Ann smiled again, then glanced at the buoy. She cranked the cannon to the side. Then cranked it some more. Then some more.
“Um, Ann?” Tress said, pointing. “The buoy is that way.”
Ann followed her pointing, then looked at the cannon—which was at least thirty degrees off. “Looks good to me.”
“Trust me,” Tress said. “Crank it back.”
Ann did so reluctantly. She grabbed the firing rod from its bucket. Then—grinning like an undertaker in a war zone—she fired.
Both of them waited, anticipating the worst. And Tress did smell a distinctive metallic scent. The cannonball hit the Verdant Sea behind, then vanished. Without harming anyone.
I’ll be honest, I was a little surprised myself.
“Thank you,” Ann said softly. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t really anything,” Tress said.
“It was everything,” Ann said. “I was beginning to believe, Tress. What they said. About me being cursed. I’m not. I just…well, I have bad aim.” She looked out over the ocean, then wiped her eyes. “Not cursed. You don’t understand how much I needed to know that.”
“Join me each day,” Tress said. “Take a shot with me. We can get better together.”
“Deal.”
“Oh,” Tress said. “One other thing. Do you know if the ship has a flare gun?”
“Of course,” Ann said. “You need them if you get stranded, or to surrender to pirates. Oh! Guess we don’t need to worry about that anymore. Surrender means death to us. Anyway, you should be able to get one from Fort.”
Ann excused herself after that—tears of joy aren’t exactly a good match with an unprotected part of the ship. Tress settled down, thinking about people and how the holes in them could be filled by such simple things, like time, or a few words at the right moment. Or, apparently, a cannonball. What, other than a person, could you build up merely by caring?
Eventually Tress fired a few shots of her own. （They all missed too.） As she was cleaning up afterward, the ship finally turned upon the captain’s order. This time no rains chased them off as they entered the Crimson Sea.
THE CHEF
The following evening, Tress took stock of the ship’s cooking ingredients. What she found was not inspiring. Stale flour, very few useful seasonings, rancid oil. And the ship’s oven? Fueled by sunlight spores in a way that made the kilnlike device heat in an impossibly uneven way. A quick test of wet flour on a baking pan proved that.
No wonder Fort had difficulty cooking anything without burning it. Indeed, it was possible he did it on purpose in order to cover up the awful flavor of the ingredients. She gave him a look with folded arms, and he shrugged. They didn’t need his writing board for that exchange.
“All right,” she said, handing him the bottle of rancid oil. “Toss this overboard. It’s too far gone.”
He regarded it with a thoughtful eye, the bottle looking much smaller in his enormous hands, held between two curled, broken fingers. He was so big, Tress couldn’t help wondering if he was fully human—which was understandable, but all joking aside, Fort was a hundred percent human. Plus at least twenty percent of something else I haven’t been able to determine.
“Trust me,” Tress said. “We can make something of the flour, but there’s no good use for the oil.”
That you know of, he wrote. You’d be surprised at the things people will trade for. He tucked it away. Together, they occupied the ship’s small kitchen, which wasn’t much bigger than Fort’s quartermaster office—though this room had counters running all around with cupboards underneath, broken only by the door on one side and the oven on the other.
“Here,” Tress said, pushing a small pile of kulunuts across the counter to him. “Mash these.”
Mash?
“Yes, and do it in the mortar so you don’t lose any of the liquid. Kulunuts have a lot of fat to them, and we’re going to need that, since the oil is bad.”
He shrugged, doing as she ordered while Tress made some small alterations with pans to turn the oven into a steamer. “For a more even bake,” she explained at his curious expression. “Steam is a good conductor.”
But aren’t we making bread?
“Nut bread,” she said, sifting the flour to check for any mold. Old flour she could work with, but moldy flour? That was far worse. Fortunately, this seemed dry and pure enough. “We need to avoid basic breads. Old flour has a bad taste, but it won’t make us sick. So we need something where taste won’t be too noticeable. Kulunut bread should be workable—and we can steam it.”
He took her at her word, continuing to mash. Over the next hour, Tress found herself falling back into old routines. How many times had she cooked food for her parents, using whatever they could afford or scavenge? There was a calming familiarity about doing so again, if on a much larger scale.
She hoped her parents were doing all right without her. She’d intended to write to them, but with all that had happened… Suddenly she felt guilty for having wished for more letters from Charlie. If his experiences on the seas had been anything like hers, then it was a miracle he’d found time to send her what he had.
Fort didn’t fill the time with idle chitchat, and while you might ascribe this to his deafness, I’ve known more than a few Deaf people who were quite the blabberhands. Fort watched everything she did carefully—and she found his attention difficult to interpret. Was he trying to learn from her? Or was he suspicious of her?
Uncertain, she popped out the first of her test cakes, sliced off a corner, and offered it to him. Fort picked it up between the sides of his hands. He inspected it. Sniffed it. Tried it. Then cried.
This type of response will send any artist into a panic. Tears wash away the middle ground—all the infinite permutations of mediocre are eliminated, and two options remain: one sublime, the other catastrophic. For a moment, both interpretations existed in a kind of quantum state for Tress. And people wonder why artists so often abuse drink.
Fort reached for another bite.
Tress’s sigh of relief could have filled the sails. She went back to chopping gull—this, thankfully, was fresh—for the meat pies. But Fort tapped her on the shoulder.
How did you do that? he wrote. I watched for sleight of hand.
“What would I use sleight of hand for?”
Secret ingredients. Swapping one cake for another, pre-prepared.
“Are you always this suspicious?”
I’m a quartermaster on a pirate ship, he said.
“Well, there were no swapped cakes,” she said. “And no secret ingredients other than practice and resourcefulness.”
He reached for a third bite.
“How much,” she said as she chopped, “would you say a meal like this each day would be worth?”
Fort stood up straight, then eyed her, smiling slyly. Oh, I guess that’s a matter for debate, isn’t it?
“That third bite you took suggests the debate is already over.”
He hesitated, mid-finger-lick. Then he typed, I thought you said you weren’t tricking me.
“Curious,” she said. “I don’t remember saying that. I only stated that the bread was genuine. Not that I wasn’t trying to trick you. Care for a fourth piece?”