Steel

She pursed her lips, trying to figure out how to answer. For the moment, she was fine. But she didn’t know what she was going to do when the sun rose. She could only shake her head.

“Is it really so bad here?” Henry said, sounding pained. “Do you really want so much to leave?”

“It isn’t that, it’s just—” She almost reached out to him. Almost took his arms and held him—and she almost didn’t want to go. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’ve got to get back home.”

He said, “If I don’t understand, it’s because, you see—I’m sure you’ve seen—that most of us don’t have anything to go back for. This is all the family we have, and all the world we need. Heaven and hell together.” He gazed up and around, taking in masts and sails, starry sky, sea and horizon all.

She kissed him. Leaned forward, almost without looking, dug her fingers into his shoulders and put her lips on his. She took him by surprise, completely. The first moment, she pressed against him while he held himself rigid. But then he melted, his arms closing around her, his face leaning in, his lips moving against hers in a warm, salt-tasting kiss.

After a moment, he pulled away. They studied each other, eyes only inches apart, so it wasn’t as if they could really see each other. For her part, Jill saw enough.

“I’m glad I met you, Henry,” she said.

“I—” Then he ducked his gaze and smiled. “You’re a rare one, and for all the pain it’s caused you, I’m glad we met as well.”

“I just wish I knew what was going to happen.”

“You still don’t understand, do you? It’s not about what happens. We all may be dead next week, eh? It’s about what you’ve got now. The wind and the sea. A bottle of rum and a ship of your own. Don’t think about what happens next.”

“Is that really a good way to live?”

He looked out at the water and avoided her searching gaze. His smile was gone now, and she was sorry she’d said anything to make it disappear. “No, it an’t a good way to live. It’s a good way to die, in fact. I suppose you’d have me go ashore and live an honest working life.”

She tried to imagine Henry as a workman onshore, one of the laborers in the harbor, loading and unloading other people’s cargo all day. She couldn’t.

“It’s not my place to tell you to do anything,” she said.

He touched her cheek and kissed her forehead. “Right now, we’ll sit and watch the waves. Then we’ll see what happens tomorrow. Eh?”

She could argue ’til morning, and he’d still be right.

Dawn broke with gray and pink streaking the sky, and the sight of a three-masted ship on the horizon, matching them for direction and speed.

“It’s him. The Heart’s Revenge,” Captain Cooper said, lowering the spyglass from her eye. “I don’t know how, we had a full night’s lead and were racing.”

“We still have a lead on ’em,” Abe said. “We’ll lose the bugger.”

“Aye, we will. Make sail!”

So the race commenced.

Jill would have thought hiding would be easy on a vast, huge ocean. A person swimming, tiny and lost among the waves, certainly would vanish. A ship could sail for weeks on the open ocean and never see another, never see land. Yet a pirate ship could always find prey on common shipping lanes; piracy thrived in the Caribbean because the sea was crowded with islands rich with trade. The ocean could be deceptively crowded. And they couldn’t escape Blane’s ship.

A chase by large sailing ship wasn’t just a matter of setting sails and hoping. This wasn’t like the steady cruising of previous days. Cooper kept close watch on Blane’s ship, trying to guess his strategy, to judge how his ship was handling and how he was riding the wind. The crew attended to the Diana, making constant adjustments based on changes in the wind, trimming sails and tightening lines to best take advantage of their only source of power. They knew what they were doing and were good at their job; the Diana traveled lightly over the waves. Silver-skinned dolphins played in their wake, leaping and diving, mindless of the drama taking place between the two ships.

On watch, Jill spent part of the day on the rigging of the mainmast, waiting to take in the line to trim one of the sails. Around noon the ship changed direction and began tacking, a complicated operation that changed which side of the ship took the brunt of the wind. Booms swung across the deck, triangular sails flapped uselessly for a moment, and Abe shouted orders. In seconds, the sails grew taut again and the ship jumped forward, heeling over, then leaning into her new course. Manning the sails was difficult, precarious work, but there was satisfaction in being part of a crew, of helping to control the ship to ride the winds.

The course change confused Blane, and they lost sight of him for part of the day; the Heart’s Revenge didn’t tack as sharply and neatly as the Diana did, and he had to loop around. Captain Cooper didn’t pause to appreciate the small victory, but ordered them to maintain full sails and racing speed, still bound for the chain of islands east of the Bahamas.

Before dusk fell, the lookout cried out and pointed—there it was, that ship bobbing into view on the far

horizon, white sails gleaming, catching the last rays of sun that cut across the ocean.

“Bloody hell, how’s he doing it?” Abe said.

Cooper watched him through the spyglass a moment before turning to him. “Have we got anything else we can put up?”

“Every inch of canvas we have is already set, Captain,” he answered. “Even if we had more we can’t go any faster without breaking to pieces.”