“Remy!” she called, dragging Fin toward the ship’s wheel. Mist leaked up from the bog around them. Something like a giant eyeball with bat wings flapped past. “Where are we going?”
Remy flipped her head, making her blond ponytail dance toward the main deck. “Ask him.”
Just beneath them, for the first time since they’d left Meres, the door to Ardent’s cabin lay open. Across from it, a gaunt figure stood at the forecastle, hands clasped behind his back as he studied the bog before them. White stars speckled the darkness of his robes.
“Look who’s up,” Fin said, laughing. It was a halfhearted laugh. But, Marrill thought, at least it was something.
Just looking at Serth gave her chills. This was the man who’d set the Gibbering Grove on fire, who’d brought about the destruction of the lost city of Monerva, who’d nearly killed them all bunches of times. Formerly the living host of the all-destroying Lost Sun of Dzannin; even more formerly the mad Meressian Oracle, driven insane by drinking pure Stream water and obsessed with bringing about the end of all things.
But he was better now, she told herself. And they needed him. He knew things no one else could know, had seen places no one else had seen. Plus, he’d been Ardent’s best friend, back in the day. He understood better than anyone else the man who was now the Master of the Iron Ship, the bringer of the Iron Tide.
If they wanted to stop their former mentor, Serth was the only lead they had.
“Great,” she whispered. “I’ll, uh… I’ll just go ask him what the plan is, then.” She paused a moment, just in case anyone else wanted to volunteer. No one did.
Marrill wiped sweaty palms against her shorts and walked down the stairs toward Serth. Her entire body hummed with the urge to flee; each step was a force of will. Several feet away from him she halted, keeping her distance. In the past, his robes had seared anything that touched them with frost. She could still practically feel it biting her skin from the time months ago when he’d held her hostage on the Black Dragon.
Serth turned slowly, deliberately, to face her. His presence felt like a sucking wind as his attention fell on her. His features were smooth, placid. His cheeks still bore the grooves from centuries of crying black tears, but his eyes were dry as they watched her.
“Hi” was all she managed to say.
“Hello,” he replied.
Marrill swallowed. Somewhere out in the mist, something burbled. The bog air was moist and clutching against her skin. Nerves fluttered in her belly. “So…” she started.
“I have been communing with the Pirate Stream,” Serth announced. His gaze pierced her straight through the middle.
“Oh,” Marrill said. She looked down at her hands, not quite knowing what else to say.
“Or trying to, anyway,” the tall wizard continued. “Ardent will no doubt have told you that a wizard’s power comes from his relationship and rapport with magic.” He let out a slow sigh. “The magic hears me as well as ever. But it is… a bit cross with me at the moment.”
Marrill frowned. She didn’t realize magic could be angry. “That sounds bad,” she offered.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Only if one is a wizard who relies on magic to perform various tasks.”
“Right.” Marrill fidgeted uncomfortably. “I was going to ask where we’re going,” she said at last.
Serth barely moved. “Ah.”
For a long moment, neither spoke. Cool fingers of mist brushed through Marrill’s hair, sending goose bumps down her arms. There was a frantic splashing somewhere off the port bow, then stillness.
She realized Serth was waiting for her to actually ask the question. If she weren’t so intimidated by him, she would have rolled her eyes. Instead, she clasped her hands painfully in front of her. “So where are we—”
“Flight-of-Thorns Citadel,” he said before she could finish. “It is the last home of the Meressian Order, founded long ago by the acolytes who attended me in my madness and first wrote down my Prophecy.” He paused and then added dryly, “They were supposed to stop it from happening, but we all saw how well that turned out.”
“Oh,” Marrill said. She waited for him to say more.
He didn’t.
She bit her lip. Serth wasn’t big on volunteering information, apparently. “So,” she said, “why are we going there?”
His face was impassive. “They still have my things.”
And with that, he turned back to studying the bog.
Marrill’s mouth gaped. She didn’t know exactly how to respond. This wasn’t at all how this conversation was supposed to be going. The last time he’d spoken, Serth had told them that to stop the Master, they would have to follow him back in time, to the birth of the Stream. He’d said he would guide them. And now they were just going to some random citadel to pick up his old junk?
“Hold on,” she said. She chose her words carefully. Talking to Serth was like walking on the edge of a knife: slow, painful, and always just one slip away from disaster. “You’re supposed to… I mean, is this really… I mean, we’re supposed to be stopping the Iron Tide.”
Serth did not turn around. “I am aware of the situation.”
Sudden anger welled up in Marrill. It blasted away her sadness and overwhelmed her fear. “Then do something!” she snapped.
The wizard stayed still for so long that she wasn’t even sure he’d heard her.
A scraggly skeleton of a tree brushed past, its branches dragging lightly across the Kraken’s deck. The tips of them had fingernails. They scratched weakly at the dullwood, trying but failing to find purchase. Pirats scrabbled down from the rigging to cautiously lift them away.
A terrible thought occurred to her. “You don’t know how to stop the Iron Tide, do you?” Marrill finally whispered.
The wizard said nothing.
Her stomach sank. This was all useless. Everything was useless. Serth was useless. Maybe she should just have the ship take her home to Arizona so she could spend time with her mom and dad before the Iron Tide swept across her world, destroying it along with everything else. She turned slowly to walk away.
“I do, actually,” Serth said behind her.
She paused halfway across the deck and looked back. The wizard was facing her once more. Only now his fingers were tented together before him. He raised an eyebrow at her, inviting her to listen.
A spark of hope lit in her chest, but she didn’t dare acknowledge it, for fear of it guttering and going out. “You do?”
Without warning, Fin jumped down the stairs to land beside her. “Oh, for love and salamanders, just tell us already!” he cried.
“Seriously,” said a girl—Fig, according to the sail-scrap drawing on Marrill’s wrist. “Enough with the drama. Just tell us what the plan is.”
A hint of a smile played across Serth’s lips, then dropped and died away. “The Iron Tide and the Master are one and the same. Stop the Master, and you stop the Tide. Simple.”
“Well, that clears that up,” Fin said, with a roll of his eyes.
Marrill cleared her throat, hoping to cover up his sarcasm. “And the way to stop the Master is…”
“In his effort to save Annalessa, Ardent has encased himself in impenetrable metal and imbued himself with incredible power,” Serth declared. The tips of his fingers drummed together as he spoke. “But he is still human. The answer is relatively straightforward. To stop him, we only need one thing: a weapon sharp enough to cut through the metal armor and reach the man underneath.”
Marrill frowned. The plan was way more straightforward than she’d been expecting. She was used to convoluted, multiple-step tasks.
Fin had apparently been thinking the same thing. “That’s it? To stop the Iron Tide we just need to find a sword sharp enough to cut the uncuttable?”
“It’s a knife, actually,” Serth said. “The Evershear. I used it years ago to sever a scale from the side of the Slithering Mountain.” His lips curled. “The Scale to the Map to Everywhere.”
>
Marrill’s eyes widened. She’d always wondered where he’d found that. Then she smacked her forehead as realization dawned. If Serth had used the Evershear to get the Scale, that meant it was tied to the Meressian Prophecy. And if it was part of the Prophecy…
“The Meressian Order has the knife,” she said out loud. “That’s why we’re going to Flight-of-Thorns Citadel.”
The young deckhand standing next to her—Fig, Fig, Fig, Marrill reminded herself—frowned in confusion. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“The Meressians were obsessed with Serth’s prophecy,” Fin explained quickly. “They spent centuries collecting anything and everything that was mentioned anywhere in it—and it’s a long prophecy. If this knife thing still exists, they’d definitely be the ones to have it.”
For the first time, the pale wizard’s smile seemed genuine. “Just so. In part anyway. There are other things we will need there as well, but I wouldn’t let that concern you.”
The spark of hope began to burn more brightly in Marrill’s chest. But it was short-lived. “Of course then we’ll have to use the Evershear,” Serth continued. “Which, admittedly, makes things a bit more complicated.”
Marrill had thought it sounded too easy. “Complicated how?” she asked, pretty sure she didn’t want to know the answer.
Serth began to pace. “The wish orb that Ardent used to become the Master contained the power of the Lost Sun of Dzannin, merged with the pure waters of the Pirate Stream. The magic of the Stream water is what held the Lost Sun in check. But that would never have lasted. The Lost Sun was too powerful; the orb couldn’t hold it for long.”
He pressed his fingertips together under his chin. “When Ardent made his wish, he brought both forces—Sun and Stream—into himself. In a sense, he became the glue that holds them together. The being we know as the Master of the Iron Ship is a combination of all three: Ardent’s passion and intelligence, the power of the Lost Sun and its drive for destruction, and the magic and malleability of the Pirate Stream.”
A girl beside Marrill shook her head skeptically. “Sounds like he just made himself super powerful.”
Serth stopped, wheeled on them. “In a way,” he said. “But in another way, as the glue binding it to the Pirate Stream, the Master is holding back the power of the Lost Sun. And if we take him out of that equation…”
“Then there’s nothing to hold back the Lost Sun,” Marrill gasped.
Serth nodded slowly. “Indeed. Once we strike the man beneath the metal, the Lost Sun will be free once more.”
“And we’re right back to it burning a great big hole in the world,” Fin finished.
Serth snorted. “We would be fortunate if it left us something to burn a hole in.”
“Great.” Fin sagged against the railing. “Because we all know how easy stopping the Lost Sun will be,” he grumbled. “That worked out sooooo well the last time.”
“Last time you failed to lock the Lost Sun in its proper prison,” Serth said pointedly. “Only the Pirate Stream itself can contain the Star of Destruction.”
“We tried that already,” Fin protested. “At Meres. But the only way to trap it in the Stream is through the Map to Everywhere, and that’s broken, remember? Even Ardent couldn’t fix it.”
Serth waved a hand dismissively. “The Map isn’t the only way into the heart of the Pirate Stream.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that Marrill’s brain ground to a halt.
Fin stared at him, mouth agape. “Then why did you spend all that effort trying to find the pieces to put it together?” His voice grew more heated. “The Key to open the Gate, remember?! If there was another way to unleash the Lost Sun, why didn’t you use that instead?”
Serth smiled. “Because assembling the Map was the easy way.”
Fin let out a moan of frustration. Marrill understood how he felt, but they had to focus. “So, if there’s another way into the heart of the Stream, where do we find it? And how do we trap the Lost Sun there?”
“To answer your second question first,” Serth said, “the Master is already inside the Stream. We just have to get in there with him.”
Fin cracked his knuckles. “Well, that should make things easier. If we defeat the Master inside the Stream, the Lost Sun will already be trapped!”
But Marrill had a sinking feeling. Nothing was ever that easy on the Pirate Stream. “Okay, then, how do we get in there to reach him?”
The corner of Serth’s mouth turned up imperceptibly. “We do what he did: travel back in time and enter the Pirate Stream at the dawn of its creation,” he said simply.
Fin barked out a laugh. “Oh, that old trick. Travel back in time.”
“Exactly.” Serth seemed pleased Fin was keeping up. “A touch more complicated, certainly. You can see why I felt that using the Map to open the Gate seemed a simpler solution.”
Marrill threw up her hands. “So when you said we only need one thing to stop the Iron Tide, what you really meant is that we have to crash the Meressian Citadel so we can grab the Evershear, travel back in time so we can enter the Pirate Stream, and then find the Master so we can stop the Iron Tide and trap the Lost Sun once again?”
Serth nodded. “I did say it was relatively straightforward.”
Marrill didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Whether to let the ember of hope inside her bloom or to stomp it out for good. She closed her eyes, struggling against a tide of overwhelming fear. “It sounds impossible.”
Fin leaned against her, his arm warm against hers. He took her hand and squeezed it. “This is the Pirate Stream, Marrill. Nothing is impossible.”
He smiled, and she felt something inside her begin to brighten. Another little spark of hope igniting in the ashes. Fin was right. They’d faced tough odds and impossible tasks before and succeeded. More or less.
At least they had a plan. No matter how crazy it seemed, it was a start.
They would find the Evershear, follow the Master—apparently back in time—confront him in the heart of the Pirate Stream, and…
Then what?
She looked out across the bog.
The dark current flowed, slow and gentle; the rafts of moss still tangled with each other, stalks shaking hands lazily as they passed. But somewhere in the distance, beyond the screeching of tongueless birds, a dull roar was rising. A roar that could have been the wind. Or a waterfall.
And then what? Her brain asked again.
The thought echoed in her head, like the looping calls of the birds. Like the growing roar in the distance. Because somewhere beneath all that iron, there was still Ardent. Regardless of what he’d done, somewhere in there was the goofy old man she loved like a grandfather. If everything went exactly as Serth said, what would happen to him?
Would the Evershear kill him?
Marrill closed her eyes, her heart squeezing tight. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. They didn’t have a choice about stopping the Iron Tide—they had to in order to save the Stream.
Even if that meant losing Ardent in the process.
And hadn’t they already lost him when he’d chosen to become the Master? She still didn’t understand how he could have done that. Abandoned them and let loose the Iron Tide. A familiar sense of betrayal began to clutch at Marrill’s chest, burning its way up her throat.
She shook her head, forcing thoughts of Ardent from her mind.
“I thought we said no more dramatic pauses?” volunteered a deckhand. (Fig, Marrill reminded herself. FigFigFig…)
“An excellent point,” Serth said. He slipped around them almost effortlessly, headed toward Ardent’s—his—cabin. “Captain!” he called up to the quarterdeck. “Prepare for some tight rapids. The Flight-of-Thorns Citadel is heavily guarded, so we’ll be sneaking in. The way is a bit treacherous.”
“Yeah, sure,” Remy called back. “Rapids, rough, got it. Done it before, no problem.”
Marrill looked ahead, squinting through the fog. The roar was get
ting louder. The air smelled of damp wood and regret. Whatever was coming, it was going to be big.
“Get some rest,” the wizard told them. “By tomorrow morning, we will be nearing the Citadel, and I’ll need you all to be ready. The Meressians are unlikely to be welcoming. And once we are done with them, things will really start to get tough.” With that, he ducked into the cabin and closed the door.
“He’s charming,” the girl beside her offered.
Fin shrugged. “At least he’s knows what we need to do to stop Ardent. Right, Marrill?”
Marrill didn’t answer. Instead, she looked out into the mist, listening to the rush of the water picking up speed. Terrified of where this current might be taking them.
CHAPTER 4
Flight-of-Thorns
Fin held tight to the railing, even as Ropebone wrapped a line around his waist, holding him tighter still. Serth hadn’t been kidding about the rapids. The Kraken surfed on a drizzle of water that ran down the outside of a stalactite hanging from the roof of a massive cavern. Remy pulled them into a spiraling path, looping around the stalactite fast enough to defy gravity—at least until they reached the big drop at the bottom.
Below them, Flight-of-Thorns Citadel hung like a great barbed bat from the ceiling of the enormous cavern. Bridges of narrow steel fanned out from it into the distant darkness. Even from up here, Fin could see that each one was secured by rows of gates, stockades, and checkpoints. He had a strong feeling there were no guardrails. Crossing through the barriers would be nearly impossible if you weren’t wanted.
Close to the Citadel, the bridges came together in a huge ring, itself joined to the main fortress by even narrower, more dangerous-looking bridges. Below them hung yet another ring, this one cupped and filled with Stream water. It was a hanging moat, Fin realized, that ensured anyone falling from the outer bridges wouldn’t be climbing back up ever again.
“The water running down this stalactite falls into the heart of the Citadel itself,” Serth shouted over the shrieking wind. “It’s how they get their drinking water. It is also, incidentally, the only unguarded way in.”