"What's that noise?" chirped Sister Wilemina. "It's not the wind, but it howls like a pack of dire wolves!"

"Danger to port!" shrilled a woman from the forecastle. "White water under our keel!"

"What?" Adira Strongheart jumped to the bloody rail and peered overside. White water in a ship's lee could only mean rocks, a spine-chilling notion. Yet they should be safely distant.

Under the stricken Drumfish, the ocean boiled. Adira caught her breath as gray water seemed to sink, a dizzying sight. Two currents ran in opposite directions, one north and one south. The corsair ship lurched as timbers pulled in two directions groaned. The pirate queen cursed in confusion. Conflicting currents meant either a rip or "All hands!" bawled Adira. "All hands drop all tasks and make sail! We skirt a whirlpool bound to suck us under!"

The sucking of the whirlpool was audible even above the howling wind and cries of the wounded. A terrifying sound, it seemed to clutch at sailors' souls and leech away their wills.

Drumfish, more a scatter of spilled firewood than a ship, spun lazily but steadily picked up speed. Water raced around the vessel in an unnatural swirl. Two men threw their hands to the heavens and screamed for the Sea King to save them. Even some of Adira's Seven slowed in hacking free the midmast that was pulling the Conch half-over.

"Get aloft!" Adira shouted, whacking people with a hard hand. "Making all sail is our only hope! Move!"

Pushed, prodded, and kicked, sailors and corsairs flew into action. As if by magic, sails began to fall from the tattered rigging as seasoned salts slashed furling strings with knives rather than untie them. Eager hands grabbed sheets and lashed them to anything that didn't move. Immediately the Conch of Cords strained like a hunting hound at the leash. Yet the dead weight of Drumfish's midmast threatened to sink her like an anchor into the widening whirlpool.

Still, thought Adira Strongheart wildly, the tangled mast was the only obstacle that prevented them from fleeing. The iron grapnels had been pried off the gunwales and snarls of rope severed. Now if the ship could only scoot before the wind-and never mind that they raced toward a granite shore-they might win free of the whirlpool and survive another hour on this ship-killing coast.

Bounding to the companionway, Adira vaulted to the quarterdeck and ran squarely into Master Edsen.

"Keep off my quarterdeck!" roared the merchantman hoarsely. He blocked the top of the ladder, glaring down at Adira. "I'm in command! You and your damned mercenaries have cursed us!"

"Belt up and steer three points before the wind!" snarled Adira. "It's the only way."

"Before the wind?" bellowed Edsen. Rain slanted now off and on, and silver droplets clung to his bearskin hat and vest. The waning day grew dim as the sky lowered. "We sheer into the wind, you damned fool."

With no time to argue, Adira cruelly punched the master in the crotch. As Edsen lost his breath and doubled over, Adira bulled her head into his belly and lurched backward while grabbing the ladder. Edsen pitched over Adira's head to crash painfully in the waist. The pirate queen charged onto the quarterdeck, a cutlass and dagger in her hands.

She bawled at the helmsman, "Steer three points wide, or you're a dead man!"

Eyes bugging, the man spun the wheel through a quarter-turn and let it steady.

A noise like the end of the world grated on the ears and chilled the heart. With a slithering roar, the misplaced midmast of the doomed Drumfish tore free of the Conch.

Adira Strongheart ran to the quarterdeck rail. Eerily, like some giant sea serpent in reverse, the varnished mast now corrugated like bark slithered along the shattered gunwale. What remained of Drumfish churned and bubbled as it sank into the whirlpool. The ocean spun like a potter's wheel, with the center dimpled a full ten feet below the water's surface. Drum' fish's torn sails, fractured deck planks, uprooted binnacle and ship's wheel, a broached longboat, and many broken bodies spun thrice in that awful gyre and then disappeared under the dark waves. The corsair's departing midmast whacked her splintered crow's nest against Conch's waist in one last vindictive blow, then plashed full length. Tugged inexorably from below, the mast whipped spray as it stood upright as if in defiance, then sank out of sight.

The danger wasn't over, for the whirlpool continued to grow, though it now sagged only six feet deep at the center. Adira wished she might drop a sea anchor off the starboard side, or else trim the sails to bite the wind, or try any of a dozen sailing tricks to free them from the vortex, but there was no time. Praying to the Sea King herself, Adira didn't even shout at the sailors scattered across the tops, for they worked as hurriedly as possible to free sails, let them drop, and sheet them home.

Slowly, after agonizing minutes, the merchant vessel kicked up her heels and lurched from the maelstrom's pull. Free, the Conch took on new life and fairly leaped as wind filled her tattered sails. Adira frowned as seawater gurgled into a rent torn in her side, but the pumps could eject it, if anyone could spare a hand for the pumps. Charting a new course closer to the wind for the helmsman, Adira hopped into the waist.

Simone the Siren, often Adira's navigator, met her captain where cordage and shreds of sails dangled. The waist was a dangerous place, for smashed longboats and pin rails, buckets and spars careened back and forth, easily able to sweep an unwary sailor out the nine-foot gap of missing gunwale.

Simone called above wind and rain, "We only broke free because that whirlpool sucked down Drumfish, you know! The jetsam blocked the gyre from catching us!"

"I know!" called Adira, though they stood only two feet apart. She glanced aloft. "Tell the hands to secure. We'll tack on my command."

"There's naught to sheet home to for half the canvas!" Simone cut her off.

"Do your best!" countered Adira. "We need to claw to windward."

"Won't happen!" Simone's dark eyes closed in negation. "We've lost half our backstays! Try to tack, and you'll shiver the timbers down on your head! Best we steer for shore! Lash the lubbers and wounded to a baulk and scout for a soft crop of rocks!"

"Never!" shouted Adira. "I won't surrender a ship! If the coast veers just two points west we'll weather it! Tell the hands we'll tack!"

"Aye aye!" Simone didn't argue. "All hands! Take care to tack for your lives'."

"What?" Adira spun as someone tugged her sleeve. No one stood there, and for a second Adira imagined ghosts and selkies and other sea haunts. Then she saw Whistledove Kithkin peeping up from under her cloak hood, the brownie barely taller than a crane.

"Whistledove! Why don't you man the crow's nest!"

"I did, but no one could hear me cry! What fish wears tall stickles on its back and tail?"

"Lots of fish." Adira's heart dropped into her belly. Queer, she thought, how the simplest questions proved so daunting. "What color? How big? Where away?"

"Greenish with brown webbing." The brownie was chagrined by her lame observations, but she stood far from her native hills. Her shivery voice piped above the wind, "The sail fin reaches high as our rail, I think. I don't know the creature's length. It follows in our wake."

Adira's eyes bugged at the ominous news so casually delivered, for Whistledove had no idea of the horrors that lurked in the deep. Hissing, Adira scampered back to the quarterdeck and ten feet up into ratlines. Straining her eyes, Adira saw nothing off the stern but churning waves, dirty gray and steepening. Perhaps, she prayed, the unseasoned brownie had imagined the sight or had just spotted flotsam from Drumfish.