The Salty Siren Inn was less of a welcoming haven and more of a collective health code violation with a liquor license. The air, thick with the ghosts of fried fish and unwashed sailors, clung to the back of my throat. From our splintered table in a dark corner, the flickering tallow candles cast long, dancing shadows that made everyone look vaguely sinister.

  Nolan, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, finally broke the silence. He set his tankard of ale down with a wet thud, his knuckles white.

  “Another device?” he squeaked, his voice cracking. He hugged his worn leather satchel to his chest like a life preserver. “Paige, what other device? My laptop battery is on its last legs, my phone is a glorified paperweight without a signal, and the solar charger works about as well as a chocolate teapot in this perpetually overcast country. What are we going to give him? My graphing calculator?”

  “Oh, relax,” I said, taking a deep swig of my own ale. It tasted like watered-down regret. “We have ten days. We’ll think of something. Maybe we can convince him your digital watch is a soul-catcher. Tell him the ticking is the sound of a trapped imp.”

  “That is precisely the sort of flippant remark that precipitates one’s summary execution,” a refined voice muttered from the floor. Bartholomew was meticulously cleaning a paw, his gray fur seeming to glow in the gloom. “You have struck a Faustian bargain with a man whose primary cologne appears to be fermented cod. Promising future marvels to a greedy, superstitious lout is akin to promising a shark a tastier meal if it will only let you go for a moment.”

  Kaelen said nothing. He was staring into his tankard as if it held the secrets to the universe, his handsome face a mask of grim self-loathing. The lies had clearly cost him more than just his dignity; they’d chipped away at the rigid code of honor that held him together. He looked less like a noble knight and more like a man who’d just been forced to kick a puppy for a Klondike bar.

  “Hey,” I said, gently nudging his gauntlet with my elbow. “It worked. We needed a ride, and you got us one. It’s called adapting. In my world, we call that ‘a means to an end.’”

  He finally looked up, his blue eyes clouded.

  “I told him the compass was a ‘Gift from the Star Weavers,’ forged in celestial fires. I described quantum mechanics as ‘the whispers of creation made solid.’ He thinks we are envoys from another plane, Paige. Mages of immense and unpredictable power.” He drained his ale in one long, desperate pull. “The Shadow Lord may well be the least of the dangers we now face. The moment Croft realizes we are not the treasure-wielding demigods he imagines, he and his crew will sell our organs for fishing bait.”

  “I mean, we are from another plane…” I muttered.

  “If they can figure out what organs are for,” Nolan mumbled, his head now resting on the sticky table.

  “A minor logistical hurdle,” I said, trying to inject a confidence I absolutely did not feel. The weight of our new, exorbitant debt was a cold stone in my stomach. First, a magical compass, now a second, non-existent magical artifact, or a king’s ransom. This quest was turning into the most expensive group project of all time. “We can always kill him when we get there.”

  “Yep, nailed it.” Nolan said with an air of supreme satisfaction.

  “Nailed what?”

  “Your alignment,” Nolan stated as though he’d just saved the day. “You go out of your way to not hurt people one day, and the next you openly suggest killing just to avoid a debt. That is classic chaotic neutral.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with the fact that we will not be killing our captain.” Kaelen wiped his hands over his face.

  “It’s always an option, is all I’m saying,” I added before returning to my beer.

  The rest of the night passed in a blur of cheap ale, Nolan’s anxious mutterings, and Kaelen’s profound, knightly silence. I retired to my room, which featured a bed with the structural integrity of a wet cracker and a mattress that smelled faintly of despair, and fell into a restless sleep filled with dreams of angry sailors and angry talking cats.

  The clammy kiss of the morning fog was our wakeup call. We met on the docks before the sun had even bothered to show up, the air cold and sharp with the brine of the sea. And there it was, our chariot to salvation: the Seaman’s Race. It was quite the name, and I noticed Nolan trying to disguise a snicker.

  My heart sank. Kaelen’s description of a ‘large fishing boat’ had been generous to the point of outright fantasy. The Salty Knave was less a ship and more a collection of driftwood held together by stubbornness and seagull droppings. Its single mast was scarred and splintered, the sail patched in a dozen different shades of beige, and the hull was coated in a thick layer of grime and barnacles that was probably the only thing keeping the seawater out. It smelled, quite potently, of seaweed and tar.

  Captain Croft stood on the deck, silhouetted against the pre-dawn gloom. He was built like a barrel, with a face like a sea-worn map and a tangled beard that looked like it had its own ecosystem. One eye, the color of murky dishwater, sized us up with undisguised avarice.

  “The star-gazers,” he grunted, his voice a gravelly rumble. He spat a wad of brown liquid over the side. “Get aboard. Tide waits for no man, nor for fancy mages with their wind-spirits.”

  His crew began to emerge from the shadows. They were a motley assortment of the hardest-looking men I had ever seen. Every one of them had a scar, a menacing squint, or a weapon that looked like an extension of their arm. They moved with a lurching, sea-legged gait, their eyes lingering on Nolan’s bag and the hilt of Kaelen’s sword. This wasn’t a crew; it was a floating gang of thugs.

  Nolan practically had to be winched up the wet, rickety gangplank. Kaelen, even in full armor, moved with a grim, practiced ease. I scrambled up behind him, trying to look like I belonged on a tetanus trap in the middle of the ocean. Bartholomew, tucked unhappily into a canvas sack slung over my shoulder, offered a stream of muffled, verbose complaints about the indignity of it all.

  “Ten days to the Isle of Whispers,” Croft declared once we were all crammed onto the cluttered deck. He pointed a thick, sausage-like finger to the east, where the sea and sky blended into an impenetrable wall of gray. “If the squalls don’t take us, and the krakens are sleeping. It’s a bad time of year. No promises.” His good eye flickered to the compass still clipped to Kaelen’s belt. “You pay on arrival. No tricks.”

  “You will have your payment,” Kaelen said, his voice flat and hard as steel.

  With a series of guttural shouts and the groaning of old rope, the crew cast off the lines. The Seaman’s Race lurched away from the dock, its ancient timbers creaking in protest. I watched as the lights of Pencook, the last bastion of civilization we had known, grew smaller and smaller, until they were just a smudge of stone and smoke against the horizon. Then they were gone, swallowed by the fog.

  We were alone. Just the four of us, on a sinking ship, crewed by pirates, sailing toward a mythical island to fight a Shadow Lord, all on a line of credit backed by technology they thought was black magic.

  A violent retching sound pulled me from my reverie. Nolan was leaning heavily over the railing, his face a pale green, contributing his meager breakfast to the sea.

  “Oh, for the love of…” I muttered, patting his heaving back.

  “The human specimen appears to be… malfunctioning,” Bartholomew observed dryly from his bag. “A most inauspicious beginning.”

  I looked out at the endless, churning expanse of gray water. The island was out there, somewhere in the mist, and between us and it lay ten days of bad weather, a crew of potential murderers, and the very real possibility that our next ‘magical device’ would be Nolan’s asthma inhaler, presented on a velvet cushion.

  Saving the world, I decided, was a whole lot messier and more humiliating than the epic poems let on.

  Ser Kaelen emerged from the cramped forecastle, his movements steady and sure-footed in a way that seemed to defy the pitching deck. Unlike Nolan, the knight looked perfectly at home, the salty spray clinging to his dark hair and the wind whipping his worn cloak around his broad shoulders. He nodded at me, his gaze briefly flicking to Nolan’s miserable form before settling on the roiling sea.

  “The ocean has a way of purging impurities,” he stated, his voice a low rumble against the howl of the wind. It wasn’t clear if he was offering a profound observation or just calling Nolan a wimp. With Kaelen, it was usually a fifty-fifty shot.

  “Right. Impurities,” I said, giving Nolan’s back a final, sympathetic thump. “You hear that, Nolan? You’ll be pure as the driven snow by the time we make landfall. Or an empty husk. One of the two.”

  Nolan just groaned in response.

  The first three days were a masterclass in misery. Our quarters were a pair of mold-scented closets below deck that we had to share. Kaelen, being a gentleman of a bygone era, insisted on sleeping on a pile of scratchy burlap sacks just outside our door, a self-appointed and probably very uncomfortable guard. The ship itself was an OSHA violation waiting to happen, a symphony of groans and creaks held together by tar, stubbornness, and what I could only assume were the desperate prayers of its crew.

  The pirates were a charming bunch. They were a collection of scarred, snaggle-toothed men who communicated in grunts and smelled like they bathed in fish guts and cheap ale. They mostly ignored us, their eyes occasionally lingering on Kaelen’s sheathed longsword or the lumpy outline of Nolan’s backpack, where our treasury of ‘black magic’ supposedly resided. They were a human resources nightmare, and I got the distinct impression that our contract with them would be terminated—along with our breathing—the second they figured out Nolan’s solar-powered battery charger wasn’t a soul-stealing artifact.

  To stave off the crushing boredom and the ever-present damp, we took to playing cards. I’d taught them a simplified version of poker we dubbed ‘Knaves and Kings’. Nolan, a natural with numbers and probabilities, picked it up instantly. Kaelen was a terrible player. The concept of bluffing was utterly alien to his knightly code of honor; his face was an open book, and every good hand was accompanied by a subtle, almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction that was as good as a flare gun.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Bartholomew, naturally, served as a feline referee and unhelpful commentator, curled on a spare barrel with an air of profound judgment.

  “A fool and his coin are soon parted,” he’d sniff when Kaelen would bet aggressively on a pair of threes. “Though in this case, the currency appears to be dried beans.”

  It was on the evening of the third day, as a greasy dusk settled over the churning waves, that our little circle was breached. The four of us were huddled around a crate, a sputtering lantern casting long, dancing shadows across the damp wood of the hold. I was about to rake in a modest pot of beans with a full house when a much larger shadow fell over us.

  I looked up into the grinning, gap-toothed face of a pirate who looked like he’d lost a fight with a barrel of lard and a family of badgers. He was huge, with a matted, greasy beard braided with what looked suspiciously like fish bones. The stink that rolled off him was a physical force.

  “Whatcha playin’, landlubbers?” he slurred, his eyes fixing on our little pile of beans.Kaelen’s hand, which had been resting on his knee, moved infinitesimally closer to the hilt of his sword.

  “A private game, sailor.”

  The pirate chuckled, a wet, rattling sound.

  “Ain’t nothin’ private on the Race. Name’s Griz.” He didn’t offer a hand, which was a blessing. He just pulled over another crate, scraping loudly against the deck, and sat down with a groan of protesting wood. The already cramped space suddenly felt claustrophobic. “Deal me in.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have enough beans,” I said, my voice sweeter than I felt.Griz’s grin widened, showing off a landscape of dental devastation.

  “Don’t want yer beans, little bird.” His eyes slid from me to Nolan, who was visibly sweating, his face shining in the lantern light. He pointed a sausage-like finger at Nolan’s pack, leaned against the wall nearby. “Heard you folk got… trinkets. Magic ones.”

  The temperature in the hold seemed to drop ten degrees. Nolan’s hand instinctively went to clutch his backpack. Inside was his tablet, the battery pack, a GPS locator, and the rest of our 21st-century survival kit. To these pirates, it was a chest of untold magical power. To us, it was our only real advantage. I realized in the moment that I had no idea how he managed to get sucked into Eldoria with so much tech.

  “Our possessions are not part of the stakes,” Kaelen said, his voice flat and cold as a winter stone. The easygoing knight was gone, replaced by the Lord Commander of the ‘Don’t-Mess-With-Us’ brigade.

  Griz ignored him, his gaze locked on me. He seemed to have identified me as the one most likely to engage in stupid decisions. He wasn’t wrong.

  “One hand,” he grunted. “Me, against one’a you. Winner take all. I lose, I leave ya be for the rest of this cursed trip. Give ya my share of the rum, too. But if I win…” He licked his lips. “I get the shiny square of glass the fat one was lookin’ at yesterday.”

  He meant the tablet. Nolan went from pale to translucent.

  “Decline the proposition, Paige,” Bartholomew hissed from his barrel perch. “This specimen of sub-humanity possesses the sort of primitive cunning that often outwits misplaced intellectual bravado.”

  “No,” Kaelen said firmly. “We will not wager with you.”

  But Griz wasn’t looking at Kaelen. He was looking at me, a challenge in his piggy eyes. He saw our group: a stoic warrior, a terrified nerd, and a talking cat. And then there was me. The wild card. He thought he could push me, that my pride or my foolishness would crack before the knight’s honor did.

  The stupidest part? He was right. Backing down felt like admitting we were scared, like giving him power over us for the rest of the voyage. My comms degree never covered negotiating with pirates, but it did teach me one thing: perception is reality. If we were perceived as easy marks now, we’d be robbed and floating on a piece of driftwood by day five.

  A slow smile spread across my face. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the crate.

  “You want to play for our ‘magic’? Fine. But you need to put up something of equal value.”Griz blinked, momentarily thrown.

  “Like what?”

  My eyes scanned him, from his grimy boots to his tangled beard. Something glinted on a leather cord around his thick neck. A key. Old, ornate, and made of a dark, heavy-looking metal. It didn’t look like it belonged to any lock on this rust-bucket.

  “That key,” I said, pointing. “The key for your big prize. You win, you get the tablet. I win, I get the key.”He instinctively clutched it.

  “This ain’t— It’s the key to the captain’s private stash. Rum. Coin. Maps.”

  “Sounds like a fair trade to me,” I chirped. “One piece of questionable pirate treasure for one piece of questionable magic.”

  Kaelen shot me a look of pure, undiluted fury. What are you doing? it screamed. Nolan looked like he was about to have a coronary.

  Griz stared at me for a long moment, then at the tablet, his greed warring with his caution. Greed won, as it so often does with men like him. A broad, ugly grin split his face.

  “Done,” he growled, cracking his knuckles. “But we play my game.”

  There was no turning back now. Not with the eyes of half a dozen bored, grimy sailors on us. Kaelen’s jaw was a block of granite, and Nolan was actively hyperventilating, but I just gave Griz my most winning, most infuriatingly confident smile.

  He lumbered over and returned with a small, worn leather pouch, from which he produced a set of five dice, each face carved not with pips, but with crude symbols: a Crown, a Sword, a Shield, a Goblet, a Skull, and a laughing Jester. The game was simple, a liar’s bluffing game of escalating bids. Primitive, just like Bartholomew said. And I was going to beat him at it.

  We knelt on the deck, using an upturned barrel as our table. The other sailors formed a loose, reeking circle around us. Kaelen stood behind me, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword, a silent, unmoving guardian. It was probably the only thing keeping Griz’s friends from simply jumping us.

  Griz dropped the dice into a leather cup, shook it with a rattling roar, and slammed it down. He peeked underneath, and his piggy eyes glittered.

  “I see three Swords,” he growled, the opening bid.

  I shook my own cup, the bone dice clacking together. I peeked. One Sword, two Jesters, a Skull, and a Goblet. The Jesters were wild; they could be anything. So I had three Swords, the same as him. But you don’t win by matching. You win by pushing.

  “I see four Shields,” I said calmly, my voice steady despite the frantic tap-dance my heart was doing against my ribs.

  Griz’s eyes narrowed. He was trying to read me, to see the lie. My comms degree felt laughably useless, but I remembered a lecture on nonverbal cues. I kept my posture open, my expression placid, my gaze locked on his. I was a serene lake of bullshit.

  He rattled his cup again.

  “Five Swords.”

  A lie. A big one. There were only five dice each. For him to have five Swords, he’d need at least three on his own, plus my two Jesters. It was statistically possible, but unlikely. He was trying to bully me out.

  I smiled. I didn’t even look at my dice. I just looked at him.

  “Liar.”

  The other sailors murmured. Griz’s face flushed a deep, mottled red. Slowly, he lifted his cup. He had two Swords, a Crown, a Shield, and a Skull. I lifted mine, revealing my one Sword and two Jesters. My three plus his two made five. He wasn’t lying.

  My gut plummeted. Round one to Griz.

  His grin was an ugly slash in his beard.

  “One to me, little bird. Not so clever now, are ya?”

  The game went on like that, a tense back-and-forth of bluffs and challenges. He was good. He was aggressive, pushing the bids high and fast, forcing me into corners. I lost another round, my hands growing clammy. Nolan was making small, whimpering sounds behind me. But I was learning Griz’s tells. A slight flare of his nostrils when he had a strong hand. A twitch in his left eye when he was bluffing. This wasn’t a game of dice; it was a game of reading the man across from you.

  It came down to the final round. We were tied. Winner take all.

  Griz shook the cup with theatrical flair, the rattle echoing in the sudden silence of the deck. He slammed it down, peeked, and a slow, greasy smile of pure triumph spread across his face. The nostril flare. He had it. He really had it this time.

  “Six Crowns,” he boomed, a bid so high it was almost impossible. He was declaring that between his dice and mine, there were six of a single symbol. He was daring me to call him a liar.

  My turn. I shook my cup, my knuckles white. I slammed it down and carefully lifted the edge. My blood went cold.

  Not a single Crown. Not one. Two Skulls, a Shield, a Sword, a Goblet. No Jesters. Nothing. I had absolutely nothing to contribute to his bid. He was lying. He had to be. But if he had five Crowns under his cup… I’d lose.

  My mind raced. He’d shown his tell. He was confident. He thought he had me. But what if his tell wasn’t for a winning hand, but just for a strong one? Four Crowns? Maybe even five? That was strong, but it wasn’t six. He was overbidding, counting on me to fold.

  Perception is reality.

  I took a deep breath, looked him dead in the eye, and gave him the brightest, most unconcerned smile I could muster. “I’ll raise you,” I said, my voice ringing with a confidence I hadn’t felt since I ordered my last overpriced latte. “Seven Crowns.”

  The air went out of the circle of sailors. Griz’s jaw dropped. Even Kaelen shifted behind me. It was an insane, suicidal bid. It was impossible. Unless… unless I had five crowns under my cup.

  Griz stared at me, his confidence evaporating. My serene, smiling face was telling him I had the perfect hand. His tell had been real; he had a monster hand. Maybe five Crowns. But if I had five, and he had at least two… his brain did the faulty math. My utter, insane confidence shattered his own. He couldn’t risk it. The shiny square of glass was so close.

  “Liar!” he roared, slamming his meaty fist on the barrel. “Show ‘em! Show your five crowns!”

  I held his gaze for one more heartbeat, then slowly, deliberately, lifted my cup.

  The circle of sailors gasped. Nolan let out a strangled cry. There they were. Two Skulls, a Sword, a Shield, a Goblet. Not a Crown in sight.

  A triumphant sneer started to form on Griz’s face, but it died before it was born. Because I had called him a liar. And for my bid of seven to be a lie, there had to be less than seven Crowns on the table.

  He was forced to lift his own cup.

  Four Crowns and a Jester. Five in total.

  Five is less than seven.

  My bluff beat his truth. I won.

  Silence. Then, a sharp, metallic ping sounded in my head, and a translucent blue box shimmered into existence in my vision.

  [New Quest!] [The Captain’s Coffers] [Use the key to open the Captain’s sea chest][Rewards: 150 EXP, ???]

  Griz stared at the dice, then at me, his face a mask of disbelief and pure, murderous rage. He snatched the key from his neck, the leather cord snapping, and threw it onto the barrel. It landed with a heavy clink.

  “Take it, ya cheating witch,” he snarled, before shoving his way through the stunned sailors and stalking off toward the bow.

  I scooped up the heavy, dark metal key, its ornate head cool against my palm. Nolan was practically weeping with relief.

  “A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but a victory nonetheless,” Bartholomew drawled from his perch, giving a delicate lick to his paw. “Do try not to make a habit of wagering our lives on your talent for duplicity.”

  I just grinned, turning the key over in my hand. Maybe my degree was going to be useful after all.