Kind of like her life, Marrill thought. Not long ago, she’d been eagerly planning her family’s escape from Arizona and return to their life of carefree adventures. Then her mom got sick, and every second since had been crazier than the last. Now, suddenly, she wasn’t just looking for a way home; she was racing against a madman bent on destroying the world.
Ice boomed again, and she hugged her arms around herself more tightly. Nearby, a stretch of smooth snow ruptured down the middle, one side dropping as the other jutted oddly into the air. Only a single snowy knoll out in the plain seemed to avoid the chaos.
“You’re my little snowy knoll,” Marrill whispered as she leaned down to pet Karnelius. He turned his head to one side and bonked it against her cheek. Somehow, it helped.
Just then, the already frigid temperature plummeted. Her face felt like someone had dunked it in ice water. Even beneath the thick wool coat, her skin bristled with gooseflesh.
“It’s f-f-f-freezing,” she stammered.
Except that as soon as the words left her mouth, her breath crystalized and turned into solid ice, the letters hovering for a moment before dropping to a pile at her feet. One of the Fs slid across the deck. Karnelius pounced down and chased after it.
Marrill was so startled she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a shout of alarm. Only instead of a shout, a crunch of random letters stuck to the tip of her tongue.
“Gahhh,” she cried, trying to work the ice free.
Ardent approached as she picked at the pieces. She jumped with surprise. Once again, she’d fallen victim to his weird old man stealth.
He grinned and held up a string of letters, roped together on a piece of twine like a charm bracelet. They read:
Marrill started to ask, then remembered she couldn’t talk. She gave him a questioning frown.
His grin faltered. He looked down at the letters for a moment, then his eyebrows jumped in understanding. He traded the ends of the string from one hand to the other and held it up again. Turned around, it now read:
Oh, Marrill thought, cold front ahoy! She nodded in understanding. Not that it explained anything.
At that moment, Fin popped up from belowdecks. Marrill hadn’t even seen him leave. Karnelius took the opportunity to bolt for warmer quarters, dashing between Fin’s legs and nearly sending him toppling to the ground.
Marrill stifled a laugh as a string of frozen letters poured out of Fin’s mouth. His eyes grew huge, and more frozen letters followed the first. Ardent shook with quiet chuckles next to her, then held out his stringed message.
Fin looked around, hands held out cautiously. He opened his mouth quickly, and the letters WHAT popped out. Then IS. He paused, clearly thinking. HAP—and the final P stuck on his bottom lip. He tugged at it, grimacing in pain.
Marrill couldn’t help herself. She laughed. And a second later, she too was prying an H and an A from the end of her tongue.
Ardent dropped his string and lifted his arms in resignation. A second later, flames popped from his fingers and a glowing orb of fire burst to life. Soon they were surrounded in a cacophony of their own voices, all talking and laughing and yelping at once as the frozen words strewn around their feet melted.
“Well, there we go,” Ardent said. “We hit a cold front.” As if that explained everything.
Marrill sighed. “I think we got that. But what kind of cold front freezes words?”
“What she said,” Fin added helpfully.
Ardent seemed puzzled by the question. “Well, this one, obviously. And it can freeze lots more than words, I’d expect. I’d wager if it weren’t for all the heating spells I’ve been placing around the ship, we’d probably all be frozen solid by now. Even so, I would try not to think too hard about anything specific, or have too many strong emotions. Those will probably freeze, too, and who knows what it takes to thaw them.”
“Emotions?” Marrill asked, dubious.
“Oh, sure,” Fin said. She stared at him, and he lifted a shoulder. “I’ve heard about them being sold at the Quay,” he said. “I mean, they’re pretty rare, but apparently fear and stuff never melts.”
“Quite so,” Ardent agreed. He tilted his head to one side, scrutinizing Fin. “Have we met?”
Marrill ignored him. She was far more focused on the impossibility of the situation. “So if it’s cold enough to freeze words and feelings, how do we stay warm?”
“Magic!” Ardent exclaimed with pride. “Though I admit the Wastes aren’t rumored to be so hospitable to… well, being alive. I suppose technically they aren’t rumored to be much at all, given that few explorers ever return from them.”
The thought did not put Marrill at ease. Every second crazier than the last, she thought.
“All the same,” Ardent continued, “I suggest staying close to me. Heat is less hot here, you know, and I’m not sure how far I can push it.” And with that, he turned and strolled off, completely nonchalant.
Marrill shivered, watching the heat orb shrink and die between them. “I guess we need to come up with some kind of sign language,” she suggested. And it was good she got that out when she did, because whatever Fin said next crashed to the deck and shattered like ice cubes.
For the next few hours, the ship ground on across the white plain, snow churning below their keel. Around them, the landscape heaved and collapsed, loud cracks of shattering ice the only sound in the unearthly silence; too massive, perhaps, to freeze.
Marrill and Fin sat cross-legged on the deck, taking turns coming up with hand signals and teaching them to each other. To explain them, they’d spit out a short stream of letters and arrange them into the right words, or reorder the letters they already had into new ones.
They’d exhausted all the normal gestures, gone through all the possible ones they might need—“Run for it!” (two fingers down, twiddled like legs) was obviously a necessity, and “Be ready to fight” (ring finger over thumb, like two crossed swords) was a recent favorite—when Marrill arranged a new word on the deck and pressed her thumb to her chest, over her heart. “Friend,” she mouthed.
She saw Fin swallow, and then his face broke into a huge grin as he placed his own thumb over his heart and nodded. But then his gaze slipped over her shoulder, and he shifted his hand to touch his left elbow with his right thumb, the sign to look. Marrill did.
Ahead something new reached up from the ever-shifting plain. A crooked tower, snaking toward the sky, stood out from the surroundings. Not crooked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which her father had pretended to hold up in that picture when her mother was creating a photo tour of Italy for an article on the great towers of Tuscany. More like a game of Jenga just before it collapsed. The bottom seemed to lean one way, then a quarter of the way up it leaned back the other, and then a little way from the top it jogged sharply to one side, hanging so far out over the empty air that it should have been impossible for it to remain standing at all.
At first she thought it was made of ice, all glassy and dimly reflecting the dancing colors in the sky. But if it was, it wasn’t pure ice; as she squinted, she could make out other colors, and even shapes, beneath its gleaming surface.
As the ship churned forward, Marrill realized the strangest thing about the tower: It wasn’t crumbling. In the whole wasteland, this tower and this tower alone seemed oddly, improbably stable.
Marrill sucked in her breath. The cold burned her lungs, and a thin layer of frost coated her tongue. She drew a question mark in the air, the symbol for “What is that?”
Fin shrugged, the universal symbol for “I don’t know.”
She squinted at the tower again. She could barely make out a dark smudge circling high above it: Rose. Whatever it was, that tower was their destination.
An hour or so later, they were just close enough to walk when the Kraken ground to a halt. Marrill gave Fin the symbol for “We’re here” (both hands extended palm-down, then fingers curled into fists). He had to take a second to think about it, but nodded.
Coll jumped down to the main deck and made his way over to them. One of Ardent’s warmth orbs hovered close to his face.
“I guess we’re here,” the sailor said.
“That’s what I just said!” Marrill announced triumphantly.
Coll seemed unimpressed. “Sure,” he said. “Anyway, get ready for a walk. And have fun, I’m staying with the Kraken.”
“Oh no!” Ardent said, coming up behind him. “If we’re to get up that thing, we’ll need all hands on deck or whatnot. But not literally. All hands off deck, as it were. Climbing.”
Coll let out a long, loud sigh and started for the ladder. Fin reached for his thief’s coat. Marrill couldn’t help giggling as he spun in circles, struggling to force it on over the bulky layers he was already wearing. With a sigh, he plucked free a few items from various hidden pockets and stashed them in his thicker jacket, then hung the coat on a hook attached to the mizzenmast.
When he noticed Marrill still chuckling, he grinned. “You can never be too prepared.”
“I’m not sure how you can ever be prepared enough on the Stream,” she responded as she made her way down the ladder and dropped to the ground next to Coll. She sank into the soft snow up to her ankles. Fin landed beside her, and Ardent after.
She surveyed their surroundings. The ice immediately around the tower was completely still—not even a snowflake drifted in the breeze. Beyond it, in sharp contrast, the mountains slid into crevasses and up again into deep drifts just like everywhere else in the Wastes, an ever-changing world of tumbling ice and drifting snow.
“I expect this line marks the edge of the tower’s domain,” Ardent told them, pointing to the ground a few yards behind them. A thick dark streak frozen deep in the ice arced away in either direction, making a perfect circle around the tower. It was scrupulously neat, she noted, almost like a physical barrier.
“Weird,” she muttered. But at least it made walking easier, not having to worry about a chasm opening up underneath them and swallowing them whole.
After a good twenty minutes’ slog, they stood at the tower’s base. Above them, it stretched impossibly into the air, lit by the shimmering colors of the midnight sky. Up close, the spire was actually more of a tapering pile of junk fused together with ice rather than a tower of ice itself, like someone had piled up a garage sale in a Minnesota winter, then sprayed it down with a hose. A narrow and very steep staircase spiraled up and around it, endlessly.
All along the steps, a series of signs were planted, most of them frozen deep in the ice and frosted with icicles.
GO AWAY, the first one read.
YOU’RE NOT WANTED HERE, said the next.
SERIOUSLY, CAN’T YOU READ? came after that.
Marrill could just make out the one that followed:
GO BACK AND READ THE FIRST SIGN
’CAUSE IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT.
Clearly they weren’t wanted. Which was fine with her; her legs ached even thinking about climbing all those stairs. “Can’t you just”—she waved her hands in the air—“magic us up there?” she asked Ardent.
He straightened and opened his mouth to answer. Thankfully, Coll cut it short: “You don’t want to trust your life to the wind elements,” he said, leaning toward her. “At least not while Ardent’s controlling them.” He dropped his voice. “Let’s just say that I think nemeses would be a good description of their relationship.”
“I’m not the one who started it,” Ardent protested.
An uneasy feeling began to churn in Marrill’s stomach. “I guess we better get climbing,” she said at last.
CHAPTER 33
The Naysayer
DONUT ENTER, the sign on the door read. Fin opened his mouth, then thought better of it. He already had a nice sore spot on his tongue from the last witty remark that had frozen there, and he didn’t really need to add to it.
Still, he tapped Marrill on the shoulder and pointed. She put her hand over her mouth, curling giggles of ice slipping through her fingers. She swallowed and calmed herself, then scraped them off her mitten and let them fall onto the crooked stairs below.
The sign stood out against an otherwise empty slate of a door. There were no handles or locks, no indication whatsoever how to open it. Coll crouched at one edge, feeling for hinges, while Ardent made exaggerated waving motions. Their efforts looked to be equally useless.
Still, thankfully, this was the end of the climb. The staircase had passed over gaps that never should have supported its weight, clung to the side of the tower in spots where it should have slid clean off, and even arched across the massive crook where the whole tower should have tumbled to the ground. How they’d made it to the top Fin wasn’t sure, but no matter how it looked or how slippery the ice should have been, never once had the path felt unstable.
As Marrill joined the others prying at the door, Fin looked out over the frozen landscape. The Kraken lay far below, her deck wreathed in soft orange and blue by the curtain of color overhead. Beyond, the landscape perpetually tore itself apart beneath the midnight sky.
Just as he started to lose himself in the bizarre crumbling beauty of the Wastes, something cold smacked him on the back of his head. He jumped and swatted at the ice sliding down his neck. A snowball fight, here? Had the rest of the crew gone mad?
Only his hands weren’t sweeping away snow, but letters. He found himself looking down at AHA, frozen into a ball. Fin turned to see Marrill watching him. Little giggle spirals still clung to her lips. Behind her, the door had come ajar, a perplexed sailor and slightly embarrassed-looking wizard standing next to it.
“What are we waitinggllh!” Fin managed to get out before a G stuck to his tongue.
“gfor!” burst out in his own voice as he stepped into the tower. Warmth flooded over him, making his frozen skin tingle. They stood in a low-ceilinged hall that felt more like a dim tunnel. Both Ardent and Coll had to hunch over awkwardly. In the dark, he couldn’t make out the room at the end, but the orange glow of a fire flickered out from it, and a salty, stale odor tickled at his nostrils.
“We can talk!” Marrill cried.
“But you can’t knock,” a gruff voice answered from somewhere inside.
Coll held up a hand to quiet them, shifting into a fighting stance.
“Hullo?” Ardent called.
“Or read, apparently.” The shadow of something massive and lumpy moved across the wall at the end of the hallway. “Say, ya didn’t happen to trip over three hundred and forty-two signs on your way up here, didja?”
“Hu-lloooo?” Ardent tried again. Fin gulped. Against all his instincts, he moved forward with the group, slowly, toward the light.
Just as Fin started to think the creature was gone, a huge, leathery head burst around the corner. It was a deep, purplish blue, and low and flat like a salamander’s. Dark orbs of eyes squinted out from it, and stringy blond hair hung off the back, more from the neck than the bald head itself. Fin was pretty sure his whole arm could fit in its large mouth. Even Coll jumped.
“Oh, fer crackin’ creepers,” it said. “Whatcha waitin’ for, an engraved invitation? ’Cause I’m pretty sure I left you one, y’know, on all those signs!” Then it disappeared again into the main chambers.
“I think he wants us to go in,” Marrill said.
“I absolutely don’t,” the rough voice called. “You’d think that’d be pretty obvious from the signs,” he muttered. “Figgers I move to the frozen rottin’ middlah nowhere and get the Stream’s dumbest houseguests. Don’t want you cloggin’ my hallway, neither, so if you ain’t gonna make like civilized whats-you-ares and take a flying leap, might as well get in and do whatever it takes to get gone again.”
The others looked at each other nervously. Fin just shrugged. As weird as this was, he’d been threatened by just about everything that had ever paid him any attention whatsoever, and this really didn’t seem like the worst of them.
Besides, as far as he was concerned, it was awfully e
asy to be ignored by something that didn’t want to pay attention to you in the first place. He stepped forward, into the main room.
He blinked. He was in a big, round chamber, with shelves lining it from floor to ceiling, save for an open window on either side. A roaring fire blazed at the far end, casting light out over every manner of junk he could possibly imagine. Used chitterchomp repellent, dusty coin purses, slightly enchanted jumble jars, even an old set of skysails. It was like Ardent’s cabin and Fin’s own attic combined, only with twice the size and much, much cleaner.
Next to the fire, their new host sifted through a stack of glowing blue crystals. Four long arms moved beneath a thick, hunched body with short, stubby legs and a tail. It was like someone had set a whale up on a couple of old stumps and pushed it out to make its way in the waterless world.
The creature tossed one of the crystals onto the fire, where it cracked and blazed. Suddenly, Fin felt more than warm—he felt confident, bold… and hopeful. In the fire’s glow, he felt like anything could happen, and everything would turn out right.
“So, what are you, then?” Fin asked.
The creature wheeled around holding up another of the crystals. “Oh, that works for you, huh?” he said, adding it to the fire. “Figgered. Loser.”
Fin opened his mouth, then closed it. A cold breeze washed over his warm feeling.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew emerged from the hallway. Ardent strode to the center of the room, almost strutting beneath his bobbing wizard’s cap. “Greetings, most noble host. I am the great wizard Ardent. Perhaps, I expect, you have heard of me?”
He put his hands on his hips and thrust out his chest. It might have been heroic, had he weighed more than a hundred pounds at his heaviest moment.