The ship’s crew divided into two watches. While one worked the ship, the other rested, slept, or ate. Lieutenant Bishop had placed Royce on the starboard watch assigned to the maintop. His job was to work the rigging on the center mast. This put him under Boatswain Bristol Bennet and his three mates. Hadrian had seen their like before. Drunks, vagrants, and thugs, they would never have amounted to much on land, but aboard ship they held power and status. The chance to repay others for any mistreatment they had experienced made them cruel and quick to punish. Hadrian still waited to discover his watch assignment, but he hoped it would be the same as Royce’s.

He had been lucky so far. This being the first day out, preparing meals had been little more than placing out fresh foods from the recent stay at port. Fruit, fresh bread, and salted meats were merely handed out with no cooking required. Consequently, Hadrian’s talents remained untested, but time was running out. He knew how to cook, of course. He had prepared meals for years using little more than a campfire, but that had mainly been for him and Royce. He didn’t know how to cook for an entire ship’s crew. Needing to find out exactly what they expected drove him to wander in hopes of finding Wyatt.

“The Princess of Melengar rules there now,” Hadrian heard a young lad say.

He didn’t look to be much more than sixteen. He was a waif of a boy with thin whiskers, freckles darkened by days in the sun, and curly hair cut in a bowl-like fashion except for a short ponytail he tied with a black cord. He sat with Wyatt, Grady, and a few other men around a swaying table illuminated by a candle melted to the center of a copper plate. They were playing cards and the giant shadows they cast only made Hadrian’s approach more disorienting.

“She doesn’t rule Ratibor. She’s the mayor,” Wyatt said, correcting the boy as he laid a card on the pile before him.

“What’s the difference?”

“She was appointed, lad.”

“What’s that mean?” the boy asked as he tried to decide which card to play, holding his hand so tight to his chest he could barely see the cards himself.

“It means she didn’t just take over. The people of the city asked her to run things.”

“But she can still execute people, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Sounds like a ruler to me.” With a wide grin, the boy laid a card indicating that he thought it was a surprisingly good play.

“Sounds like them people of Ratibor are dumb as dirt,” Grady said gruffly. His expression betrayed his irritation at the boy’s discard. “They finally get the yoke off their backs and right away they ask for a new one.”