Chapter One: A Primer on Piratical Pursuits Chapter One A PRIMER ON PIRATICAL PURSUITS


Several weeks later

Across the vast Atlantic Ocean and beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, the Palaemon, a beautiful square-rigged tall ship, departed the docks at Toulon on the south coast of France, sliding through the harbor’s choppy water like a dark blade.

High up in the crow’s nest on her mainmast, fourteen-year-old Tom Morgan caught his breath as he gazed out across the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. He could taste salt spray on his lips, feel the sea air thickening his hair, ruddying his skin—and doing little to help his urge to throw up. As the Palaemon turned through the swell to avoid an incoming Prussian trawler, he gripped the edge of the crow’s nest like a vise, convinced he was about to tumble out.

Back in London, he and Morris used to enjoy leaning over Tower Bridge to watch tall ships sail up and down the Thames. Tom always wanted to reach out and try to touch the tips of the mainmasts as they passed below. Morris would make up stories about where the ships had come from and where they were going. Tales of daring adventure on the high seas, of dashing pirate captains and cursed treasure islands. Of Morris’s numerous epic yarns—many of which, astonishingly, turned out to be true—these were among Tom’s favorites.

The sadness he felt at Morris’s death still sat like a stone in his chest. The years were passing, but the pain Tom felt at his loss wasn’t getting any easier.

He turned his attention to the bay. The waters outside Toulon were teeming with activity: merchant ships carrying cargo from the Japanese Empire, trawlers and passenger steamers flying Prussian flags, and mighty French battleships, ocean liners, and elegant pleasure yachts. Tom took his mind off his fear and nausea by studying his favorite ship: a sleek black yacht gliding effortlessly through the water half a mile away.

On the deck below, Tom’s housemates had shed their civilian disguises and reverted to their usual Shadow League gear—light and stretchy dark gray clothes, boots with cleverly designed grips, and blue Guile House neckerchiefs worn as headbands. Some were working on the Palaemon’s sails and rigging. Some were swabbing her decks. Others were belowdecks, organizing food supplies and assigning sleeping berths.

The school operated according to a strict hierarchy, six levels in all. Every newcomer began as a first-grade Tenderfoot, no matter if they were twelve or seventeen, no matter their pre-school training or their family name. From there they rose—if they proved themselves—to second-grade Greenhorn, then third-grade Fledgling, fourth-grade Colt, fifth-grade Initiate, and at last, to sixth-grade Apprentice, before earning the right to call themselves a Shadow Thief.

Progress was usually collective. You rose with your cohort, shared their successes, their failures. But anyone who fell short—too many failed modules, too many mistakes—was made to repeat the year. The system was unforgiving by design. Each grade demanded more discipline, more precision, and as the difficulty increased, so did the spread of ages within the ranks. It gave the place a curious air—half school, half proving ground. And it meant that while Tom was two years older than the rest of his classmates, this wasn’t an unusual scenario across the grades.

As a minor salve to the way the school year had ended under such an extraordinary cloud of mayhem and tragedy, Siegfried Templeton, Beaufort’s headmaster, had abandoned the usual summer exams and had automatically progressed each grade to the next stage. Tom and his classmates were now second-grade Greenhorns, Enzo and Jericho were now third-grade Fledglings, Maxine was now a fourth-grade Colt—and so on across the rest of the school. This meant that the previous year’s Apprentices were now technically graduates—but they were unable to leave to become fully fledged Shadows until the quarantine was over.

Those older students were gathered on the quarterdeck at the Palaemon’s stern. They all looked like pirates—except for those throwing up off the side of the ship. Tom’s own stomach churned again, and he raised his gaze to the horizon and tried to hold on to his breakfast.

Mitch Quinn, a fifth-grade Initiate a couple of years older than Tom, was swabbing the deck at the base of the mainsail.

Tom gave a shrill whistle and called down, “Wanna swap?”

Mitch shaded his eyes. His handsome face broke into a wide grin when he took in the color of Tom’s face. “No problem,” he shouted back. “I don’t want you ruining all my hard work by puking everywhere.”

With a surge of relief, Tom began to climb carefully down the rigging, his arms and legs feeling like jelly. He was met halfway by Mitch, who ruffled his hair before climbing past him. Tom murmured his thanks, embarrassed by how easily Mitch was leaping up to the crow’s nest. One thing was for sure: Tom wouldn’t be pursuing a career as a pirate when he graduated from Beaufort’s.

He immediately felt better when his feet touched the deck. He hooked his long dark hair behind his ears, picked up the mop Mitch had dropped, and made a few cursory swipes across the deck before spotting a group of his friends laboring at a line of ropes connected to the mainsail.

“Whatever else we have to do on this bloody boat,” he called out to them, grinning, “just don’t send me up that mast again.”

“Give us a hand over here, then,” shouted Maxine Berjon, flicking a long braid of hair away from her face. She was grimacing with the effort of hauling on one of the mainsail’s halyard lines.

“Nah, get on this one,” cried Jericho Fox, beside her on another halyard. “I’m knackered!” His usual easygoing demeanor appeared to have deserted him, and he was puce with effort. Tom had never seen Jericho work so hard at anything before. He was tempted to take a seat and enjoy the spectacle.

“Shut up, Jer. He’s helping me,” growled Maxine—and Tom abandoned the idea. It didn’t do to cross Maxine. He grabbed the rope alongside her and leaned his weight into the effort as they pulled.

“I’m regretting this already,” he said, the muscles in his arms beginning to burn.

“Tiring work taking in the view, was it?” panted Enzo Jag, sweat pouring from his brow as he hauled on his own rope.

Maxine ordered Tom to hold the line steady and began to wrap it around a pin rail. Then she helped Jericho and Enzo do the same. With all the lines secured, they collapsed together in a heap on the deck.

The Mistral, a strong, cold, northwesterly wind, blew at the ship’s stern, filling her sails and propelling the Palaemon farther out to sea. Tom propped himself on his elbow so that the breeze could cool his damp hair.

“How long before we reach the island?” puffed Jericho.

“Sometime tomorrow,” said Enzo, mopping his face with his sleeve. “Hopefully the Corsair will rotate our duties. My arms are about to fall off.”

Tom smiled. If Enzo had had a choice, he’d have stayed at Beaufort’s for the summer, cooped up in Guile House with a pile of books, preparing for life as a third-grade Fledgling.

“I thought being a pirate would be more fun,” said Jericho wistfully, staring up at the clear blue sky. “Cutlass fighting, firing cannons, drinking rum, that kind of thing.”

“Careful what you wish for,” said Maxine. “We’re cutlass dueling later today—and the losers have to walk the plank, then sleep out on the poop deck tonight. They’re gonna be freezing.”

“That’s exactly the kind of motivation I need, actually,” said Jericho with great bravado, despite lying on the deck like a melted jellyfish. “I’m not sleeping out here all night in soaking clothes. I’m ready to fight. The kind of fighting they write ballads about.”

Tom laughed. “You talk some amount of rubbish, Jer. You’d be useless in a fight!”

Jericho, outraged, opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by a shout from the quarterdeck.

“On your feet, sailors! I’ll have no slackers aboard my ship!”

The Corsair—Hezekiah von Stuppe, Master of Guile House—was dressed like his crew but with his Guile House neckerchief tied loosely around his collar. Standing at the wheel of the great ship, he was tall and barrel-chested with a thick dark beard and long hair scraped back into a knot.

With a groan, Tom and his friends pulled themselves to their feet and stood to attention.

The Corsair looked exhausted, his face gray behind the dark beard, his eyes hollow. But he forced a grin. “Now, get up here and learn a thing or two about navigation!”

On the quarterdeck, Tom and the others found four sixth-grade Apprentices—Hercule Wolf, James Montague, Sabine Taylor, and Verity Bishé—examining a chart.

The Corsair stepped away from the wheel. “Here’s our latitude and longitude,” he said as he scribbled on a small scrap of paper, which he handed to Maxine. “Help the Apprentices check our course. Tom, take the helm.”

Startled, Tom took hold of the ship’s wheel while Maxine, Jericho, and Enzo received instruction on how to check and plot the course of the ship from the Apprentices, who had evidently studied piracy back at Beaufort’s.

“I think we need to turn a little to starboard,” said the Corsair, examining a shiny brass compass cupped in his palm. Tom looked at him blankly. “That means turn right,” murmured the Corsair under his breath.

Tom tentatively turned the spokes of the wheel.

“Steady. That’ll do,” said the Corsair. “We don’t want to end up in Algérie.”

Tom experienced a thrilling sense of power as the huge ship turned at his instruction. “Now, this is a job I could get used to,” he said.

“Ambitions to be captain, eh?” The Corsair snorted, his eyebrow arching gently. “You’ve come a long way since the streets of London, Tom Morgan.”

Tom’s life in London felt like it had been a lifetime ago, yet it had been less than a year. How could he have gone from there to here in so short a time? From scraping for survival in a condemned warehouse to piloting a tall ship on the Mediterranean? And his old friends… He’d helped to set them up with money and new identities, but he’d had no news from them since. He thought about them constantly. Did they ever think of him? His hand strayed to a little green stone he wore on a shoelace around his neck. Then he shook the thought away; it made him sad and anxious. There was nothing he could do to address it now anyway.

He could see the sails of a ship some distance behind them, but the rest of the world was an expanse of uninterrupted blue. Beside him he could hear the Corsair’s ragged breathing. The housemaster was leaning heavily on the quarterdeck handrail.

He shouldn’t be here, thought Tom. He should be recovering back at Beaufort’s. Or somewhere safe and quiet.

It had only been a few weeks since Tom and the Corsair had nearly died in an airship crash. The Corsair had been wounded by a huge shard of glass beneath his rib cage. He would have bled to death if it hadn’t been for Tom. Unsurprisingly, his recovery was proving extremely slow.

The air crash had killed Vincent Crowe, the man responsible for the assassination of the Shadow League Directorate in an attack that had unleashed a weaponized version of the deadly Crimson Flu virus right in the middle of a packed crowd at Beaufort’s.

The whole town had fallen into chaos as terrified students, townspeople, and visitors had crammed into the cable car and onto other airships in a bid to escape the infected mountain. Eventually the cable car was stopped, and no more airships were permitted to leave. The streets of the town were left eerily empty—a situation made all the worse when cases of Crimson Flu started to emerge, and those left behind were housebound, only allowed outside on a strict rotation.

Bleak and unnerving days followed as everyone prepared for an outbreak in their homes. And then came the boredom. Tom had begun to look forward to Thursdays, when supplies, mail, and back copies of that week’s Argus were sent up via the cable car. He had always volunteered for the job of collecting the Guile House allocation, just so he could spend some extra time outside. It was hard work lugging everything back to the boardinghouse, but at least it was something to do.

This routine had gone on for several weeks until an announcement was sent from headmaster Siegfried Templeton’s office in the Spike to each of Beaufort’s boardinghouses. The students were to be relocated until the outbreak of Crimson Flu had passed. They couldn’t go home for the summer, as they were still in isolation, so instead they were being sent off in their houses to various camps to enjoy fresh air and outdoor activities.

Ghost House was on the way to a League-owned island off the west coast of Scotland. Artemis House was heading to a League training facility in the Belgian Black Forest. Swindle House was destined for a similar facility in Poland’s Owl Mountains, Janus House was going to a secret cave complex in the Pyrenees, and Duplicity House to a mansion in the Kolmården forest in Sweden.

Guile House, meanwhile, was bound for a deserted island in the Mediterranean called Île Tête de Mort—known in English as the Island of Skulls.

The island was something of a legend in League circles. Its name was derived from a natural phenomenon on the cliff at its southern tip, where centuries of wind and rain had carved a skull-like face into the rock. Ancient inhabitants of the island had carved replica skulls on rocky outcrops in the bay to mimic the huge skull on the cliff.

“It’s an old League stronghold in the Mediterranean, a hundred and fifty nautical miles off the south coast of France,” Enzo had explained to Tom when they learned where they were going. “My mum used to tell me ghost stories about it when I was little. It’s been abandoned for years—and said to be nearly impossible to reach. Massive spires of rock, called the Shark’s Teeth, circle the island, and the currents are treacherous. The only real landing place is to the south, on a beach below the skull cliff—but thanks to the reef in the bay, the beach can only be accessed by the most skilled and daring sailors. Many, many ships have been smashed to smithereens against the Teeth or on the reef.”

“So how are we meant to reach it?” asked Tom skeptically. It surely couldn’t be as wild a place as Enzo was making out.

“The Corsair will get us there,” said Enzo confidently. “He’s meant to be one of the greatest sailors there’s ever been.”

With the course to the island set and the weather fair, they began their piracy lessons in the afternoon—starting, as Maxine had predicted, with cutlass dueling.

From a chair on the main deck, the Corsair issued commands to the Apprentices. The senior students split the remainder of the crew into rough groups and began to instruct them on how to handle the curved blades.

“D’you think the Corsair is going to get off his arse and teach us any of this himself, or is he just going to sit there playacting the pirate king?”

Tom, who had been admiring his blade, looked up to see Olaf Blister, a third-grade Fledgling, talking to two other Fledglings, Milo Wormwood and Lance Dorling, and a fifth-grade Initiate, Cassidy Mortlake.

Cassidy sneered. “I doubt it. Teaching is too much trouble for the great Corsair. He’ll just sit there like a lord and leave us with this clown.” She nodded toward Montague, who was trying to explain to Tom’s classmate, Genevieve Wolf, how to hold the cutlass in her teeth while climbing the rigging.

Tom wanted to snap at them to shut up, but he bit it back. He had no time for Blister, Wormwood, and Dorling, who appeared to have swapped one leader for another with Matthias Hoffmann now gone. Hoffmann hadn’t been seen by any of his schoolmates since the day of the Beaufort’s attack. His place in the group had been assumed by Cassidy. Tom loathed her even more than the others.

What made it all the more galling was that they had a point. The Corsair was just sitting there, his thoughts clearly a long way from the lesson he was supposed to be giving.

No one but Tom and his closest friends knew the truth about their housemaster’s health—that he was in no fit state to be in charge of schoolchildren in the middle of nowhere. The only comfort Tom took was that these were no ordinary schoolchildren. They had been trained all their lives to look after themselves. And while they may not have had Tom’s street cunning or real-world experience, they were all whip-smart and possessed an array of highly developed skills that he could only envy.

The air was alive with shrieks of joy as the students battled one another on the main deck, each with an arm held out for balance while they lunged and parried, feinted, shuffled, and shimmied, stepped and spun, cutlasses clashing and clanging, sweat pouring down their faces, eyes wide and bright with the thrill of combat.

Up on a boom of the mainmast, Mitch Quinn and his twin sister, Connie, were locked in a dance-like duel. Each held a hand gracefully—almost arrogantly—behind their back as they slashed and deflected cutlass strokes, looking as relaxed as if they were in a fencing studio at Beaufort’s rather than balanced on a narrow beam on a ship rolling through open seas.

Even Cassidy, Wormwood, Blister, and Dorling were hollering in delight as they pitched into fierce battle with one another. Tom, too, was soon caught up in the thrill and terror of a duel as he went head-to-head with Maxine, who took little time to pry the cutlass from his grasp with an expert flick of her wrist, the flat of her blade then pressed to the side of his neck.

“Do you yield?” she asked with an arched brow and a wide grin.

Tom, disappointed with how poorly he’d fought, held up his hands in surrender.

They settled down to watch the other battles, leaning against the portside bulwark, enjoying the mixed sensation of cool sea breeze in their hair and warm sun on their faces.

One by one, the duels came to an end, with the victors crowing in triumph while the losers yelled in annoyance. At last only the Quinns were left—and it looked like their duel might go on forever.

Tom marveled as their cutlasses flickered back and forth like striking snakes, swiping, jabbing, slashing, and parrying, blades whirling, steel shrieking on steel, their feet dancing on the boom. But at last Connie pulled off a magnificent feint toward Mitch’s shoulder, which he went to deflect, only to find himself wobbling when she swerved her blade away. She poked him in his exposed ribs with the tip of her cutlass to claim victory—tipping him off-balance.

There was a collective gasp from below as Mitch flailed his arms and toppled sideways. But cool as anything, Connie grasped the jib line and swung down to catch her brother just as his feet lurched away from the boom. She dropped him in a tangled heap beside Tom and Maxine before landing smoothly on the deck amid a great roar from her fellow students and a round of applause from the Corsair.

She brushed salt spray from her face, laughed as Mitch groaned theatrically, and offered him a hand with that same effortless confidence she’d shown on the rigging. There was no trace of hesitation in her movements—only certainty, as clean and strong as the wind snapping the sails above them.

She looked up and gave Tom a wink—her usual celebration whenever she won a game. Tom realized his heart was racing, and not just from Mitch’s near miss with the deck.

Over the previous weeks, when Beaufort’s had been in lockdown and the days had blurred into one another, the Guile House students had folded themselves into small friendship groups that had huddled together in tight knots in the common room, the dining room, or on window seats in the library, often armed with books and board games and mugs of tea. Of all the year groups, the Initiates had the most absentees, and so Connie and Mitch, who were already friendly with Maxine, had gradually attached themselves to the group with Tom, Maxine, Jericho, and Enzo.

Stuck inside, the six had entertained themselves by playing games: cards, code-breaking challenges, strategy boards, or logic puzzles scavenged from old books in the house library. Tom had always liked to think of himself as skilled when it came to games like these—he was quick, instinctive, and shrewd—but more often than not, Connie won every game through patience and timing. She watched, waited, learned patterns—then struck. And she always celebrated with that cool wink.

Although frustrated when he lost, Tom couldn’t help but admire her skill and gamesmanship, and he started to watch her closely to see what he could learn from her. He noticed how intently she listened when others spoke, and how she observed their movements and body language like a hawk. Beyond the games, he also noticed how she could read a room almost instantly—who was in a good or low mood, who was hiding nerves, who was struggling with the memory of the gas attack. He noticed how often she won arguments, not by raising her voice, but by smiling and letting her opponent talk themselves into a corner, then sharply turning their own words on them to dramatic effect. She could make you look a fool, yet had you laughing about it with her.

Connie had a way of asking questions that nudged conversations into deeper waters before anyone realized. It was she who had asked about Tom’s past, about London and the warehouse kids, the Rawlock and the Pitbull, which no one else had ever really dared to do, even Maxine. Tom had found himself telling Connie things about his life that he usually tried to keep buried, often before he even knew he was doing so.

Somewhere in those weeks, his view of her had evolved, like a coastline changing shape. Tom had always thought that Connie was beautiful and smart and funny—even a little mysterious. But she soon ascended to some other stratosphere in his mind.

And now here she was, sunlight on her hair, deck boards steady beneath her boots, having just saved her brother without so much as a second thought. She wasn’t just beautiful, or clever, or brave. She was formidable.

The Corsair clapped once more, loud and approving. “Well caught,” he called. “You’ve a head for heights, Mademoiselle Quinn—and for timing.”

Connie grinned, a little flushed now, and gave a half bow that sent another ripple of laughter through the crew. Tom broke into an embarrassed cough when he realized he was laughing louder than anyone else.

The Corsair signaled for the Palaemon’s anchor to be dropped, and as promised, the loser from each duel was forced to walk the plank.

“Hard luck,” Tom said as he took his place in the queue next to Mitch. “I thought you had her at one point.”

“Nah,” replied Mitch with a little shake of his head. “Connie’s deadly.”

Tom gave Connie a little sideways glance. She was sitting on the bulwark beside Maxine, the two of them laughing. A strand of dark hair had come loose from Connie’s headband and blew across her face; she curled it behind her ear, then looked toward her brother. Her deep brown eyes met Tom’s. Tom looked away immediately, not wanting to be caught staring, and pretended to wave to Maxine instead, who gave a slightly confused wave back.

“It’s not all bad, though,” continued Mitch. “I’ve been wanting a dip in the sea all day!”

He took the plank at a run, leaping into the air in a great swan dive before hugging his knees to his chest and somersaulting into the waves—earning whoops of approval from those on deck.

Grinning, Tom sprinted after him, leaping out from the plank and then arrowing himself down into the waves. It wasn’t as spectacular as Mitch’s effort, but with spirits high aboard the ship, he earned almost as much applause. The water felt magnificent. Much nicer than when Morris had taught him to swim by throwing him into the Serpentine.

Fortunately, the defeated duelists weren’t made to shiver for the night on deck, but were given towels and half an hour to dry off in the sun before the next round of lessons. They spent the remainder of the afternoon practicing taking a rival ship by firing cannons from hidden gunports and using ropes to swing from the rigging as if boarding an invisible enemy. After wolfing down a dinner of steak pies and fruit, they settled into quieter evening activities: learning how to tie knots, reading the weather, and general ship-handling as they adjusted the sails and checked the ropes, working in shifts to pilot the Palaemon south. The Corsair sang sea shanties as the sun lowered in a fiery red that filled the sky and cast long, sharp shadows across the deck.

As the first stars pricked the bluing sky, a fifth-grade Initiate named Frederick van Bosche caused great excitement when he triumphantly announced that he had discovered some smuggling compartments in the cargo hold filled with sweets and puddings.

“I was hoping that someone would find them tonight. Well done, Freddie,” declared the Corsair. “And as an extra reward, you can be the one to activate the pump jets.”

The Corsair led the students to the quarterdeck and swept a theatrical hand toward the wheel. Then he reached out and rotated a wooden dome at its center until it unscrewed in his hand to reveal a dial and a red electric button, which looked completely out of place.

“We are aboard a pirate ship,” he explained, unable to hide the glee from his voice. “And every pirate should have a trick or two up his sleeve that no enemy will possess—or suspect. This is the secret to the Palaemon. If you will do the honors, Monsieur van Bosche.”

Van Bosche pressed the button. There was a groaning sound from somewhere far below them, and a deep hum reverberated through the ship—and then, with a jerk, they began to accelerate forward.

“The pump jets!” cried the Corsair in delight. “Hidden engines that give us a surprise burst of speed and agility. I stole the technology from Norwegian scientists some years ago and had the engines fitted to the Palaemon. She looks like a traditional sailing ship, but in reality, she is the fastest vessel on the sea.”

“Why haven’t we been using these pump jets the whole time?” demanded Cassidy. “It would have saved all that work with the sails and the ropes and all the rest of it—and it would get us there in half the time!”

The Corsair looked at her for a moment, as if examining a curious—and apparently unpleasant—insect. Then he bent down and pressed the button to turn off the pump jets.

“Mademoiselle Mortlake,” he said. “In your four years as a student at Beaufort’s School for Deceptive Arts, have you ever been encouraged to take a shortcut to success? Has a teacher ever given a lesson that proved, ultimately, to be an irrelevance?”

The way Cassidy’s jaw tightened at this last question made Tom believe that she had, in fact, sat through any number of lessons she had deemed irrelevant. But she remained silent.

“We could motor to the island very quickly using the pump jets, yes,” continued the Corsair. “But it would be a wasted opportunity when we have so much we can learn aboard this beautiful ship. The journey, as they say, is often as important as the destination. Sometimes more so.”

This time Cassidy couldn’t hide her derision, and she rolled her eyes.

The Corsair chuckled. “You may cringe, but it is true. As is this: you have to learn that the real world is a difficult and dangerous place.” His tone had grown serious. “You have been coddled at Beaufort’s. Out here, at sea, dangers are everywhere. And there will be more on the island. If you rush, if you try to cut corners, if you are lazy in any way, you will be in grave danger. And something terrible might happen.”

He clapped his hands, making all the students jump, and smiled tightly. “But if you take your time and remember your training, then you can embrace the dangers—and perhaps discover something new about yourself. Do you understand?”

Tom sensed that Cassidy was fighting the urge to roll her eyes again. “Yes,” she said. Then added, “Sir,” in a surly tone, which the Corsair, this time, chose to ignore.

“Mademoiselle Mortlake has reminded me that there is still much to be learned from hard work,” said the Corsair. “So we will continue to sail in the old-fashioned way. Those of you on duty, get back to your stations! The rest of you, get belowdecks and get some sleep.”

There were loud groans as the students withdrew from the quarterdeck.

“Très bon,” the Corsair called after them. “We make land tomorrow!”