“How awful.” Blake gazed at Bee. “It’s hard to comprehend all the evil committed in the name of love.”
“Or greed,” I said, remembering Kashmir and Slate and the business I’d mostly forgotten all afternoon. I took a step back, toward the ship, suddenly anxious not to have Kashmir come up on deck and see us together. “Good night, Mr. Hart.”
“Until the full moon, Miss Song.” He tipped his hat to me, as though ready to leave, but he did not go. “I would like to ask,” he said after a moment. “I would be honored . . . if you would attend as my personal guest.”
“Oh? Oh! Oh, ah—I was attending with, uh . . . with my tutor, actually,” I finished lamely. Puzzlement flickered across Blake’s face; it was a terribly unbelievable story, for the time. “He is also my dancing instructor,” I extemporized.
“Do you dance much on the ship, then?”
“Ah. Well. You must have heard that dancing is a cure for seasickness!”
“Odd,” he said. “A sailor who gets seasick?”
I laughed a little. What else could I do?
“Well,” he continued, dropping the point. “Perhaps he would prefer to have the evening off? There are many events in Honolulu that night.”
“I . . . I know he is eager to attend the ball.”
“Ah. Then I will be pleased to see the both of you there,” he said, but he seemed less pleased than he had a moment before. He tipped his hat again. “Good night then, Miss Song.” He turned Pilikia toward home. Her ears swiveled forward, and she broke into a trot with little urging.
I climbed up the gangplank; here, on the deck of the ship, I was once more on firm footing. I met Bee’s eyes. “He doesn’t have any cattle either,” I told her, and she laughed.
Kashmir and Slate had not yet returned, so I needn’t have worried about being seen, though I could have been worrying about where they were. But I was too hungry to worry. I ate so fast I barely tasted my dinner, outpacing even Rotgut, although that may have been because he was telling me about the rock lobsters he’d caught on the reef, while I was focused more single-mindedly on consuming them. It was only shortly after I finished my bowl that I heard Kash and Slate tramping across the deck above my head.
After a moment of consideration, I made up two conciliatory bowls of stew and carried them topside. I found them together, their heads close. The captain’s face was drawn, and though they spoke in low tones, his gestures were emphatic, and he broke off abruptly when he saw me approach. Kashmir accepted the bowl gratefully, but Slate just shook his head.
It had been years since I’d last bothered trying to insist. I dug into the stew myself, more slowly this time. It was very good: huge chunks of white lobster in a broth rich with butter. Rotgut loved to eat well, and it showed in his cooking.
“So,” I asked. “How did it go? On a scale of one to treason?”
Kashmir barked a laugh, but Slate waved a dismissive hand. I pursed my lips. “I was worried about you,” I said to my father. He didn’t respond. “Worried you’d get shot.”
He folded his arms and glared off toward the blackness of the open sea. “We weren’t shot.”
“Yes, indeed, I see that now.”
“Thank you for your concern,” he said, stalking off to his room.
“You know we’d be stuck here if you died,” I called after him.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You wouldn’t be stuck,” he said, seeming to speak to the teak of the door. “You would find a way, Nixie. If you really wanted to escape.”
He shut the door behind him, and Blake’s words came back to me. “Why would I? This is home.” I shook them out of my head and slid down to sit against the bulwark, setting my half-empty bowl on my knees, suddenly uncomfortably full. “Ugh.”
“Today put him in a foul mood,” Kashmir said.
“I put him in a foul mood,” I corrected, leaving myself wide open, but Kash didn’t even seem to notice.
“Then today made it worse.” He tipped his own bowl and scraped the bottom with his spoon. Then he sat beside me and took my bowl from my hands.
“What happened?”
He made a face. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah. Shoot.”
“Ha ha. Well. We’ve encountered a few obstacles, the biggest one the weight of the gold. There’s no way to carry it away without help. Or at least a couple of draft horses. There’s also the Royal Hawaiian Guard to consider. It’s only fifty local boys in nice uniforms, but all it takes is one lucky shot. Slate was talking about hiring mercenaries, but—”
“Ugh, not really?”
Kashmir shrugged. “He didn’t seem happy about it.”
“Where would he find them? The map ends a hundred miles out to sea. How would we get back here? And can you imagine having mercenaries aboard? Or, God, unleashing them here?”
“I don’t know, amira. It’s a last resort. He doesn’t want any bloodshed.”
“Well, then, he shouldn’t be considering piracy.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”