Anne Dray's Arc

Chapter 6 of 28

The captured treasure ship rode heavy behind Anne's warship, its broken rudder lashed straight. Anne had her proof for the free captains. Now she had to reach them alive. She spread Grimjack's charts across the wheel table and traced the strait home. The lines meant nothing to her. She looked up at the old navigator. "Show me the safe water." Grimjack limped over and pressed a thick finger to the chart. The brass compass swung at his chest. He squinted, then frowned. "These are forty years old. I drew them myself, when I was young and the channel was deep." He tapped a shaded patch. "Sand moves. What was open then may be a graveyard now. Run this line and we could plant our keel in mud with the whole fleet at our backs." Anne walked to the rail. Claire called down from the mast. Behind them, sails climbed the horizon. Crown ships. They would reach the narrows by dusk. "We can't wait for you to guess," Anne said. "Guess wrong and we run aground. They take us where we sit." Grimjack said nothing for a moment. Then he pointed past the strait's wide mouth to a black smudge of coast. "There's another way. A shallow cut nobody charts, because nobody sane sails it. Reefs on both sides. A ship your size scrapes through with inches to spare." He met her eyes. "I've done it once. In daylight. Sober." "Then do it again," Anne said. Emily crouched at the hull's seam and ran her palm along the planks. The exiled shipwright knew every timber she'd helped raise. "She'll take a scrape or two," Emily said. "I can plug what opens. But if we hole her below the line, I can't stop the sea." She stood and wiped her hands. "I trust your reading, old man. Don't make me a liar." Grimjack took the wheel himself. He steered the warship away from the open strait and toward the black coast. The channel narrowed. Reefs broke the surface on either side, close enough to touch. He read the water by its color, calling turns in a low voice. The hull groaned once, hard, and Emily bent to a leaking seam with tar and cloth. Anne held the rail and watched Grimjack's hands. The warship slid through. The treasure ship followed in its wake, rudder dragging but clear. Behind them the Crown fleet reached the strait's mouth and stopped. Their deep hulls could not follow through the reefs. Their sails shrank and fell away. Anne let out her breath. "Now the free captains." She looked at the treasure ship, at the gold that was less than she'd promised. The tavern waited on its remote shore. She had the proof they demanded. She had a debt she could not yet pay. And a weathered two-masted raider rode at anchor there, its lanterns lit, its captain among those she still had to convince.