Scarlet let out a loud sigh of relief. The boar grunted and swung its head from side to side. Jem clutched his whomping heart. Master Davis didn’t matter anymore. Jem had to find his own way out of this, playing by the islands’ rules of logic.
Think fast, he told himself. What are these pigs so upset about?
That was easy—they saw him and Scarlet as a threat. The islands had been invaded time and again, their homes torn up in an endless search for wood, spices, and jewels. Maybe the King’s Men even hunted them for food, like they did back in the Old World.
He would have to show the pigs he meant no harm. But how?
“What,” Jem asked himself without taking his eyes off the angry boar before him, “would Master Davis never, ever do?”
The answer that came to mind sounded so absurd, it made perfect sense.
“Scarlet.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think we’re going to have to talk to them.”
“Talk,” she repeated, then turned to stare at Jem.
“Yes.”
“To the pigs.”
“Right.”
“Because you think they’ll understand us.” She couldn’t have looked more baffled if he sprouted a snout himself.
“Just because you’ve never met a pig that understands English doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” He dared to grin at her, well aware that under different circumstances the remark would have earned him a smack upside the head.
Then he turned to the pig who was drooling on his shoe.
“First of all, let me say that we mean no harm. We don’t want to hurt you or any of your friends, and certainly not your home. We’re here to make as little noise and as few footprints as possible. We’re just going to take a look around for a treasure, then go back the way we came.”
The pig turned its great head to one side and regarded Jem with what looked like suspicion.
“Besides, we’ve come so far already. Perhaps you could just let us pass this once. We’ll be no trouble, I promise. You have the word of a Lost Soul.”
That last bit seemed to clinch it. The pig gave a final grunt, swung around, and trundled off with his band, leaving Scarlet and Jem one last whiff of his nasty odor.
They stood frozen moments after the smelly wild pigs had disappeared.
“Fitz,” Scarlet finally gasped. “You did it. You spoke to a smelly wild pig and . . . and he listened. To you!”
Even Jem couldn’t believe what he’d done. He only knew that no one back home could ever hear of it. And he was fine with that.
“Have you noticed how much brighter the forest has gotten?”
“And louder. Listen to those bird songs.”
They’d barely scurried a mile past the pigs when the scenery began to change.
“Is it just me or does the air smell sweet?”
“I think it’s warmer, too. Do I hear water? Is that a creek?”
Two steps more and they had to stop to take it all in. It was the most beautiful sight Jem had ever seen.
The trees had parted to reveal a clearing shaped like a perfect circle, bordered by high palms and giant ferns. Inside the clearing stood shrubs covered in flowers of every color; Jem recognized several from the Pseudophoceae family, among Uncle Finn’s favorites. In the very center of the clearing, a creek spilled softly into a shining pool, also perfectly round and perfectly clear. Two ruby-red birds sailed across the sky and disappeared into the trees.
The air smelled spicy-sharp and sweet at once. But there was something else in it—a feeling. A peaceful, contented sort of feeling.
Try as he might to stay focused on uncovering the treasure before the pirates caught up with them, Jem felt his anxiety ebbing like a lazy tide. He looked at Scarlet to see if she felt it, too. She was smiling in a way he’d never seen before. In fact, she was almost radiant, like the place itself.
“This place . . . ,” she whispered without looking at him. “It’s so beautiful. And . . . familiar?”
“Beautiful, yes.” Jem watched his captain twirl around in a slow circle, looking dazed. “But I’m not sure about familiar.” She certainly was acting odd, even for Scarlet.
Actually, she was looking more and more like she might collapse on the grass and go to sleep. Jem tried to fight his own urge to do the same. There was a treasure to be found. And the rest of the crew, of course. And . . .
“Jem!”
It had been only a week since Jem had heard that voice, but it felt like years. Decades, even.
Jem and Scarlet turned. Rappelling down a palm tree on the edge of the clearing was none other than the famed explorer Finnaeus Bliss. The man laughed as he slid down his rope and planted both feet on the forest floor.
Jem’s jaw dropped. “Sink me!”
“I was starting to think you’d never get here!” Uncle Finn wiped the sweat from his bald head. “Whatever took you so long? I thought you’d be here ages ago, what with the map and all . . .”
Aside from being a few pounds lighter, Uncle Finn didn’t look half bad, considering he was supposed to be dead.
“You’re not dead!” Jem shouted as he ran for his uncle.
“Not yet!” Uncle Finn swooped him up in a great hug that left his nephew unable to breathe.
“Are you sure?” Jem gasped as he watched the world spin over his uncle’s shoulder.
“Quite.” Uncle Finn set him down. Jem latched onto his uncle’s arm, both to ensure the man was real and not a ghost and to keep himself from falling over.
“But how?”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Uncle Finn promised. “But first tell me what’s happened to you. And don’t forget to explain why you’re dressed up like a Podipus alpus.”
Jem drew a deep breath and spewed his story as fast as he could, dying to hear his uncle’s own story of escape.
“So the long and short of it is, the pirates have the map and were hot on our heels last time we saw them,” Jem concluded. His words suddenly reminded him that the rest of the crew might well be in danger and not far away. As comforting as this place felt, and as deliriously happy as he was to be reunited with his uncle, he couldn’t forget them.
“Hurry, Uncle Finn. Tell us what happened to you.”
“Well, you’ve obviously guessed that the pirates didn’t make me walk the plank. I think it was a barrel they threw over in my place—just a ploy to get you to talk,” Uncle Finn began. “They did, however, tie me up, gag me, and throw me in a very uncomfortable, dark space where I had no hope of alerting you. I thought we were through, both of us”—he reached out to lay a sap-covered hand on Jem’s hair—“but then one of the pirates had a change of heart.”
“What? Which one?”
“Thomas, the one with Herculean shoulders. He said the guilt was eating away at him, especially since you’d been kidnapped by a bunch of deadly ghosts.” Uncle Finn smiled. “Oh, it’s not that I wasn’t worried for you. I was. But, well”—he paused, looking a little smug—“for the record, I always suspected the Lost Souls weren’t as deadly as everyone thought.
“Anyway, poor Thomas’s conscience was killing him. So the next time we docked in port, a few days after you left with the Lost Souls, he smuggled me off the boat and left me in Jamestown, where I found a sailor willing to take me to this island for a few doubloons.”
The story left Jem speechless. So old Thomas had had the nerve to defy the Dread Pirate Captain Wallace Hammerstein-Jones. Jem shook his head. Thomas was the real hero of the story.
“Jem, you didn’t introduce me to your friend.” Uncle Finn turned to Scarlet, who’d hung back just to watch and listen.
“Scarlet McCray.” Scarlet extended a hand, then leaned forward and whispered, “Just for the record, I always suspected you weren’t as dead as
everyone thought.”
Jem grinned. “Scarlet’s the captain of the Lost Souls.”
“Captain!” Uncle Finn bowed over Scarlet’s hand, looking impressed. “Then I thank you for saving my nephew, Captain Scarlet McCray. His parents would have killed me if I’d lost him.”
“All right, all right,” Jem said, not wanting to think about anything to do with the Old World at the moment. “Let’s get to the point. Are we here? Have we almost reached the treasure?”
“Treasure?” Looking amused, Uncle Finn spread his arms out to the sides. “Look around you, boy. Is this not treasure enough?”
Scarlet was getting that dreamy look again. She nodded.
“Wait a minute,” Jem said. “We came all this way for . . . this? I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is a beautiful place, but is it really the treasure?” He looked at Scarlet, who simply smiled.
“It’s treasure enough for me,” she said.
Uncle Finn eyed her for a moment. “Then you’ll want to thoroughly explore this place. But it might have to wait. If I recall correctly there are some angry pirates out there. With a map leading them directly to us.”
“Right. Of course.” Jem nodded.
Uncle Finn looked back toward the trail. “They’ve got our map, and that’s bad. But they’re also after your friends, which could be worse. Because, let’s face it, they’re only children.”
Finally Scarlet snapped to attention. “Not just any children,” she protested. “Children who sail the seas. Children who brave bloodthirsty swabs and deadly jungle creatures without a second thought nearly every—”
“Agreed, Captain,” Uncle Finn cut her off. “They’re not just any children. But they still may need our help.”
Scarlet thought for a moment, then nodded. “Agreed.” She looked around her, eyes lingering on one of the red birds that had emerged from the trees and perched nearby. “As much as I don’t ever want to leave this place,” she said, “I can’t desert my crew. Not now. Or ever, for that matter.”
Jem didn’t relish the thought of reencountering all they’d come across on the way. Especially those awfully smelly pigs. But they couldn’t leave the others.
“Count me in, too,” Uncle Finn said, looking at the soft ferns and the shimmering pool almost hungrily. “We’ll have your friends back here in no time.”
With that, he started marching toward the path they’d come in on. Jem and Scarlet took one last look at the clearing, where everything felt safe. Then they turned to follow Uncle Finn back into the jungle, where anything could happen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
First came the pigs. The reeking leader, who’d charged at Jem less than an hour before, burst out of the trees not long after the trio left the protected place. He grunted and shook his wrinkly gray head from side to side as his equally malodorous posse shuffled out of the bushes and assembled behind him. Scarlet thought the leader seemed almost exasperated, as if he wanted to say, “What’s the matter with you people? You said you’d only pass once. I’ve had just about enough of being bothered by humans.”
In fact, the more she watched him, the more certain she felt that this was exactly what the old boar was trying to tell them. But how could she know that? She couldn’t speak Pig to save her lost soul. All she knew was that this smelly wild pig felt irritated—and she was feeling that irritation for him. It was the strangest thing.
“I’ll handle this.” Uncle Finn pulled a syringe full of green syrup out of his trouser pocket. “The fastest way to pass these beasts is to inject them with a potent solution of soothing herbs. It makes their eyes droop like sleepy babies.” He made a dive for the pig chief, ready to sedate him with the mysterious concoction.
“Wait!” Scarlet yelled, startling them all. Uncle Finn missed his target, tumbled forward, and ended up injecting a large mushroom on the path. It turned purple with white polka dots and wilted immediately. The pig looked from Uncle Finn to Scarlet and grunted. Scarlet knew instinctively that if he could speak, he’d say something along the lines of, “Take that, you clumsy, flat-footed, pasty-skinned human.” She decided not to relay the message.
“Fitz,” she said instead. “Talk to him like you did last time. Tell him we have to pass again to save our friends from some bad men who want to harm the island. Tell him we’re acting in his best interests and we’ll make sure no one damages his home.”
Jem repeated the message as if he were standing before the throne of King Aberhard himself, while Uncle Finn looked on incredulously from where he still sat, legs splayed, in the middle of the path. When Jem finished his request with a polite bow, the pig grunted again—Scarlet was certain he’d have rolled his eyes if he could—and jerked his head to the right. His putrid posse shuffled back into the trees, leaving a rancid cloud for the trio to pass through.
“I . . . I can’t believe it,” Uncle Finn bumbled as Jem helped him to his feet. “You just spoke to one of the island’s most deadly creatures. And . . . and it listened.”
“I just told him what he needed to hear.” Jem shrugged, but his ears were pink with pride.
They slipped past the wary chief, Uncle Finn still shaking his head in wonder. Scarlet was impressed with her friend’s talents, too, but what concerned her most at that moment was her newfound ability to channel the island’s feelings—or rather, the feelings of the island’s inhabitants. Right then, she was picking up an uneasy sensation in the trees. She didn’t know exactly which creature was feeling this, but she knew it was somewhere off to her left. Hiding.
She didn’t have time to explore this phenomenon, however, because they were approaching her least favorite part of the trip: the ophid . . . ophidi . . . that thing full of deadly striped vipers. Scarlet turned to Uncle Finn. “I don’t suppose you know any tricks to get us around the ophidiwhatsit?”
“The o-phi-di-an ag-gre-ga-tion,” Uncle Finn said pointedly. “And who needs tricks? You simply follow the explicit instructions on the map: “Ophidian aggregation. Keep right. Or in this case, left.”
“Keep right?” Scarlet repeated, then turned to Jem. “We just had to keep right?” she growled.
“Of course. How did you two get around it?”
“Um, we took the scenic route,” Jem said.
Uncle Finn raised an eyebrow at them but didn’t twitch a whisker when they approached the pit. They slogged through the jungle and passed without incident.
“I can’t believe you made me walk right through that,” Scarlet grumbled to Jem as they marched away from the pit.
Jem gave a cool shrug. “It wasn’t so bad.”
She felt like lopping off his ear.
Soon the temperature grew warmer and continued to rise. With it rose Scarlet’s apprehension. The trees quivered above them. The millipedes burrowed in the amber earth below, hiding their heads from a danger they couldn’t identify. Scarlet couldn’t identify it, either—all she knew was that she had to find her crew and get them safely back to the protected place.
A thick curtain of steam drifted across the path, and the jungle opened up onto the edge of the boiling lake. They stopped and stared down at its milky, blue-green bubbling water.
“Look!” Jem pointed through the steam to the far edge of the lake. Scarlet squinted and could just barely make out a small figure across the lake. Then another, and two more. They were creeping hesitantly toward the boiling water. One wore what looked like a headdress of ferns.
“The crew!” Scarlet had never been so happy to see them, and she took off at a sprint around the perimeter of the lake.
The Lost Souls looked up to see their captain barreling around the edge of the blistering water and cried out in relief. Scarlet ran straight into the middle of them and tried to hug as many as she could at once.
“Where’ve you been? Did you find the treasure?” Ronagh cried.<
br />
“Who’s that?” Monty pointed at Finn as the man ran up, huffing, behind Jem.
“That’s my uncle,” Jem said.
“Your uncle!”
“Did you find ’im at the treasure?”
“Did you find the treasure?”
“First tell us what happened to you,” Jem insisted.
“But hurry,” Scarlet said, glancing around her. “We can’t stay here long.”
Monty, still in costume, cleared his throat. “We scared ’em good, we did. We kept making creepy noises and dropping snakes and chasing those old pirates around the jungle until they couldn’t take it anymore and turned tail. Well, most of ’em did. Lucas and three others, including the captain, ran on past. The rest of those big babies rowed right back out to the Dark Ranger and wouldn’t budge. That’s when we decided it’d be safe to follow you. We stayed a good distance behind Lucas and his gang.”
“Good for you,” Scarlet said.
“And as for our crew,” said Liam, “we made sure Lucas and the others were following close enough behind us, then took ’em straight to that old lukewarm slough. They weren’t looking at the map, and they followed us blind. Then we ran on, leading ’em in big circles and always ending up back at the lukewarm slough. The captain was so mad he almost lost his mind.”
All the Lost Souls laughed, imagining it.
“While the Dark Ranger pirates were arguing and threatening to hang each other,” Tim continued, “we made a run for it, straight to the place where Scarlet told us we’d find the path. Not only did we find the path, but we found the rest of the crew. You were right, Cap’n—the path appeared like it’d always been there, and we’ve been following it ever since.”
“So you’re sure you lost the Dark Ranger pirates?”
“Fairly certain,” Smitty said. “Now what’s your story, Cap’n? Fitz? Fitz’s uncle?”
The Ship of Lost Souls 1 Page 18