by H. N. Klett
Pirate Queen
Book of the Navigator
H.N. Klett
Contents
Publisher
Prelude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Hey you! Join our Pirate Crew!
Acknowledgments: The real heroes
About the Author
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
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Pirate Queen: Book of the Navigator
Copyright © 2016 by H.N. Klett
Smashwords edition
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All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Published by: Raven Rock Press
Edited by: Crystal Watanabe
Typeset by: Jay Artale
Cover Design by: M. Wayne Miller
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954706
ISBN 978-0-9979699-0-0 print
ISBN 978-0-9979699-1-7 mobi
ISBN 978-0-9979699-2-4 epub
ISBN 978-0-9979699-3-1 PDF
ISBN 978-0-9979699-4-8 Audiobook
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First edition, 2017
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Young adult fiction: Adventure YAF001010, YAF001000
Young adult fiction: fantasy YAF019000
Young adult fiction: science fiction YAF056000
Raven Rock Press
P.O. Box 284
Browns Summit, NC 27214
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Visit:
hnklett.com
To my family and friends.
You all told me I could.
You were right.
HNK
Prelude
Captain Seamus Pike felt ill at ease looking out at the wall of mist approaching them. He couldn’t help but get the feeling when he looked at it, it was looking back at him. He wondered what the crew would have made of this portent, had they been up. His crew looked for signs of ill omens in everything. The birds in the air, the schools of fish in the water, even the amount of foam that was in their mugs of grog. Seamus didn’t believe any of it, but the heavy mists of the evening raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
Their sloop, the Polly, was anchored off the tropical island of Vregora, just outside of the trader’s port of Baron’s Bay. The island’s climate was known to be steamy and sometimes unbearable, but much calmer than the weeks of rough waters they had just endured to get there.
They rested just off the shore, away from the traffic lanes, where the warm tropical waters sometimes met with the cool currents from the north. It wasn’t the fact that there were mists that bothered him—mists could be found anywhere in the world; there was even a large Sea of Mists to the far north, not that he ever risked going through it—the unusual thickness of these mists just didn’t seem natural to Seamus. As a lifelong sailor, he had grown up skirting the mists, but this was somehow different.
He sat quietly and watched as they continued to creep in. It was like some sort of sea beast silently approaching, intent on consuming the ship and its sleeping crewmen one bite at a time. Seamus was the only one awake to witness it. He had chosen to man the night’s watch alone.
He had been all too happy to let both shifts of crew get a full night of rest, since he would benefit from it in the end with the crew’s hardiness and good will, something he needed for the four-week haul back to their home port of Jakar in the north. A rested crew meant a better sailing crew. Seamus decided that the cost of loneliness for the night would be worth the price of taking the lone watch and getting home to his family sooner. But now, looking over the mists, he felt a slight chill and questioned the wisdom of his decision.
The mists reminded Seamus of stories his father told him and his brothers when they were children—tales of spirits in the mists, ghost pirates out on the seas, searching for souls to join their crew.
As the plumes of fog slowly crept over the rails and saturated the deck, Seamus remembered his father’s warning about misty waters.
Eyes of red
of the pirate dead
Are on the hunt for you.
Beware the mists,
And take no risks,
Lest you become a ghost pirate, too.
A shiver sliced into his spine like a cold scalpel. His eyes tried to focus on the mists that had now entirely enveloped their ship, but it was just a solid wall of gray that revealed little and covered everything.
The heavy trod of boots came from behind him. Seamus spun around to track the noise and quickly found himself caught in the glare of a pair of glowing red eyes that beamed through the mists at him. Those eyes began to approach him.
Seamus froze, a scream firmly wedged in his throat. He found it hard to breathe.
The large and imposing figure stopped just a short distance away from him, its glowing ruby eyes unblinking as they stared at him. With a gloved hand, it drew a dark and sinister cutlass from a worn and moldy sheath and pointed it at Seamus’s chest.
“W-w-what is it you want?” Seamus gagged on the words.
The figure stood there, unnaturally still.
Seamus’s gaze kept moving back and forth from the cutlass to the glowing red eyes that stared at him, unblinking. His frantic mind clawed at him like a cat trying to escape drowning. Whatever this thing wanted, he would give, just to make it go away. But what did it want?
It leaned towards him. Its jaw did not move when it spoke.
“The book,” said the figure.
Silence.
There could only be one book they were after: the book with the skull on it. The book that couldn’t be opened.
“I-I-I don’t have it.”
The figure cocked its head, its ghostly visage impossibly menacing as it stood there, its glowing eyes searching him.
Most books written by someone other than the Crown or Church were deemed subversive and marked as contraband. To have one was considered to be a hangable offense. In certain sailing circles, it was known that Seamus was a collector of some of those rare and outlawed books that bought you a ticket to the long drop with the short stop by the hangman’s noose.
Another pair of glowing red eyes appeared beside the captain. It, too, stared at Seamus, unblinking. The two never turned their gaze from Seamus as the captain addressed the other set of eyes. The first gave only one command, the lightly spoken words drifting through the mist.
“Search the ship.”
Out of the mists blossomed a multitude of red glowing eyes inside of dark human-like forms, which then washed over the decks. Seamus numbly turned and watched as the flood of ghostly forms swept down into the bowels of the ship, where the crew slept unaware. There were no screams from a surprised crew, only the sound of rushing boots above and below decks.
Turning back to his captor, Seamus looked over the creature, still stoically standing impossibly still and holding him at bay with its icy gaze. The creatu
re’s clothes looked old and threadbare. The once bright red seaman’s coat was dark and mottled with age, its edges frayed by use. Its dark captain’s hat was rimmed with mold and was in the shape and style of a time long ago. The tangles of dark hair that fell about its shoulders looked like thick ropes of seaweed and framed the fearsome and glowing features of its skull. The moist, moldy scent of the monstrous creature clawed its way into Seamus’s nose and at his sanity.
“I don’t have it! I swear!” Seamus gasped at the figure, still trying to catch his breath.
After a few minutes, footsteps sounded behind Seamus, and joining them to his right stood another towering ghost pirate with glowing red eyes and a gruesome-looking hook for a left hand.
In a deep and gravelly voice it said, “He speaks the truth. It’s not here.”
Seamus turned back to the ghost pirate captain and shrilled like a child, “I told you I don’t have it! I traded it to another merchant in Baron’s Bay.”
“WHO?” the ghost captain bellowed. The question boomed into Seamus like a cannon shot. The ghost captain leaned closer to him and cocked its head slightly.
If this was the only way he could get rid of them, then Seamus would do it. His head was dizzy and he felt his knees starting to give way. His face went numb and the world grew dark as the words dripped from his mouth.
“His name is Orin Heartstone… H-h-he’s the captain of the Arrow.”
Chapter 1
Many miles to the northeast, Orin Heartstone’s ship, the Arrow, raced the dawn. Low slung and lean with two great masts brimming over with brightly colored sails, it grabbed the winds in a burst of splendor matching the dawn. Its sleek and light wooden hull leaned into the water like a racing sloop. At full sail, the vessel almost skipped over the water like a cannon shot.
The Arrow was the fastest merchant vessel in the western hemisphere and the pride of her home port of Daden, and it went around the globe flying the home port’s green and gold in sail and flag. The Arrow could outrun anything.
Normally there was no need to rush their return, but they were at full sail and barreling on towards home. The few days they had spent in the port of Baron’s Bay had been incredibly profitable. They weren’t due to return home for several more days, but Orin’s mother had sent him a dispatch at port. It said to hurry home and nothing more. Dispatches over great distances were an incredible rarity and wildly expensive. Orin’s mother may have been a lot of things, but loose with money was not one of them. She had never sent a dispatch before.
Orin tried not to let worry get the better of him. As he often told his daughter, Hailey, there was no point worrying about things you couldn’t control, and the only thing a good captain could have control over was the present moment. Hailey would have been a fine captain, if only she wasn’t a girl.
Hailey had a keen, discerning eye and a sharp wit, but often held her tongue, sometimes to her detriment, but she could be bold when she felt she was allowed to be. She grew up on the Arrow the daughter of a merchant. She knew everything there was to know about sailing and running an efficient ship. She could tie down a mainsail before she could tie her shoes. Not only did she know seven different ways to rig a ship, she could instruct you on each one of them. She was a true talent at sea, but her true calling was navigation.
Before Hailey had become a teenager, she had full run of the ship, helping where she could. Every night Orin would sit her down over hot chocolate and show her the maps and weather tools, teaching her the ways of navigation. He taught her to navigate anywhere—where they were, where they needed to go, and why they chose the route they did.
He taught her how to use the devices and magical tools leased to them by the Crown. She became adept with the contraption that predicted the weather hours in advance, but it was the compass and using navigational charts that were her true loves.
It got to the point that Orin finally conceded that she was a natural and made her unofficial navigator of the ship. As she grew older, though, Orin started listening to her counsel less and less when it came to navigating. In everything, really. She was no longer his little girl. As Orin’s mother often reminded him, Hailey was a young lady now and shouldn’t dirty her hands with such work. It was unseemly for a woman to learn the craft of sailing. Even more so for her to be around the crew.
He wrinkled his brow when it occurred to him that it was she who had plotted this quicker course home. The last act of navigation he could allow. She had skillfully and tactfully plotted and replotted a course that narrowly dodged a large storm that would have slowed them immensely had they run into it or tried to wait it out. The rosy dawn was their reward for narrowly missing the rains. He stood and appreciated it for a moment as the last stars of the night disappeared into the rising light. He looked up from the quarterdeck and knew exactly where to find her.
He could barely see her at the top of the main sail, but she was there. Unaware that this was the last time she would be able to climb such heights with him.
Hailey leaned against the spar while balancing on the footropes, her hands quickly working the sextant to line up on the few stars twinkling in the morning twilight. Satisfied, she set it back into her pouch and found herself lost in her commanding view of the beautiful world of Ephryae. It stretched out before her like a treasure chest overturned. Its sapphire-blue waters spilled out to the horizon and crashed into the wrinkle of deep-emerald land on the horizon under a garnet-colored dawn. At that moment, she felt like the richest person in the world.
From below, she heard her father’s voice call out to her.
“Hailey! I took the celestial fix earlier this morning. Come down.”
She let out the exasperated sigh of a teenager and pulled the notebook out from under her arm, made a note, then made her way down the rope ladder and to Orin on the quarterdeck. His eyes followed her progression down the rigging.
Hailey’s single braid bobbed back and forth on her shoulders as she easily worked her way down the ropes. Her dark brown hair was woven with several light streaks running from the crown of her head, bleached by the sun. The dark and light contrasted and complimented one another as they were woven into the braid. Like her father’s hair, it was a sign that she was a girl from the isle of Arwend.
She wore an outfit that was a step above pajamas, but only slightly. A comfortably loose shirt and baggy short pants that came to just above the knee were fine for crawling around a ship, but as Orin’s mother constantly reminded them both, it wasn’t proper for a young lady to crawl around a ship. In his head, Orin could hear his mother clucking like a mad hen at him about it. They would be at port soon and he knew she was waiting. So did Hailey.
Hailey wasn’t a little girl anymore, even though she still dressed like one. She had grown as tall and beautiful as her mother Rebecca once was, though her hair was different. Her mother’s hair was long and as black as a raven’s wing. It flowed past her shoulders and down to the small of her back, much like most of the people of her home on the far away isle of Iconen. Despite the minor difference, Orin found himself looking at her from time to time with a touch of sadness. For just a moment, he would catch a glimpse of his late wife in her smile.
He wished that Rebecca could have seen Hailey now. Hailey may not be a proper lady according to his mother, but she was smart and beautiful and he was proud of how wonderful she had turned out. He only wished that life could have stayed as it was back when Rebecca was alive. Life had changed so much since she died.
When Orin got the news of his beloved Rebecca’s death, he’d been devastated. For a time, he simply shut down. It was if he wasn’t there anymore, just a shell of a man standing around, waiting for the world to stop along with him. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t do anything. Orin’s mother, Rose, moved in to not only take care of him but to help raise Hailey.
Grandmother Rose became the dominant force in their household during Orin’s temporary absence. For a time, it seemed to Hailey that she had l
ost both of her parents. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the complete absence of her mother from her life or the presence of the shell of her father as he wasted away. She worked as hard as she could to help bring him back.
When Orin finally started to come around, it was as if he had been asleep for a long time. Right away he started to notice a few things he didn’t like, such as the way his mother harassed Hailey about courtly manners and the expectations of women. Still, he said nothing and watched his daughter wriggle under the strain. He was too weak emotionally to fight with his mother. His heart was too damaged from Rebecca’s loss and the shame of his shutting down was too great to allow him to say anything.
Grandmother Rose felt it was her duty and obligation to see to it that Hailey was “properly educated” now that her mother wasn’t around. After moving in, she forced Hailey to adopt an entirely new lifestyle. The life of a proper young lady.
Her life went from one of adventure on the high seas to dull and mind-numbing propriety. Formal dress attire, endless tea parties, manners classes, elocution lessons, not to mention the endless reading of dry materials from a primer that told her every way to do, be, and think.
When Orin finally objected, Grandmother Rose tersely explained to him that, though he was a wonderful father to Hailey, he was still only a man, and he could never understand the social ways of women and how important it was that Hailey be properly trained.
According to Rose, the loss of Hailey’s mother had not only hurt the child emotionally, it hurt her socially. In a system where the only advancement a woman had was determined through social circles, Hailey was already at a disadvantage learning so late in life. Such a late start meant she would not be able to climb the social ladder high enough and fast enough to marry a noble, the end goal for any young lady. She could be forced to settle for a commoner and hope that he could support her and any children they had. Rose intended to make up that difference quickly and shove Hailey up the social ladder. She would bring her to the pinnacle of ladyship, whether Orin and Hailey liked it or not.