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chamber pot. Finding no such article, she finally squatted over a spittoon, eyes clenched shut in embarrassment at the necessity and the telltale noise.
    She had just finished, hidden the spittoon to be emptiedlater, and removed the chair from in front of the door when Patrick returned. She washed her hands.
    He put a tray containing porridge, bread with butter and jam, and coffee on the desk, and Charlotte fell to eating with no hesitation at all.
    “I’d like to go out walking on the deck,” she said. If she was going to be on board a ship, against her will or otherwise, she reasoned, she might as well make an event of it and see what was there to be seen.
    “Some other time,” Patrick answered, busy rifling through a logbook he’d taken from the storage chest. “We’re expected at the palace, goddess, and my friend the sultan is not a man to behave graciously in the face of disappointment.”
    Charlotte’s hearty appetite immediately fled. Patrick had been relatively kind to her, except for a little teasing, and she’d shoved the possibility of his villainy to the back of her mind. Now it sprang out at her like a weasel stuffed behind the door of a flimsy cupboard.
    “Disappointment?” she asked, her voice thin as thread.
    Patrick looked up from his logbook, frowned pensively, and returned his gaze to the pages before him. He was holding the volume in the curve of one arm. “Khalif’s a sociable man,” he said.
    Charlotte swallowed the bile that rushed into the back of her throat and shoved away her half-finished breakfast. She looked down at her ungainly breeches and shirt and had a desperate inspiration. “I haven’t the proper clothes to go calling—especially not when the host is royalty.”
    Patrick closed the logbook, tucked it into a tight space on one of the few shelves. “Don’t worry,” he said, his mind clearly fixed on some other matter. “There are lots of women at the palace. They’ll be able to outfit you with something appropriate.”
    With that, he started toward the door.
    “Wait!” Charlotte barked.
    He turned slightly, looked back at her over one shoulder. “Yes?”
    “I don’t want to belong to some man’s harem, sultan or not!”
    Enlightenment shone in Patrick’s eyes; a sudden smile lit his face. “Oh. You thought I was going to sell you to Khalif, or present you as a gift. Well, goddess, you were wrong—I was only teasing before. This is merely a visit, and it would be a shame if you missed out on the exotic food and music.”
    The adventuress in Charlotte was stirring again, but she: was still suspicious. After all, her situation was most precarious. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
    He raised one of those damnably magnificent shoulders in a shrug. “I guess you don’t.” With that, he went out and closed the door. Charlotte was already moving toward it when she heard a key turn in the lock.
    Having no other choice, and knowing she’d need her strength, Charlotte went back to her tray and began to eat again.
    Barely an hour later, a man came for her and she was escorted onto the familiar deck of the
Enchantress.
She’d dreamed of the ship so often, drawn so many sketches of its graceful masts and wind-billowed sails, that she almost felt at home aboard the vessel.
    Patrick was waiting for her at the rail, where a rope ladder had been tossed over the side. He grinned, surely thinking of the time fear had held her stuck in the very rigging swaying above their heads.
    “Shall I carry you down?” he asked, with politeness so elaborate, it could only be mockery.
    Charlotte was incensed. She and Millie had climbed many a tree, and she was no coward. She tossed Patrick a look full of acid and swung over the railing to find the first rung of rope with her bare feet.
    She was careful not to recognize the dark shapes moving with deadly grace under the surface of the clear, blue-green water, or to calculate the distance between the rail and that tiny