The Captive Kingdom Page 8

  A full ten seconds passed before I heard a rustling sound outside the magazine. I left the room in time to see Fink emerge from behind two barrels and a stack of extra blankets.

  He looked terrified, and when I started toward him, he began backing up. “Don’t be angry. I needed a place to hide. You would have done the same thing.”

  I grabbed him and held him by the shoulders. “Do you know how dangerous this room is?” Then I pulled him to me and wrapped my arms around him, digging my fingers into his back. Until now, I hadn’t realized how afraid I had been for him. “Why are you here? I’d hoped you were on the boat that Imogen escaped with —”

  “What boat?”

  I stood back from him. “The lifeboat that escaped the Red Serpent. There was a figure inside made to look like me.”

  “I heard them talking about it. Imogen planned to release the lifeboat, then Mott was supposed to hide her within the walls, just like Amarinda.” His brows pressed together. “I know they brought Amarinda here, I’ve heard them talk about her. But where is Imogen?”

  I pushed a hand through my hair. “I don’t know. Are you sure she didn’t get on that lifeboat?”

  “I don’t know what happened, to either her or to Mott. I was busy looking for my own place to hide.”

  “You were supposed to hide in the walls too!”

  He frowned. “And if I had and they sank the ship, where would I be?”

  I must have had a visible reaction to his words, because he quickly apologized, adding, “Imogen wouldn’t have stayed hidden once the ship took cannon fire. She would have escaped. Mott too.” He paused while I collected my thoughts, then added, “I chose the crates because I knew they’d bring them here. I figured at some point, you’d need my help.” He pointed to my wrist, still wrapped in the bandages. “I could have helped prevent that.”

  I pulled my wrist behind me. “Do you think having you here helps me, that it helps anything? I’m having trouble keeping myself safe — how am I supposed to do that for you?”

  “I’ve stayed safe this entire trip. I’ve found food on my own, or at least, I did at first. Tobias will help me now.”

  I stopped to stare at him. “Tobias knows you’re here?”

  “Shortly after we boarded, I snuck into the sick bay for food. He caught me there.”

  “How did you get into the sick bay?”

  Fink pointed out the window. “It was simple. I crawled out and grabbed a rope that was hanging low and used it to climb into the lifeboat, then pulled myself up to the nearest porthole to his room and snuck in. Like I said, simple.” He drew in a quick breath. “Tobias caught me a few minutes before he went to the deck to bring you the lodestone. I found that, by the way, down here. I just didn’t know what it was. So I suppose I helped you in that way too, huh?”

  “Tobias knew you were here and failed to say anything to me?” I still couldn’t believe my own words.

  “He hasn’t said anything to Roden either, not even when they both came down here a while ago. I —”

  “Stop.” I stepped toward him. “What did they say?”

  Fink stared at me. “Roden said you’re not king anymore, that the throne belongs to someone else.”

  “There is no one else.”

  “Roden told Tobias to get you off this ship, but said he’s got to stay and see this through.”

  “See what through? Whatever Roden has heard, he’s wrong. No one else could possibly be —” I stopped there, my heart suddenly racing. I looked at Fink. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I need your help.”

  He threw a fist into the air. “I knew you would! Where are we going?”

  Despite what Fink had said, I had to believe that Imogen was on that lifeboat, and Mott too, though I knew it wasn’t possible. Swallowing those worries, I pointed to the porthole. “Get back into the lifeboat, and let’s hope that spare rope is still there.” I explained my plan to him, then practically shoved him out the porthole.

  He would meet me in the sick bay when he was finished, but I needed to finish my work here and get there too. The entire future of Carthya depended on it.

  Despite Teagut’s promise, the lower deck was far from abandoned when I climbed up to it. In fact, it was the very opposite, crowded with both pirates and Prozarians, half of them grumbling about afternoon duties when they only wanted to sleep, and the other half wanting to stay awake and gamble.

  “Place your wagers,” one Prozarian in the corner was calling. “Come now, pirates. You lost your ship, why not lose your coins as well?”

  That set off a round of arguments and a few thrown fists, but I put my head down and walked straight through them all.

  Teagut was still guarding the sick bay door and pointed out his addition to Tobias’s sign, which now read, suspected plague. do not enter. I grinned at him, promised myself again to find a way to pay him the coins he was owed, and entered.

  Tobias hadn’t yet returned from the midday meal, but I was anxious to speak to him. I listened at the door as a man walked up to speak to Teagut.

  “Did I see that door open just now?”

  “Jaron wanted to escape,” Teagut replied. “I told him to go back inside and he did. He’s afraid of me.”

  “Then you should remain as vigil. What if the plague gets loose on this ship? We’ll all be dead.”

  A third man joined them. “Maybe this is a cursed ship after all.”

  Behind me, I heard a knocking sound at Tobias’s porthole window. I turned and saw Fink’s face, upside down, waving at me.

  I rushed over to him and opened the window, then grabbed his arms to pull him through.

  “Why are you upside down?” I asked.

  “I pulled the wrong rope. It carried me up a little high, almost to the deck. Wouldn’t that have been awful?”

  He grinned. I did not.

  “No one goes inside,” Teagut said from outside the sick bay door. “No one.”

  Whoever was speaking to him was much quieter. I opened a cabinet door and told Fink, “Get inside.”

  “I hate hiding in dark places!”

  “You got on this ship by hiding in a crate!”

  “That’s how I know I hate it.”

  “Get in.” I shoved him in almost as forcefully as I’d sent him out the porthole, then closed the door in time for Tobias to enter, which he did in an unexpected good mood. Then I remembered why. He had just seen Amarinda.

  “How is she?”

  “Ready to escape. We all are, but only if you are there too.”

  “I won’t leave until I have more answers.”

  “Amarinda has taken care of that.”

  “How?”

  Tobias’s smile fell. “She stole the captain’s closet key.”

  “Why do you look like you’ve just announced a funeral?”

  “What if you don’t want to know what’s in that closet?”

  Eagerly, I held out my hand. “What if I do?”

  Tobias’s eyes shifted. “The key is useless down here. Amarinda will unlock the closet when it’s safe.”

  My brows pressed together as my heart began to pound. “It will never be safe! Where does she think the captain will search first when she discovers the key is lost?”

  “Is it safer to sneak you in to unlock it?”

  I clenched my fists, a quieter method of expressing frustration than yelling. “What if she is caught searching inside that closet?”

  “Jaron, you are not the only one who can take risks, nor the only one who can hide a secret.”

  “Oh, I already understand that.” I opened the cupboard door and Fink popped out, breathing heavily as if he’d been holding his breath for the past ten minutes.

  His first words were, “I only told Jaron so that he’d be angry with you instead of me.”

  Tobias slowly exhaled before looking up. “I’m sorry.”

  “What other secrets are you keeping from me?”

  “No othe
r secrets.”

  I doubted that was true, but this wasn’t the time to force those secrets out of him. Nor was it that time for the next several hours as we waited within the sick bay for Amarinda’s signal. I gave him every opportunity to talk to me, but he refused each time. Finally, we heard a knocking sound in our room. But it wasn’t coming from the door, nor the bulkhead.

  Fink had been entertaining himself by rearranging Tobias’s medicines in every possible way. He accidentally knocked over a few when he pointed upward. “It’s coming from the compartment overhead.” Then he squinted. “Did you cut a hole in it?”

  I jumped onto the medical table and steadied myself before removing the piece of wood we had cut. There was no way of knowing who would be on the other end of the hole until I saw them, but it probably didn’t matter. Whoever this was obviously knew what I had done.

  I wiggled the cut piece of wood until it came loose, then slowly lowered it, only to see Amarinda’s face peering down at me.

  “I’m sorry it took so long,” she said. “Wilta’s been in here until just a few moments ago. You’ll want to see what I’ve found.”

  Tobias eyed me. “No, Jaron, I don’t think you will.”

  “So there are other secrets.” Disappointed, I clicked my tongue, then raised my arms to take the first item.

  From below, Tobias, Fink, and I formed a line. I would take each item and pass it to Fink, who would give it to Tobias, who was standing near his bed, ready to place each item on a sheet he had laid out.

  After a few breathless seconds, the first items came through, small bundles of gold coins in satin bags. They clanked louder than I wished they did, and I held them tight in my hands as I passed them all over to Fink. All of them but the last bag, which I placed inside a pocket of my jerkin. A notebook came next, presumably Captain Strick’s, though I had no time to read it now.

  While we worked, Tobias said, “If I have kept secrets, it’s because there are things in this closet the captain will kill you for stealing. Nothing here matters as much as your life.” If that was his attempt at an apology, it was pathetic.

  And he was wrong. “Carthya matters more than my life.”

  “I know that.” Tobias put his hand on my arm. “And I think it’s possible that what you find in this closet might be a threat to Carthya.”

  Still irritated, I brushed off his hand. “All the more reason to keep going.”

  From above, Amarinda whispered, “I don’t know what this is.”

  She passed down another, larger satin bag. Inside was a brass tube, no longer than my hand, with an eyepiece on one end and three slots through its middle. The workmanship was exceptional, and it bore strange markings around the rim.

  A small metal box was in the same bag, and when I opened it, I saw a glass lens with etchings on it. I inserted it into the first slot and there saw an image of a large, rocky cave with a long cliff at one end that dropped into seawater. From the angle of the carving, water appeared to be passing through the cave.

  “I wonder if this is Belland.” I tried to pass the tube to Tobias, but he pushed it away, clearly nervous.

  “That cannot be a good thing to steal!” He grabbed it and tried to hand it back to Amarinda, but I pulled his arm down and took the scope.

  His eyes wide with panic, Tobias said, “Put that back, please. Don’t take anything more than we must take.”

  “Agreed. But we must take this.” I gave the items to Fink to put back into their bags, and while he did, I said, “After we’ve emptied that closet, Wilta knows a secret way from the captain’s office down here. You’ve got to help Amarinda find it. Then the three of you are going to bundle up this sheet and get everything off this ship. Is the lifeboat ready for them, Fink?”

  He squinted. “I suppose. Aren’t you —” I glared at him and he said, “Yes, it’s ready.”

  Tobias had understood what Fink did not say. “You said you would come with us.”

  “I said I would come if I’d found the answers I needed. I haven’t found them. Now, when the time comes, I’ll provide the distraction you need. Just make sure nothing remains.”

  Tobias raised a brow. “I know your kind of distractions.” He reached for a roll of bandages and tossed them onto the sheet. “All right, but this is all we can carry.”

  “Jaron!” Amarinda whispered. “Is this yours? It looks similar, only larger.”

  She passed a crown through the hatch and immediately my heart stopped. More accurately, I felt time itself stop.

  I knew this crown, but why was it here?

  It was gold leaf with interwoven lacing around the rim and lined with round sapphires. Its owner used to have his servants polish it after every wearing in public, and eventually it became nearly bright as a mirror. I saw myself in the gold now. It still was that bright.

  I looked up at Tobias, who eyed me with an expression of dread more than surprise. I let that soak in.

  Tobias should have been surprised, or curious, or shocked, or any of a dozen possible emotions that would suggest he didn’t know any better than me what was about to come through our carved hole.

  But of all possibilities, it was dread. This was the secret he did not want to reveal.

  “You knew about this?” I mumbled.

  “From what Roden told me, I suspected there’d be something up there. I didn’t know it was this. Is it real?”

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the object in my hands. “This was my brother’s crown … once.”

  When he had intended to create a false prince, Conner had taken possession of my crown. Perhaps he had taken Darius’s crown too, around the time of his death. Along with my parents, Darius had been poisoned at a supper one night, a joint plan concocted by Conner and the former head of the castle guard. But why would Conner have taken this crown, and how could it have fallen into Captain Strick’s hands? The Prozarians could have no connection to that plot against my family; at least, not in any way I understood.

  “There’s one more item,” Amarinda said. “Jaron, what does this mean?”

  I positioned myself directly beneath the gap. If my brother’s crown had stopped my heart, then what she began lowering now made it pound so hard that I wondered how it didn’t beat through my chest.

  “Jaron, please put everything back,” Tobias whispered.

  This was a sword, one I took hold of with carefully placed fingers, noting with a quick test that it was as sharp as I remembered. “This was my brother’s too.” I glanced over at Tobias with tears in my eyes. “Why do they have these?”

  The sapphire set into the pommel had a scratch across the center. Darius had done that when he tried to follow me up a wall of the castle years ago. He’d slipped and fallen hard enough to sprain his ankle. He never climbed again, and I’d gotten in trouble for urging him to try it.

  With that confirmation, any sentimental feelings within me vanished, replaced with something beyond anger. The sudden burning in my chest was a desire for vengeance against Strick, and whoever got in my way on my path to her.

  “You wanted your distraction,” I said to Tobias. “Get Amarinda down here, then I want the three of you in that lifeboat immediately. This will be your only chance.”

  I flung open the door, wielding Darius’s sword against two vigils who must have recently replaced Teagut. “Step aside or I will strike,” I warned them.

  They obeyed and I pushed past them, marching directly to the crewmen’s bunks, where Teagut was lying on his bed. He sat up and stared at me with an open mouth. I reached into my jerkin and tossed him the sack of gold coins. “Go to the sick bay. Do whatever they ask.”

  Then I rounded the corner to reach the steps for the main deck. Roden stood in front of them, his eyes locking on mine. He knew I would be here. He knew why I’d be here. And that made me angrier than ever.

  Behind me, Tobias put a hand on my shoulder. “Come back into the sick bay.”

  I pushed his hand away and growled, “How much
of this did you two know?”

  “I warned you to leave —” Roden began.

  “No, I’m asking what you knew! What you still know and aren’t telling me!”

  A spark flickered in his eyes before he finally answered. “Earlier this morning, the captain told me she had gotten these directly from Darius. I didn’t tell you because I thought she was lying —”

  “She is lying. Darius is dead.”

  “Maybe he’s not. A lot of what she claims makes sense. But I didn’t want to come to you with this news until I was sure. I swear that I would have told you when I thought you’d be ready.”

  “You had no right to make that decision for me! You had no right to keep this a secret!”

  “How many secrets have you kept from us? How many do you still keep?” His eyes flashed. “Tell me, right now, is there anything about this voyage that you have not shared with me?”

  “Count on it.”

  “Well, I’m telling you everything now. Go back to the sick bay. I’ll tell the captain you are having sick delusions. She might trust me enough to believe that.”

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it, since you’ve done so well in losing my trust.”

  Roden reached for my arm, but I shook it off. “Listen to me,” he said. “I am trying to help you. But you must return to the sick bay and give up this fight, at least for now.”

  I raised the sword. “I never give up.”

  “I know that.” Roden’s expression changed, but not to anger as I would have expected. Instead, his brows pressed low and his eyes softened to sadness. “But this one time, I wish more than anything that you would.”

  I started toward Roden but he crossed directly in front of the steps. “You’re not getting past me.”

  “I’ll go past you or go through you, your choice.” I raised my brother’s sword. “Where is the captain?”

  He sighed and stepped aside. “The wardroom. Don’t do this, Jaron.”

  “The wardroom?” I arched a brow. “Good. I’m hungry.” I turned back to Tobias. “Didn’t I already give you other orders?”

  “You’re only making this worse….” He brushed a hand over the nape of his neck. “Just listen to us.”