Bait

Part 1

"Cod is a trash fish and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."

It seems that we've devolved into the whining portion of the day.

Silver slouched even further into her chair and poked at her bowl. Cod stew. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For two weeks. If she never saw a cod again it would be too soon. "They don't even season it," she cried, shoving at her spoon, throwing cold chunks of stew across the table. "They just boil it with onions and potatoes. Everything is boiled with fucking onions and potatoes."

Don't forget the cabbage.

Echo frowned at her friend, not for the first time, jealous that she couldn't just subsist on carrion like he did. She'd tried it once and consequently, spent the next three nights hurling her guts up. "Spirits forbid I forget the cabbage."

Because a raven needn't concern himself with cabbages or cod, Memphis simply preened his feathers as Silver fussed over the sludgy remains of her meal. Outside the inn, rain fell in frosted sheets, slicking the cobblestones and turning the air to ice. As if today needed to be any more miserable.

At least there was a fire going in the taproom. Silver yawned. She'd come to this stupid town because she heard of an old, broken down castle in the mountains up here. Knowing from experience that abandoned places held a number of unusual, interesting, and often valuable things, Silver went digging. The place had been pretty picked over already. Everything shiny had already been taken, down to the doorknobs. Silver had walked away with a tortoiseshell comb, a couple of tapestries that didn't look too bad, and a tome titled The Pocket Menagerie. The comb and the hangings she sold in town. The book she kept.

Silver fought off another yawn. If the old clock in the corner was any count, the time was inching towards noon. But there was something about this town that just sapped the life from her bones. Any longer here, and she'd start to grow mushrooms. "I'm tired of Broz," she said, not quite managing to scrub the whine from her voice. "Let's go somewhere warm."

Warm is south, Memphis said. What's south of here?

The rain was still hurling just outside the window. With a view like that, it was hard for her to imagine anything but frostbitten wind and ice floes. "A lot of places are south of here," she told her friend. "It's not a matter of what's down there, but who's going that way."

We're not stowing away this time, Memphis demanded. I won't be subject to you sweating in a small box for days on end.

"Fine," Silver agreed. She didn't really feel like squeezing herself into a cargo hold this time anyway. "Come on then. The faster we find a ship, the faster I can get some real food."

After about an hour of getting rained on and arguing with just about every captain on this dock, Silver was ready to call it quits and swim her way south.

Then, in a bogged-up corner of the harbor, Silver found her ship.

And what a monster it was. The unholy union between a steamer and a sail ship, she was slim and sleek, her oaken hull stained black with tar and laced with veins of steel. Bright red paint across her rear claimed her as The Queen Ripper.

Four serrated, wicked looking harpoons sat mounted on either side of her. There was only one reason a ship needed those. "Ripper indeed," Silver said on a whistle. A vessel fit for hunting pirates.

A man stood alone on the dock, arms crossed, watching as what had to be the rest of the crew loaded supplies on board.

"Interesting looking rig," Silver called out to him, still eyeing the harpoons. "Are you the captain?"