Free The Buccaneer's Apprentice by V. Briceland Page A

stranger had been caught in some sort of trap. The rope suspending him had been tied to the top of a young but sturdy tree that even now bobbed and flexed as the man struggled. He took a step forward, so he could see better. “What are you—?”
    Too late did Nic hear the warning crack beneath his feet. He did not see the stones fly that he had disturbed with his step. Had he noticed the lithe tree bent almost double among the other tree trunks, he might have been more wary, but the second trap caught him completely off-guard. In mere seconds, all the blood in his body seemed to be rushing to his head. His world was upside down. He watched, dizzy, as his sword fell from his hands and onto the ground, six feet below.
    Worse than being tricked in such a way was the man’s reaction. “Ah-hah-hah-hah!” he howled, his laughter echoing throughout the wooded area. For a long minute he laughed and laughed. Tears ran from his eyes onto his forehead and into his hair, carrying more of the blue dye with it. So hard did the man shake and guffaw that he began to spin at the end of his rope. Slapping his knees with mirth didn’t help to slow him down.
    “Oh, shut your mouth.” Now that he was face-to-face with the man, although upside down, Nic was certain he was a pirate, probably escaped from the conflagration two nights before. Nic was trapped, and it was his own fault. The rope that had captured his leg was knotted in a complicated pattern that clutched his ankle like a vise. He couldn’t even find the beginning or end of it. “What do you know about Cassaforte, anyway?”
    “Cassafort City,” the man said again, almost as if correcting him. “She too is from Cassafort City.”
    “Who?” Nic might have understood the man’s words, but he made no sense. “Who is from Cassaforte Cit … Cassaforte?”
    “She.” When Nic shook his head, the man pointed down. “She.”
    A girl stood on the ground below Nic, her eyes blue and her hair long and golden. In her hands she carried a long club, heavy and blunt. She swung it hard at Nic’s head before he could think to dodge. He had only one coherent thought as he sank once more into unconsciousness: that the girl was the loveliest pirate he was ever likely to see.

It was due to a tiresome error on the part of a housemaid that we received tickets to see not the Marvelous Theatre playing near the city’s center, but to see some third-rate, attenuated troupe called the Theatre of Marvels appearing in the southwest. My ears are still ringing from the two hours of mugging we had to endure, and I have taken steps to dismiss the housemaid.
    —Palmyria Falo, of the Thirty, in a letter to her mother

    W hen Nic’s eyesight had begun to focus on the rocks above his head a few hours before, he first wondered if he’d been dragged back to his own shelter. He was in another cavern of sorts, but its craggy ceiling was higher and the sand rockier beneath his feet. Not that he could move his feet. They had been bound fast with rope and tied to his similarly restrained wrists, so that he was curled into an uncomfortable ball, only able to lie on either side, or to pull himself up and sit on his behind. He’d had a brief notion of rolling himself around the crates and sacks and out from the cave mouth to escape, but a mouthful of sand and an uncertainty of who might be out there had so far prevented him. The back of his head throbbed. He wished he had a little more freedom with his hands.
    What he wished had been tied—gagged thoroughly, in fact—was his companion’s mouth. The blue-faced pirate with whom he’d been captured hadn’t stopped talking since Nic had woken. “When you making the pirate? Eh? Eh?” he was asking now. His attempts to speak in Nic’s tongue were heavily accented. Nic knew nothing about the language of Charlemance, but apparently the inhabitants of the city of Longdoun all spoke as if they had mush in their mouths. When Nic didn’t reply, the pirate