A few moments later, Khaznot Bay’s ugly brown waves were spitting foam at his feet, and his face was level with the end of a thick wooden pier. Fighting his instinct to pull up, he pushed down even closer to the water, shooting into the shadows beneath the wharf. Dodging the cross-beams and rock breakwaters jutting from the surf, he glided the last few feet and landed in a quick run just above the waterline.
Fin plopped down on the dirty sand and, after giving himself a minute for his racing heart to settle, checked on the things he’d nicked from the temple ship. The nice new knives for Stavik, still sharp despite all the climbing, were tucked into the back of his raggedy canvas pants. The ornate doorknob and vial of water sat heavy in the thief’s bag tied to his belt, next to his jar of glowglitters. It wasn’t much of a haul, he had to admit. But whatever other treasures the Meressian ship might have held, they lay at the bottom of the bay now, making friends with grimysharks and sludgeels.
He pulled out the most important piece—the ruby key—and considered it. It weighed heavy in his hands. What was so important about this key, he wondered, that the Meressians would sink their whole ship over it?
He shrugged, tucking the key into his breast pocket. Whatever it was, it was worth giving up to find his mother.
Whistling, Fin left the docks and followed one of the narrowest, steepest alleys as it zigzagged staircase-like from the Wharfway Warrens up the mountainside. The wind was definitely picking up again. A few times when a hard gust came up, he had to stop and grab the nearby safety chains running along the edge of the street. It was about two in the afternoon, he figured, bracing a shoulder against a particularly sharp breeze. At this rate, the wind would be strong enough to carry a kid away by four.
As he passed by the market square, his belly growled, reminding him he’d skipped breakfast and lunch. He detoured over to Squinting Jenny’s cart to nick a piece of fruit. At his approach, she leaned toward him and pushed her eyelids together. “Have I seen you before, young man?” she asked, the way she always did.
“No, ma’am,” Fin answered in his best sad orphan voice. He hung his head pitifully. “Just new in town, ma’am, and awful hungry.”
“Oh, you poor thing!” she said. “Take a tentalo, on the house.” She hovered her hand over the rack, finally resting it on a big yellow fruit with six twisty growths coming out of it like starfish arms. Fin tried not to chuckle; it reminded him of the crystal doorknob he’d just swiped.
“You’re too generous!” he said instead, tucking the fruit into his thief’s bag to ripen. He batted his sad eyes at her again. “Now, if only I can find someone as kind as you at dinnertime…”
A minute later, slurping away at a bright green squiggy-fruit and with three “on the house” plummellows in his pocket, Fin slipped into the chaos of the Khaznot Quay market. The noise swallowed him whole.
“Hup, hup!”
“Trog eggs!
Fairy barbs!
Molten nettles!
Get your trog eggs!”
“I tell you, it was a brine butterfly
sure as I’m standin’ here!”
“Came outta nowhere.
Saw the red lightning, and we laid
out every sail to get away.”
“Quit pushing,
you bafter!”
“Strangest kinda ship I ever seen. Sank good and fast, she did.”
“Ten shid,
and not a drillet more!”
“If I lived in the ol’ sinky town,
maybe I’d fall fer a stork, too.”
“Trog eggs! Will someone buy these rotten, hatchin’ trog eggs!”
Fin slid through a set of legs, bounced off a rickety stall, scrambled up a wall, and skittered along the top of it. With the wind picking up, he made sure to steer clear of the windward alleys (no more time for skysailing today) and kept an eye out for falling orphans in the overhangs.
The Quay crawled with life, and he loved every second of it. For most, the smell of the Quay was stagnant sea and unwashed bodies. For him, the sweet hint of cinnamon and berry threaded through the stench.
A new sound came to him as he climbed the damp, mossy steps to the pie shop’s secluded plaza. A sound like someone crying. A few steps farther, it grew louder. Not just crying—bawling their eyes out. He picked up his pace.
The shop door stood wide open, letting the flies in. Some-thing was very, very wrong here.
Carefully, he slipped inside. Ad and Tad stood at the counter, as usual. But they weren’t moving. Just staring into space, Tad’s fingers in the money till, Ad’s pressed into some dough. Tears dripped down their faces. Their chests shook without sound.
“What’s wrong?” Fin mustered. “What happened?” But they didn’t seem to hear him. He might as well have been a ghost, and they, silent mourners at his wake.
The little hairs on the backs of Fin’s arms and the tops of his feet stood up. Not the ones that said “Watch out for that ax!” or “Guards! Run for your life!” but the other ones. The ones that stood up when he was lying on his coin purses in the middle of the night, with the attic room creaking and swaying and the shadows making figures on the walls. No matter how much he knew they weren’t real, he just couldn’t help feeling monsters behind him.
That was how Fin felt right now. Because as creepy as Ad and Tad were, the sobbing he’d heard wasn’t coming from them. It came from the walk-in oven behind them. The one that led down to the thieves’ den.
The false back was also open, and Fin approached it cautiously. The stairs creaked as he stepped down them and into a funeral chamber.
On either side, thieves and pirates were gathered as always, leaning against the walls, holding cards over half-eaten pies, sharpening their knives, or whittling their lock picks on benches. But the laughter, the chatter, the whispers were gone. Only the sobbing remained. Every one of them, just like Ad and Tad. Faces slack, crying like babies, their eyes staring off into some unseen distance.
And Stavik, too, sitting on his figurehead throne at the back of the room. The anguish on that scarred face worried Fin more than everything else combined.
When the basilizard Stavik had hand-raised from an egg got cooked for lunch, the Pirate King had shrugged. When news came in that both his brother and his best friend had been locked away for life in the lowest dungeons of the Marmar Cote, he’d giggled.
Stavik stole skin from dragons, Fin thought. He never cried. But now, Stavik the Pirate King wept as though the world had died.
This was more than weeping potion or sniffle gas could manage, he knew. This was real magic, the kind only worked by wizards and truly powerful things. The kind that rarely ever came to the Khaznot Quay.
Fin willed his eyes to move past Stavik’s trembling, scarred face to the shadow lurking beside him. It was a man. And like the others, he, too, shook with sobs. But unlike the thieves, his eyes were clear and focused, staring straight at the spot where Fin now stood as if he had been waiting untold hours for someone to come and stand right there.
Dark robes cloaked him. Dark robes covered in stars.
His pale porcelain face streamed with black tears.
CHAPTER 12
Lots of Pirates and Adventures and Whatnot (Are Underappreciated)
Marrill stood with her elbows propped on the ship’s railing, her chin resting on her hands. Behind her, Ardent and Coll fussed over a sea chart, the sound lost in the din of the ship’s sails popping with wind and the rigging constantly moving and adjusting itself. They’d left the rain behind, and now the golden waters of the Pirate Stream shone like liquid metal in the sun.
But the wonder of it wasn’t enough to keep Marrill from thinking about home. A deep ache lodged in her chest and her throat burned. She couldn’t stop picturing her parents pacing the living room together, waiting for her. How long would they hold out hope before they realized she wasn’t coming home?
She could see her dad now, running frantically from house to house, the way he’d gon
e from tent to tent in Alaska when she stayed out too long picking berries. Her parents loved her, but now they needed her, especially with her mom sick again.
And she wasn’t there.
Marrill’s eyes blurred with tears as she stared down at the wake created by the Kraken’s rudder. All she could think about was how thin her mother had looked. How she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after, because Marrill was lost.
She had to find a way back home, and she needed to take Ardent’s healing magic with her. She couldn’t let her mother down.
The thoughts churned so ferociously that she was startled to feel something tickle the back of her ankle. She yelped and looked down to find Karnelius weaving figure eights around her legs. He was exactly what she needed. Smiling, she scooped him up, pressing her face into his fur and listening to him purr. Her best friend. “I’m sorry I dragged us into this, Karny,” she whispered.
She heard someone approach and lifted her head. Coll leaned against the railing next to her. The way he stared out at the horizon made it seem as though he’d seen it all before, even though he couldn’t have been older than sixteen.
“You can trust Ardent,” he told her. “If he says he can get you home, he will. He’s got a kind of second sense for finding people who need him.” He absently traced the outline of another knotted-rope tattoo, this one circling his left wrist.
There was something about the way he said the words that made Marrill believe him. Maybe it was because she wanted them to be true. “Thanks,” she said softly. “Is that how you two met? Him helping you with something you needed?”
Coll barked out a laugh. “I guess, in a manner of speaking.”
Marrill waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “How long have you known Ardent?”
He looked over at her, one eyebrow raised. “That would be a story for another time.” Gripping the railing, he leaned back and stretched, reminding her of Karnelius.
Marrill stared at his right hand. Frowning, she looked at his left wrist. “When we met, I could have sworn you had a tattoo on your right hand, too, just like that one but around your knuckles.”
Coll lifted his hand and flexed his fingers. “Probably.”
Exasperated, Marrill rolled her eyes. “Probably? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He grinned. “Welcome to the Pirate Stream. If you’re looking for sense, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“Thanks, I think I got that when feathers sprouted out of my wrist and a wizard showed me around his magic ship,” Marrill huffed.
“Ship’s not magical,” Coll corrected her. “Stuff in it is.” He paused. “I guess I can see why that would be confusing.”
Karnelius began getting antsy, and Marrill shifted him in her arms. “So about your tattoo?”
They both looked down at his wrist, but the tattoo seemed to have shifted, the knot becoming more intricate. Marrill’s eyes widened; she’d never seen anything like it. Her cat’s tail began twitching madly, and she ran a hand down his back absently to calm him.
Coll lifted a shoulder. “It moves according to where we are on the Stream. Helpful for navigation. For example, right now, we’re nearing the Khaznot Quay.”
Just then, Karnelius surged in her arms. Teeth chittering, he dug his claws into her shoulder as though he were about to jump overboard. She snagged a finger through his collar and looked to see what had gotten him so fired up.
Dozens of stories below, a scrap of paper with a star sketched across it floated on the water. Marrill squinted, not certain she could trust her eyes.
“The Map,” she breathed. She couldn’t believe it! “Look! It’s the…” She struggled to remember what Ardent called it. “The Compass Rose!” she cried, pointing. But as she watched, an eddy of water caught it, carrying it away from the ship and toward a big, ugly sign that Marrill could have sworn hadn’t been there a moment ago.
It was held up by a giant hand, its fingernails black and broken against the rusty metal. Written on the sign in white scratches were the words
The water around it had gone oily, the golden hue of the Pirate Stream turned to a brownish red. A thin skin of rainbow color floated along the surface, reminding her of a puddle on asphalt after a summer shower. Above, the sky threatened to match the water, and the stink of old socks dipped in sour milk made her wrinkle her nose and hold her stomach.
As she stared, a seagull swooped by, letting out a thin screech that scraped along her bones. She closed her eyes and shook herself, as if that could get the feeling off.
When she opened her eyes again, the scrap of paper was no longer there. “It’s gone,” she sputtered. They’d been so close, but now… what if it had sunk?
Ardent came to stand next to her and smiled. He pointed past her. “Right, right,” he said with a glint of mischief in his eye. “While it might have appeared to you as though the Map disappeared, what you really saw was simply the Map drifting off the Deep Stream, and into the bay of…” He motioned as they sailed past the rickety sign.
“The Khaznot Quay!” At the wave of his hand, shapes jumped up from the water, stretching around them like a horseshoe. Docks and wharves oozed out toward them, and over it all, a steep mountain climbed to the sky. Tumble-down buildings crowded its slopes, falling all over each other and across one another in a patchwork landslide. Here a tottering tower with a base of brick leaned out across a stone crag; there rows of houses cobbled from wood and plaster zigzagged through a sluice and into a low, flat valley.
It was as if a giant had spilled his Legos down a hill, Marrill thought. And then kept snapping new Legos onto the old ones, with no regard for where they lay or how they looked, over and over, for centuries. Every square inch of ground she could see was either run-down city or sheer rock.
Karnelius hissed and bolted toward the hatch. Marrill stumbled back from the railing, her head swimming. Every time she thought she had a handle on what it meant for there to be magic in the world, something new shattered her expectations. “Did all of that come from nowhere?”
Ardent chuckled. “Oh, that would be a feat, wouldn’t it? Quite clever, quite clever. No, no, dear, that didn’t come from nowhere—that’s always been here. We came from nowhere.”
Marrill remembered the parking lot back in Arizona—one moment, a barren wasteland, and the next, port to a massive ship. Was this what that looked like from the other side?
“Some places are obvious,” Ardent said, reading the question on her face. “Get close enough and you can wave. Others are hidden and don’t show themselves until you stumble into their waters. Some few require passkeys, but don’t worry about them. I have been a wizard for a long, long time, and I go where I will.”
Marrill puzzled that last statement as they slid toward the city. She knew Ardent was powerful; she imagined any wizard must be. “How does it work?” she asked. “Magic, I mean. Could you teach me?”
He paced, considering her question. “Well, it’s different for every person,” he explained. “You see, magic is a persnickety and personal thing, and figuring out how to convince it to do what you want takes centuries of difficult study and experimentation. I daresay I have spent my whole life on those studies, and even I can only manage a fraction of its potential.
“As for teaching you…” He paused to look her up and down. “Maybe for very small spells, I might be able to show you a thing or two. But to do anything with any real power, what works for me almost certainly would not work for you. You have to build up a rapport with the magic, you know.”
“Oh,” Marrill said, disappointed. She thought for a moment. “So is magic how you knew the Compass Rose would end up here?”
The wizard beamed. “Not at all.”
“Um… then how…?”
“We’ve been following the directions you gave us,” Ardent said. “Well done on your part.”
Marrill was more confused than ever. “But I didn’t give you directions.”
&n
bsp; “Sure you did. When I asked if you’d seen the scrap of paper, you said yes. And when I asked where it went, you pointed. Now here we are! The good news is that the Compass Rose has likely washed ashore by now. I’m confident it won’t take long to find this time!” He smiled and put his hand on her shoulder. The gesture made her feel a little better. Ardent seemed sort of like a grandfather, and she had never really known either of hers.
“The Quay’s an interesting place,” he told her. “One where you can find almost anything. I think you’ll like it. Lots of pirates and adventures and whatnot. Little girls love that sort of thing, don’t they?”
“That’s little boys,” Marrill corrected. Like a weird, confusing grandfather.
“Oh. Well, that’s unfortunate, then.…” Ardent’s voice trailed off as something in the distance grabbed his attention. He pressed his lips together so tight that his entire mouth was swallowed by beard and mustache.
Marrill followed his gaze. Several hundred yards away, a ship foundered, the water around it churning white as it sank. She had never seen a boat like it: disklike with a bunch of masts sprouting from it like a forest of trees.
“What do you think that was?” she asked. The last thing to go under was the carved figure on the bowsprit, holding out a bronze image of the sun.
Ardent turned away as the bronze star slid into the water and sunset forever. “I’m sure it was nothing,” he said. “Things like this happen, you know. The seafloor here is positively littered with shipwrecks; were it not for Coll’s skills, we’d have run aground on one already.”
Just then, Coll shouted, “Coming abaft!” The Kraken veered toward one of the larger wharves, high enough to be nearly level with the deck.
“We need not linger overmuch,” Ardent said as the ship slid into place. “It’s a dangerous place, after all.” He popped himself effortlessly over the rail and onto the wharf before the ship even fully stopped.