Dragon Ship. Natalie Yacobson

The wounded goblin said. He was the most formidable and huge monster on board.

      «And whose ship is this?» Patricia asked.

      «It is nobody’s.»

      «It sounds like it’s an independent living creature that drinks the blood of the unfortunate girls who boarded.»

      She seemed to have hit the mark. The monsters looked at her with reverence, as if she were an all-knowing sorceress.

      «The ship belongs to nobody, and so does this saber,» the goblin lowered his eyes guiltily. «So far, no one has been able to take it, but it has harmed everyone. The ship is also named after the saber.»

      «You mean a saber?» Patricia was surprised.

      «No, it is a bloodsucker.»

      «That doesn’t sound nice.»

      «Well, the ship isn’t going to a beauty contest, but to a pirate heist.»

      «Since you have a handsome captain now, you’ll have a handsome name.»

      The Wicked One is squirming.

      «You should go back to land, pretty girl!»

      «It is too late. I’m with you now. Whoever went aboard will never come back alive unless he’s your captain. That’s what the swamp women whisper.»

      «Do you hear them? Swamp women! Oh, come on! You’re not a fairy yourself, are you?»

      The fiends hopped around Patricia on the deck. Some claws even felt her back for wings.

      «She is not a fairy!» A troll said disappointedly.

      «Don’t worry! I’ll be a good captain.»

      «I see, or you wouldn’t have the saber,» said the ugly duergar.

      Fate is whimsical. She almost got burned by dragon fire, got on board with the wicked! But with a crew like this, you can get your revenge.

      «Let’s go!» Patricia commanded.

      «Where is it to?»

      «Head for Opal.»

      «Are we going to look for food for the ship?» The goblins became animated.

      Did they say food, not profit? Did Patricia hear what they said?

      «Does the ship feed on gold?» She asked.

      «No, it feeds on the blood of captured men who have fallen into the water. There’s a reason it’s called a bloodsucker.»

      «I would have called it «The Light», the name of my ship when I was a noble lady.

      «And what are you now?»

      They couldn’t tell whether she was a peasant or a lady by her dress. Patricia thought it unnecessary to explain her social status. She wasn’t sure she had retained her title and manners. She had been wanted as a rebel for a week now. To hide, she’d been stubbornly playing the role of a commoner.

      «We will avenge my kin,» she said dryly.

      «If you want to burn all of Opal, you’d better summon a dragon ship. He can do it in one swim,» said the clever trolls.

      «He’ll burn us, too. We can do it ourselves!»

      On the way, they captured a pirate ship and ate all the pirates. «The Bloodsucker» really did feed on people. Perhaps we shouldn’t have changed its name as it exactly matched the behavior of the bloodthirsty vampire ship. The ship couldn’t have been named more accurately. Its ropes, like living snakes, stretched out and caught game. The sails swirled cocoon around the captured humans, and for a moment the bloody stains on the sailcloth were visible. The deck greedily absorbed the blood, making sucking sounds. You don’t need to wash a deck like this, you just sprinkle blood on it and it’s clean. The stains are immediately absorbed.

      Patricia cheered, realizing that luck had come to her in the form of a magical ship and its crew. No one could handle goblins, swamp elves, and trolls in battle. A crew of the unholy is just what you need to take revenge on powerful enemies.

      Barrels of fire

      Patricia covered her eyes and it seemed to her that the fire ship was floating towards her again and a serpent was forming from the fire and hissing:

      «The dragon seeks you! The dragon wants you! Swim to him!»

      Is it to fight him? Or is it to fall in love with him? The silhouette of the dragon ship stirred strange feelings. Her heart blazed, but her mind remained cold. Patricia realized that sailing towards the dragon ship meant certain death. Pirates should be more calculating. You should only attack those you can defeat. You also need to inspire respect among the crew so there’s no rebellion.

      How to look more dashing? How about wrapping a black eye patch around one eye? That would be dashing, but not practical. The view is worse with a blindfold on. To fight with a saber, she needs to see both right and left.

      Pirates without one eye or a wooden leg are cripples after all. What’s so dashing about them? Patricia still took a skein of cloth to bandage her knee or elbow as if they were shattered. It would give the impression that this wasn’t the first time she’d pirated.

      Someone’s voice called out from the void:

      «You are the dragon’s chosen one!»

      What does it mean, the chosen one? The dragon wants to kidnap her and sacrifice her? So she has a saber to defend herself and a bloodthirsty ship that will suck the blood even out of the dragon if the dragon suddenly swooped down. But what is about the dragon ship? It can’t be handled that easily. And there’s the risk of burning. There’s no escape from the blazing sea. But she’s a captain at sea, and the water around the ship isn’t on fire yet.

      Life has changed for the better. Not so long ago Patricia was serving drinks to pirates in a tavern, and now she is a pirate captain herself! Fortune had finally smiled on her. The dull everyday life was colored by pure magic. The saber hovered over the cabin, guarding Patricia’s sleep. In addition to goblins, trolls, and boggles, the crew even included swamp elves. They were tall and green-skinned. Patricia had only seen tiny elves before and naively thought they were all as small as pixies. The swamp elves turned out to be hulking men whose skin was sprouting slime and moss. The tavern elves tended to leprosy by climbing into beer mugs. Their size was perfect for such hiding. If they were discovered, they blew a whirlwind of magical beer bubbles in the drunkard’s face that would make him lose his mind and dance in the street all night. No one believed the complaints of the drunks in the morning. Many complained that they were enslaved by elves, not ale. Naturally, they were only mocked. It was until disaster struck.

      One day some drunkard swallowed a beer elf, and his stomach swelled, sparks ran along his skin, and the elf laughed from his gut. Everyone thought he had a ventriloquist inside him. The poor guy lost his bearings and hit the iron hook with his belly. The freed elf flew out of the belly. The murder was blamed on the pirates.

      Patricia remembered how the drunkard’s body hung on the hook like a meat carcass, while the mocking elves circled around the hook and cheered:

      «How easy it is to fool people!» They chanted.

      Now they were helping her to pirate. And she had thought that magic tricks were easy only with drunkards in the tavern.

      The first ship they captured was a galley. There was nothing to eat. But the vampire ship did, both the ship’s owners and the galleys’ oarsmen. Its ropes and sails caught its victims in a cocoon and smeared them in a bloody stain. The blood would quickly disappear, soaking into the ship, and the sails would turn boiling white again. This was great, because sailing with bloody sails meant being under suspicion forever. You could tell a bloody ship belonged to pirates. The ship itself didn’t care, it was all about food. It easily accepted the presence of a captain, as long as the captain leads it on a voyage for game. But the crew lacked other values.

      «We