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him, and vault onto the giant wooden table that filled the room.
    To Jack’s horror, when he looked down, he realized that someone had used an axe (or a sword) to carve a hole in the bottom of the door—a hole just big enough for a small dog to leap through, which is precisely what happened.
    YAP! YAP! YAP! the dog hollered, bouncing and leaping around the table as if he were shouting: “Come down from there, you coward! Come down and face me like a dog!”
    “No, thank you,” Jack said politely. “I’d much rather stay up here. This is exactly where I intended to be.”
    Suddenly his nose twitched. He clutched his face, and then sneezed three times in rapid succession. That overpowering scent of dying lavender flowers…that could only mean one thing.
    “Ah, Jacques ,” purred an insufferable French voice behind him. The accent—and the weight of the arrogance and egotism buried in it—made Jack’s skin crawl. “ Bienvenue to le chateau Chevalle. I hope you will not be staying long.”

C HAPTER S EVEN
    C arolina blinked, her eyes stinging. Smoke was quickly filling the storage room. Already in pain from his wounds, Diego was starting to lose consciousness. If he breathed too much of this smoke, he would suffocate, and so would she.
    “Come on,” she said, shaking him. “Diego, stay awake. We have to get out of here.”
    “What’s happening?” he said woozily as she threw one of his arms over her shoulders. They staggered the last few steps to the door, slipping on spilled rum and broken glass. Carolina could feel small pebbles under her feet. When she looked down, she realized the floor was littered with dry beans that had exploded out of one of the barrels when the cannonball hit. She kicked the debris out of their way and leaned Diego up against the wall while she dragged a dented box aside. Finally, she got the door open and pulled Diego upright again.
    Just as they stepped into the outside corridor, the ship was rocked by another explosion, and they both fell. Smoke poured out of the room behind them, and Carolina twisted around to kick the door shut. There was shouting and more smoke from the galley, where the second cannonball must have hit.
    Three sailors came running from the sleeping area and skidded to a halt, gaping at Carolina and Diego.
    One of them gasped. “What’s that?”
    “Stowaways!” cried another.
    “It’s a girl! A GIRL!” the third shouted in horror.
    “Oh, shut up,” Carolina said, grabbing a pistol from his belt. “You’ve got bigger problems. The Pirate Lord of the Black Sea is attacking you!”
    This announcement made all three sailors blanch with terror. “Not Ammand the Corsair!” the first one gibbered. “He’s going to kill us all! He’s going to string us up from the yardarms and use our bones for wind chimes!”
    “I’ve never even heard of Ammand the Corsair,” Carolina said. “So he can’t be too bad. My—I mean, I’ve heard, uh, Spanish noblemen complaining about the Barbary pirates for years, and his name never came up.”
    “He’s new,” the second sailor whispered, his brown eyes wild with fear. “They say he murdered the last Pirate Lord and his entire crew by himself, using only his scimitar and deadly skill. He took the title with violence, and ever since he has been wreaking havoc from Morocco to Turkey.”
    “He will not stay in the Black Sea,” the third sailor chimed in. “His fleet terrorizes ships throughout the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, Villanueva’s territory. I heard he even stole from some of Villanueva’s own ships.”
    “Maybe he’s the one who made Villanueva disappear!” wailed the first sailor.
    “What?” Carolina asked. Villanueva had disappeared?
    But the sailors were too worked up now to answer her questions. “We’re all going to die!” shouted the second sailor. “I knew we never should have left Barbados!”
    “Our blood will run like rum into the ocean!” hollered the third. “This is the