Akira paused for a moment. Balthazar the Black was an infamous pirate who preyed on shipments from Europe to North America, mostly those going to Washington or farther south. Anwen was known to attack trading routes used primarily by the East India Company. This meant she was often around the Cape of Good Hope off the southern coast of Africa. So why was the last sighting of the Bloodshed so far north? The richest shipments were always found off the Cape of Good Hope. It was true the company did do business in North America but the ships coming from India and China had more valuable goods. It was odd. Akira went back to the records. She picked out the records of the shipments from the east to London. Several of the largest shipments never made it around the Cape of Good Hope. Akira suspected that Anwen had taken these ships and had to offload her spoils somewhere. Where was the question. Thanks to her father, Anwen knew the seas well. She also knew the trade routes used by the various companies. She must have used Iceland or Greenland to store her spoils. It made sense. Both were sparsely populated, far enough from the trade routes that they were relatively safe, but they were also close enough that she could attack the ships heading to North America. All of this only mattered because Balthazar the Black, Balthazar Price, was her father. Balthazar had taught her about the trade routes. He had taught her about the pirates terrorizing the Carribean and the southeastern states. He’d more than likely told her that though the port of Nassau was a haven for pirates, it wasn’t all that safe. According to the few records remaining from his last few voyages along the trade routes, he had taken a small amount of the goods from the shipment and stashed them away somewhere. His ship’s records show that on their return from South Africa, they were blown off course by a storm they hadn’t been expecting. They’d been so off course they hadn’t known where in the Atlantic they were until they reached Iceland. This must have been where Balthazar stored the goods he’d taken from the shipment. Now, weather records don’t support the ship’s records but weather records for out at sea are not as reliable as for on land. Akira stood and went to gather some of the weather records for the time period in question. She’d been right about there not being a storm to blow Balthazar’s ship off course until his final voyage as a merchant. But this storm wasn’t strong enough to blow them all the way from the west coast of Africa to Iceland.

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