by Matthew Cody
Max was in a lifeboat tied to the ship. She tried sitting up, but her head was spinning. Dridge reached the lifeboat and shoved her aside.
“Sick of taking orders,” Dridge was saying. “For you, Vodnik will pay me enough to get my own boat. I give orders from now on!”
That’s when Max spotted, off in the distance, the small silhouette of a second ship cutting through the waves. This far away she couldn’t tell what kind, but whatever it was, it wasn’t adrift like the Leviathan.
Dridge drew a long knife from his belt and cut the rope, severing their lifeboat from the Leviathan. Just then a wave rose beneath them and slammed the boat against the hull. Dridge nearly fell overboard, but unfortunately he managed to hold on.
“Call for help and I’ll gut you like a fish,” he warned, and he scrambled past Max to the lifeboat’s little outboard motor. He turned the ignition switch, then cursed as sparks suddenly shot out, followed by a small puff of smoke. It looked like their lifeboat was having its own engine troubles.
As Max rubbed her sore chest—she was getting her breath back slowly—she remembered what Mrs. Amsel had said about magic creatures and electricity. The two didn’t generally get along. That was probably why the Leviathan was a steamer.
Dridge growled and slammed his fist down on the useless motor. If they didn’t pull away from the Leviathan soon, the waves would smash their little craft to pieces against the ship’s hull.
Dridge pulled out the lifeboat’s oars and slotted them through the oarlocks on either side, and then he began to row. He was trying to make it to the other ship before the rest of the crew discovered they had gone missing. He rowed into an oncoming wave and Max held her breath as it crashed over them, threatening to capsize their little vessel. Cursing all the way, Dridge was struggling to row against the storm and the storm was winning. Just then, on the deck of the Leviathan, Max saw a light shining, like a flashlight, searching the waves. People were gathered at the railing.
“Over here!” she screamed as she stood and waved her arms. Dridge could do his worst. She wasn’t going to let herself be kidnapped again. Never again.
The goblinfolk sailor roared at her to shut up and whirled around in his seat, knife appearing in his hand as he dropped the oars. That turned out to be his mistake because at that very same moment the lifeboat hit another wave and the oars, sitting loose in their oarlocks, were torn free. Instinctively, Dridge reached for them to keep them from washing away. He’d lowered his guard, and Max kicked him in the face with everything she had. The cobbler’s boots were thick-soled and solid, and Dridge’s nose was not. He screamed in pain as he dropped the knife overboard.
But the force of Max’s kick knocked her off balance as well, and she was already standing in a boat on a choppy sea. There was a moment where she was balanced on one foot; then the boat rocked and she followed Dridge’s knife into the water.
The world disappeared in the roar of the great churning ocean around her. She swallowed salt water and gagged as she struggled to keep her head above the waves, but they washed over her, and the heavy boots she’d been so thankful for just moments ago weighed her feet down like they were lead. She was sinking.
She held her breath until she felt her lungs would burst, but it was no use. She was drowning.
Then she wasn’t. Something had her. Arms wrapped around her middle and she was swiftly hauled to the surface, where she took in the sweetest gasp of air she’d ever tasted, before vomiting up a lungful of seawater. She was dimly aware of a face next to hers. Dridge? No, this was someone else. This sailor had her in his arms, cradling her head to keep it above water as he held on to a life preserver that was being pulled back toward the Leviathan. The next thing she knew, strong hands were hauling her aboard. Harold had her, and Mrs. Amsel helped him lower Max gently onto the deck.
Max lay there, coughing and sputtering and surprised to be alive. Captain Hob stood over her, but he didn’t seem concerned about her. He was peering through a pair of binoculars at the distant ship, which was getting nearer. Max pulled herself up to sitting and saw that Dridge and the stolen lifeboat were nowhere to be seen, but then she thought she spotted a flash of a lone red cap being tossed about on the waves.
“We got worried when we saw the engine smoke through the porthole,” explained Mrs. Amsel. “When we went outside, we bumped into the captain, and it was obvious that he never sent for you. We were so worried. It was lucky his men spotted you.”
“Thank you,” said Max. Her voice was ragged from coughing up salt water.
The captain lowered his binoculars and looked down at her, unsmiling. “Why does that other ship follow us? Dridge has always been spiteful, but he has been with my crew for years. Now I suspect that he sabotaged my ship to get you off it. Why? What’s so important about you that would drive one of my men to mutiny?”
He knelt down until he was face to face with her. “No more stories now, or I will toss you back into the drink like an underweight fish. Tell me.”
Max looked to Mrs. Amsel and Harold, but they didn’t say anything. This was Max’s mission. Her decision.
“Better than that, let me get my backpack,” she said. “And I’ll show you.”
The captain’s quarters were surprisingly well furnished and clean. Max didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but given Hob’s appearance, she was surprised to learn that the captain of the Leviathan was something of a neat freak. His bunk was impeccably made, the sheets turned back and folded with a crisp crease, and his desk had been varnished to a shine. There were shelves of antique nautical instruments on one wall—a brass compass, a spyglass—and they were spotless. You could give this room the white-glove test and not find a speck of dust.
Captain Hob insisted on questioning Max alone, so Harold and Mrs. Amsel were made to wait outside, which they didn’t like at all. But they were just on the other side of the door should Max need them. She hoped that she wouldn’t.
Captain Hob offered her a chair, but he stayed standing. “Well?” he said. “What do you have to show me?”
Max dug around in her backpack while trying to stay calm and not think about the captain’s black-eyed stare. She could only hope that she was doing the right thing by trusting the captain. It was hard to put faith in strangers, but she didn’t see any other choice. Her simply being on his ship had put them all in a dangerous spot, adrift in the ocean with a mysterious vessel closing in. If he even suspected her of lying now, he’d just toss her overboard. Max had to hope the truth was enough to win her some sympathy.
Gently she placed the two jars on the captain’s desk and angled them so that he could see the floating, misty faces within. He bent down to get a closer look.
“This a trick?” he asked.
“No,” said Max. “That’s my mom and dad. Vodnik the magician stole their souls and put them in these jars, and I’m stealing them back.”
“That him in the other ship? The one that’s headed toward us?”
“I think so,” said Max. “Dridge said that Vodnik was paying him to kidnap me.”
The captain folded his arms across his chest and stared down at her. “Perhaps the magician will pay me instead. Maybe more for all three of you? You think of that?”
Yes, she had thought of that, and that’s why she was glad her friends were right outside the door. Though if it came down to a fight with the entire crew, they wouldn’t stand a chance. But this captain felt like a different sort than Dridge, and Max was betting everything on that being true.
“I think…,” she began, forcing herself to meet the captain’s stare head-on. “I think that if you could be bought, Vodnik wouldn’t have bothered with Dridge. I think you have more honor than that.”
Captain Hob chuckled, letting out a deep croak. “No one’s ever called Hob the Hobgoblin honorable!”
Max shrugged. “I call them like I see them.”
“Hmm. Well, I have no love for magicians and their games, I’ll tell you that.” The capt
ain reached out a clawed finger and tapped lightly on her mother’s jar. The image didn’t stir. “And no one deserves to be trapped like that. No creature belongs in such a cage.”
He turned back to Max. “I’ve heard the promises Vodnik makes. I’ve carried men and women across the sea who gave that magician everything they had just for a chance at happiness. And do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“Happiness isn’t a place. Happiness is being free. Vodnik bleeds dry the desperate who don’t understand this, feeds on those less powerful than he is. He is a creature to be feared.”
“Are you afraid of him?” asked Max.
“I’d be a fool not to be,” said the captain. “But no one turns a member of my crew against me. Magician or no, out here on the sea I am captain!”
In two long strides he had crossed the room and flung open the door. Mrs. Amsel came tumbling into the room. She, of course, had been listening at the keyhole.
He barely spared her a glance. “Keep those jars of yours safe,” he told Max. “There’s choppy waters ahead.”
Max hardly had time to stow the jars away in her backpack as she scrambled to follow the captain onto the deck. Harold and Mrs. Amsel followed.
The captain used his binoculars to study the oncoming ship. After a moment, he handed them to Max. Through the glass, she could see that she’d been wrong earlier when she’d assumed it was a boat like this one. The ship that bore down on them was in fact an enormous longboat, the kind she’d seen in books and movies about Vikings. Mr. Twist could be seen on deck, beating a drum to keep time as the empty oars rowed themselves. And there at the prow was Vodnik, his long beard trailing in the wind. Despite the distance, he seemed to be looking right at her. Max quickly pulled the binoculars away from her face and, with a shiver, handed them back to the captain.
“Necromancy,” he said.
“Necro-huh?”
“Death magic. The magician uses the souls he’s trapped to crew his ship.”
“Okay,” said Max, shivering at the thought. “He has a crew of tireless ghosts. So what do we have?”
Captain Hob smiled. “We have the best captain ever to sail this ocean, and a darn good mechanic to boot!”
He called down to the engine room, which thankfully had stopped billowing smoke. “I need everything you’ve got!”
A crewman poked his head out the hatch, his green face black with soot. “Could use a few more hours to do it proper.”
“You have two minutes,” replied the captain.
The sailor grumbled under his breath and disappeared back into the hatch. Max and her friends watched the oncoming ship get closer and closer. They exchanged nervous glances as the seconds ticked away; all the while, the captain stood there calmly humming to himself.
Almost exactly two minutes later, there was a loud clang, followed by the rumble of the engine coming to life. “All hands to their stations!” the captain roared. “Anyone falls in, you’d better be ready to swim home. Let’s show this magician what real sailors are made of. Full steam ahead!”
The goblinfolk let out a cheer, and the Leviathan began churning up waves as the chase began.
You didn’t need to be an expert tracker to follow ogres. Rats were good at covering their trail, since they liked to hide their numbers and use surprise as an advantage. But ogres traveled out in the open, and they seemed to go to great pains to announce their presence for miles around to anyone who’d listen. Like it or not.
For instance, Lukas noticed that rather than hide their tracks, ogres took enormous pride in both the size and the depth of the footprints they left behind. Having big feet was a very attractive trait in an ogre. Also, they were noisy when they traveled, barreling into each other in their near-constant brawling, and singing at the top of their lungs. (At least, Lukas thought it was singing. That or they were just clearing their throats.)
As for the worrisome alliance between the rats and the ogres, it was not exactly a match made in heaven. Lukas and his friends discovered this when they came across a squished-dead something that might have at one time been rat-shaped. So this new alliance between the rats and the ogres might not have been perfect, and that at least was cause for hope. Which was good, because up until now Lukas had been able to find pitiful little else.
They’d been following the ogres for two days, across the grasslands west of the Great River and into the Shimmering Forest. Ogres were tireless creatures and marched day or night, but they weren’t fast and they often stopped to brawl or smash things for fun. Lukas hoped that if they kept following, they might discover why the ogres and the rats were working together. They might even lead them to the rat king’s nest.
That was, if Lukas didn’t kill Paul and Emilie first. The two had never gotten along, but Lukas had long ago become accustomed to their bickering. Paul would do something to irritate Emilie, sometimes on purpose, and Emilie would retaliate by chasing him with a stick—always on purpose. But recently their relationship had changed. Now when Emilie got angry at Paul, she really got angry. Sticks wouldn’t do, and she’d taken to hurling rocks at him. This escalation in hostilities was bad enough, especially when Emilie’s aim went wide and she pelted Lukas instead, but even worse was their behavior when they weren’t fighting. In all the long years that Lukas had known Emilie, he’d never seen the Eldest Girl of the village giggle. And he’d never seen Paul, who was widely known to be shameless, blush the shade of a ripe tomato. And yet that’s what the two of them did almost nonstop when they weren’t trying to murder each other. They walked side by side along the trail; they sat next to each other at night when they made camp. Paul cracked silly jokes and Emilie laughed and he would grin an idiot grin and turn red. The jokes weren’t even that funny. There were only so many variations on a fart joke one person could stand.
And worst of all, even more unbearable than all the fighting and laughing and blushing were the compliments. Paul commenting on how nice Emilie looked today (which was totally untrue, as the three of them were covered head to toe in dirt and Emilie’s hair stuck out of her bun like crooked straw on a bent broom). And Emilie wouldn’t stop going on about what an impressive tracker Paul was, ignoring the fact that tracking ogres was about as hard as telling someone which way was up.
The two of them were so busy fawning over each other or fighting with each other that Lukas might as well not even have been there. But, unfortunately, he was. The sole witness to his two best friends’ unbelievable, terrifying, stomach-churning courtship.
Not that Lukas was jealous—far from it. Although children back in New Hamelin often teased him about his feelings for Emilie, that was only because he was the Eldest Boy and she was the Eldest Girl, and there was an expectation they’d end up together. Lukas had never seriously entertained the idea, and if he’d ever wondered if his feelings for Emilie were more than friendly, he’d gotten his answer the day he met a new girl. A girl with bright pink hair.
But he tried to put that other girl out of his mind, as she was literally a world away and, he hoped, safe. And if nothing else, watching his two friends swoon over each other confirmed something Lukas had long suspected—love was gross.
They were finishing up a short rest (unlike the ogres, children weren’t tireless) when Emilie called Lukas over. She and Paul had been huddled together as he used a stick to draw in the dirt. Probably pictures of a pig farting. Again.
“Lukas,” said Emilie, “look here. Paul has just had the cleverest thought!”
The cleverest thought? Lukas could remember a time not very long ago when she’d accused the scout of using his empty head to store wool—just this morning, in fact. But he bit his tongue and joined them anyway.
Paul had sketched something in the dirt, but it wasn’t a pig. It was a rough picture of the Shimmering Forest and the lands west of the Great River.
“Can I see your map?” asked Paul, so Lukas dug out the charcoal-drawn map of the isle he’d re-created from memory and laid
it out next to the dirt drawing.
“Not bad,” said Lukas.
“Well, I know the lands this side of the river well enough, as I’ve spent most of my days hunting or playing in this very same forest,” said Paul.
Lukas nodded. “This is what you wanted me to see? I mean it’s a good map, but…”
“But that’s not all,” said Emilie. “Go on, Paul. Tell him.”
Paul scratched his head. “Well, I’ve been thinking about the path these ogres are taking, and something about it bothers me. So I drew this, because I wanted to be sure.”
“Sure of what?” asked Lukas. Paul was clever, but not known for his problem solving, and Emilie’s boasting had obviously made him self-conscious about whatever it was he wanted to say. For a moment, Lukas felt sorry for him. As Captain of the Watch, he knew how hard it was to say what you really thought when everyone was waiting to hear what it was.
“Well,” said Paul. “We’ve been thinking the ogres are headed to the mountains, what with the rats and all. And they certainly are going in that general direction, but that’s what bothers me. It’s too general.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Lukas.
“It’s the maps,” said the boy. “Maps lie. By looking at the map and the trees around us, I can tell you that we are in the Shimmering Forest, right?”
Lukas nodded again.
“But what this map doesn’t show you is the twisted ropewood tree that looks like a witch’s nose where I buried the jars I use for catching kobolds.”
Emilie gave a little sniff and Paul reddened. He’d most recently been grounded for trying to sneak a jarred kobold into New Hamelin—a punishment Emilie had sentenced him to.
“Anyway,” Paul said quickly. “We passed that tree yesterday, and that would be right about here.” He pointed to a section of the dirt-drawn forest west of the Great River where they’d crossed. “Now, the reason I use that ropewood as a marker is that there’s a clear game trail that cuts right through the forest to the northwest. Can’t miss it.”