Ellie mounted the tower stairs feeling significantly brighter, if still mildly butterfly-queasy.

Not that this was of any real concern. After all, the imminent trip she and her swain had planned could hardly be considered “safe”, and it was on the far side of the world from “official” or “sanctioned”.

It just barely missed being outright illegal. Technically.

Neither she nor Drake was naïve or arrogant enough to think that Avlon didn’t have some inkling as to what they were up to. But it wasn’t his attention, or his retribution, they were worried about.

As she climbed the steps, Ellie rehearsed the plan they had devised to slide their intended misadventure past Prokvert. But those thoughts vanished when she entered the bunk room.

The Vixen sat cross-legged, paging through Amelia's work stack in essentially the same spot and manner as Amelia herself had been when the raiders had struck.

If Ellie didn't know better, which she did, she would have thought her bunkmates had swapped places. Were it but for the question of why, apart from the aesthetic appeal, any beast with more sense than a bag of cement would want to step into Bon Bon’s boots.

Ellie was about to inquire towards Amelia’s whereabouts. But when Bon Bon looked up at her with about as much life in her expression as one of the hammock posts, those words got lost on the way to her tongue.

In their place came the question, “where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” was Bon Bon's unusually vacant response.

Ellie dropped down on her bunk and began to undress for the second time that night. Something was definitely off here.

“I suppose you and Tom had a good time tonight,” Ellie said, fixing the Fox with her best imitation of Drake’s penetrating stare.

Like a boulder perched precariously on a mountain edifice, Bon Bon’s stone face withstood Ellie’s prodding pebble slide. Indeed, her compunction hardened into something that very nearly resembled full and normal sanity.

But Ellie wasn’t fooled. Her maternal instincts were second to none. And like any competent matron she knew an illusory wall when she saw one.

“I heard you singing all the way from the range,” she said. Letting a calculated dose of conspiracy sneak into her tone. “Honestly, I had no idea you were …”

These pebbles formed a landslide. Beneath their tremulous weight, Bon Bon’s strained emotional dikes snapped like rotten timbers.

The weight of her compounded failures and their echoes all streamed over her heart. Reigniting her smoldering rage and grief and stoking them into a carrion inferno that ate at her very life force.

With no tears left to dampen the pain, she crumpled like a burning parchment. Shielding her face with her hands as her entire frame shook with the force of unguarded sobs.

For that first moment Ellie stood stunned.

Sure, Bon Bon may have been a neodymium drama magnet, but beneath all her chaotic neutral eccentricity had always been a heart of pure wrought diamond that even the Headmaster admitted he respected and admired.

Whatever had happened today, wherever she’d been, whatever she’d been getting up to, had somehow driven an adamantium nail through that prismatic gem.

Maternal instincts being what they were, Ellie was by her side before her rational mind had finished computing all of this. She cradled the younger girl’s slender shoulders and cooed softly the way she would soothe a newborn pup.

Bon Bon fought vainly to steady herself long enough to form words. For a long time, the only sounds she could make were odd pathetic squeaks interspersed by rapid volleys gasps.

Either through tremendous effort of will or simply the exhaustion of her emotional boiler pressure, she eventually managed to croak out the words, “I saw him.”

Ellie was still trying to hammer out a means to process this when the door to the common room, then the door to their bunk room slammed open in rapid succession.

The elder Canid was already armed and on her feet when their door burst aside revealing not another petty delinquent, as she’d expected, but a thoroughly wind-swept and frantic Drake.

With reflexes only a few microns faster than the seditious combustion rate of rumor, forgetting Bon Bon and practically hurling her weapon to the floor, Ellie hauled Drake in by his collar then shut and bolted the door behind him.

Before, during and after her thoughts rocketed along the ‘please dear merciful gods let no beast have seen that’ telemetry.

Safely absconded from scandalous view, Drake’s fatigue caught up with him. In what amounted to a controlled collapse he sank to the floor in between the astonished females. Who both stared at him as if he had just returned from the land of Nevermore.

Ellie didn’t so much settle by his side as nest. The way a Bee colony readjusts after its hive gets blown away.

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A bed of squirrellous snakes writhed in the pit of her stomach.

How extreme must whatever calamity had spurred him have been to cast not only Academy policy but even the most basic norms of social decency into the irrelevance basket?

A wave of electric dread rippled through the arid silence as Drake fought to take in a sure breath. Which itself only brought another ringing hammer blow down on the matter.

For a beast in Drake’s prime athletic condition to be so utterly reduced to the state of a hump of heaving laundry meant he must have bolted clear across the island at a pace that would have added a tint of blue to Adrian’s prairie pallet.

Again, not something he was prone to do at the drop of a hat.

And again the question ‘why’ slashed at Ellie’s brain like a fulgor maelstrom. But she bit her tongue.

Eventually, after a painful minute, when Drake had reconstituted enough lung capacity to gasp out a few words, the ones he chose were these: “Amelia ... gone … Taken … I couldn’t … I wasn’t …”

Ellie stopped him there and pulled him over to her bunk. Forcing him to lay down and fully compose himself.

At any other time, under any other circumstances, such action would have earned the couple an infinite supply of inuendo-laden taunts from Bon Bon.

Here and now, however, the Vixen did little more than whimper in vicarious agony at watching Ellie’s tender nursing.

“Who took her?” the golden Dog asked in the golden voice that had earned her first love.

“Ghost ship …” he coughed. “Black as the night. Looked like the grave. Riding on a bed of fog.”

He shot bolt upright with such violence that his own circulatory system reprimanded him. He swooned and fell back in a haze.

This got a tiny, furtive smile out of Bon Bon.

When he stood back up more carefully he said, “we have to go after her.” Then, in the manner of one recently gifted a sword by a magickal rock he issued the general command to, “rally the herd!”

At the mention of ghosts a slight squeak escaped the Vixen as she curled into a fetal position below Amelia’s hammock.

Neither one would admit it even in the privacy of their own brains, but this take-charge persona was the beast who had first won Ellie’s heart.

They nodded in mutual salute then Ellie strode over and pulled Bon Bon sharply to her feet.

“You heard the Captain,” she barked, slipping into her Quartermaster’s boots with the same fluid ease as Drake assuming his Captain’s crown.

When, after a few seconds, Bon Bon had failed to budge, Ellie nudged her in true Pyrate fashion.

“What’re you waiting for girl, an engraved invitation? Get off your ass and move like you’re getting paid for it!”

While it wounded Ellie at her most fundamental layer to verbally assail a beast in such a wretched state, especially a crewmate, greater needs than hers called at present.

And besides, she’d often found that the best cure for Bon Bon’s melodramatic stupors was a stiff kicking. Even if this particular episode seemed a bit more heartfelt than most.

Even in her pitiful state, the tear-sodden Fox snapped briskly to attention. An action built into her sinews through years of dutiful training, and activated now by habitual motors rather than spawned in actual conviction.

That so, the Vixen fell into her role now like an out of line bearing knocked back into its running groove.

With a boisterous snort which Ellie chose to interpret as “yes sir” and a hasty swipe of a sleeve across her eyes, Bon Bon hit a level-headed sprint out of the dorm tower. Very nearly forgetting to unbolt the door first.

She slammed it behind her with such intensity that the dense wooden slats which housed the latch and handle birthed a two inch split down the grain.

Drake and Ellie both grimaced. Any beast who hadn’t already been rocked awake by Drake’s crashing entrance surely had no excuse now.

“Subtlety is not one of that lass’s strong points,” Drake remarked.

Ellie let a hissing sigh escape through her nose. Then she smiled and jabbed playfully as Drake’s lower ribs with an elbow.

“Well, Captain, you're our paranormal expert. How do we find this ghost ship?”

Drake’s expression turned steely and his whole aura fell a number of palpable degrees.

He shook his head as if trying to dislodge some irritating parasite. “We’d need its name. But it was too dark for me to make out any detail.”

He looked down at his boots. Then back up at Ellie to see her asking with a slightly tilted head for elaboration.

“It’s a type of Wild Magick. The Druids called it a Soul Splinter. When we love a thing enough to name it, as in actually give it a name, it becomes ‘real’. It gets a soul.”

“So you mean,” Ellie said, genuinely interested and curious, “when we’re born, our parents …”

Drake shook his head again.

“No. For us names are more of a badge than an anchor. They’re a projection of our identity, not its source. Nobody gives you a soul. You have to … you have to grow it, if that makes any sense.”

He could see it did not. But time being of the essence, he sidestepped the issue. “It’s the same reason why many warriors name their weapons, you see. When a Captain names his ship, he gives a piece of his soul permanently to the craft, whether he realizes it or not. Hence why ships are referred to as ‘her’ and not ‘it’. It’s like a marriage …”

He caught her eye and it was like catching a direct sunset ray.

Drake felt his heart leap as if being struck by an electric probe, so he forced his gaze out the window instead. He took several breaths to clear his head, then continued.

“A Captain becomes ‘bound’, in a sense, to his ship. Forever. Even after death.”

He could feel Ellie's gaze boring holes through the side of his skull as he said that. But he did his best to ignore it. “The problem is, a ghost anything doesn’t strictly exist. What I mean is, it could theoretically go anywhere. It could be in the very Core right now. Or on the other side of the suns. Without that name we don't have a prayer of …”

As if summoned back by an involuntary spell, Bon Bon's frazzled head popped back through the damaged door.

“It’s the Sleeping Giant,” she said. In answer to Drake and Ellie’s confused looks she hurriedly added, “it was Tom's first ship. Her Captain’s Long John Silver. Far’s I know it was last heard of making landfall in Cape Madea … if that helps.”

As quickly and mysteriously as she’d come, she retreated before the first drops of the initial wave in their sea of damning questions could break ashore.

Ellie looked at Drake and saw him smile a smile that usually meant a plan. What's more, it made her want to bolt that door and lay him back down on her bunk for real. But she shook these thoughts off like a bad dream. There was serious work to do.

“I should go put the other girls back to bed,” she said, donning her full battle attire.

As she was reaching for the door, however, she was stopped by a question she knew was not going to leave her alone until she tackled it. So she did exactly that in the only way that was known to her. Squarely head on.

“What exactly can we do if we catch these ghosts?” she asked. “I mean, after all, recognizing a problem …”

“And actually solving it are what a stick is to an axe,” Drake finished the quote from Old Iron Hide, almost as if he’d heard it as many times as she had.

More to the point, he’d clearly been ready for this question.

Brandishing his sharpest teeth in a grin that gave Ellie running chills of mingled fear and desire he announced with considerably more assurance than he actually felt, “when we catch them, we’re going to teach them why Pyrates are called the ‘Terrors of the Nine Depths’.”