“After you turn the wood down, you should probably try to snag some eyes,” Stephanie told Ace.

“That’s going to be tough. They’re hidden under all this scum.”

An hour later the ship was heading due east, pitching through open seas. The scum had been ladled off, and the fish eyes slopped in the broth, mercilessly bashing themselves against the side of the big metal pot while Ace hunted them down with his spoon. Sweat rolled in rivulets along Stephanie’s back and collected on her upper lip as she stood guard over her baking biscuits.

“Any problems?” Ivan called down. “Folks are getting hungry.”

“Tell them to keep their pants on. You can’t rush a gourmet feast like this,” Stephanie yelled over the sizzle of coffee splattering on the hot stove. She opened the oven door, whipped out a tray of biscuits, and dumped them in a bread basket lined with a red linen napkin. “Hardly burned at all,” she told Ace. “I don’t think we even have to scrape the black off the bottoms of this batch.”

Ace took time out of his fish-eye hunt to appreciate the biscuits.

“How many eyes have you got?” Stephanie asked.

Ace poked around in the cup sitting next to the stove. “Seven. Looks like I’m only missing one. You think we could have had a one-eyed fish?”

“You keep looking while I take the biscuits up.” She assembled a tray of chowder mugs, soup spoons, napkins, and tubs of butter, and set them on the roof of the midship cabin. She added baskets of biscuits and bowls of fresh fruit, and felt her lip curl involuntarily when Ace appeared with the tureen of fish stew.

“Are you going to eat this?” he asked in a whisper.

Eat it? Was he kidding? She’d inhaled enough fish stew to last her a lifetime.