The Lost Prince

For Dean, a treasure more precious than gold

CHAPTER
1

I
don’t suppose it would change anything if I said I was sorry.…”

Dean Seaborne looked around the ship with a strained smile as rain fell hard against his shivering body. His words hung in the air like a bad joke. Gallows humor doesn’t work when coming from a thirteen-year-old boy who is about to die. Dean was terrified thinking about the punishment his captain had planned for him. It wouldn’t be long now, and it wouldn’t be pretty. Most pirates made you walk the plank if you crossed them. Not this captain. Not One-Eyed Jack. He was a bit more creative. He also happened to be the pirate king of the Caribbean, and like it or not, that made him Dean’s boss. At least, for as long as Dean was still alive.

Dean gulped as One-Eyed Jack gave him a look mean enough to make a killer squid spill its ink. He was a large, barrel-chested man with a head like a cannonball, and the battle-worn face of a bare-knuckle boxer. His black leather eye patch, bald pate, and sun-scarred skin gave him a fierce, grisly countenance that was well earned, for he was a mad combination of short temper and violent rage. His name was known throughout the Caribbean as a merciless buccaneer, and otherwise-dauntless men trembled before him—his own crew most of all.

One-Eyed Jack had been known to keelhaul men over such minor transgressions as not laughing hard enough at his jokes, or remarking that the weather was hot when he had already decided it was merely warm. Whether or not he had even told anyone how he felt about the weather was beside the point. One-Eyed Jack was not a man to be trifled with by anyone or anything.

Dean felt the tip of a dagger in his back as one of One-Eyed Jack’s men nudged him toward a rusty iron cage. It was One-Eyed Jack’s right-hand man, Scurvy Gill, a slender, filthy pirate with eyes in the back of his head. Gill’s only job was to watch the captain’s back, and nothing got by him except perhaps a bar of soap. Black water ran off his body as the falling rain washed over him, but no storm on earth could scrub his grubby hide clean. Dean stepped inside the cage and ran his hands along the bars. He was thin enough to squeeze out between them, but he wouldn’t get the chance to try. Scurvy Gill pulled a red cloth out of his
pocket, blew his nose with it, and offered it to Dean. “Blindfold?”

Dean’s lip curled upward. “No. Thank you.” If he was going to die today, he would go to his grave without Scurvy Gill’s handkerchief wrapped around his head, thank you very much. The cloth smelled of rotten eggs, pickles, and very pungent mucus. Just the thought of it gave Dean the chills. He felt as though he’d dodged a musket ball when Scurvy Gill tucked the cloth back into his pocket, even as the door to Dean’s cage slammed shut.

“Hoist away, lads,” ordered One-Eyed Jack.

A team of pirates pulled on a thick rope, and Dean’s cage rose a foot off the deck. “Whoa.” Dean grabbed hold of the bars for balance as the strongest men on the ship heaved away at the line. It ran through a pulley at the end of a yardarm high above his head. The other end was tied to an eyelet at the top of his cage. One-Eyed Jack’s crew hauled Dean up over the gunwale and swung him out over the waves. A piercing wind blew right through him as he hung there, trapped and helpless. It was a cold, wet morning, and charcoal-gray clouds filled the sky.