Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

11. Bait and Switch

15th of Uirra, Continued

For four hours, I sat in NaVarre's cabin, wondering what in all blue blazes was going on.

I didn't get any answers from NaVarre. There was a tense moment when he came thundering down the ladder – and I scuttled over to the far end of the cabin – but he only snatched a sextant and a map off his desk and went climbing back up through the hatch.

The only other person who came in was the ship's cook. The first time, he brought in a big bowl of that bisran, with steamed rice and a glass of coconut cream.

I made myself wait until the man left before I attacked the food. I had never tasted anything that delicious in my life, and the fork couldn't get it into my mouth fast enough. I just ate it with my hands, shoveling it up with my fingers like some sort of mountain-bred heathen, barely chewing the first few bites. Then I slowed down and forced my tongue to actually taste the nuanced flavors of roasted carrot and fig; to absorb the smoldering heat of arcara chillies; to appreciate the delicate, tangy pop of pinsauri berries, and revel in the sensation of a hot, cooked meal sliding down my throat.

A little while after my embarrassing moment with the bisran, the cook brought in a tray of dainty little berry and creamed-cheese pastries, and an urn of chocolate. I stared at that tray for a good half hour. The individual edges of the pastries were crimped with a fancy little flourish design, as if they had been made by a highly ranked baker in Arritagne, and there was an insulated copper mug with a vented lid to keep the chocolate warm. Even the tray was beautiful, inlaid with mother of pearl and what I could have sworn were tiny rubies.

Only that morning, I had been half-starved and freezing cold, and now I was on a pirate ship, warm, dry, well fed, with a tray of absurdly pretty after-dinner pastries in front of me. I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn't some weird dream.

The tray was real. The pastries were real. The chocolate was real.

Half an hour later I felt sick, partly because of all the pastries, but also because I was still in that cabin. My father's binder clearly meant something to NaVarre, but that didn't explain why he didn't just take the thing and send me down to the hold with the rest of the survivors. Something else was going on. It didn't help that my brain had already made a list of all the horrible things a pirate might do to a young woman trapped in his personal quarters. The longer I was stuck there, the jumpier I got.

I needn't have worried. NaVarre never came back. I heard him up on the aft deck, ordering his crew around, but for all those four hours he remained above decks. From the sound of things, he was too busy keeping the Angpixen running as fast as she could before the wind, because the Stryka – miraculously, I gathered – was keeping pace behind her.

At first I thought NaVarre was fleeing like a coward. Now I know better: he was forcing Arramy to chase him until the sun began going down. Then, abruptly, as if he had been awaiting some mysterious signal, he ordered the Angpixen about and brought her to a dead halt in the water.

Half an hour later, when the Stryka's sails came into plain view, the Angpixen was lying in wait, rendered nearly invisible to the approaching warship by the blaze of an open-ocean sunset.

NaVarre gave no courtesy warning. He simply shouted, "Fire!" and all thirty of the Ang's portside long-guns roared in quick succession, coughing out flashes of bright light and the stench of expended powder.

I inched forward, craning to see through the deck railing from my perch on the hatchway ladder, my stomach twisting as I watched a hailstorm of heavy shot fly in awful, deadly arcs through the air, streaking toward that far-off, oncoming ship. I heard NaVarre shout again, and the second gun crew instantly set off another volley before the first round had even struck home.