It turned out that Jace did not have even the smallest difficulty wrangling the position of cook for himself. He was not all hampered in his attempts to sample the better of the foodstuffs that were brought aboard the Chaser. He was not thanked for his efforts, either in preparing the food or for having procured it in the first place.
He was, to put it very shortly, not paid any attention at all by Katryn, and he didn’t see Sheiral at all anymore. They stayed shut up in the cabin, poring over the old manuscripts and Katryn’s maps, both of them growing increasingly frustrated with each other.
Katryn had not planned on staying on in Montport, but she had decided on the day of their arrival that they would remain just long enough to puzzle out a clear destination so that they wouldn’t be wandering aimlessly. It had occurred to Jace that perhaps Katryn was only staying in the harbor so that she could be rid of the two of them as soon as the secret was cracked and Sheiral was no longer needed, but he’d also decided that on the balance it would be better for this possibility to arise nearer to the shore than farther away, and so he’d kept his mouth shut.
He might have tried to warn the sky princess to be stingy with the information she doled out, but that seemed to be happening as a matter of course. He didn’t know much about reading, but he wasn’t sure that she could be any slower if she tried. They were now entering their second week in port. Katryn was sticking to her initial plan even as the days piled up and the progress of translating whatever it was they were studying seemed to slow. Jace had thoroughly explored the neighborhoods around the harbor, and was becoming a familiar sight to many of the merchants and vendors of the area, who all called him “Kat’s crew”, as in “Well, there goes Kat’s crew.”
Apparently it was something of a novelty for the Horizon Chaser to have rolled up to the dock with anyone other than Katryn and Loki aboard her. It didn’t bother Jace at all, as he was used to being “Prit’s boy”. If Katryn started thinking of him as her crew, too, then she might start treating him better… or at least be less inclined to turn him off her ship when her current task was finished.
That was why he jumped to attention every time she stomped out of her cabin, if he was around, and why he worked to quickly complete any task she gave him, even if it was something pointless and obviously used as a petty way of venting frustration, as when she scowled and ordered him to straighten up the tangle of nets hanging on the walls, that had been like that for far longer than he’d been on the ship.
One particularly hot afternoon, while he was riding out the sunniest part of the day below deck, he heard a marrow-curdling shriek from Sheiral followed by the sound of heavy glass pots shattering against the wall. There were heavy seconds of silence and then Katryn stuck her head, dripping red, out the door.
“We need more ink,” she said.
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