Fourteen

Tobias

Things Tobias had learned during that talk with Mary: mermaids were real, she was a princess, and Jack could swap between the two forms as needed. Oh, and mermaids were real .

It was blowing his mind a little bit.

Partly because Blackbeard had been right .

There'd been a moment when Tobias had been a lad of just eight or nine, and Blackbeard had decided to "teach him the stars."

"The best captains are their own navigators," he'd said. "You must learn how to find the ship's latitude. You must know how to read a map." Blackbeard shuffled through several papers on his desk—a fascinating pile of various maps and charts. Then Tobias spotted the drawing of a mermaid.

"Why do you have this?" he asked with a fearful shiver. "Mermaids are bad luck, Pa. If you look into the ocean and say the word mermaid three times, one will appear out of the water and eat your face off!"

Blackbeard drew back. "Who told you such a thing?"

"Johnny Silver in my class."

Blackbeard gave a hearty laugh. "Well, that's not true." He pulled the drawing out from under the other papers to show Tobias. This mermaid was beautiful, with long flowing hair and a piercing yet somehow kindly gaze. No fangs. "Mermaids are magical, my son. They're good luck, they are. Count yourself most fortunate if you ever encounter one."

Well, now Tobias had.

He couldn't help but wonder what Blackbeard would think of his current circumstance.

The existence of mermaids kept popping up in Tobias's thoughts at the strangest of times, such as when he wandered down to the galley to see what was for dinner, and Mr. Child had a dozen fish spread out on cutting boards. Mary used to have a tail like that , he found himself thinking, and later he couldn't eat anything but the beets Mr. Child had served up as a side.

And, of course, whenever he looked out into the water, he found himself straining to see some kind of kingdom under the surface. Maybe a mermaid looking back up at him. Should he wave if he saw one? Or pretend like nothing was going on? What if he said mermaid into the water three times? Would one actually appear?

Finally, there was that time he was on the main deck taking noonday sights and caught Mary with the hourglass in her hand, a brief, worried expression passing over her face.

If they didn't win the contest, her father—the actual king of the sea—would come find her and take her away, and Tobias would never see her again.

He could not let that happen.

And so, he focused fully (or, rather, as much as he was able, given this new reality he was getting used to) on the task at hand: getting his pa's treasure, returning to Nassau, and seeing Mary crowned Pirate Queen.

Unfortunately, they hadn't been able to take the Kingston . Nor did they have time to go looking for another ship. The three they had would have to be enough.

The first part of their journey was simple enough. They sailed to North Carolina, which took nearly a week. Once they reached North Carolina, they had to leave the fleet of ships in a place called Pamlico Sound and take a rowboat up the river to Plum Point, a large expanse of property the governor of North Carolina had bestowed upon Blackbeard when the old pirate had made a deal with him that he wouldn't attack any of the governor's ships.

"I'm coming, too," Anne insisted when Mary assigned herself, Jack, and Tobias to the initial scouting party. "You'll need another person who can scrap, if there's a fight."

"There won't be a fight," Tobias said.

"There will be if I don't get to go with you," she pointed out.

So they all piled into a single rowboat, and off they rowed.

It was the dead of night and pitch-black out when they finally made it up the river to Plum Point. All around were trees with Spanish moss hanging in dark clumps, fireflies swinging in and out and out of them, a pale blue mist rolling over the ground. Tobias and Anne kept stumbling as they came up the path from the shore. They were having a much worse time of it than Jack and Mary, he noticed, who could see better in the dark than he could. (It must be a Mer thing.)

They passed a creepy little shack where an old man was playing an out-of-tune banjo on the front porch. Then Plum Point Manor loomed out of the dark ahead of them. Tobias's breath caught. Even though his feelings about Blackbeard were complicated, he still couldn't help the thrill that shivered through him. His father's house.

Was it Tobias's house now? He didn't know.

They reached the front steps of the house, which was dark—no lights in the windows, no smoke curling from the chimney, no creepy banjo music. It was clear that no one was home. Tobias stared at the house for a long moment, looking into the space where his pa should be.

"He never felt at home here," Tobias said. "He couldn't find his land legs."

He turned and started walking briskly away.

"Wait!" Mary called, running to catch up with him. "Aren't we going in?"

"Nope."

"But isn't the house where we'll find the treasure?"

He didn't answer. He just led them behind the house to a rocky field where, at the far edge, he knew they'd find an oven-like structure made of bricks.

"What's this?" Jack asked, baffled.

"It's called the Kettle," Tobias said. "It's where Pa made tar for sealing the hulls of his ships."

Anne eyed the thing doubtfully. "It doesn't look like any kettle I ever saw."

"It isn't like any kettle you ever saw." Tobias kicked around in the dirt at the base of the structure for a while. Then, presently, he bent and picked something up. A large, rusty key.

The group swiveled again to look at the oven.

Tobias brushed aside a bit of greenery from the top of the Kettle, revealing a hole in the brick just big enough for a person to fit an arm into. There was a message etched into the brick right above it in surprisingly fancy script: Give me a Hand.

His father had made a joke of that, every time they'd come here. Which had been often.

Tobias glanced around, keeping his expression sober. "Anyone know how to stop excessive bleeding? Because if I don't do this right... well, there's a reason so many of my father's men had hooks."

Anne, Jack, and Mary gave a collective gulp.

"No? Oh well, here goes." Tobias thrust his hand (which was holding the key) into the hole.

"Be careful," said Mary.

There was a bit of scratching and the sound of metal on metal. Then came a loud metallic click.

And Tobias screamed.

They all rushed to him, Anne yanking off her belt to serve as a tourniquet, Mary tearing a piece of her shirt off as a bandage. Jack found a stick that he could bite.

But then, as they pulled him back from the hole, Tobias gave a halfhearted laugh.

"I'm just kidding," he said. "I'm fine."

He held up his hand and wiggled his fingers for them to see.

Jack gave a grudging smile. "Oh, I see," he said. "You wanted to scare us in order to be humorous and entertaining."

"Yes, that was the plan," Tobias said ruefully.

Anne grinned. "Classic!"

Mary said nothing. Her hand was at her chest, clutching the shirt/bandage. Then she scowled and hit him hard on the arm.

"Don't ever do that!" She blinked several times and dashed the strip of torn shirt against her eyes. "That's an order!"

"Aye, Captain," he said. "Sorry, Captain."

"Now, about that key?" Jack said.

They all turned their attention to the hole again. Under the hole a metal plate had popped out from the wall. Tobias swung it open, revealing a crank.

"Anyone want to volunteer to turn the crank?" Tobias laughed again weakly.

No one did.

Tobias put his shoulder against the wall and turned the crank smoothly. They all heard another metallic grinding noise, and then a trapdoor began to slide open in the floor of the Kettle, leading down into a dark passageway.

"Gawl," said Anne.

Tobias lit the lantern and led them through the narrow passageway until it opened into a small cave, and at the other end of the cave was a set of long wooden stairs leading farther down into the dark. There was another little message posted: Walk on the Left side.

"Now we're getting somewhere!" Mary grabbed the lantern away from Tobias and started enthusiastically down the stairs.

"Wait!" Tobias called after her.

Mary hated waiting, as he knew well. But she only got about halfway down the stairs (treading carefully on the left, as the sign had instructed) when the wooden steps gave way beneath her and she plunged down, down, down. She only just managed to catch herself by one hand on what was left of the stairs, swinging and then dangling from the edge. Her lantern smashed on the rocks (and a nasty assortment of sharpened spears) below her.

"Mary!" Tobias ran down the steps (smartly keeping to the right) and grabbed her hand and sleeve and whatever else he could reach. "Here—"

"I'm all right," Mary gasped, still dangling. "I can manage myself."

The corner of his mouth quirked up. "Oh, can you now?"

She reached for him with her other hand, and he caught it. He hauled her to her feet, drawing her close to his chest for the briefest of comforting moments, but she pulled back from him as Jack and Anne descended to meet them. "Why in blazes did he instruct us to walk on the left side?"

"Pa had an odd sense of humor," Tobias admitted.

"Like father, like son," Mary scoffed, and then stepped back against the wall and gestured for Tobias to go first as they proceeded. He took the scrap of shirt from Mary and the stick from Jack and made a handy torch out of it, which was good, because the lantern was long gone. Much more slowly and carefully, the group went down the stairs. At the bottom there was a locked metal door, which Tobias opened using the same key he'd retrieved from the hole earlier.

They had to push hard to get the door to open, as it was partially rusted.

"This is it," Tobias said. "Treasure enough to win the contest."

"This wasn't nearly as hard as you made it sound like it would be," Mary said. "I thought you said there'd be more booby traps."

"Well..." Tobias shrugged. "The stairs counted as one."

"I'm not complaining," Jack said. "All I want is a thousand pieces of eight."

"I want more than that," Anne said. "I want to dive into a vault of gold coins and swim around—"

"Let's not count our coins before they clink," Mary said as they stepped inside.

On the other side of the door was still another cave. Tobias had always felt cozy in there, with some of the walls covered with sails to give the impression of a real interior. It was also crowded with an assortment of odd furniture: a tiny table bearing a chessboard and ivory and ebony pieces, an old pianoforte with several missing keys, the top of a ship's crow's nest braced against the ceiling of the cave with various trinkets and bottles and brightly colored fabric hanging down from it. A chandelier fashioned from the wheel of another ship. A bar (of course) and an assortment of barstools, flanked by a few barrels of what could have once held gunpowder or rum.

But now, Tobias's heart was sinking.

"Look!" Anne exclaimed behind him. "Blackbeard's flag."

Anne, Jack, and Mary stood a long time looking at the flag. (Tobias barely gave it a second glance, as he'd seen it many times before.) It was a horned skeleton who with one hand held up a goblet (apparently to toast the devil) while the other hand grasped a sword and stabbed it into a perfect red heart with three drops of blood spilling out.

"What does it mean?" Anne asked, awe filling her tone.

"Who can say?" Jack shook his head. "The messaging is all over the place."

Anne patted Jack's arm. "Your flag is much better. I'm sure soon enough all pirates will come to stand behind the skull and crossbones. Now that's a message. But can I have this?"

"Sure, whatever," said Tobias. "But the treasure..."

Mary glanced around furtively. "There is no treasure here."

Anne turned a small circle, her sharp eyes scanning every corner. "It's just... stuff."

The hard truth settled over them all. There wasn't a gemstone in this room, nor a single coin. The only promising items were a few old trunks scattered about, but upon inspection they were stuffed with damp, moth-eaten old clothes. Even the candlesticks on the large table in the center of the room weren't real silver, but pewter, and the table itself was strewn with ruined books and inscrutable maps.

"What the fish?" Mary spat. "Tobias? You said it would be here."

"I thought it would! He must have moved it somewhere else before he..." He glanced around, but there was nothing but maps and books.

His heart grew heavy. If Blackbeard had moved the treasure, then it meant that he hadn't wanted Tobias to have it. All that talk about being the heir... and in the end, their final argument had won out. Tobias had said he didn't want to be the Pirate King—and clearly Blackbeard had, in the end, agreed with him.

"What are you looking at?" Mary stepped into Tobias's line of sight and he realized he'd been staring into space. "This?" She pointed at a map.

Wait... a map!

He surged toward the table and began rummaging around, pulling out maps and discarding them. "Maybe there's a map here, to where he's stashed the real treasure," he said. But even as he rifled through his pa's old papers, he knew it didn't make sense. Blackbeard had often said that the only people who knew how to find his treasure were himself and the devil. And Tobias, allegedly.

He swallowed a knot in his throat. Now was not the time to feel sorry for himself.

Mary picked up one of the largest books and started to shake it, as though a secret map would fall out. None did. But then Tobias noticed the writing in the book. The same neat, curly handwriting as the messages on the wall of the Kettle and the space above the booby-trapped stairs.

"Wait." Tobias took the book from her. "This might be something. Anne, Jack, light those candles."

They did. The group circled around behind Tobias and all tried to make out what was written.

"May 12, 1719," Jack read over his shoulder. "Why, I think this is a diary!"

"His journal," Tobias agreed softly. He wanted to close it, to keep everyone from seeing whatever Blackbeard had written about him. But Mary was already touching the page, reading aloud.

"‘ The mermaid is laughing at me ,'" she read. "What does he mean mermaid?"

"My father was obsessed with mermaids," Tobias admitted. "He had a tattoo of a mermaid over his heart, in fact. Recently, he"—Tobias paused, something working in his throat—"went on some wild-goose chase looking for them. He thought he saw mermaids everywhere, in every wave, on every big rock in a bay. He kept saying only a mermaid could cure him of his malady, that he had definitive proof that they existed."

"His malady?" Anne asked.

"It was, uh, the French disease." Tobias felt heat moving up his neck. "He was quite mad, by the end."

You're mad! The shame of those cruel words welled up in him again.

Mary touched his arm, the smallest form of comfort she could offer him, but it made him feel better in so many ways. Then she read a bit further. "‘ She has begun to sing to me, songs of my own death, songs of love, songs of all the secrets of the deep. I think she means to give me away to my enemies.... I think she wants me to leave. To return to her. But I won't part with my gold. It's mine—more than I could ever spend in a lifetime, but mine. My own. My pr— '" Mary rubbed at her eyes. "I can't read any more. It's smudged."

"So he does have gold," Jack said. "At least now we know for sure."

"He did have it," Anne corrected him. "He doesn't have it now. He doesn't have anything now." She glanced at Tobias. "Sorry."

He nodded sadly. "It's all right. It's the truth."

"But he did have a treasure recently," Jack persisted.

"And he was definitely paranoid about losing it," Mary said.

Paranoid about losing it... and intentionally moving it away from the one place Tobias knew to look.

They were all quiet for a moment, considering.

"Perhaps he was in the process of moving it. Which means his treasure would have gone down when Pa went down," Tobias said. And they all knew what he meant.

The treasure could be with the Queen Anne's Revenge . And the Queen Anne's Revenge was somewhere off the coast of North Carolina.

At the bottom of the sea.

"Well, the good news is that we can find out, can't we?" Tobias said cheerily. "Jack can go down there and check."

"He can?" Anne looked at Jack.

"Uh, on account of what a good swimmer I am," Jack said quickly.

"Yes. Swims like a fish, Jack does," Mary added.

"Ha! A fish!" Jack tried to laugh.

Anne looked from Jack to Mary and back again. "What's going on?"

"Sorry," Tobias said. "This is my fault."

"It's nothing," Mary insisted. She blew out the candles. "All right, then. Let's get back to the ship. We're wasting time."

It took them until morning to row back to the Ranger. Once there, the group compared notes with the crew. What stories had the men heard about where, exactly, the Queen Anne's Revenge had gone down? Then everyone started yelling names they knew of towns in North Carolina or rumors they'd picked up: about how Blackbeard had grounded the ship on a sandbar on purpose when he couldn't outrun Jonathan Barnet, or how he'd sent Caesar, his loyal quartermaster, down below with orders to set the powder room alight when defeat had seemed inevitable. Tobias felt a great, sorrowful tension rising up in him at every story, but he didn't have time right now for grieving what he'd lost. The point of the stories was this: his father's ship could be in a thousand pieces on the sandy bottom right now.

Eventually the guy with the chicken said he knew a guy who knew a man who'd spoken with a fella back at Nassau who claimed he'd been the cabin boy on the Revenge and escaped in a dinghy before it went down and had given them an approximate location of where the shipwreck could be: near an island. Ocracoke Island.

(The game of telephone hadn't been invented yet, dear reader, but only because telephones hadn't been invented yet.)

Still, it was the best they had to go on.

Tobias consulted the map, then scoffed in disbelief. "We're practically there already." He oriented himself and then strode to the starboard rail and pointed. "Ocracoke Island should be that way, about seven or eight miles due east. We can almost see it from here."

"Let's go, then," Mary told DuPaul, and the men sprang into action to heave the anchors and pass down Mary's orders.

"We'll be there within the hour," DuPaul said.

Tobias hoped the treasure would be there this time. Otherwise, he was out of ideas.

He was about to go find his pa's journal again when Anne bounded onto the deck. "Jack, my dearest darling, I must show you something. In the captain's cabin."

"In my cabin?" Mary asked.

Jack, however, looked thrilled. He immediately followed Anne into the cabin. Mary was close behind them, scowling. And Tobias went after them because he just had to know.

The moment the door shut behind them: SPLASH!

A bucketful of wash-water flew straight onto Jack, dousing him, and in the space it took Tobias to blink, Jack was on the floor, his trousers in tatters thanks to the enormous tail he was now sporting.

A tail.

To be told that the Mer existed was one thing.

To see it, though. That was something else.

Jack's tail was a shimmering, iridescent green, which darkened into a bronze color at the large, fluted end. There were two smaller fins on either side, a little higher than Jack's knees would have been. Tobias couldn't take his eyes off the place where skin met scales and how seamless it was.

It did seem to be magic, after all.

He glanced quickly at Mary, wondering what her tail had looked like. Then he glanced back at Jack, wondering if he should offer a towel. But before he had time to do anything more, Anne spoke.

"I knew it," she said hoarsely. "I just knew it!"