Chapter 11
Kat senses that she’s just witnessed a profound moment.
As usual, that moment is largely neglected by Dunstana — Captain Kid is tugging at her again.
“Hurry up!” she urges. “Someone might steal our gold if we take too long.”
Clearly, she doesn’t have as much appreciation for the significance of meeting and befriending the ghost of one of the most famous pirates who ever lived, or for overcoming the various ordeals which he had set against them. It’s not exactly something that happens every day.
But how does that matter when there is a treasure chest full of gold waiting?
Slowly, Kat pulls herself from the spot to which she has become rooted.
“Yeah,” she says, still not paying particular attention to Dunstana. “Let’s go.”
She glances down one more time at the ivory rose in her hand before putting it in one of the pockets of her Adventuring Belt.
With Dunstana following close behind, Kat makes her way down the stairway leading to the floor, and crosses the treasure room to the backdoor Captain Fryte has opened for them.
The door leads to a staircase that leads to another door that opens out onto the beach.
Kat is happy to be out of the cave, to feel the wind on her skin and to breathe fresh air again.
And it’s stopped raining!
Things just keep getting better.
As she steps out onto the beach, she sees that, just as Captain Fryte promised, the treasure chest is waiting for them.
“Yay!” Dunstana exclaims, pouncing on the chest and wrapping her arms around it like a mother embracing a long-lost child.
She has recovered remarkably well from slogging through a trap-filled cave and being literally thrown into several perilous situations.
She is either the toughest ten-year-old in Realmgard or just that excited by the gold.
It’s probably the gold…
Honestly, Kat is pretty excited about the gold, too.
As a freelance adventurer, money isn’t something Kat sees a lot of, so winning a whole treasure chest is like having two birthdays at once.
She’s just a lot better at keeping her head than Dunstana.
But then, she’s had five extra years of practice.
She approaches the chest and gives it a tentative push. Weighed down with gold, it barely moves.
They’ll have to work to get it home.
Kat reaches into Dunstana’s backpack and rummages around, producing a length of rope and looping it around the chest, tying it into a secure knot. She pulls tentatively on the rope to make sure the knot won’t come undone.
She turns to Dunstana.
“Come on. You’re gonna need to push.”
Dunstana nods and hurries to take her position at the far end of the chest.
“Ready!” she announces, her three-cornered hat barely visible over the chest’s lid.
Kat grasps the rope and starts pulling. It takes the sisters a minute to get the chest moving, but soon they’re making slow but steady progress down the beach.
It’ll take a while to get their treasure back to Darkstone Manor.
Of course, that’ll lead to questions from Mom and the Admiral.
At which point Kat will insist that, no, she certainly never threw Dunstana across a pit full of spikes or used her to bait a Dragon.
And Kat will go on to explain that at no point in the day was she herself ever almost eaten by the King of All the Rats, or tied up and dangled over a fiery chasm.
Their adventure was, she will say, entirely uneventful and not the least bit dangerous.
And a kind, gentlemanly ghost had given them this lovely treasure chest.
“Hey, Kat?” Dunstana asks, bringing Kat out of her contemplative silence.
“Yeah?” Kat answers.
“Thanks for coming with me. I don’t think I could’ve done this by myself,” Dunstana says.
“Yeah, well, thanks for not letting Captain Fryte drop me down a fiery chasm,” Kat answers.
Looking back on the day’s madness — and there was a lot, even for an adventure with Dunstana — Kat decides that, despite finding herself in several perilous situations, there are probably worse ways she could’ve spent the day. Just loitering around the tavern wouldn’t have netted her a treasure chest.
“You know,” she tells her sister. “Today was actually kind of fun.”
“Yeah,” Dunstana says. “But mostly, I like the treasure.”
“Yeah,” Kat agrees.
“Today was awesome,” Dunstana continues, “but I think tomorrow I just want to go to the toy store. There’s a new Princess Moonflower doll, and I want it.”
Kat smiles. “I think we can probably manage that.”
She doesn’t imagine that a ghost pirate is going to threaten to drop her into the fiery bowels of the earth at the toy store.
But when your sister is Captain Dunstana Darkstone, you can never really be sure.
As she thinks about it, Kat decides having Dunstana for a sister it isn’t such a bad thing, at least not always.
It guarantees her life is very rarely boring.
“But if a Dragon tries to eat us again,” Kat continues, “You’re on your own.”
Epilogue
Whenever she and Kat get back from an adventure, Dunstana always looks forward to telling her best friend about it.
And not just because there’s usually cookies — that’s just a bonus from having a best friend from a family of bakers.
As she hears all about Dunstana’s latest adventure, two things occur to Ginger Breadman.
First, adventures seem scary and she never wants to have any adventures of her own. Never ever.
Ever.
Second, she has no idea what Dunstana is talking about, or why she’s so excited about it.
“So, anyways,” Dunstana is saying, “after we found the way inside Captain Fryte’s hideout, there was some rats.”
She scoops up another armful of cookies from the plate Ginger brought over.
“Thanks for the cookies, by the way. And after that —” she continues through a mouthful of cookies “— Kat stepped on a thing that turned the floor into a slide.”
“That is not what happened!” Kat insists from her position lounging on her beloved plaid couch. “And leave some of those cookies for me!”
“That part was pretty fun,” Dunstana concludes. “And then Kat locked herself in a room and I had to save her.”
“That is not what happened!”
Ginger stares blankly from behind her glasses at her best friend.
“Wait,” she says as Dunstana stops to take a rare breath. “Dunstana, who’s Captain Fryte?”
Now it’s Dunstana’s turn to stare blankly.
“Who’s Captain Fryte?” she repeats incredulously. “Seriously, Ginger? I must have told you all about it at least a million times! Wait here.”
Still muttering in disbelief, Dunstana darts out of the living room of Darkstone Manor, around the corner and up the stairs to her room.
“Don’t worry, Ginger,” Kat says from the couch. “I didn’t know, either.”
Dunstana comes running back into the living room with her trusty Big Book of Pirates tucked under her arm. She sets the book down on the table in the centre of the room and flips through the pages.
She waves Ginger over and emphatically points to the image on the page.
“See, Ginger? Him! Captain Fryte!”
Ginger nods and pretends to be interested.
“Captain Fryte was one of the best pirates, like, ever,” Dunstana explains.
“And he had a lot of gold. And then me and Kat met him and he let us have some gold. But we had to fight some skeletons and a dragon, first. And he almost dropped Kat down a hole.”
“Chasm,” Kat says.
Ginger shivers and the colour drains from her freckled face.
Traps?
Rats?
Skeletons?
A dragon?
“Oh,” Ginger says. “That sounds —”
“And he was a ghost, too,” Dunstana adds like it’s no big deal.
“That sounds scary,” Ginger mutters.
Dunstana leaps to her feet in excitement. “Are you kidding? It was awesome!”
“It was awful,” Kat groans, covering her face with one of the cushions from her couch.
“We go through all that, and we don’t even get any of the treasure!”
“But I though you said that he gave you the treasure,” Ginger says.
Dunstana nods. “He did.”
“But then Mom made us put it in the bank!” Kat laments, pressing the couch cushion more tightly over her face to scream into it.
“And we don’t get it back until we’re twenty-one! I had big plans for that treasure!”
Dunstana turns to Ginger. “She wanted to buy all-you-can eat lunches for a whole month.”
“Shut up, Dunstana,” Kat says through the cushion over her face.
“Oh,” Ginger says. “That’s too bad.”
She decides to offer Kat the only help she can think of. She slides the plate of cookies closer to Kat.
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