And Merrick, of course. His contrasting eyes — the piercing blue, for all of his cleverness and grit, and the black-and-red eye. A dead eye.
She missed them all.
Her chest suddenly gave a little tremble. The celebration around her dimmed and muted itself. Everything was coming up fast, a rush of sky, as though she was surfacing too quickly from a deep-sea dive. She’d survived a kidnapping. Survived pirates — and not just any pirates, but the pirate, the most dangerous outlaw who had ever sailed. She’d survived the Undertow again, survived a breakneck trip to the tropics, survived an encounter with a territorial shark, survived finishing the Water-Eater.
And she’d survived losing her parents.
She folded herself in half over the table, buried her face in her hands, and cried hard.
“Shhh.” Aunt Julia patted her back with soft hands. “Let’s get you home.” Her voice echoed, faraway to Fidelia.
Aunt Julia led her out of the pub and into a canal boat, the sailors lining up to watch her leave, like a processional. She managed to stay awake long enough to see Arborley Library — still massive, still beautiful. She managed to get out of the canal boat and up the marble steps.
Then Fidelia collapsed, the weight of the last few weeks — the last few months — making her too weak to stand. She felt Aunt Julia lift her — small, wispy Aunt Julia carried her up all three flights of stairs, tucked her into bed, and didn’t let go of her hand until she fell asleep.
When they reached Medusa’s Grotto, Merrick shut himself in his personal tunnel — the captain’s quarters — and locked the door behind him.
Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie kept busy. They cleaned their wounds from the great naval massacre, bandaged cuts, repaired themselves as best they could with the primitive first-aid supplies they kept on the Jewel. They scrubbed the ship of barnacles, refitted new wood along the boards, tarred the dry rot. They caught fish, grilled shrimp, and guzzled rum while staring, silent, at the fire in the sandpit. They slept, rose, and slept again.
Merrick’s door didn’t budge. If he came out to find sustenance or drink, it was in the night, while his comrades were snoozing.
“He’s been in there too long,” Bloody Elle said after a week, her fingers following the lines of her wrist tattoos, around and around. “I’m breaking down the door.”
Cheapshot Charlie held his arm in front of her. “He needs more time.”
“He needs water!” Bloody Elle cried. “And food! And air!”
Cheapshot Charlie gripped her shoulder. “He’ll come out when he’s ready,” he said. “I know Merrick. He loves to fight …” The boatswain stared at the door. “But he also loves to brood.”
“If we open this door next week and find a skeleton with one blue eye, I’m telling Merrick’s ghost it’s your fault,” Bloody Elle grumbled. But she let the captain alone.
Cheapshot Charlie, who had known Merrick for more than a decade — who had first met the ambitious, glib pirate captain back when he was a fresh-faced, silver-button-wearing, goose-stepping member of the Queen’s Own Navy — Cheapshot Charlie was right.
One morning when Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie walked past the captain’s quarters, the door was ajar.
Their captain sat on the edge of the dock, his bare feet dangling in the water. Jellyfish swirled dangerously close but didn’t sting him.
As if they sensed he’d been through enough.
His greatcoat, once the pride of his wardrobe — black velvet lined with silk, white embroidered ivy along the collar — was flung over a post, ruined. He bought that coat after his first raid, a ceremonial purchase from a fur stall in Molvania. And now the coat was trashed: tails tattered, embroidery unstitched and frayed, the lining stained with giant scorch marks from the admiral’s cannons.
Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie approached their captain slowly; wounded animals were often desperate enough to lash out for a last taste of blood in their final hours.
“Greenlegs,” Merrick said, after a moment. “The great pirate.” He skimmed his toes along the electric-blue surface of the water. “He died young. Only thirty years old.”
“I remember,” Cheapshot Charlie said.
Merrick continued. “Iron Chest Shelley also died at thirty. And Captain Walden. Crowfoot Callum died two weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday. And how did they all die?” He didn’t wait for them to answer. “Swinging in the gibbets, wearing noose neckties. Or shot down at sea by the navy.” He kicked at a jellyfish who pulsed too close. “All of them, caught.”
“What are you getting at, Captain?” Cheapshot Charlie asked.
Merrick finally glanced up, his cheeks gaunt, his good eye distant and cold. “I’m thirty this year,”’ he said.
“You’re twice the pirate any of those others were,” Bloody Elle said. “Even Greenlegs.”
“Yes,” Merrick agreed, “but I’m thirty. I’m due.” He jerked a loose button from his overcoat and skipped it along the glowing pool, watching the ripples until they stopped.
“Some would say those pirates went out in a blaze of glory,” Cheapshot Charlie offered.
“More like a dying star,” Merrick said. “A puff of smoke, and they’re gone. Forgotten. Replaced by whatever new sailor decides to turn sour.”
“Is this about your — your legacy, Captain?” Bloody Elle said.
“No,” Merrick growled. “Legacies are for the living. Why should I care what they say about me when the worms have eaten my ears? No, I’m concerned about more … current events.” He slid his feet out of the water and used his old greatcoat to dry them. “She threw her brooch in the cave.” He put his feet back into his boots and stood. “I’m going to get it back.”
Cheapshot Charlie balked. “The cave, Captain?”
“Aye.” Merrick climbed aboard the Jewel, beginning preparations for the voyage.
“But, Captain —” Bloody Elle began.
“I’m maggot food anyway, aren’t I, mates?” Merrick burst out. “It’s only a matter of time before one of Bridgewater’s cannons finally hits my melon. I’m already slower than I used to be. I can feel it, feel death creeping up on me.” He put his hands on the railing. “Now, I am going down into that cave, and I am going to turn over every piece of eight until I find that brooch. You can help me sail to the tropics, or you can stay here. I don’t rightly care. It won’t be easy to man the Jewel alone, but it’s possible.”
“You really think this’ll work, Captain?” Cheapshot Charlie asked. “You think she’ll take you back if you bring her the brooch?”
“This isn’t about getting her back.” The cold shock of this realization sank in — it was true, then. She really was gone forever. He shook his head. “I’m a wanted man. I can’t run forever. And I won’t put her through that. She deserves better. She deserves —” He stopped, clearing his throat of something that had collected there, some sorrow. “I’m the pirate who threw away the greatest treasure he ever got his hands on. The biggest fool to sail the nine seas. And I have to make sure she knows I know that. Make sure she knows I’m sorry — before I’m gone.”
Bloody Elle climbed aboard the ship. Cheapshot Charlie, however, took a few more seconds of contemplation.
“You know I would follow you to the ends of the earth, Captain. Off the maps entirely.” His eyebrows pressed down so hard, they seemed to knit together. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“I never should have let her go,” Merrick said.
“Are you sure this is how you want to go?”
He knew why Cheapshot Charlie asked. The same dilemma had cycled through his mind in the last few days, over and over, like a bad sea shanty — to do this went against nature itself, didn’t it? Willfully dying, instead of waiting for the universe — or whoever made such decisions — to turn him into fish food?
Merrick didn’t even pause. “Without a doubt.” A death on his own terms. A death with a purpose.
Still, Cheapshot Charlie hesita
ted.
“You’ve been with me for a long time, Charlie,” Merrick said.
“Since the beginning,” Cheapshot Charlie replied quietly.
“If this is too far for you, then go. Go now.”
“Captain —” Cheapshot Charlie started.
“You will never be my enemy,” Merrick finished, walking to the helm, giving his boatswain space to decide.
Within an hour, the Jewel cruised across open sea at a fair clip. Cheapshot Charlie trimmed the mainsail, worry lines wrinkling his bald head as he watched his captain.
But his worry was unfounded. Merrick was like a greenie, taking in everything with a fresh eye —
The sight of the seabirds, dipping their wings into the water.
The sun hitting the water, the waves glittering.
The marble in the salted meat.
The way Bloody Elle’s lips disappeared when she concentrated on a knot; the way Cheapshot Charlie watched Bloody Elle, secret yearning in his eyes that he thought was well hidden.
He would miss it. All of it.
But not as much as he would miss seeing her smile one last time.
Merrick slipped into the turquoise water and swam straight into the cave. He crawled out of the water and took his first breath without fanfare. The air in the cave didn’t smell different, didn’t taste poisonous, but he knew the pollen was all around him — invisible and deadly.
A single breath inside the cave, and it was already too late.
For hours he searched for the brooch under the watchful gaze of the happy, yellow-eyed daises coating the cavern walls.
If the water could hold a pirate’s memories in its fluid, otherworldly matter, then each piece of his treasure was a tangible, touchable memory. Each piece jetted him back to where he stole it, whom he stole it from, and how it came into his possession: Through coercion? Through blood? Through trickery? Through all three?
A chain of rare emeralds, taken from a Canquillian cocoa ship.
A giant golden cross necklace, lifted off a priest’s barge passing through the channel.
Rubies, diamonds, pearls — and it could be tossed straight onto a bonfire in hell, for all he cared.
The brooch. That was the only memory he wanted.
And at last he found it.
Just as evening crept out of the palm trees on the islands and the turquoise water became a place of stripes and shadows, he found it.
With one last deep breath of toxic air from the cave, he swam into the open water, brooch in hand —
Only to be met by the largest, most terrifying mouthful of teeth he had ever seen.
A shark — a tank of a fish almost twenty feet long — whipped its tail as it patrolled the mouth of the cave.
Merrick reared back in the water, and the brooch fell out of his fingers. Frantically he grasped for it as it sank through the water, but at the very moment his fingers brushed it, the shark charged.
Merrick dodged out of the way, then arced his body downward and immediately began pouring his hands through the slimy algae.
But the brooch was gone. Frantically he searched, until his lungs were on fire and his brain sent explosive warnings.
The animal, to its credit, did not strike; it herded him to the surface, then left him alone and paced the seafloor near the cave, as if hired to act as guard.
When Merrick broke the surface, his mates threw down a rope. Their hearts sank into their stomachs like peach pits: after their captain gasped for air, choking on the sweet purity of oxygen after breathing in the pollen, they expected him to flash a conquering smile. But Merrick’s expression was stoic as he climbed into the Jewel.
“I dropped it,” he said, spitting up seawater. “I dropped the brooch.”
“Where is it?” Bloody Elle asked.
“I don’t know!” Merrick blasted. “A shark, a huge one — it surprised me — I dropped it beneath the reef somewhere —” He stopped talking and coughed.
A small cough, dry and innocent. It could have been his lungs trying to wring more water out of his system. It could have been the chills, or the bends, or the beginnings of a nasty cold.
But Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie knew what that cough meant. They looked at him with wide, unbelieving eyes.
“Now I have to find that brooch,” Merrick said. “Or I’ll be dead for nothing.” He coughed again.
He didn’t stop coughing as he worked on a new plan, didn’t stop coughing when they reached their mark. They anchored the Jewel in the gray, stormy bay off Arborley Island. Coughing, and coughing, and coughing.
He was thirty, after all.
He was due.
A thunderclap.
Fidelia awoke in the darkened, dampened dawn. She waited for the pelting of rain on the loft window but heard nothing.
She let her eyelids flutter shut, disregarding the noise as a dream. The room was silent, the couch warm, and she snoozed.
Another thunderclap.
Fidelia rolled off the couch and stumbled to the loft window. The streets were mist-shrouded, the sky hazy and purple in that perplexing time that was both moonless and sunless.
It wasn’t a thunderclap, she realized. It was the navy’s cannon. The naval base.
“Tomorrow at dawn.” That’s what Admiral Bridgewater had said.
And now tomorrow was today.
The navy sounded its cannons for all public hangings. The first cannon fired when the noose was strung. The second cannon, when the convicted dangled.
A third cannon blast meant he had ceased his kicking and was gone.
Two cannons had fired. Merrick, right now, hung from the gallows, noose tight, face red, purple veins bulging.
Fidelia held her breath.
The third cannon came.
Fidelia bit down on her fist, trying to rid her mind of the image of Merrick’s lifeless body twisting in the morning breeze. What about the brooch? The brooch he’d given his life for?
Had the admiral found it in Merrick’s final moments and tossed it in the garbage? Or had Merrick managed to stash it somewhere? Did he pitch it back into the sea before they hanged him, where the salt water might eventually finish it off, eating the pewter until it became brine?
She heard a noise in the other room.
Padding around the corner, she found Aunt Julia sitting up in bed, staring out her own window with tears streaming.
“Aunt Julia?” Fidelia asked, her voice creaky with sleep. Why was her aunt crying? Happy tears, because Fidelia had returned safe? Sad tears, because Ida and Arthur had not?
“Are you all right, darling? What is it?” Aunt Julia discreetly wiped her cheeks.
“Bad dream,” Fidelia lied. “But I’ll try to forget it.”
She went back to the couch, but sleep eluded her.
Stony Beach was a wasteland of wood splinters, broken shells, jute bags lost from cocoa ships and torn apart in the storm, and the sun-bleached bones of a sea creature. A kitchen sink, of all things, had washed ashore, its porcelain already decorated with acorn barnacles. Kelp was everywhere, dried, clinging to rocks. Low tide brought a fishy sulfur stench to the beach, but Fidelia breathed it in as if it were her first taste of air.
Her heart pitter-pattered. Ocean as far as she could see. The shift of pebbles, to course sand, to foam beneath her boots … Some things, at least, never changed.
She flipped open her observation book before the tears came and traced a finger along the outline of Grizzle’s sketched tail.
Sickle-shaped. A tail built for power. For speed. A sweeping tail that made the whole ocean shudder.
Fidelia shut her observation book and looked around. It was midday. The bay wrinkled in the beginning wisps of a storm. Waves kissed the harbor and retreated, swelling higher every second. Old thunderstorms blew away; fresh rain moved in. The windows of all the buildings turned into mirrors, making the whole city feel like the inside of a cumulonimbus cloud.
She hadn’t been able to save her parents. She hadn�
��t been able to save Merrick.
But maybe, if she hurried, she could save herself.
If you have something important to do, Merrick had growled to her in Medusa’s Grotto, while the starfish ate the barnacles decorating the Jewel’s hull, you do it now.
Now.
Inside the library, Fidelia found Aunt Julia stamping catalog cards for a few new atlases. “Aunt Julia? Can we talk?”
Aunt Julia considered her niece, then nodded. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll put the kettle on.”
In the loft, she brought two cups of tea and sat across from Fidelia, quietly waiting at the little green table.
Taking a deep breath, Fidelia opened her observation book to the sketch of Grizzle, then pushed it toward her aunt. “On the night that Mom and Dad … died,” she said, noting that she had managed to say the word without flinching or hollowing out, “this shark swam into the bay. I was so close to tagging him, but then the Undertow hit, and …”
Aunt Julia reached out a hand, gripping Fidelia’s chilly fingers.
“He’s out there still,” Fidelia said. “Puttering around the tropics, untagged. And if I don’t track him down and tag him, someone else might.”
Aunt Julia sipped her tea.
“I know you feel like this is my parents’ work,” Fidelia said, “and that I am just a girl, but —”
Aunt Julia shook her head. “No, Fidelia. I was wrong.” She took a deep breath. “You are not just a girl. You are a Quail. And I can’t think of anyone better to continue with the Quail family research.” She traced a finger along the floral print of her teacup. “I’ve never been the bravest person in a room — the quiet of books, that’s what I’ve always preferred.” Aunt Julia pushed her round glasses higher on her nose. “And it’s cost me dearly, in the past. It cost me —” She cleared her throat. “I think I could learn a lot from you, Fidelia. If you would be willing to show me.”
Fidelia came around the table and gave her aunt a hug.
“They would be so proud of you,” Aunt Julia whispered into Fidelia’s hair, and Fidelia felt a tingle of warmth trail down her spine.
Race to the Bottom of the Sea Page 22