I shouldn’t have opened Dad’s old chest, she thought, as she pulled out the letter to read once more. His private, personal stuff, I’d kill him if he looked at anything in my room. Even though I found this …
Miya didn’t go into the attic much, it was filled with dust and cobwebs and spiders—not that she was scared of spiders, she just preferred to be where they weren’t. It was also where her parents kept their old stuff, and she knew how guarded they both were about their pasts. Even being up here felt wrong, like being an uninvited guest. Miya had been taught about ‘respect for the past’ from a very young age, not least from the stories her father had read to her and the history lessons her mother had taught. Clover Island was, in part, a place for second chances. A lot of people came to the island with pasts they’d rather forget. Part of what Tomas and Lily had instilled within Miya was the belief that you should not delve too deeply into someone’s past—not without invitation.
But, Miya reasoned, this is important. Dad doesn’t understand but that’s because he’s busy, he’s got other things to do, responsibilities. He’s worried, like we all are—that’s why he couldn’t listen to me properly. And I know he must have something that can lead to his parents up here, he’s probably just forgotten about it, or he’s too busy to think about that kind of stuff, or he doesn’t want to tell me for some reason. He thinks I’m still too young, probably, he’s always too protective of me. Also, maybe he just doesn’t have the time to go scrounging around in a dusty old attic. So, I’ll find it for him and save him the time and bother, and prove I’m old enough to do things for myself—and I’m sure once I get the time to explain things to him properly he’ll thank me for it, and then we can go find my grandparents together.
Miya knew exactly where to start looking—her father’s old sea-chest, a big heavy thing in the back corner of the attic, made of weathered but tough old wood, black with age (and ash; at some point in its life the chest had survived a rather serious fire). It was surrounded by crates and smaller chests, and Miya had to spend some time shifting things out of the way just to get to it—she’d wrapped a bandanna around her mouth and nose before coming up here so the dust didn’t bother her too much, although it did get into her eyes a little.
After clearing enough stuff out of the way, Miya knelt in front of the chest and opened it, or tried to at least—upon attempting to raise the lid she found that it was locked. This may have discouraged some people, but to Miya it was just another challenge to be overcome. Locked treasure chests were a normal part of pirate life, to be prepared for and dealt with appropriately. Miya’s father had told her that so-called ‘skeleton keys’, said to be capable of opening any lock, weren’t to be relied on. Rather, a good set of lockpicks was what you needed. On her eighth birthday, in private, Tomas had given Miya her own set; half a dozen small, strong steel tools in a roll of leather. (As well as the lockpicks and lessons on how to use them, he’d also given her a series of serious lectures about only using them in an emergency or when you knew—KNEW—that the person who owned the lock you were picking wouldn’t mind you messing around with it. Miya hadn’t enjoyed that part of the gift so much, but it had penetrated her thick skull eventually. That was part of the reason she felt so guilty.) Miya had practiced with her lockpicks for a little less than a year, until she could open most locks in a matter of minutes without any difficulty at all, after which, having mastered the skill to her own satisfaction, she’d lost interest. This was to her mother’s great relief; she’d grown more than a little tired of all the doors in the house mysteriously locking and unlocking themselves.
Miya knelt in front of the chest for a few minutes, running a hand over the dusty surface, chewing on her lip. Eventually, her expression hardened and she nodded, taking out the little leather roll and getting to work without further hesitation. The lock wasn’t a complicated one, but it was old and clogged with dust—Miya had to spend several minutes just cleaning it out before she could even get started. After that, however, it was just a matter of time before she heard a tiny, intensely satisfying ‘click’ and felt the lock give beneath her hands. She put her lockpicks away, feeling a twinge of guilt at using the skills her father had so proudly taught her against him—but is it really against him? Considering I’m doing this for his benefit, I shouldn’t feel guilty at all, thought Miya. That didn’t really make the guilty feeling go away, but it helped her ignore it as she pushed the heavy lid up and looked inside her father’s chest.
The contents had been covered with a layer of fine dust, but aside from that seemed to have survived the years remarkably well. There was a small knife in a scabbard (probably his first weapon, thought Miya, remembering how her father had once told her he’d been given a knife almost as soon as he could hold it on his own), as well as around a dozen compasses (her father had collected them at one point, after becoming terribly lost thanks to a poorly-made compass failing him), a vicious-looking tooth that looked almost long enough to use as a dagger (Miya thought it was probably from a large shark), a long length of yellow ribbon, tied into a neat bow (it looked familiar to Miya, but she couldn’t quite place it), a crude eye patch (but he has both his eyes, Miya thought), a bit of dry, rubbery, red skin (what the heck did this come from, Miya wondered, as she held it up to examine it, and why does it smell so bad?), a very small painting of a city skyline at night (having never been outside of the Rainbow Archipelago, Miya didn’t recognise the city), an ordinary-looking arrow, broken in half (I’m pretty sure Dad never used a bow, Miya thought, so where did this come from?), a tiny, rather crudely carved wooden ship, missing its mast (Miya liked the blood red colour that parts of the toy had been painted), a bit of strangely-shaped iron (after examining it for a moment, Miya realised it was a broken-off hook from a grapple), a scrap of old, yellowed fabric (it looked like it’d been torn from a dress), two pieces of thin rope, one a faded blue colour, the other faded red, tied together in an intricate knot (Miya was fascinated by this but had no idea what it was supposed to represent, if anything), a bit of sharpened metal, one end wrapped in dirty cloth (after a moment Miya realised that it was actually meant to be a crude knife), a small, ragged bit of black shark’s skin (maybe from a panther shark, Miya thought with a small shiver), a sword hilt with about two inches of blade left, the rest having broken off (Miya didn’t know the story behind this one), the dried skull of some kind of weird-looking fish (it had dozens of tiny, needle-sharp teeth—privately Miya decided that whatever this fish was, she never wanted to meet a live one), a long, burnt splinter of wood (Miya looked at this a while but couldn’t figure out why her father had kept it at all; eventually she decided it had probably ended up in the chest by mistake), a large piece of curved, slightly tarnished metal (maybe part of an old suit of armour, Miya decided), the old, broken-off heel of a boot (Black Boots, Miya thought with a smile), a bit of green cloth with a symbol sewn into it in gold thread (some sort of royal thing, Miya thought, probably Highland—but I don’t recognise the symbol), a small carved wooden idol decorated with faded purple feathers (Miya felt oddly sad at this one, although she didn’t know why), a few old charts (all quite out of date, from what Miya could make out), a number of shells and rocks, a jar of different types of sand … and several bundles of letters.
Fighting back the feelings of guilt, swearing to herself that if she so much as suspected that the letters contained anything personal or otherwise unrelated to her mission she would stop reading them immediately, Miya picked up the first bundle. She undid the old ribbon tying them together, unfolded the first one, and read the first word. It was ‘to’. That seemed harmless enough, so she read the second word, which was ‘my’. Although she was beginning to get a sick kind of fluttery wrong feeling in her stomach, Miya pressed on, but upon reading the third word (‘darling’), she immediately refolded the letter, shoved it back into the bundle and tied the ribbon tightly around it, before exhaling sharply.
“Okay,” she said to herself. “Not that bundle.”
Miya glanced back, at the entrance to the attic, then picked up the second bundle. This one was tied with string rather than ribbon, which seemed a good sign to her, so she untied it and unfolded one and, with one eye closed, read the first word, which was ‘total’. This seemed a little strange, so she read on, soon realising that this bundle was a bunch of receipts and trade records. She was puzzled as to why her father had these in the first place, let alone why he’d kept them. He’d certainly never been a trader. Had he? In any case there weren’t any clues to be found there, so she folded up the letters and tied them with the string, and turned her attention to the third, most tatty-looking, smallest bundle. It was so tatty-looking, in fact, that it seemed as if it could fall apart at any moment. But, Miya thought, I’m not going to get anywhere by being cautious. To her horror, though, as she untied the bundle most of the letters actually did fall apart in her hands—the paper was cheap and dry and old, and despite her care she was unable to save much except for one, which seemed to be on better quality paper and was perhaps more recent than the others. Feeling intensely guilty about destroying the other letters, she unfolded it. Her heart did a little somersault as her eyes were automatically drawn to the large signature at the bottom—JB! Jonathan Black, she thought, this is a letter from my grandfather!
Miya took a little breath, forced herself to be calm, then started reading from the beginning:
January 30th, 1790
Tommy Boy,
Cheers for your letter, don’t get much mail these days. Took two months to get to me, maybe a new record. World’s moving faster and faster, hard to keep up sometimes.
Wasn’t surprised to hear about the state of things down your way, but then if you had any brains you wouldn’t be either. You never were one to take good advice when it was offered. Still can’t say I’m happy about what you’re doing now, but good luck to you if that’s your choice. Could always use a decent swabbie so if you ever change your mind about things seek me out. Just kidding. I know you’ve captained a ship yourself so taking orders wouldn’t sit well with you I’m guessing. Especially from your old man.
Still can’t believe you’ve got a squirt of your own now, seems not so long ago you were toddling around with that wee blade of yours pretending to be a pirate king or some such nonsense. Makes things hard, don’t it? Harder than they should be. I know plenty of kids done well with just their mother around to raise them, so don’t let it get in your way.
Speaking of that, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of your mother since we met last year, heard a couple of rumours she was up around Spirea but you know how that manner of thing goes. I’m hoping to meet up with her sometime soon, even if it’s a repeat of things better left unsaid, you know what I’m talking about.
Where was I last I wrote you? The Diamond Isles? Don’t believe the name, lad, there’s not a diamond to be found on any of ‘em! Not that I was looking for diamonds. Most of the big countries have changed a lot of their shipping routes, it’s exciting times if you find a good busy area but it means a lot of the old haunts aren’t as fruitful as they once was. The Diamond Isles served me well for a long while but they’re too quiet these days, nothing like the old times. Might try heading Bloodclot Reef way, heard it’s a rough sort of place so it might suit me well, eh? Doesn’t pay to get too comfortable, but you shouldn’t need me to tell you that.
Give my regards to your wife. As for your squirt, just you make sure she knows she’s a Black. None of this bloody royal nonsense, can’t see that doing a child anything but harm. She’s got pirate in her blood, boy, and there ain’t nothing that can change that.
Better sign off here, pub’s getting rowdy. If I can write again I will. If I can’t I won’t.
Good sailing,
JB
Miya blinked, tears trickling down her cheeks as she did so.
“Must be the dust,” she murmured, then she read the letter again, excitement growing to replace the guilt. The Diamond Isles! Bloodclot Reef! Neither of those places are too far away, she thought, a week’s travel if we push ourselves, maybe even less! And then maybe a day or two to track down my grandfather, and then maybe he’ll know where my grandmother is, and then another week back here, what had Dad said? One or two weeks for Badger Pete to get here? But that was before we knew about his detour to Triangle Island, and also he’s probably travelling slower because of his bigger-than-we-thought gang—
“We can do this,” Miya said to herself. “We can really do this!”
” ‘We’,” Miya muttered. “Hah.”
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the stars, tried to find her constellation. She’d never been that good at astronomy, but after a few minutes of searching she found The Sword, and using that as a reference she quickly located The Arrow. She’d always secretly thought it looked a little lop-sided, and tonight was no different.
“Straighten out, you stupid arrow,” she said. “Show a little discipline, you lazy stars.”
The longer she looked at the constellation the more annoyed she got, until she couldn’t stand it any more and rolled back over onto her stomach. She spotted another pebble and flicked it into the water, watched it hit the surface with a tiny ‘plop’. She looked at the spot it had hit for a while, then rolled onto her side and looked out to the north, trying to picture what lay beyond her sight.
“Why’d you go?” she murmured. “Why’d you go without me?”
Miya flew down the stairs, brushing roughly at her clothes as she went, trying to rid herself of the dust and cobwebs. She blew past her mother near the front door with a quick “See you later, Mum!”, not pausing to hear her response.
She hurtled down the cliff path and into town, heading for the docks. There weren’t many people around in the upper parts of town, but she didn’t really take much notice of this. What did catch her attention, though, were the crowds gathered around the port. Must be a ship coming in, or leaving maybe, she thought. She pushed through the crowds, heading for the far side of the port, to the Dragon’s Spine, a natural rise in the land on top of which a small fort had been constructed. If Dad’s meeting with the captains then he’ll definitely be there, Miya thought, all I have to do is—
Then she broke through the crowd, and saw the ships leaving the harbour.
Three corvettes and her father’s brig; almost half of the Black Navy.
Miya stood on the docks, physically unable to move for a few seconds, paralysed by shock and disappointment.
Then she was running, up the longest pier, pushing past people without thought, boots pounding against the sturdy wood until she was at the end of the wharf.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she yelled at the distant ships. “JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”
Then she sank to her knees, suddenly exhausted, defeated, her clothes covered in dust, cobwebs in her hair, the princess of Clover Island; just one girl in all the world.
Miya sat with her back against the ship’s wheel, listening to the sounds of the jungle at night. Mostly the night jungle was the domain of insects, in particular a kind of large green cicada, but there was also a group of small, wide-eyed monkeys (whose diet consisted mostly of large green cicadas) that hunted nocturnally. Their distant shrieks and howls were a familiar and comforting sound to Miya—she often heard them from her bedroom at night. From where her ship was anchored now their calls were clear and loud, and Miya felt she could even make out individuals—here a clever, active monkey, there a worried, protective monkey, there a lazy, anxious monkey.
“Lucky monkeys,” muttered Miya. “I bet a monkey never had to deal with all the nonsense I do.”
She stared at the dark jungle on the shore for a while, trying to imagine what her life would be like if she were a monkey.
“Simpler, I bet,” was the conclusion she came to. “Way simpler.”
After seeing her father leave with half the navy, Miya had sullenly made her way back through town and up to her house, ignoring everything, a girl defeated. Her mother was holding some sort of meeting in the nice lounge when she got home; Miya tried to avoid her but couldn’t help stomping a little on her way up the stairs to the second floor.
“Miya—excuse me, please, I must speak with my daughter for a moment—Miya, is that you home?”
Miya stopped, halfway up the stairs. “No,” she said. Her mother appeared below.
“I’m holding a meeting to discuss our response to this situation,” said Lily. “Would you like to attend?”
“Not really.”
“Are you sure? I’d love you to be part of it.”
“What’s the point? No one listens to me anyway, and no one tells me anything until it’s too late. Sometimes not even then.”
“Oh, come now, Miya! Don’t be such a Grumpy Gloria, you know your father and I value your contributions greatly.”
“Whatever. Why didn’t Dad listen to my plan, then? Why’d he just go off without even telling me? He didn’t care about what I said at all.”
“What.”
Her mother’s tone made Miya turn around to look at her.
“You didn’t know?”
“What did your father do?” asked Queen Lilith, her voice calm, her tone dangerous.
“He—”
“Miya. What has your father done?”
“He … you didn’t know?”
“What. Has. He. Done?”
“If you go outside now you can probably still see the sails—”
Miya watched her mother stomp outside, and smiled. Good! At least I’m not the only one that doesn’t get told things around here! Then the smile faded from her face. Her father had never been underhanded with her mother before, not like this. Oh, sure, he’d snuck around behind her back and organised things without her knowing in the past, but that was different … when it came down to it, he’d never actually done anything without her knowledge and approval, however reluctantly (or late) it came. Every decision about the island, no matter how hard and long they argued about it, was made together—even if that meant one or the other had to go along with a decision they didn’t fully support. Taking half the navy and leaving, without even telling Mum … Miya bit her lip and walked up the stairs, a heavy pit in her stomach. Somehow it didn’t make her feel any better, that she wasn’t the only one he hadn’t told. It didn’t make her feel better at all.
The monkeys were really getting noisy now. Must be some kind of monkey party going on over there, thought Miya, as she focused on working her knife into the deck of her ship. Surrounding the stern deck, helping to stop clumsy people from falling overboard, were beautiful dark wooden rails. Whenever Miya was feeling down or stressed (or just bored) she carved a clover into the deck, in the gaps between the
supports—over the years she’d carved one into almost every gap. As Miya chipped away at the hard wood, using the knife Lars had given her for her birthday (it really was very sharp indeed), she idly wondered what she’d do once she’d filled every gap with a clover symbol. Maybe start carving MY symbol into the gaps, she thought. An arrow striking through each clover.
Miya frowned a little as she considered the symbolism of this; it might send the wrong message. On the other hand it would look pretty cool.
“So what, anyway,” she muttered, stabbing at the deck. “I know what they really think of my ‘worth’.”
“Miya. Miya, I’d like to talk to you.”
Miya lay on her bed, face buried in a pillow.
“It’s important, Miya. It’s not a mother-daughter thing. It’s for the sake of the island.”
Miya sighed into her pillow, then flopped herself over and let herself slide off her bed. She lay on the floor a few seconds then forced herself to get up, walking to her bedroom door and opening it a crack.
“Yes?” she said.
“I have a very special and important request for you. We both know that your father has—”
“Yes, we both know what Dad did. You don’t need to say it,” said Miya. “What do you want?”
Queen Lilith looked at her daughter.
“I’m not the expert on sailing that you and your father are. But I know that your ship is the fastest we have.”
“The fastest in the Necessary Ocean,” said Miya, a flutter of excitement stirring in her chest.
“Yes,” said her mother, smiling. “And I feel it’s very important that we get a message to your father—that we open lines of communication, and as quickly as possible.”
“I … I agree,” said Miya, eyes bright.
“Good. So, it is with that in mind—”
“Yes?” said Miya, expectantly.
“—that I request the use of your ship, to send a messenger to him.”
“What.”
“Captain Sparks has volunteered for this role, with a small crew backing her up. Apparently your father gave each captain a choice—”
“What do you mean, ‘request the use of your ship’? What do you mean ‘Captain Sparks has volunteered’? I could do it! I … I’m a great sailor, I know the Black Swan better than anyone, I bet I could catch up to Dad in a day, less than a day, I bet you I could be back here before first light tomorrow morning if I started now. Why not me?”
“Miya, I couldn’t possibly ask you to sail into hostile waters, and right now even the waters close to the island must be considered hostile.”
“Who needs to ask? I’m volunteering, I want to do this!”
“No, you’re not listening to me. Your safety is always our greatest concern, that is something your father and I never disagreed on—”
“Mum, I won’t be in any danger, you just said yourself that my ship’s the fastest we have, even if I do see one of Pete’s ships I could outsail it!”
“No, Miya, I can’t let you go. This isn’t something you can argue. It’s too dangerous, you’re too much of a target—”
“A TARGET? Did you just call me a TARGET?”
“I meant—”
“No. No, you can’t have my ship. I’m not letting anyone else sail it. If you want to send it after Dad, I go with it.”
“I can’t—”
“Fine then. Guess you’ll have to find another ship.”
Miya pushed past her mother and stomped downstairs, slamming the front door behind her as she left.
Miya sighed. It wasn’t fair. Why can’t anyone see what a great sailor I am? Why can’t they understand that I can take care of myself? Why can’t anyone look past the fact that I’m a princess? Why can’t they see that I’m a pirate, too?
“WHY?” she screamed suddenly, grabbing the ship’s wheel and using it to pull herself to her feet. She stomped to the stern of her ship and grabbed the rail, took the deepest breath she could and then screamed again, “WHY?”
“I don’t know. What’s the question?”
Miya spun, her knife in her hand. At first she couldn’t see anyone, but then she realised the intruder on her ship was Sola, standing silent and still on the main deck.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How’d you find me?”
“I asked your friend Penny where you would go if you were truly upset,” said Sola. He turned and pulled on a rope, securing his canoe to the side of the ship.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Miya said sharply. “I haven’t exactly invited you on board.”
“Of course,” said Sola, straightening. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”
“Granted, I suppose,” Miya said, after a moment. “I guess you finished that book about sailing, then?”
“Yes. It’s not as complicated as I thought it would be.”
“Huh.”
“What is the question?” Sola asked, as he knelt to finish securing his canoe.
“What?”
“The question. You asked ‘why?’, so I wondered, ‘why what?’.”
Miya shrugged, a little embarrassed that Sola had heard but determined not to show it. “Why whatever.”
” ‘Why doesn’t my mother trust my competence?’? ‘Why doesn’t my father listen to me?’?”
“Have you been eavesdropping on me? Spying on me?”
“You are very loud sometimes. You make it difficult not to hear.”
“Oh.”
“And now you ask, ‘why shouldn’t I go after my father?’,” said Sola. Miya shook her head.
“No. That’s not it. He’s doing his thing. I … I kind of … I wish he’d told me. I don’t know why he didn’t. He’s never … he’s never just gone off like that before.”
“Then you are going to search for your grandparents?”
Miya looked at Sola, then nodded. In honesty, when she’d stormed out of the house that evening and taken her ship out, she hadn’t thought about a destination. She’d come here, to her bay, because it was where she came when she was worried, or stressed, or just wanted to escape.
“I have to do something,” she said. “If I stayed here, just waiting, waiting for messages telling me how the battles are going, or waiting to see enemy sails on the horizon … if I had to just wait, I’d go mad. I have to be out there, doing something, doing anything—and I know I can find my grandparents, I just know it.”
Sola nodded. “I’ll help you,” he said. Miya stared at him for a moment.
“You’ll what?” she asked, finding her voice.
“I know how you feel,” he said. “If I had to stay, simply indulging myself in your library … perhaps in a few days I would feel fine, perhaps in a few weeks I would feel fine, but some time in the months or years to follow, I would look back and think to myself ‘was that all I could have done?’. And especially knowing that my sister had a plan … no. I will help you.”
Miya smiled.
“Also, I don’t have faith in your navigational skill.”
Miya’s smile vanished.
“You said that you hadn’t read the book on navigation,” Sola continued. “That you didn’t understand it.”
“Well, yes, maybe, but—”
“So I believe that you are not skilled at navigation.”
“That’s … that’s kind of true, but—”
“So, I will help you by navigating.”
Miya opened her mouth, then shut it again. She had to admit, she didn’t have the patience or head for navigation, and having someone else do all those fiddly calculations and readings would save her a lot of headaches.
“Well, okay, you can be my navigator,” she said. “Um, thanks.”
“Also—”
“I already said you can come, you don’t have to make a big list of my faults,” she snapped.
“This is about me. I … my people are peaceful, we haven’t warred with our neighbours for many years. My grandfather told me that when he was a boy there were some battles, but even then they were mostly settled by blood duels.”
“Blood duels!” Miya’s eyes lit up. “Uh, I mean … um, sorry, that just sounded kind of exciting.”
“It’s a simple system. Whoever bleeds first must yield.”
“Oh, okay. To first blood, with our system,” said Miya, feeling slightly proud to include herself in a piratical ‘our’.
“To come to my point, I am a peaceful person. I use my spear for fishing and hunting, or in duelling games with my cousins or those from other villages. I am not among the weaker in my village,” said Sola, with some pride in his voice. “Before Badger Pete came … before that day, I had never thought of raising my spear in anger. It was a tool, or a toy of sorts. But seeing my people enslaved, my village burned …”
Sola paused a long moment, looking out past Miya to the north, before speaking again:
“Badger Pete made me look at my tools and see weapons. Reading the book in your library, the one that confused me until your explanation, I found many stories that spoke of revenge.”
Sola paused, as if considering this. He looked down at his big hands, then up at Miya.
“I want revenge,” he said. “I want to do something that will hurt Badger Pete. I know I can do little by myself. But if your … if OUR grandparents can help us to defeat him, then we should seek them.”
Miya took a deep breath. “Did that sailing book you read have anything about helming a ship?”
“Yes.”
“Then unlock the wheel, mate, and prepare to sail.”
Miya hauled up the anchor then climbed into the rigging, untied the sails and let them unfurl. She patted the mast and smiled, then called out, clear and loud:
“Bring me that horizon, and all the treasures it hides!”
Next:
5
The Miya Black Guide To Widening Your Social Circles And Making Your Name Known
