Blue Sea Burning (21 page)

Laying Plans

“THEY'RE PIRATES,”
Millicent was saying. “Surely if we pay them enough, they'll do the job for us.”

“They're not exactly hurting for money just now,” I said. “And where would you get that much coin?”

That seemed to stump her. Millicent's only source of funds was her father, who'd not only disowned her, but wasn't likely to open his wallet so she could hire some men to bust the slaves out of his own silver mine.

“Dig that treasure up from Deadweather,” suggested Guts.

“There's a treasure on Deadweather?” Cyril raised his head from the pillow it was resting on and cocked an eyebrow. It was the first time he'd opened his mouth since we'd started brainstorming. Until then, he'd been stretched out on one of the beds in our hotel room, gazing up at the ceiling with that annoyingly superior smirk on his face.

“Keep yer
pudda
hands off it, Feathers!” Guts snarled.

“What did you call me?” Cyril asked him.

“Feathers.”

“And this is because . . . ?”

“Way your hair looks. Like feathers hangin' down.”

Cyril shrugged, then let his head sink back into the pillow. “Suppose I've been called worse.”

Millicent was chewing on her fingernail, deep in thought. “Depending on what's in the treasure . . .”

“Forget the treasure,” I said. “It doesn't matter how much money we've got to pay them. My uncle will never let his men help us.”

“Why not?” Millicent asked.

“For the same reason he wouldn't bail you out of jail. He doesn't want to get involved.”

“My people will help,” said Kira. “If we go to the New Lands, and find them in the mountains, their warriors will join us.”

“How long would it take to get there?” asked Millicent.

Kira shrugged. “Three days' sail? Then a few days overland, into the mountains—”

Cyril chuckled. “And then six months to build a ship that'll hold them all. Or did you think my little sloop could carry enough Okalu warriors to storm a silver mine?”

Millicent shook her head. “Ship or no ship, we haven't got that kind of time. We have to go
now
—while most of the soldiers from Sunrise are still off in Pella Nonna. Once they come back, it'll be too difficult.”

“How many soldiers they got now?” Guts asked.

“On Sunrise? I don't know,” admitted Millicent. “But not a lot.”

“How many is ‘not a lot'?” I asked.

“Thirty? Forty?”

“Easy peasy,” said Cyril. “That's, what? Seven or eight highly trained riflemen for each of us? What are we waiting for? Let's leave tonight.”

“You don't have to be sarcastic.” Millicent glowered at him. I couldn't help feeling a little pleased about that.

Cyril sighed and sat up straight. “As much as I admire everyone's idealism, do you have any idea how useless this entire conversation is?”

“We've got to stop it!” said Millicent.

“You
can't.
Not with force. Game it out, darling. Five of us, totally unarmed—”

“We can get arms,” I said. “That's easy enough.”

“Fine. Say we're armed. And you somehow manage not to shoot your own toes off—”

“I know my way round a gun,” snarled Guts.

Cyril sighed. “Whatever. Let's assume you even succeed. Storm the mine, free the slaves, miraculously get them off the island.
Then
what? I'll tell you what:
they'll get more slaves.
It'll be a setback. But in the long run, nothing will change.”

“The short run is good enough for me,” said Kira. “As long as the Okalu in that mine go free.”

It wasn't good enough for Millicent. “What are you saying, Cyril? That the island we grew up on is just evil, and there's nothing to be done about it? We should just get used to it?”

“No,” said Cyril. “But the fact is, if you really want to change what men
do,
you've got to change the way they
think.
Who's read
Liberty and Blood
?”

He looked around. None of us knew what he was talking about.

“Who's at least heard of it?”

No takers. “Well, that's rather tragic. What schools do you go to?”

“Never been to no school,” said Guts.

“Neither have I,” said Kira.

“I had a tutor,” I muttered, feeling my face turn red when I thought about how little I'd learned from Percy.

“Are you just trying to make everyone feel bad?” Millicent snapped at Cyril. His smirk vanished, and I nearly smiled myself. Seeing them fight gave me hope.

“No! It's a
very
well-known book. And dangerous. It's the reason I got kicked out of Thistlewick—because my mates and I were secretly printing copies and passing them around.”

“How is a book dangerous?” Kira asked him.

“Because of the ideas in it. About rights, and justice, and government—before I read it, I was as loyal a subject of King Frederick as anyone. And if I'd known there was slavery going on in that silver mine . . . well, I can't say I would've been too broken up about it.

“But once I read
Liberty and Blood,
it was like the scales had fallen from my eyes. I realized our whole system of government's rotten to the core, and it's got to be replaced if there's ever going to be any justice in this world.”

“What does this have to do with the silver mine?” I asked.

“Everything,” said Cyril. “Real, meaningful change starts in here—” He tapped his head. “And change like that doesn't come from a gun. It comes from ideas. What we need to do is get that book in the hands—”

“A book?!”
Guts snorted.
“Pudda — blun!
Wot you gonna do? Throw it at people?”

“Let me finish! Get it in the hands of the men who really hold the power. And make them see the folly of their ways.”

“No book is going to change my father's mind,” Millicent said, in a voice full of disgust.

“And there's no plan the five of us can cook up that's going to liberate that mine,” Cyril huffed. “Thirty soldiers are still thirty soldiers.”

Then they started to really go at it. I stopped listening to the argument, because I needed to think—if I could just come up with some kind of plan, good enough to not just free the slaves but show Millicent I was worth more than this twittering snob . . .

But the snob was right. We needed men.

“You want change, it's got to come from within!” Cyril was telling Millicent.

Come from within . . .

“They'll do it themselves,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“The slaves. There's probably hundreds of them. Right? So we just have to arm them, and open the gates or whatever, and they'll do the rest. They'll free themselves.”

Everyone's eyes widened . . . except Cyril's, which narrowed.

“You're going to haul two hundred rifles up a mountain? And give them to men who might not even know how to shoot?”

“Not rifles. Slings.” I looked at Kira. “Do you know how to make a sling?”

“Of course.”

“Could we make a lot of them? Hundreds?”

She began nodding eagerly.

“And there's no shortage of rocks in a mine—”

“Egg, this is brilliant!” Millicent was beaming at me.

Cyril had his mouth slightly open in a look of bewilderment. I couldn't help rubbing it in a little.

“You probably didn't learn this in your school,” I said, “but the Okalu fight with slings. If you know how to use one, they're every bit as good as a rifle. And a lot easier to haul up a mountain.”

“We'll need money for materials,” said Kira.

“I'm sure I can get that from my uncle,” I said. “He was free enough with the money we used to bribe Percy. And if we just need rope, cloth, and thread—it can't cost that much.”

The mood in the room had turned from gloomy to bright.

“This is really brilliant,” Millicent repeated.

“Nice thinkin',” Guts told me.

“Indeed!” said Cyril. The smirk was back on his face. “Congratulations. You've just devised the perfect plan for slaughtering a thousand innocent people.”

Everyone turned to stare at him.

“Once again: game it out,” he said. “You're going to put deadly weapons in the hands of a couple hundred freed slaves, then set them loose on an island full of the very people who enslaved them? If you think they
won't
take blood revenge on every man, woman, and child—”

“My people would not do that,” Kira said through gritted teeth.

“
All
people would do that,” he shot back at her. “It's human nature. And what's more—” Cyril turned back to me. “How do you propose to get all those freed slaves off the island? Because without some kind of escape plan, once they've finished slaughtering every Rovian on Sunrise, they'll be stranded there. And sitting ducks for the soldiers who show up to avenge the killing.”

The mood quickly turned gloomy again. Now it was Cyril's turn to rub it in.

“Other than that, it's perfect. Just got to tidy up the part where everybody dies.”

“Oh, shut up!” snapped Millicent. “It's like you don't even care!”

Cyril looked offended. “Of course I care! There's nothing more important to me than justice—”

“Or at least
talking
about it,” scoffed Millicent.

Cyril recoiled like he'd just been slapped. I had to bite my lip not to smile. A few more minutes of this, and there'd be no question who Millicent favored.

“Nonsense! I want to stop that slaving as much as you do! But we've got to come up with a plan that works!”

“Then help us come up with one! Stop shooting everything down with that stupid smirk on your face!”

For a moment, I thought Cyril was going to storm out of the room. I stared at the floor and prayed for it.

Please leave. Please leave. Please leave in a huff.

But in the end, he flopped back onto the bed and started to stare at the ceiling again, only without the smirk this time.

“We need a diversion,” he said. “To draw the troops away . . .”

IT WAS ALMOST TIME
for lunch when I finally came up with a diversion that made sense to everybody.

“Ripper Jones.”

“What about him?”

I told them what I'd heard from my uncle about the Ripper—that he'd been itching to attack Edgartown and Sunrise for years, and might even be planning a raid.

“So we'll tell the soldiers guarding the mine that the Ripper's just invaded Blisstown,” I said. “And they need to come quick and save us.”

From there, it took just a couple of minutes of back-and-forth to settle on the particulars: Millicent and Cyril would run screaming up to the mine, terrified out of their minds because the Ripper's crew had just landed and was going to put all of Sunrise to the knife if every able-bodied Rovian on the mountain didn't rush right down to the port to save the day.

“Then how do we free the Okalu?” asked Kira. “If they are locked up, how do we get the locks open?”

It took hours to puzzle that one out. Eventually, we tracked down a pirate from the
Grift
who'd worked as a locksmith, and learned from him that there were six or eight types of skeleton key, which between them should open just about any lock we might encounter. Then we found a smith in Edgartown who agreed to set us up with a full set of skeleton keys for thirty gold.

After that, it was on to the next question.

“So we're standing outside the mine with a couple hundred Okalu,” said Cyril. “How do we get them off the island without starting a war?”

“The same way they came in,” said Millicent. “Through the secret port in the cove on the south side of the island. If we do it in the middle of the night, they wouldn't be likely to run into any Rovians on the way.”

“What we gonna do for a boat?” asked Guts.

“Birch's slave ship,” said Millicent. She looked at Cyril. “When we left, it was docked in the cove. And no one was on it.”

“What if we get to Sunrise and it's not there anymore?” Cyril asked.

“Then we'll wait around until it is.”

“How do we sail it?”

That stumped everybody. By breakfast the next morning, the best we'd come up with was either to have someone teach us how to sail a ship that big ourselves—which seemed like it could take ages—or hire a crew, which promised to be not only expensive, but difficult.

“If you were a sailor,” asked Millicent, “how would you feel about getting approached by five teenagers who wanted to buy your services for a secret mission they wouldn't even describe to you beforehand?”