Free Steel by Carrie Vaughn Page A

While eating, they began to smile, and even laugh, almost delirious. Their interpreter spoke to Abe, who answered him as kindly as he’d spoken to her. Jill couldn’t imagine what they were thinking.
    She’d been feeling sorry for herself ever since that tournament, so upset because she couldn’t make a decision about what to do next—but at least she had choices, and a future to go with them. And all she’d done since coming to the Diana was complain that she didn’t belong here. Well, neither did they. And she hadn’t come here in chains. She had nothing to complain about. Nothing. While she still felt trapped here, she suddenly felt lucky.
    Well after dark, the new passengers began to sing. The voices were soft, wavering—still weak. Like the lantern light, the words and tunes seemed to rise up among the sails, to echo above them, sounding larger than they were. Jill sat against the side of the ship, near the stern, just out of sight of the small celebration. She didn’t want to be seen. But she tipped her head back and stared up, watching the patterns of light and shadow on rippling sails, feeling the vibration as someone pounded a beat on the deck.
    When Henry bounded in front of her, dropping from some unseen spot above, she gasped, flinched, and banged her head on the ship’s rail. He laughed, taking a cross-legged seat nearby, a shadow just at the edge of the lantern light. His eyes gleamed, like this was all a big party to him.
    Rubbing her head, she muttered, “What do you want?”
    “I wanted to congratulate you on surviving your first battle,” he said.
    Frowning, she looked away. That wasn’t a battle, it was a raid, a true pirate raid. Or a rescue mission? She’d only watched, dumbstruck. “I didn’t do anything.”
    He shrugged. “You didn’t interfere. You didn’t make an ass of yourself. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.”
    That almost sounded like a compliment. “What happens next?”
    “I’m guessing we’ll sail for Jamaica. There’s a place there we can let them off and they’ll be safe.” He nodded toward the middle of the ship and the group of former slaves. “Some pirates would sell ’em off in Havana, but not us. We may stop somewhere to provision first. However the captain chooses.”
    None of those plans seemed to offer Jill a way home. But Captain Cooper wasn’t taking her into account—Jill had signed on as crew, hadn’t she? She was bound by the captain’s articles.
    Henry lingered, not smiling this time, not taunting. Just quietly watching her, as if he knew she wanted to talk, which gave her the courage to ask, “Does this happen a lot? Have you done this before?”
    “Done what, capture a ship? Of course, plenty of times.”
    “But a slave ship,” she said.
    He glanced upward, maybe seeing the same patterns she did. But then he’d probably lived on the ship for years. The view may have seemed ordinary to him. “We try. Because of Abe, you see. It’s where he came from. He’d stop every one of those ships sailing from Africa if he could. He’d give up his share of every other haul we make to stop the trade. He can’t. But we try.”
    “What about you?” she said, the question sticking in her throat, because she had a sudden image of Henry, beaten and in chains, and she hated thinking of him like that, however much he might annoy her. It was the opposite of Henry as she saw him now—smiling, bright, fit, alive.
    “What about me? Did I come from Africa on a ship like that?” he said, and shrugged. “My mum did, not that she ever talked about it. I was born here, on the islands. Jamaica, in fact.”
    “And your father?”
    He snorted. “Who knows? Some English sailor stopped in port, I reckon. I was bound to turn pirate, wasn’t I? A half-breed bastard like me.”
    He grinned like it was a joke, but she turned away. She wanted to tell him what would happen with the slave trade, how many more decades of suffering were ahead of them, that it