Steel

She’d been feeling sorry for herself ever since that tournament, so upset because she couldn’t make a decision about what to do next—but at least she had choices, and a future to go with them. And all she’d done since coming to the Diana was complain that she didn’t belong here. Well, neither did they. And she hadn’t come here in chains. She had nothing to complain about. Nothing. While she still felt trapped here, she suddenly felt lucky.

Well after dark, the new passengers began to sing. The voices were soft, wavering—still weak. Like the lantern light, the words and tunes seemed to rise up among the sails, to echo above them, sounding larger than they were. Jill sat against the side of the ship, near the stern, just out of sight of the small celebration. She didn’t want to be seen. But she tipped her head back and stared up, watching the patterns of light and shadow on rippling sails, feeling the vibration as someone pounded a beat on the deck.

When Henry bounded in front of her, dropping from some unseen spot above, she gasped, flinched, and banged her head on the ship’s rail. He laughed, taking a cross-legged seat nearby, a shadow just at the edge of the lantern light. His eyes gleamed, like this was all a big party to him.

Rubbing her head, she muttered, “What do you want?”

“I wanted to congratulate you on surviving your first battle,” he said.

Frowning, she looked away. That wasn’t a battle, it was a raid, a true pirate raid. Or a rescue mission? She’d only watched, dumbstruck. “I didn’t do anything.”

He shrugged. “You didn’t interfere. You didn’t make an ass of yourself. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.”

That almost sounded like a compliment. “What happens next?”

“I’m guessing we’ll sail for Jamaica. There’s a place there we can let them off and they’ll be safe.” He nodded toward the middle of the ship and the group of former slaves. “Some pirates would sell ’em off in Havana, but not us. We may stop somewhere to provision first. However the captain chooses.”

None of those plans seemed to offer Jill a way home. But Captain Cooper wasn’t taking her into account—Jill had signed on as crew, hadn’t she? She was bound by the captain’s articles.

Henry lingered, not smiling this time, not taunting. Just quietly watching her, as if he knew she wanted to talk, which gave her the courage to ask, “Does this happen a lot? Have you done this before?”

“Done what, capture a ship? Of course, plenty of times.”

“But a slave ship,” she said.

He glanced upward, maybe seeing the same patterns she did. But then he’d probably lived on the ship for years. The view may have seemed ordinary to him. “We try. Because of Abe, you see. It’s where he came from. He’d stop every one of those ships sailing from Africa if he could. He’d give up his share of every other haul we make to stop the trade. He can’t. But we try.”

“What about you?” she said, the question sticking in her throat, because she had a sudden image of Henry, beaten and in chains, and she hated thinking of him like that, however much he might annoy her. It was the opposite of Henry as she saw him now—smiling, bright, fit, alive.

“What about me? Did I come from Africa on a ship like that?” he said, and shrugged. “My mum did, not that she ever talked about it. I was born here, on the islands. Jamaica, in fact.”

“And your father?”

He snorted. “Who knows? Some English sailor stopped in port, I reckon. I was bound to turn pirate, wasn’t I? A half-breed bastard like me.”

He grinned like it was a joke, but she turned away. She wanted to tell him what would happen with the slave trade, how many more decades of suffering were ahead of them, that it would never be made right. But she would sound crazy. Like she was apologizing for a stretch of history she had no control over. But she felt like she ought to apologize.

REMISE

Henry was right, and the captain announced that they’d be sailing for Jamaica next. There had been some debate, back and forth, between Captain Cooper and Abe. “We could go east,” Abe had said. “Take them home.”

Cooper had refused. “We don’t have provisions for such a voyage, and we can’t be sailing ’cross the Atlantic. Tell them that.”

So Abe did, explaining in the language they shared that they couldn’t go back home, that they’d be sailing west instead of east. The interpreter seemed to plead with Abe

, who relayed the words to Captain Cooper.

“Abe, you know as well as I do we can’t take them home,” Cooper said. “And we’re still going after Blane.”

Captain Cooper put it to a vote among the crew—Africa or Jamaica? Only Abe voted for Africa, so they sailed to Jamaica.

Again, Jill watched Captain Cooper holding up the shard of rapier blade, watching it turn on its string, following its length with her gaze to stare out at a different part of the horizon than where they sailed to.

Jill still wondered what the broken rapier meant—how Cooper knew the shard would behave like this, and what the captain hoped to accomplish by following it. And how did Jill fit into that? Or had she been brought here by accident? It was all too strange.

After spending the night on deck, the former slaves went below to continue resting in semidarkness. They were still sick, and the surgeon, Emory, continued to move among them, checking for fevers, dispensing liquid concoctions. Jill hadn’t learned anything new about him. He glared at everyone and didn’t invite conversation.

The next day, the captain set her to scrubbing the decks again. The whole thing, all over again. When Jill came to the middle of the deck, where the Africans had first been when they came on board, where their irons had been cut off, she found blood. Drops, smears, and stains of it marring the planks. She scraped with the stone, pressing as hard as she could, ’til the muscles in her arms cramped, but she couldn’t get the wood clean. Choking up, her throat tightening with tears, she kept scrubbing. She’d clean it, make it shine, if she worked hard enough, scrubbed fast enough.