My Salty Mary

Book 0: Lady Janies

by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows

Genres: YA Action & Adventure

Synopsis

My Lady Jane fixed Jane Grey’s tragic past—and now My Salty Mary will do the same for the infamous pirate Mary Read!

Perfect for fans of The Princess Bride and A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, New York Times bestselling authors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows are back with a fantastical, romantical, and piratical historical fantasy remix that marries the story of The Little Mermaid with the life and times of infamous lady pirate Mary Read.

Don't call this mermaid "little"—call her "captain," unless you want to walk the plank.

Mary is in love with the so-called prince of Charles Town, except he doesn't love her back. Which is inconvenient. Since she's a mermaid, being brokenhearted means she'll—poof!—turn into sea-foam.

But instead, Mary finds herself pulled out of the sea and up onto a pirate ship. To survive, she joins them. But Mary isn't willing to just sing the yo-ho-hos. She wants the pirate life, all of it, and she's ready to make a splash . . . by becoming captain. But when Blackbeard dies suddenly, Mary has a chance to become so much more: Pirate King . . . or Queen. She won't let anyone stop her—not Blackbeard's cute son, not her best friend from back under the sea who's having a bit too much fun with his new legs, and certainly not everyone who says she can't be a pirate just because she's a girl.

She may not be the best man for the job, but she'll definitely prove that she's worth her salt.

And don’t miss the Prime Video streaming hit My Lady Jane!

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 448

Sample

Prologue

You definitely know this story. A mermaid saves a handsome prince from drowning and, in the process, falls madly in love with him. An evil sea witch magics her into becoming human—all for the low, low price of one beautiful singing voice—and it seems (for a minute there) like the mermaid is going to get her much-deserved happily ever after. But then the prince decides he’s madly in love with another girl.

As for what happens next? Well, there are a few versions. In one, the mermaid battles the sea witch, triumphs, and marries the handsome prince—the story is sweet and satisfying (with maybe a few catchy musical numbers) and everything turns out just how it should. But in the older, original version of the story (the one that probably shouldn’t be told to children), our heroine loses everything. The prince marries the other girl. The little mermaid dies of a broken heart and turns into sea foam.

That’s right: she dies.

But there’s another version. A better one. Ours.

Yes, our story is about the little mermaid. But it’s also about treasure. And true love. And pirates.

A little history on pirates. Piracy has pretty much always been a thing since boats were invented, but 1719, when our story takes place, was part of what’s known as the “Golden Age of Piracy.” It had all started with a war: England versus Spain, with a little France thrown in. Spain was winning, so the queen of England gave a bunch of guys with ships permission to attack Spanish ships and steal the gold and supplies the Spanish were stealing from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These crown-approved guys with ships—aka privateers—thought of themselves as the Robin Hoods of the sea (if Robin Hood had kept all the money for himself). It was a pretty sweet gig if you liked to sail and didn’t mind risking your life.

Then—as all good things must come to an end—England and Spain made peace with each other.

Overnight, the permission to plunder those shiny Spanish ships was revoked. And, overnight, a bunch of guys with a very specific set of skills no longer had jobs.

So, what’s a bunch of out-of-work privateers to do?

Piracy.

But they decided to be civilized about it. They founded a brotherhood in which they supported and treated one another as equals. They set up a code of honor—specific rules for how they would operate—as they continued to relieve the Spanish of their (stolen) gold. (They also took it upon themselves to liberate the gold of the English and French.) And if they happened to come across a ship that was stealing people from, let’s say Africa, the pirates might take the ship, welcome the formerly enslaved men as new recruits, and make a stop at a nearby island to let off everyone who didn’t want to be a pirate.

This didn’t go over well with those who were trying to build an economy on human trafficking, so the rulers of Europe collectively decided that seriously, piracy should stop being a thing. England hired a ruthless captain named Jonathan Barnet to hunt down all the most infamous pirates. To set an example, you see.

You may have heard of some of these pirates, like Captain Blackbeard, the most notorious swashbuckler to sail the seven seas. (Our version of Blackbeard is actually a combination of Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy, and a few other pirate-y guys who had “black” in their names.) Then there are some buccaneers you probably haven’t heard of, like Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the most notorious women pirates in the Caribbean. Being a lady pirate wasn’t half-bad. On a pirate ship, you didn’t have to wear a corset. Your worth wasn’t decided by who you married or how many babies you birthed. You could be free.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, of course. A woman on a ship was considered bad luck, so you had to dress as a man if you didn’t want to get thrown overboard. It was difficult to find good shampoo. And oh yeah, you occasionally got chased by Jonathan Barnet. And if he caught you, well, that was it. You died.

That’s what the historians say happened to Mary Read: she was captured, tried, and found guilty of piracy, but died in jail before she could hang.

But—bah!—what

do historians know?

They certainly don’t know that Mary Read and the little mermaid were the very same person. A girl who loved books so much she gave herself the last name Read. A girl who learned the hard way that romance isn’t a fairy tale. A girl who’s going to start out our story feeling pretty darn salty about love.

But don’t worry. She’ll come around. 

 

How It Started

our version

 

“I’m getting married!” the prince said again.

Mary sank down onto the edge of her bed, stunned. When he’d said it the first time she’d assumed he meant they—he and she—were getting married, and she’d been confused because she was pretty sure that the proposal was supposed to come before the wedding. But then he kept talking—about something called a dowry, which was apparently a negotiation with the bride’s family—and Mary slowly came to understand he wasn’t talking about her. Which meant that Charles—aka the prince, aka the love of her life—was getting married.

To someone else.

“You’ll be there, of course,” Charles went on. “Even if Lavinia didn’t want to invite you, I insisted.”

Mary stared at him.

“Oh, right.” Charles gave a sheepish smile. “I should have mentioned: I’m marrying Lavinia. Oh, and the wedding is tomorrow,” he added.

Mary’s mouth dropped open.

“I know, I know,” said Charles. “I should have told you earlier.” He took in her expression and gave a pitying laugh. “You’re shocked, of course. This must be most unexpected news.”

Or it was the sort of blindsiding news that could kill a person.

Thankfully, she didn’t turn into sea foam.

Yet.

Where Mary came from, it was a well-known fact that getting one’s heart broken was fatal. And where she came from, that was what happened when a person died: they burst into a mass of fluffy white sea foam and floated away on the next tide. Yes, it sounds drastic, but where Mary came from, people lived for three hundred years. Why, Mary had a grandmother who was two hundred and ninety-two years old. But Mary herself was only sixteen. The last thing she wanted was to die of a broken heart.

She pressed her hand to her chest and found the organ in question still stubbornly beating. It hurt, yes—there was an unpleasant squeezing sensation—but it hadn’t killed her.

Yet.

“You’re disappointed.” Charles gave a dramatic pout. “Please try to understand. I’m so fond of you, truly.”

She gasped. He was fond of her! She knew it!

Charles pressed on. “But you’ve seen Lavinia. She’s undeniably beautiful. And you’re so tall—you’re nearly taller than I am—and you’re—” He grimaced, as though struggling with how to explain it. Finally, he held his hands person-width apart, palms facing each other, and made a straight line down.

Like a box. Like the shape of her.

Her heart gave a painful twist. She wasn’t beautiful, she knew, not by human standards. Not like Lavinia, whose perfectly symmetrical face actually was in the dictionary next to the word beautiful. (Mary had been there the day the dictionary people came to take Lavinia’s sketch.) But so what?

She loved him.

The first time she’d laid eyes on Charles, on the fine ship where he’d been celebrating his birthday, she’d known that they were meant to be together. She’d seen fireworks that night—literal fireworks, exploding in the sky over their heads—and what she’d felt for Charles was like the fireworks, so bright and loud in her heart.

She loved him. Like Juliet loved Romeo in her favorite story.

He had to love her back.

“You understand, don’t you?” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The truth of the matter is, I’m a prince. You know how everyone here calls me ‘the prince of Charles Town.’ And as a prince, I must marry a . . . princess, of sorts. It’s a rule—well, an unspoken rule, but a rule nonetheless. And Lavinia’s a princess.”

Mary opened her mouth to tell him that she was a princess. A real one. Unlike Lavinia, Mary was the daughter of an actual king. She had a crown and everything. But the words didn’t come, not because she couldn’t speak—she could; she’d spent months learning how to speak English—but because even now, at this crucial moment, she couldn’t tell him the truth about who she really was. He wouldn’t believe her. And she was always tongue-tied around

Charles, like she was so dazzled by him that it was as if he reached into her throat and stole her voice away.

Mary hurried to the trunk at the foot of her bed and rifled through her belongings.

Charles watched her warily as she found what she wanted. “What’s this?”

Proof, she wanted to say. But instead she just held up the crown.

It was crafted from a single piece of coral, which shifted from orange to pink depending on the light, and gave off a kind of ethereal glow. Pearls, white and black and every shade in between, had been set in intricate designs along the front. The crown had belonged to Mary’s mother, passed down upon her death. It was the only thing Mary had taken with her when she’d come Above.

It proved, beyond a doubt, that she was a princess.

Gently, Charles took the crown and inspected it. “This is beautiful,” he breathed.

A lump formed in Mary’s throat. She nodded. “I—”

“It’s perfect,” Charles said, still gazing at the crown. “This will look exquisite on Lavinia tomorrow. She’s been desperate to find a tiara to match her veil.” He began to prattle on about the details of the wedding. “It’s to be held aboard my father’s finest ship: the Fancy. Won’t that be nice? I know how you love the water. Come, you must help me with the preparations. There’s much to do before tomorrow.”

The stabbing pain returned to Mary’s chest. This is it, she thought. Sea foam. But she remained very much alive, red-faced and speechless, when Charles smiled his heart-melting-est smile and held out his hand to her.

“Please, my little foundling?” he pleaded.

She took his hand. She’d taught herself how to speak English, but she’d never learned how to say no to him.

His little foundling, Mary fumed the next day as she stood aboard the Fancy and watched Charles say his wedding vows. He never called her by her name, she realized suddenly. Not the name she’d been given at birth nor the human name she’d chosen. She’d picked Mary because she’d often seen it in books, and it was a name humans seemed to revere. She loved that name—it just fit her somehow.

But Charles always called her his little foundling.

Little. What a joke.

“I do,” Charles was saying now.

Mary’s jaw clenched. How could he do this to her? She’d given up everything for him.

“I do,” Lavinia cooed back to Charles.

That codfish.

The priest announced that Charles could kiss the bride.

Mary glared down at the deck. Humiliation burned through her. She was sure everyone was looking at her, laughing at her, because everyone had known she and Charles were together. But now he’d cast her off. How did this happen? she asked herself. She loved Charles. And he loved her.

Didn’t he?

Wait, didn’t he?

She was beginning to have her doubts.

Everyone clapped, and Mary looked up to find Charles and Lavinia facing the crowd, smiling bashfully, holding hands.

It was done. He was married.

Her heart gave a great squeeze. She pressed her palm against it as she blinked back tears and somehow didn’t become sea foam right there in front of everyone.

What a scene that would cause. The onlookers would be shocked. There’d be screaming, perhaps even some fainting. The wedding would be spoiled.

It was a petty but comforting thought.

That night, after the food and cake, the dancing and toasting, after the newlyweds retired to their room belowdecks and everything had gone quiet, Mary stole a bottle of rum and sat on the bow of the ship. She liked rum, she discovered as she watched the moon gleam on the black, rolling ocean. The liquid burned its way down her throat, warming her stomach. It reminded her that she wasn’t foam.

Yet.

Just then, a head breached the surface of the water, followed by a set of pale arms, a torso, and a long, shining green fish tail. Effortlessly, the creature climbed up the ship and hoisted itself to sit on the rail.

It was a mermaid, obviously.

It also happened to be Mary’s sister, Big Deal, who—when she’d been giving everyone secret human names—Mary had dubbed Karen.

Mary rushed to the rail to help her onto the deck. “How did you find me?” she cried in Merish.

(A note, dear reader, about Merish: when Merfolk speak to one another, they’re directing their thoughts-as-words like a type of targeted telepathy. The range of Merish is similar to that of out-loud speech—one can whisper or yell or anything in between. To us humans, however, Merish would sound totally silent, as we don’t have the part of the brain that can detect it. So Mary’s cry wasn’t really a cry, but you get the idea.)

“Oh, you know. Magic.” Karen fixed her gaze on Mary’s feet. “Seriously? All that fuss over those things? And what are those nubby stumps on the ends?”

Mary resisted the urge to tuck her feet under her, out of sight. They were blistered and red. The fancy wedding shoes she’d borrowed had made her feel like she was stepping on knives whenever she walked. She’d tossed the heels overboard right after the wedding. “There’s more to being human than just feet,” she said stiffly.

Karen scoffed. “So you’re happy? Is being human everything you thought it would be?”

There was a knowing glint in her eyes. Somehow—Mary didn’t know how, but 

somehow—her sister knew about her predicament.

“Does everyone know?” she asked. Everyone, meaning the other Mers.

Karen nodded grimly. “So it didn’t work out with the human. Gee, who could have predicted that?”

“I’m fine,” Mary insisted, her face burning. “It’s true that I didn’t marry the prince, but I’ll figure out something else. I can take care of myself.”

This wasn’t true, and Karen could tell. (It is supremely difficult to lie while using telepathy.) Mary didn’t honestly know how she could live in the human world without Charles. She had no way to provide for herself.

“I’m fine,” she lied again.

“You’re remarkably calm, considering,” Karen said. “I mean, you have, what, half an hour left to live? It’s nearly dawn.”

“Um,” Mary said. “What do you mean?”

Karen put a hand to her scaly hip. “Everyone knows the rules: ‘The day after your one true love has wed another, when morning breaks, so shall your heart.’ And then . . .” She pursed her lips and blew a frothy raspberry.

Sea foam.

Right.

“Oh.” That seemed awfully specific to Mary’s particular situation. Had the Sea Witch (aka Aunt Witch, to Mary, since the Sea Witch was her father’s sister and therefore her aunt) said anything about that? Mary hadn’t been paying the best of attention that night; she’d been in such a hurry to be reunited with her darling prince. What a fool she was!

An improbable laugh escaped her, along with a rum-tasting burp, which just made her laugh and sob harder.

Great Waters, she’d given up everything for Charles. And now . . . And now . . .

The sky was lightening on the horizon. It was almost morning.

“We can fix it,” Karen said. “Aunt Witch sent me to give you this.” She began digging through her bag.

Hopefully she’d brought Mary a potion that would magically solve all her problems.

Instead, Karen pulled out a long, sharp knife.

Mary reared back. “Aunt Witch wants me dead? But aren’t I about to die anyway?”

Karen snorted. “No, stupid. It’s a magic knife. Obviously. I traded my hair to Aunt Witch to get it for you.”

Mary gasped, just now noticing how her sister’s hair was cropped up to her ears. What an enormous sacrifice! A mermaid’s hair was considered her pride and joy; it had magical powers, in fact, like the ability to stay shiny and untangled while submerged in saltwater twenty-four hours a day.

Karen gave the knife to Mary. “Aunt Witch says to plunge this into the heart of the human who hurt you. Let his blood spill over

your weird, disgusting legs, and they will become a proper tail again. Then you’ll come home and we’ll all pretend this humiliating incident never happened.”

“Stab him?” Mary’s mouth dropped open. “I can’t do that!”

Karen rolled her eyes. “You can if you want to live to see tomorrow.”

There was a sudden phlegmy cough from somewhere down the ship. Karen dropped into the water with hardly a splash.

“You’d better do it quick,” she called up when she surfaced again. “I’d estimate that you have about ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.”

Mary shivered. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Karen snapped. “Just do it. And don’t forget to bring Mother’s crown back with you. One day, when I’m the Sea Queen, I’ll need that crown for my coronation. You can’t just take things that belong to both of us.”

Mary’s mouth opened and closed. “All right. I—All right.”

Then Karen was gone, back down to their watery home, aka Underwhere (yep, you heard that right: Underwhere, as in W-H-E-R-E), aka the Kingdom of the Sea.

Five minutes later, Mary was standing at the foot of Charles’s bed, glaring down at him and Lavinia. They were spooning.

Mary’s palms were sweating. The knife felt slippery in her grip.

She really, really didn’t want to die in five minutes.

But could she actually do it?

Just then, Charles turned over onto his back, perfectly positioning himself to be stabbed in the heart.

Mary lifted the knife, trembling. Her thoughts were muddled—thanks largely to the rum. She tried to work up the rage she’d felt earlier.

She loved him. But he didn’t love her—and never had. It was so obvious now.

Her fist tightened around the knife handle.

Charles gave a sudden snort. His chest, with its very stabbable heart, rose and fell as he began to snore like a chain saw (although chain saws hadn’t been invented yet).

The trembling in her hand grew worse.

If she did this, she could go home. She could live the rest of her three hundred years trying to forget him. But no one else would forget it. She’d always be the littlest princess. The silly one, who tried to be special and ended up getting dumped. She’d never live it down.

She couldn’t go back.

But the alternative was not living at all.

And time was running short.

It was now or never.

It’s him or me, she thought. I have to do it. I must.

No.

She couldn’t.

She lowered the knife to her side. In the mirror over the armoire, she caught sight of herself, a wild and desperate girl, her blue eyes red-rimmed

 and sorrowful. The fancy updo she’d fixed herself for the wedding had half fallen down now, framing her face in lank strands. Her gown didn’t suit her, either. It was a pale blue satin number that was too tight in the shoulders, and too loose in the hips and chest. It would have been beautiful on someone with Lavinia-like curves, a proper woman, the kind Charles would have wanted to marry.

Suddenly Mary couldn’t stand to be wearing the dress for a moment longer. She tore at the laces.

The dress didn’t budge.

She tried to wriggle out of it.

It stuck fast.

Then she remembered she had a knife in her hand. She hacked her way out of the dress and hurled it onto the foot of Charles’s enormous bed, where he and Lavinia still slept obliviously.

Calmer now, Mary stole a shirt and breeches from the armoire and put them on. Then, because she’d said she would, she glanced around the cabin for the crown. Not on Lavinia’s head, not on the chest of drawers, and not on the heap of clothing.

Oh well. Mary couldn’t spend any more time looking for it, since she had a, uh, deadline.

She returned to the bow of the ship and used the magic knife to saw off her hair, as a show of solidarity with Karen. She hoped her family would understand. She hoped her father would stop being mad at her and maybe feel a teensy bit sorry for her instead. (But he’d probably stay mad. The last time she’d seen her father, they’d been screaming at each other—silently, that is—and she’d said she hated him.)

She couldn’t go back.

Before she could change her mind, Mary flung the knife into the sea.

It was dawn. The sky was washed with shades of pinks and peaches. The sun breached the horizon in an orange flare. Mary closed her eyes, savoring the feel of the wind tugging at her, the salty sea air, the warmth of morning on her face. . . .

The pain hit her again, this time in her stomach. (Reader, this could have been the rum.) She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting to become foam.

It didn’t happen.

Perhaps it was going to take a moment?

But the ship was beginning to wake. Mary couldn’t stay here and burst into foam in front of everyone. That now seemed downright undignified. So she did the only thing she could think to do: she ran to the starboard side and hurled herself, unceremoniously, over the rail.

She expected to explode into foam the instant she struck the water, but no. The only thing that happened was that she bounced painfully against the hull a few times. Then the ship kept sailing away, and 

 Mary discovered something significant:

She couldn’t swim.

She was momentarily drowning until she figured out how to doggy paddle. But even then, she quickly tired. I could really use some help, she thought, and thankfully, just then, a helpful sea turtle came along and let her rest upon its shell.

An hour passed. Two. And still she had not turned into sea foam.

“All right. What am I to do now?” she asked the sea turtle.

The turtle didn’t answer. It did, however, abruptly decide that it had somewhere better to be, and Mary was back to treading water.

She wondered if Charles had found her dress yet. She imagined him standing on the deck, clutching the blue satin to his chest, gazing out at the water with deep sorrow. He would regret everything. He’d weep for her. Wouldn’t he?

No, she thought bitterly. Probably not.

She was so tired of treading water. How easy it had been to navigate the world as a mermaid, slipping through the depths with a flick of her strong tail. Karen was right. These weird damn legs weren’t getting it done. She couldn’t go on.

So it’s to be sea foam after all, she thought as she slipped under the waves. Broken heart no longer required.

“Man overboard!” someone yelled.

Mary startled, her head breaching the surface. Had Charles come back for her?

A hulking shadow fell over her: a ship. There was a splash—someone jumping into the water—and then strong hands around her middle. They hauled her into a net, which hoisted her up and onto the deck, where she was dumped out, coughing and sputtering.

Another shadow fell over her.

Mary brushed water out of her eyes and squinted up to see, not Charles, but a man dressed all in black. He wore a faded black shirt with a black leather vest atop it, a very shiny and fancy pistol tucked into his belt alongside a wicked-looking cutlass. He had a short scruffy beard and wore the top part of his hair tied back, revealing several piercings along the outer edges of his ears, the rest of his hair loose about his shoulders. His skin was weathered and tanned (because sunscreen hadn’t been invented yet), and his eyes seemed permanently squinted. Mary noticed that his knuckles were scabbed over, as if the man had recently been in a fistfight. He grinned down at her, a glint of gold in his teeth.

“What a strange catch we have today,” he said in the lowest, raspiest voice she’d ever heard. “What say you?”

Mary gaped up at him, speechless.

The man who’d jumped in after her—not the one with the deep voice, we should clarify—turned out to be a young man about her age with brown skin and dark eyes. He smiled kindly. “Can you stand?”

With his help, Mary

rose unsteadily to her feet. Her head was woozy. Her stomach hurt. She was really starting to regret that rum.

“Here, have some rum,” said the man in black, thrusting a bottle under her nose.

Mary took a swig. Then she ran to the side of the ship and spilled her guts over the rail.

“Ha! A lightweight,” scoffed the man as Mary stumbled back, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “Where did you come from, boy?”

Boy?

It hit her instantly, that now-familiar rub of not being slim enough or curvy enough to be considered a real woman. Yes, she was wearing men’s clothes, and she’d cut her hair, but even so, if she’d ever been girl enough there would have been no question.

But just as she was about to blurt out that she was a girl—a woman, thank you very much—she noticed that there were an awful lot of men on this ship. Only men. She didn’t see a single woman, in fact. So given the circumstances, perhaps it was in her best interest to be viewed as a boy. “I came from a—a ship. I fell off.”

“Well, that makes it simple enough!”

Did it? She glanced around again. All the men were grinning like they knew something she didn’t. She noticed then that the men weren’t all what humans referred to as “white,” like the sailors from the Fancy had been. Many of them had brown skin—like the young man who’d saved her—and black skin. The range of skin tones was more like Mary was used to in Underwhere. And some of these men had eye patches. One had a peg leg. And another had a parrot perched on his shoulder. “Is this a merchant vessel of some kind?”

The man in black laughed huskily, which the rest of the men copied. “This is a pirate ship, lad! I am Captain Vane. And you, my young friend, have the good fortune of being the newest member of our crew.”

Mary straightened, her heart (which was obviously functioning just fine, in spite of everything) picking up its pace.

Pirates.

In her time as a human, Mary had come to understand two things about pirates: they were scary and bad. Scary as in the mere mention of pirates made grown men shiver. And bad as in they were criminals, although she wasn’t sure what kind of crime they were involved in. As Mary had been rather focused on Charles, any other details about pirates had escaped her.

“It’s not so terrible,” the kind young man whispered. “You’ll see. You can start as a cabin boy and work your way up the ranks. Maybe you’ll even like it. We go where we please and take what we want. It’s not a bad life.”

“It’s better than being sea foam, I suppose,” Mary said.

“Aye, it is that,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “I’m Tobias, by the way. Tobias Teach. I’m glad to meet you.” He stuck out a hand. ...