Arai, Lillandra, and the rest of the crew -- apart from Captain Burt, who was taken aboard the pirate ship -- were led below, into the crew's quarters, and summarily locked up. The resigned crewmembers crawled into their hammocks, while Arai and Lillandra sat together, upon a rather fragrant pile of laundry. Twine soon joined them, asking them about the pirate captain and his plans for them.

"I didn't catch his name," Arai said. "But it sounds like he's planning to take us to Grand Skir."

"I was afraid of that," Twine muttered.

"Have you been there before?" The redheaded sailor, after all, had claimed to have been everywhere.

He shook his head. "To Grand Skir? No. No one in their right mind visits Grand Skir."

"Tell me about it."

"It used to be a kingdom," he said, "until it was taken over by Mustaf Draj."

"The Aeromancer?"

"Yeah. He's a very powerful sorcerer. He overthrew the Skirrish king about thirty years ago. That's when it became the Despotate. Grand Skir had always been kind of a miserable place, and they never got along with their neighbors, but after the Aeromancer took power, they immediately declared war on Citias and Galleus. The Citians ran them off, but the Galleans have been fighting them for a long time now. The war's been going on for years."

"The pirate captain said something about conscripting us to fight for Grand Skir."

"I've heard rumors about Skirrish ships abducting foreign crews," he said nervously, "and taking them back to Helltrix. Turning us into soldiers, though? I can hardly believe it."

"Helltrix?"

"That's the capital of the Despotate. It's a big city, on the northern coast of the Bay of Vandals." He frowned at Arai. "But you must know all this. You speak Skirrish."

"Lillandra cast a spell on me a few months ago, which allows me to speak and understand all languages. I'd never even heard of Grand Skir until we arrived in Addis."

Twine glanced at Lillandra. "A spell? You mean...you're a witch?"

"Yes," she acknowledged.

"Then you can get us out of here!" he exclaimed excitedly. "You could set their ship on fire, call up a wind to blow them away--"

"I can't do things like that. And I can't do anything with my hands tied like this, anyway."

"Let me get those off," Arai said, reaching for the rope that had been wrapped around her wrists.

"Don't bother," she said. "The rope has been enchanted."

It was Arai's turn to blink. "Enchanted?"

"It's a zemi, a Snake's Knot. I don't know where they got it -- maybe that fellow Bickerstaff made it; he obviously has some magical talent. But I can't remove these ropes. Your sword could cut through them, I suppose, but only another sorcerer can reverse the spell."

"Could Shell do it?"

"I think so. In any case, I can't do any magic with my hands tied. No sorcerer can."

"You need your hands free to perform the gestures?"

"In some cases, yes, but there's more to it than that. Simply binding the wrists of a sorcerer robs them of their power. You didn't know that?"

"No," he admitted. "I didn't." But it was certainly interesting.

"So what do we do now?" Twine wondered. He stopped suddenly, looking around. "Hey, where's your elf girl?"

"In hiding."

"It'll be big trouble if they find her."

"She'll be all right. She's a smart kid." He sighed. "She just might be our only hope."

"So what do we do?" Twine asked again.

"At this point," Arai muttered, "I think the only thing we can do is wait. Maybe the pirates will get drunk on Captain Burt's liquor. Maybe we'll find an opportunity to wrest control of the ship from them. Maybe we'll run across one of these Gallean patrols the pirate captain mentioned. Until then..." He shrugged.

Twine nodded sadly. "I thought it'd be smooth sailing to Tax Trium after we got out of the Phantic Gates. But this voyage has only just begun, hasn't it? Damn it all."

* * *

They spent the next several days locked up in the crew's quarters. It was hot, and cramped, and the smell grew worse every day, but the pirates did give them fresh water from time to time and fed them hardtack out of the ship's stores. Arai tried to ask the pirates some basic questions: the name of the pirate captain who had seized them, how long it would be before they reached Helltrix, and so on, but the men were tight-lipped, and refused to tell him anything.

They had no way of knowing whether Shell had been found out. He wasn't sure what they would do to the elf girl if they caught her -- would they have her killed? Would they throw her overboard? Would they lock her up with Arai and the rest of the crew? He tried to remain optimistic -- Shell, after all, was a clever girl, a pickpocket and thief who had been living on the streets of Kingsaile for half her life, and now, thanks to Lillandra, she was a budding sorceress as well. But this was a bad situation, and a single mistake could cost her her life.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It was hard to tell day from night in the dark confines of the crew's quarters. There were a few lanterns hanging around, but by the third day most of the candles had burned down and most of the oil had burned off, which left them groping in the dark. And perhaps as a result of this, the crew began to grow increasingly nervous.

"It won't be long now," Twine noted. "We'll reach Helltrix in two or three days."

"So soon?" Arai asked.

"The prevailing winds are southerly in the Bay of Vandals. We're moving at a very good clip, six or seven knots at least; I can feel it. At these speeds we could cover a thousand miles in less than a week, and we're out of the Gates, too, which means we're not likely to run into any serious storms."

"What about the Galleans? The captain mentioned something about Gallean patrols."

Twine shook his head. "No, I don't think we can expect any help from the Galleans. They use their ships to protect their coastal villages; they never venture very far from land. The Galleans aren't exactly a seafaring people. They have a kind of navy, I guess, but they prefer to do their fighting on land, with horses and lances."

A few more days passed. One night, while Twine and the rest of the crew were sleeping, Arai heard a curious tapping coming from the port side of the ship, a few feet away. He moved a bit closer to investigate; the tapping seemed to be coming from a little ventilation shaft which had been built into the ceiling, and which was covered by a metal mesh to keep the rats from using it as a throughfare. He peered up into it...and suddenly found himself looking up at Shell's face, peering back at him. He was so surprised he almost cried out, but caught himself at the last moment.

"Shell!"

"Arai," she greeted, her voice a whisper.

"How did you get in there?" The ventilation shaft was very narrow.

"Very carefully," she said. "I had to sneak past a dozen pirates. But that's not important right now. What's the situation?

"We're fine," he said, "for the moment."

"Lillandra?"

"She's sleeping," he said, glancing back at her. "But the pirates bound her hands with some special rope that prevents her from using her magic. How are you doing?"

"Well, they haven't found me yet," she said. "I've been sneaking food at night, like you said, and only coming out of that closet once or twice a day." She grimaced. "It's been torture, trying to hold it in."

"Have you learned anything about the pirates?"

"A few things. The pirate captain is called Radille, and his ship is the Reaper. They seem to have started out as ordinary pirates, but they have a commission now from the Skirrish government to attack merchant ships and deliver their crews to Helltrix. They've been making very good money." She paused, then added, "I overheard one of the pirates say we'll reach Helltrix tomorrow morning."

"I was afraid of that," Arai muttered.

"What are we going to do?"

"Just a moment." He woke Lillandra, who yawned, sat up, and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes with her bound hands. When she saw Shell, looking down at them through the metal grate, she blinked in surprise.

Arai quickly apprised her of the situation. "I have a plan," he told her. "Can Shell undo the Snake's Knot from there?"

"If she can touch the ropes she can," she said, and she scooted over to the grate. She explained to Shell what she needed to do; the elf girl managed to slip a single finger through the mesh and touch the ropes when Lillandra held them up. "Concentrate now," the sorceress said. "Draw out of the magia, and--"

But the ropes slackened and fell off her hands before she had even finished speaking the sentence. "I did it!" Shell exclaimed. "That was easy."

"Excellent," Arai said. He turned to Lillandra. "Do you still have that little mirror Jerade gave you?"

She reached into her pocket and pulled it out. "I was going to throw it into the sea," she confessed. "But I thought it might come in handy."

"Can you make a Volcanic out of it?"

She frowned. "I could," she said. "But it might be better to break it apart. A piece of glass this size would produce a very large explosion."

Arai grinned wolfishly. "That's exactly what I'm counting on."

* * *

They arrived in Helltrix the next morning. A large group of pirates, carrying ropes and manacles, entered the crew's quarters and, without preamble, proceeded to tie them all up together. Lillandra replaced the Snake's Knot on her own wrists, to make it seem as though it was still intact, and fortunately the pirates left her alone; they didn't tie her to the others. Arai was tied up, however, and dragged up on to the deck with the rest of the crew.

It was the first time he had been outside in over a week. The morning glow was so bright that it blinded him, and the air was so fresh that he found himself sucking it in greedily.

It took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the light, and to his surroundings. He was standing on the deck of the Cockatrice, which had found a berth in a not-very-busy harbor attached to a large city, which he presumed to be Helltrix. It appeared to be a rather gloomy-looking place, but it was such a foggy morning that he couldn't make out very much; the only buildings that stood out were a pair of large black-brick towers, which rose up out of the fog.

The Cockatrice was floating next to a long pier, right off the harbor, and a gangplank was already hauled up to allow the pirate crew -- and their prisoners -- to disembark. Radille and the Reaper were just arriving at another berth, some distance away.

Arai threw a glance at Lillandra, who had also been brought up on the deck. He nodded to her. She nodded back.

Shell was there, too, crouching behind the steps leading up to the quarterdeck -- just as he had instructed her. He nodded at her as well, when she peeked her head out to look at him, and she nodded back, determined.

Arai, who had been tied up with Twine, whispered to him: "Get ready."

"Get ready for what?"

But he had scarcely said the word when Arai suddenly shouted: "Now!"

Lillandra responded immediately, freeing herself of Snake's Knot, pulling the mirror out of her pocket, and throwing it at the pirates, most of whom had gathered themselves near the gangplank and who were preparing to lead their prisoners off the ship. Lillandra had warned him that the explosion would be big, but even Arai was unprepared for the massive sound and concussive impact of the zemi, which tore through the bodies of the pirates and splintered the deck. Limbs flew through the air; men screamed; and the entire ship was rocked, the explosion causing it to heave from side to side.

In the confusion that followed, Shell emerged from hiding and began using her little Witch's Dagger to saw at the ropes holding Arai. Unfortunately Twine and the other members of the crew, to whom Arai was tied, had been thrown into a panic by the explosion, and they were jostling around so much -- Arai was being pulled all over the place -- that she couldn't cut him free. And some of the pirates -- those who had managed to avoid the explosion -- were now attempting to get the prisoners back under their control. One of them shouted at Lillandra, and several others had drawn their cutlasses and started to converge on her.

Arai grit his teeth. The explosion might have maimed half a dozen pirates -- there was blood all over the deck -- but it hadn't caused quite as much confusion as he had expected. And the sound of the explosion must have alerted others as well, because he was already hearing shouts of alarm coming from the harbor.

There wasn't enough time.

He turned to Lillandra. "Take Shell and get out of here," he said. "Use the Mermaid's Glass. They won't be able to find you under the water."

"What about you?"

"There's no time to argue!" he shouted. "Go!"

She gave him a lingering look, but she did as he bid, grabbing Shell by the wrist and pulling the elf girl over to the ship's railing. Shell, who had collected their zemi, and Arai's sword as well, dug the Mermaid's Glass out of her bag and handed it to Lillandra. And then, without another word, both of them dove into the water.