As gulls flew over the sparkling turquoise ocean, a black haired youth in a brown tunic and trousers leaned against the side of a ship,watching some dolphins that were playing near the vessel. The ship’s owner, a merchant named Samuel Potter, stood nearby. He was a massive man, strong as an ox, with fiery red hair and a welcoming grin on his face. His large hands were callused with labor, and his emerald green eyes sparkled.

While a gentle breeze ruffled the teen's short, choppy hair, the ship plowed through the waves, and salty spray sprinkled the deck. There!The merchant was gazing at her again! Would he see through her ploy?All the young woman could do was trust God to protect her. Sighing, Hadassah returned to her sweeping. Could it have been only a few days ago that she had been a carefree girl with not a thing to worry about? Her mind returned to that dreadful day.

The sun had risen dazzling and cheery, laughing down at the vast meadows as enchanting flowers opened to drink up the morning light. A few pleasant huts dotted the landscape. The one on the far right was where everything had begun.

Hadassah had jumped out of bed, fresh and eager to take on the day. The smell of fish frying and fresh fruit drifted from the kitchen where her mother, Ruth, was preparing breakfast. Hadassah dressed hastily in her favorite blue cotton dress with her leather belt and boots. She added her knife onto her belt and fastened her elegant locket around her neck. Hadassah then crossed the corridor and stepped outside to assess the weather. She breathed in the fresh morning air; it was going to be a beautiful day.

Hadassah enjoyed life with her loving mother and handsome older brother,Eleazar. Her father was a mystery, and her mother never spoke of him.Since she had never met him, Hadassah had no reason to miss him.Stepping back inside, she began setting the table as her mother added the finishing touches to their meal. Whistling a cheery tune, Eleazar joined them, full milk pails in hand from the morning milking. He greeted his sister fondly and said grace as they all sat down to eat.

After chores, Hadassah set off to take advantage of the wild berry season.“The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and the sky is a lovely shade of blue,” she sighed contently. Sometime later, her bucket now full of mouthwatering, juicy berries, Hadassah decided to head home. The sun was now directly overhead, and she was worried she would be late for lunch. On the way back home she began day-dreaming of surprising her brother with a delicious pie when he returned from working in the garden later that evening.

As she approached their hut, she noticed a parchment nailed to the door. Curious, she proceeded to read it and was shocked by what it said:

Missing! Any information regarding Hadassah Cypress will be rewarded accordingly! Up to 20 silver pieces

It had a sketch of her, and in the bottom right corner the seal of Lord Colten, the ruler of the Isles of Arvad! Hadassah gasped, rooted to the spot. “What's going on? This must be a mistake. I haven't been gone that long,have I?” she wondered. At once, she burst into the house,announcing her arrival as guilt stabbed her for worrying her mother so.

It soon became obvious that a struggle had taken place. Things were scattered everywhere, pages were torn, and chairs were broken. She examined the scene, an anxious feeling creeping into her stomach. She searched desperately for her beloved mother and adored brother,scouring the house, yard, and garden. They were nowhere to be found.

Her mother and brother had been taken captive it seemed, and evidence pointed to Lord Colten as the culprit...but why? All she knew was that she would be next if she didn't pull herself together, and quickly. She decided it would be best to leave the island until she could figure out what was going on. Disguising herself as a boy would probably be a good idea as well.

Hadassah crept into her room and packed some necessities, such as her pocketknife, flint and steel. Next she crossed over into Eleazar's room to pack some of her brother’s clothes. She put on a pair of his trousers and a tunic, throwing the rest into her knapsack. Stuffing her hair in her brother’s cap was impossible due to its length, so Hadassah reluctantly cut it, short, choking back tears as the thick,wavy locks fell to the ground.

Treading quietly in her boots, she strode into the kitchen of her home and packed some food. She then stepped outside, hoping no one would recognize her.

Hadassah strode to town looking for transport. Upon a store front, she had spotted a sign hanging with large lettering. It read:

Cabin Boy needed on ship sailing to Bloemeneneiland. Inquire inside.

Hadassah learned the sound of accounting young. Her uncle, who had run the shop for years had always said she could work as his apprentice, would always welcome her with open arms and warm tea. But when he looked up, his eye widened.

Hadassah knew fear.

It came as the rasp of boots on marble, echoing through the colonnaded hall of her uncle’s house, and the sudden hush of the fountain in the courtyard as servants fled. It came as the way her uncle’s hand trembled when he pressed a folded parchment into hers, the king’s seal glaring red as a fresh wound.

“Hadassah? Did you not hear? There is a warrant,” he whispered. “Your name is on it.”

Hadassah did not ask why. In Qamarayn, questions were luxuries, and she had spent hers long ago; on books smuggled from the House of Wisdom, on arguments with scholars who did not think a dyer’s niece should debate astronomy, on ink-stained nights copying forbidden charts of the stars that contradicted the king’s astrologers. Knowledge, she had been told gently and often, was not the crime. Defiance was.

“Go,” her uncle said. “Now. Before dawn.”

By sunrise, Hadassah no longer existed.

She cut her hair with a kitchen knife, each dark lock falling like a severed thought. She bound her chest, wrapped herself in her brother's spare tunic, and practiced walking with her shoulders loose, her gaze direct. The mirror did not lie to her, but it did not betray her either. She looked like a boy on the edge of manhood—slight, sharp-eyed, unremarkable.

At the docks of Al-Saffar, unremarkable was a blessing.

The harbor breathed: tar and salt, spices and sweat. Dhows and baghlahs rocked against their moorings, hulls painted with prayers and symbols to ward off the evil eye. Merchants shouted in half a dozen tongues, and sailors laughed too loudly, as if daring the sea to overhear them.

Hadassah—“Hadi”—kept her head down and her answers short.

“I can scrub decks.”

“Can you climb?”

“Yes.”

“Ever been at sea?”

She hesitated only a heartbeat. “Once.”

The merchant who hired her, a broad man named Rashid ibn Luqman, snorted. “Once is more than never. You eat little?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We sail with the tide.”

The ship was called The Blue Heron, and it carried indigo dye, glassware from Basra, and books sealed in waxed chests—legal ones, Rashid said with a wink, which told Hadi they were not. The crew was a knot of men hardened by sun and salt, their prayers timed to the roll of the deck and the call of the muezzin drifting from the shore.

The first days blurred into aching muscles and blistered hands. Hadassah learned the language of the ship: how the rigging sang when the wind shifted, how the cook’s temper rose and fell with the sea, how to sleep curled against a barrel while waves slapped the hull like an impatient creditor.

She learned, too, how to be invisible.

She spoke when spoken to. She laughed when others laughed. She hid her fear behind work and her thoughts behind silence. At night, when the stars wheeled overhead, she traced their paths in her mind, correcting old errors, remembering truths the king had declared false.

On the seventh night, the sea grew restless.

Clouds smothered the moon, and the wind sharpened. Rashid paced the deck, eyes narrowed. “Reef the sails,” he ordered. “Storm’s coming.”

It came like an answer to a challenge.

Waves reared, black and white, and the Blue Heron groaned as if alive. Men shouted, ropes burned through palms, and rain hammered the deck until the world was water and noise. Hadassah clung to the rail, heart pounding, every lesson screaming at once.

Then she saw it.

“Captain!” she yelled, before she could stop herself. Her voice was swallowed by the wind, but Rashid was close enough to catch the shape of her panic. She pointed—not at the sea, but at the sky.

“The stars—when they vanish like that, all at once—it means the wind will veer south, not east.”

Rashid stared at her. “What?”

“The clouds,” she insisted, soaked to the skin. “They’re moving against the current. If we keep this heading, we’ll take the waves broadside.”

A lesser man might have struck her for insolence. Rashid looked at the sky, then at the compass, then back at the boy who spoke like a scholar in a storm.

“Turn her,” he said finally. “Just a point.”

The ship groaned, protested, and then—miraculously—rode the next wave instead of fighting it. The storm still battered them, but it no longer sought to break them in half.

When dawn came, pale and exhausted, the crew stared at the horizon as if it had personally offended them. Rashid leaned on the rail beside Hadassah.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked quietly.

She considered lying. She considered running. Instead, she said, “From books.”

He grunted. “Books don’t usually save ships.”

“They can,” she said. “If you listen.”

Rashid studied her with new eyes. “What’s your real name, boy?”

She met his gaze. The warrant, the boots, the knife flashing in lamplight—all of it pressed close. But so did the deck beneath her feet, the sea she had survived, the stars that had not abandoned her.

“Hadassah,” she said. “And if the king’s men ask, you never heard it.”

Rashid smiled, slow and thoughtful. “Kings don’t own the sea,” he said. “Nor the wind. Nor, I suspect, the truth.”