Cali twitched on her stool as she remembered Pip mentioning portable pastries for her journey. She hoped that wasn’t what was keeping her friends in the kitchen, but she suspected it was.
Sass clanked the tankards onto the bar and flicked her gaze toward the ceiling. “I blame that pirate.”
“Bonnie?” Cali felt a strange surge of defensiveness for the woman. “How can you blame her?”
Sass braced her hands on her hips and rapped one toe on the floorboards. “She walked in here, pretty as you please, in the middle of Lira’s wedding.” She scrunched her lips to one side. “In the middle of a storm, no less.”
“The storm is hardly her fault—“ Cali said before Sass’s complaints rode roughshod over her.
“Now she’s lured you away with the promise of an adventure on a notorious pirate ship.” Sass made a noise in the back of her throat. “Aye, mark my words, this will come to no good.”
“I’m not being lured,” Cali said in protest. “I volunteered to help find Marina.”
“You were volun-told is more like it.” Sass scoffed, the sound loud enough to startle Thrain awake for a beat. His eyes flew open before he sank back into the chair and resumed snoring.
“Don’t think I don’t have a bone to pick with Iris over that.” Sass leaned closer to Cali, eyeing her up and down. “But how do we know you weren’t coerced into agreeing? That pirate might be part sea fey, if you ask me. And you can’t trust the fey.”
Cali didn’t take the dwarf’s words too seriously because she’d also loudly proclaimed that you couldn’t trust elves before becoming best friends with Lira, who was half-elf.
Vaskel rolled his eyes, his chuckle velvety. “She’s not a sea-fey.”
“And I’m not being coerced,” Cali said with a smile as she slid off the stool, “I told you I’ll be back before you know it. Speaking of leaving, I suppose I’d better head back to my room to pack.”
Sass harrumphed. “This isn’t the kind of journey you should take on your own.”
“Are you offering to join me?” Cali teased.
The dwarf’s brown skin took on a green tinge as she shook her head. “Dwarves were not made for the water. We sink like stones.”
Cali understood being hesitant around water. Pantheris didn’t sink, but they avoided water whenever possible. She tried not to think of this as she headed for the door. “I don’t plan to end up in the sea.”
“No one ever does,” Sass called after her.
Six
Morning light slippedbetween the sun-faded curtains and soaked the scuffed wooden planks of her room. Cali tapped one foot as she eyed the contents of the standing wardrobe and lamented to herself that she had nothing to wear for a pirate adventure.
The burgundy vest and matching trousers she’d worn for the wedding now hung neatly inside because, if there was one thing she knew, it was that she wouldn’t need anything nearly so fancy on a ship. She folded a pair of dark pants into her satchel, then added a patterned kerchief to tie back her hair.
It was hard to believe that the wedding—and the pirates showing up—had only been the previous night. Which meant that she didn’t have much longer to pack.
“It’s not like you won’t be back,” she reminded herself. Even though she’d been restless in Wayside, it was her new home, and it was where her friends lived. Restlessness would pass. Friends who were like family were irreplaceable.
Not that she wasn’t secretly relishing the fact that Iris had volunteered her to the pirate captain. An adventure was exactly what she needed to forget Marina and her own foolishness. She suspected that Bonnie One-Eye was exactly the kind of person who could make her forget the hellkin. Her pulse quickened as she imagined the journey to Eldu with the pirate captain.
Stop it, Cal. This is exactly the kind of thinking that got you into the last mess.
She returned her focus to packing, glancing at the simple desk hunched under the window. Her leather-bound journal sat in the middle, the pages soft at the edges. She picked it up and thumbed through it, the scent of paper and ink comforting.
Well, she had to take her journal. She’d been documenting her adventures since she started crewing. There was no way she’d miss writing about a journey on a pirate ship. But she used her journal for more than recording stories. She also used it to keep track of all the places in The Known Lands that she’d visited and when, so she would know which places she’d already looked for Adelaide.
“Just because I haven’t found her doesn’t mean she’s not out there somewhere,” she told herself, just as she’d been telling herself since the day she returned to her crew’s camp and found Adelaide’s tent empty.
She tucked the journal into her knapsack and gave it a gentle pat, just as the door to her room flew open and banged against the wall.
“There you are!”
The hairs bristling on the back of her neck relaxed when she recognized Vaskel’s silhouette. “We don’t knock anymore?”
