Revenge Of Captain Rogers

The first cannonball cut through the rigging above Captain Rogers’s head and tore the moon from the water in a spray of black foam.

Elias dropped behind the quarterdeck rail as splinters snapped across his cheek. Around him, Blackwake Bay erupted. Lanterns swung from masts, throwing broken gold over crowded decks and narrow channels. Ships knocked together in the dark, their hulls groaning like wounded beasts. Somewhere beyond the smoke, a bell clanged three times.

“Port guns!” Elias shouted. “Bring her around!”

No one moved.

A second shot struck the mainmast. The mast shuddered, ropes shrieked, and a man fell from the yards into the press of deckhands below. Elias rose with his pistol drawn.

“Port guns, damn you!”

His crew stood frozen - not from fear, he realized, but from waiting.

The man beside the larboard cannon lifted his match. Elias saw the red ember, saw the cannon turned not toward the attacker but toward the quarterdeck.

“Down!” cried Elias.

The gun fired.

The blast punched through the night. Heat washed over him. The quarterdeck rail burst apart, and Elias was thrown against the wheel. Pain flashed through his ribs. He hit the planks hard, one hand closing around the spokes to keep from sliding across the deck.

When he looked up, the crew had drawn steel.

His own men.

The ship that had opened fire on them came drifting through the smoke, black sails reefed, lanterns hooded. Its bow bore the pale carving of a hooked jaw. Elias knew that shape. Every captain who traded in Blackwake Bay knew it.

The Rook.

A grappling hook clanged against the rail. Then another.

“Captain,” said a voice near the foremast, “you should have taken the offer.”

Elias turned. The speaker was Harlan, his boatswain, a broad man whose hands had once hauled Elias from a burning wreck. Blood ran from a cut above Harlan’s eyebrow, though Elias could not tell whose blade had made it.

“What offer?”

Harlan’s mouth tightened. “The one you were too proud to hear.”

Men from the Rook swarmed over the rail. Their boots struck the deck in heavy rhythm. Elias fired at the first face he saw. The man spun backward, dropping into the darkness between the ships.

“Who sold us?” Elias demanded.

Harlan advanced with a cutlass lowered at his side. “You did, Captain. Every man aboard knows it.”

“I did?”

“You took the cargo meant for Governor Vale. You kept the payment. Then you blamed the crew when the governor’s hunters came.”

“That cargo was stolen from children starving in Saint Brine.”

“And now half our crew is dead.”

The accusation landed harder than the cannon blast. Elias saw the empty places among the men: Sutter, gone from the helm; Pell, who had slept beneath the forward stairs; young Niles, who had laughed whenever the sea turned rough. Their absence became a weight in the smoke.

A blade slashed toward his throat.

Elias caught Harlan’s wrist with both hands. The boatswain drove forward, using his weight to crush Elias against the wheel. The wheel’s broken spokes dug into his back.

“Listen to me,” Elias growled. “If I had sold you, the hunters would not have needed the Rook.”

Harlan hesitated.

That breath was enough. Elias drove his forehead into Harlan’s nose. Bone cracked. Harlan staggered, and Elias wrenched the cutlass free.

A pistol barked from the darkness.

Harlan jerked. His eyes widened. He fell against Elias, hot blood soaking through Elias’s shirt before sliding to the deck.

Elias shoved him aside and saw the shooter: one of the Rook’s men standing atop the rail, pistol smoking.

“Take the captain alive!” someone shouted.

That was the first truth Elias had heard all night.

He ran.

The quarterdeck had become a trap of broken timber and tangled rope. Men fought among the cannons, slipping on blood and seawater. Elias vaulted the rail onto the lower deck of a neighboring sloop. The sloop’s owner screamed and swung a belaying pin at him.

“Move,” Elias said.

“Get off my ship!”

Elias ducked the pin, seized the man’s coat, and flung him into a stack of barrels. “Then pray I do.”

Behind him, the Rook’s men poured across the gap. A bullet punched through the sloop’s mast. Elias sprinted toward the bow, but Blackwake Bay offered no clear path. Boats crowded every channel, tied three and four abreast. Lanterns swung from their prows. Sailors shouted, cursed, and shoved away from the fighting ships, only to collide with others fleeing the same storm.

He leapt onto a fishing boat, then onto a low barge loaded with salt crates. The bay bucked beneath him. Oars struck water in frantic, uneven beats.

“Captain Rogers!” called a voice from the Rook. “The ledger, Captain!”

Elias stopped.

The ledger.

He had left it in his cabin, hidden beneath the false floor where he kept the records no crewman was meant to see. It held cargo marks, payments, and names copied from letters taken in Governor Vale’s warehouse. If the betrayal had been arranged, the proof would be there.

The Rook’s men knew it.

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