Steel by Carrie Vaughn Read Free Book Online

how we scrub decks!”
    “Aye!” He’d been coiling rope with another sailor by the side of the ship, but he looked gleeful when Cooper called to him.
    Henry, the boy she’d fought. Who might have beaten her if the captain hadn’t stopped the duel. She didn’t want to face him. Cooper pulled him aside, and Jill caught a few whispered words: “Make sure Jenks and his crowd keep away from her.”
    “Aye,” he murmured back. Jill pretended not to hear, but she worried.
    Cooper straightened and called, “Off you go. Welcome to the Diana .”
    Jill didn’t feel very welcome. She’d play along just until she could find a way to get out of here. Somehow. But it was hard to escape from a boat in the middle of the ocean. Land was still in sight—a rough band of foliage on the horizon. But she didn’t know if it was the Bahamas, and she didn’t think she could swim so far.
    Then Henry was standing before her holding a brick-size rock, like a pumice stone, and a bucket. “Don’t take it personal. The newest bloke always scrubs the decks.” He held the stone and bucket out to her.
    The deck, which was probably only sixty feet long and twenty feet wide, suddenly looked as large as a football field. “The whole thing?” she said. “With this?”
    “Now you can guess why it’s always the job of the new bloke.” He was enjoying this.
    “But…I mean why bother? People walk around on this all day. It’ll never stay clean. Why bother scrubbing it?”
    “You don’t know? Really?” She looked blankly at him. “It’s the damp, the salt air, the mildew. It’ll rot the wood if we don’t keep it scrubbed. Wait’ll we have to careen her and scrub the rot off the hull. There’s a bloody dire job.”
    Stone in hand, Jill knelt and dreaded starting because it would take forever. She started in one corner in the back and ran the stone over the wood, polishing it. The deck was pale and smooth from all the previous scrubbing.
    Henry watched, sitting up on the side, leaning against a length of rigging, whittling on a piece of wood with a penknife, dropping shavings on her nice clean deck. Teasing her.
    “Do you have to sit there?” she said.
    “I need to keep a close eye on you. Make sure you don’t miss an inch. Try scrubbing in circles, it works better.”
    So she did, shifting sideways, until she’d reached the other side of the ship. Then she worked her way back. She could feel Henry watching her, an itching down her spine. He seemed to be far too pleased, watching her working on her hands and knees. Like he was gloating.
    “I gotta ask,” he said, putting the knife away. “Where’d you learn to fight so pretty? Like a picture in a book, you are. That’s no use in a real fight.”
    A real fight—that tournament was real fighting. At least, she’d thought so then. It was all this that wasn’t real. She paused a moment to glare at him. Just like she thought, he was teasing, and he didn’t let up. “I’m just trying to figure out what your story is. Most of us have pretty good stories, but you, finding you alive in that wreckage—seems like it ought to be right impressive.”
    “I don’t know what happened,” she said, her voice flat.
    “Don’t be sore. I’m just trying to be friendly,” he said.
    She glared again. She wasn’t in the mood.
    “Don’t you want to know how I ended up here?”
    “Not really.”
    “I was a lad on a merchant ship that the Diana captured. I got much the same offer you did, sign on with the crew here or be set adrift. But I didn’t have to think it over. My old captain was a mean one. A right bastard. Held back rations to raise profits, and us at the low end got shillings for our troubles, never mind shares. I tell you true, this place is a world better than where I came from. I wouldn’t trade it.”
    In spite of herself, she’d stopped scrubbing to listen to him, trying to imagine the world he might have come from. And she couldn’t. “I don’t belong here at