by Traci Chee
“How’d you learn to control it?”
He shrugged. “Same as you control anything else. Practice.”
“But only the ship, nothing else?”
A flicker of grief crossed the mate’s face. “No, nothing else.”
Sefia peered up at him. “Why?”
“It’s the trees,” he murmured. “The trees tell me everything.”
They were silent, listening to the stretching and groaning of the timbers, the hissing of the wind in the sails. Setting the book securely inside a coil of rope, she climbed to her feet and dusted off her hands on the thighs of her trousers. “Will you teach me?”
He stared down with his gray eyes, and she felt like he was peering inside her. What did he see? Was she as brave, or as good, as she hoped? Or did he see a stupid, reckless girl who’d gotten Nin kidnapped? Who’d killed Palo Kanta? She straightened her shoulders and met his unnerving dead gaze.
Finally he nodded. “All right, girl. Pay attention and do as I say.”
She grinned. Normally she hated it when people called her that, but the way the mate said it reminded her of Nin, who’d rarely used her name. But every time Nin called her “girl,” it meant she was cared for. It meant she wouldn’t be left behind.
“How about we start with this scar?” The mate tapped the dent on his nose.
She nodded.
“Don’t let yourself look at the whole thing. You’ll make yourself sick doing that, and you won’t be able to make sense of anything when you’re flat on your back trying to keep down your breakfast. Just focus on my scar. Tune the rest out.”
She blinked, and the world filled with gold. Trails of it wove across the chief mate’s square features, in and out like sparkling currents. She saw his childhood, before his sight was taken: the rocky Everican shore, an old woman laughing, the tangy smell of mulch, and trees, trees, trees whispering and creaking and laughing and speaking. The sights and sounds and smells churned around her, blurring into one bloody streak of memory.
“It’s like picking out one person in a crowd.” The mate’s words cut through the chaos. “One voice. The one you’re listening for. Let everything else become background noise.”
The dent in his nose. All the threads of his past spun around her, faster and faster the longer she looked, but that one gleamed more brightly than the others.
“Do you have it?” he asked.
His grandmother had been able to talk to the trees. She had lived her whole life among them, in the green-gold light and the minty fragrance of their bark. And when his parents were killed in a mining accident, the mate went to live in the grove with her, learning to nurse the tender shoots into towering giants with rustling fan-shaped leaves.
When he was eleven, the men came. They came with saws and axes and rifles and carts. They came accompanied by soldiers in blue uniforms with silver epaulets. The navy needed ships, they said, and it didn’t matter what his grandmother said or how she begged—they cut the trees down. The chewing and hacking of their axes. The mate saw one of the oldest trees in the grove topple, groaning, branches grasping at its neighbors as if they could stop it from falling.
His grandmother spat at the soldiers, cursing them. Her fingernails dug thick gouges in their skin. But she couldn’t stop them. They barricaded her inside her own home and set it on fire. The crackle and hiss of burning wood. The smell of singed hair and blistering flesh.
The mate ran after her, but the soldiers caught him before he could enter. He thrashed at them with his scrawny fists. One of them raised a rifle. The butt end came smashing into his face. Explosions behind his eyes. Blood. Smoke.
When he awoke, he was blind, and the trees were gone. He couldn’t hear the whispering of their leaves or smell the medicinal scent of their bark. All he smelled was ash and upturned earth.
Someone—a man with a voice like suede—adjusted the bandages over his eyes and nose. “They didn’t have to blind you,” he said sadly, “but people are cruel.”
The mate nodded. His face burned as he tried to stop himself from crying.
“You have a choice now,” the man said. “Come with me, and you’ll be safe. You’ll have a good life in the Library.” He described all the ways the Library was suited for the blind—the routine, the unchanging furniture, the textured knobs and cupboards in the kitchen. He’d be given a home, and all he’d have to do was care for it. Dust the tables. Tend the garden. A simple life, away from the cruelty of men. “Or you can try to make it on your own,” the man said finally, “but the world will have no pity for a blind boy.”
“Now you know,” the chief mate said.
Sefia blinked as the lights whirled and faded away. Swallowing tentatively, she waited for the nausea, the headache, but none came. She beamed. “Who was that man? Did you go with him?” The questions bubbled out of her in her excitement. “To the Library? What’s a Library?”
The chief mate shrugged. “I never found out.”
“You turned him down? Why?”
He rubbed his hands over the smooth woodgrain of the rail. “I was in no shape to go with him then, so he left me in the care of a family from a nearby town while I recovered. I don’t know if he came back, because as soon as I was well enough, I left.”
“Why?”
“When my grandmother died, she must have passed her power to me, because I could hear her trees calling to me, faintly at first, then louder and louder. Across the entire kingdom, I could hear them calling my name.” The mate closed his eyes, and Sefia realized he was listening to the ship, to the very timbers it was made of. “And I had to go to them. I had failed them once, but I couldn’t let them be taken from me again.”
This wasn’t the same magic as her Vision, but it was closer than anything she’d found yet. Maybe the mate could help her master it, so she’d be good enough to catch the answers she needed, next time.
Sefia twisted a couple of locks of hair in her fingers and looked to the book, where it lay in the nest of rope like an egg, ready to hatch. “Let’s get to work,” she said.
• • •
The chief mate made her practice for hours: sinking into the Vision and spinning out of it, studying the capstan, the chase guns, the amber ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand. She needed a mark. A dent or a crack or a scratch. Something to focus her Vision on so she wouldn’t get swept away. By the time four bells struck, Sefia was exhausted, but she could wield her Vision with the precision of a filleting knife. If she’d wanted to, she could have seen the history of the sixteenpounders at the gun ports, the ship, maybe even the sky, the sea, the very air that whipped around her.
“Not yet, girl.” The mate grunted. “Not by a long shot.”
She laughed.
“Get out of here. Go bother someone else.” He dismissed her with a flick of his fingers, and she gathered up the book and wandered down to the main deck.
Stumbling a bit on the last step, Sefia waved to Jaunty. A gaunt man of fifty, the helmsman never left the deck. No matter the weather, he’d be out there in furs and oilskins, only leaving his post a few hours each night to sleep in a tiny closet on the quarterdeck, a few feet from the wheel. He’d never done more than grunt at her when she greeted him, and none of the crew much enjoyed his company, but he could steer a ship better than anyone in Kelanna.
On the main deck, she plunked herself down among the spare ropes and buckets of tar Horse and Archer had left on deck. Hugging the sun-warmed book to her chest, she leaned back.
Archer was on the mainmast, and the sun shone through the brittle sticks of his hair, turning them gold as sheaves of wheat. She watched him for a moment, painting the rigging black, his brush moving quick and sure on the ropes while the shadows shifted along his arms.
There was such grace to his movements; she wondered why she’d never noticed it before.
Sm
iling, she flipped open the book.
Her bookmarks were piled in one place between the pages, their stories gone. She picked up Archer’s feather, gleaming iridescent green and fuchsia, and ran it along her cheek before tucking it into her hair.
The letters crackled with a sense of possibility. What would she read next? What grand adventure would come to her now? Leaning over the book, she began to read.
As she sank into the page, submerging herself in the words, at first all she saw was fog—thick fog, like snow, that shut out the sounds of the everyday world—and the noises of the wind and the waves seemed to fall away around her.
She shivered, delighted, as the words began to form images in the mist. Fence posts. The indistinct shadows of barrels and wheelbarrows. She imagined dew-dampened grass batting at her shoes and the legs of her trousers.
The sunlight seemed to dim as she read, sinking deeper and deeper into the silent world inside the book. A chill crawled up her back as a house appeared above her. At first it was just a shadow in the mist, but as she approached, she made out the muted shape of a grassy hill, a stone foundation, and white walls. At either end of the house, a stone chimney rose from the slanted rooftop.
Sefia gasped. She knew where she was—where the book had taken her. And she knew what she would find inside the house. She knew what she would see, and she went cold the moment the door swung open, and she was faced with the fragile silence inside.
But part of her, deep down, a part of her she could not quite subdue, wanted to see. To see him again, though it would not be him, not really, lying on the floor of the kitchen.
She kept reading. She couldn’t stop. She watched the house break into tiny pieces and drop away. She watched the girl in the book step inside, trembling, her wet shoes leaving mud and bits of grass on the carpets. She watched her pass through the living room and the dining room—the rugs unraveling and the table splintering and the paintings on the walls turning to dust.
She reached the kitchen, and it was just as she remembered: the whitewashed cabinetry, chipped at the corners; the tile countertop; the wooden cutting board scored and nicked with age. Even the crumbs in the floorboards were the same, from the egg-and-vegetable tart they’d had the night before.
She was there.
There on the page and there in her memory, seeing it twice, seeing it all over again. Wanting to look away and desperately needing to read on, needing to see him again. But she knew it was him without having to look closely. She could not look closely. She knew it was him by the sheepskin slippers, by the shape of his trousers, by the oversize threadbare sweater. She knew it without having to see his face, because she could not see his face anymore. There was—
Sefia grabbed a bucket of tar from the deck beside her. She could barely see. Her eyes filmed over with tears. She raised the brush.
—no face left.
She dragged the bristles across the page, eclipsing the words.
Her father’s killers had done more than kill him.
Every word.
They had destroyed him.
Every image.
They had taken his fingernails, his kneecaps, the lobes of his ears, his eyes and tongue.
Every memory.
The sentences grew dark and indecipherable under her brush. The smell of smoke filled her body. She thrust the bucket away from her, and it spilled over the deck, black and sticky. She dropped the brush. Specks of tar spattered her clothing, her hands and arms, her chin.
Were there footsteps? Was she retreating into the living room, to the fireplace and her secret staircase?
Someone took hold of her. They had her! This wasn’t how it had been. She writhed in their grasp. She hadn’t made it to the tunnel in time. They were going to take her away. They were going to kill her. They had killed her father and now they were going to kill her too. She screamed.
“What’s wrong, Sef?” A voice like the bellows of a forge. Large arms and hands like hammers clasped her from behind. “What happened?”
Someone else knelt in front of her, his hands on hers. Two crossed fingers. Strong like twine. She blinked. Archer’s face swam into view. Archer. Yes, Archer. She was with Archer, and Horse was behind her, asking what was wrong. She was on the ship. She was in the wind. There had been no wind that day. Tenderly, tenderly, Archer swept a lock of hair away from her forehead, along her temple, and back behind her ear. Archer. She clutched at his arms.
“I’m in the book,” she whispered.
She looked down at the disfigured page, with its hideous black marks, and the words came lunging out at her, empty eyes and open jaws. She was caught. She was being sucked down with them, into the book, down into that darkness, into that cold cube of darkness in the walls of her basement bedroom, where she crouched, sobbing into the cold clay floor.
Her father was dead. He was dead. And gone forever.
Chapter 29
Tonight a Kiss, Tomorrow a Lifetime
Lon crept through the corridors, his bare feet achingly cold against the snowy marble. He gritted his teeth against the chill and passed under the domed mosaic arches as quietly as he could. He would never master the Second’s eerie stalking silence, and he could hear his shallow breaths and the slippery shifting of his feet in the vaulted stone hallways.
From the walls, the painted eyes of former Directors seemed to follow him, their faces austere, their lips unmoving. Their countenances were so lifelike that sometimes he was sure they would leap out of their frames in the deep of night, flat hands grabbing, clothes rippling behind them in unseen winds.
In the Library, the long curved tables were bare; the reading lamps, unlit. The bookshelves with their neatly ordered manuscripts slumbered in the shadows, while overhead pale moonlight wafted through the stained glass windows, lighting on the bronze statues of past Librarians standing vigil over the galleries.
Lon hesitated at the threshold, but there was no sign of movement. He had at least two hours before the Master Librarian woke from his fitful sleep and came padding among the bookshelves to check a cross-reference, a footnote, a scribble in the margins. Lon slipped into the Library, clinging to the walls as the Second had instructed him, pretending that he too could melt seamlessly into dapplings of light on the marble floor.
He passed the vault, trailing his hand along the steel spokes, the keyholes like compass roses, and he pressed his ear to the door, as if he could hear the rustling of pages inside. But, as always, he heard nothing, and continued to the shelves beyond. Lon tapped his fingers against each of the spines and slipped one of the books into his arms. The scent of leather, paper, and glue drifted around him, making him smile. There was only one smell he loved more than the smell of a book.
As usual, the Second had arrived before him, and the faint scent of metal still lingered in the air. She’d left the doors to the greenhouse ajar, with just enough space for him to slide through sideways, and he inhaled deeply as he stepped into the garden.
Outside, flecks of snow spiraled out of the black sky, landing on the glass walls and melting instantly, but the air of the greenhouse was warm and damp and smelled of earth. Lon walked quietly into the center of the indoor meadow and looked around. White primroses huddled beneath the trees, and cyclamen with their green and silver leaves were scattered among the hedges and outcroppings of rocks like strange cups of snow.
“You’re late.” The Second’s familiar voice slid from the shadows.
Lon grinned lopsidedly at her. She was so silent that he was never quite sure where she would appear, like a fish breaking the surface of a black pond, and every time he saw her he felt like a witness to some rare creature that would disappear again if he blinked.
“Not by much.” He handed her the book.
The Second wore dark green pajamas, and her black hair flowed loosely around her shoulders, blending into the curves of her back. Her fe
et were bare, and the cuffs of her pajama pants rose past her ankles as she sat in the grass, settling the book in her lap. She ran her fingers along the edges of the cover and peered up at him. “What is it?”
Lon plopped down beside her. “A manual on the Transformation of water into ice. I think you’ll like it. In the winter of the Northern Wars, General Varissa ran out of ammunition, so she began making ice spears to launch at enemy ships. You’re not a Soldier, but I thought maybe you could apply the same principle to something smaller.”
The Second smiled. “And untraceable.”
“Yeah.”
She pulled a set of throwing stars from the folds of her clothing. They were made of some mysterious metal with no shine to it, some material developed especially for the Assassins. She held them up and grinned. “Are you still bored with juggling?”
Lon was nearly seventeen now, and three years since his induction, he’d finally graduated to the second tier of Illumination: Manipulation, a more complicated magic that involved directing the currents of light in the Illuminated world to maneuver objects from one place to another.
After four weeks of slow, painful drills in the practice room, Erastis had still only allowed him to manipulate one object at a time. So he had started meeting with the Second in secret. Although at nineteen she was away from the Library more often and their lessons were infrequent, under her tutelage, he finally felt like his progress matched his ambition.
But at the sight of the throwing stars he grimaced. He had done juggling drills with her before, but those had always been with palm-sized beanbags that he could catch if he faltered. There would be no catching tonight. He didn’t even like paper cuts, and shuddered to think of what it would feel like if one of the throwing stars nicked him.
“Stand over there.” She pointed to a clear section of grass. “You can start with one, and I’ll toss in the others if I think you’re ready.”
Lon took a deep breath and stood where she told him, allowing his sense of the Illuminated world to rise up inside him. Then he blinked, and the entire greenhouse began to glimmer with golden threads of light, swirling and shifting and moving with the slow growth of the trees, the upward inching of flowers.
