by Heidi Heilig
Blake stared at Crowhurst with deep fascination. “You’re trying to save the town?”
“I have saved it.”
“In point of fact, you only haven’t yet destroyed it,” Blake countered, but Slate’s hand shot out and grabbed Blake by the shoulder, pushing him back in his chair.
“Who cares about the future?” my father said. “Tell us how you changed the past.”
“All in good time.” Crowhurst gave a signal, and the servants brought food around the table, many courses all at once in a service en confusion. There was a scalloped silver tureen filled with hot saffron soup, tiny china cups holding the pickled eggs of guivres, and a fat swan with gilded feet, roasted and sewn back into its own feathered skin. The centerpiece, set down with great ceremony, was a nest woven of willow twigs and filled with ortolans—whole broiled songbirds, blinded and drowned in Armagnac.
The sight of them gave me pause—they were banned in the modern era for the cruelty of their preparation—and when a man in livery offered me a second napkin, I declined. So did Slate. “I have one already,” he said, but I leaned across the table.
“It’s to cover your face while you eat the ortolan, Dad.”
He looked at me askance. “Why?”
Crowhurst answered before I could. “They say it’s to hide your greed from God, though I think it’s because stuffing a whole bird in your mouth looks rather monstrous.”
Slate threw his napkin on his plate. “There goes my appetite.”
I felt queasy too—or was that only nerves? But I wasn’t here to eat. “It’s very impressive,” I said to Crowhurst. “But I hope this isn’t the gift you mentioned.”
“Not at all!” His eyes twinkled; he took his glass and propped one elbow on the table. “The gift I have for you is much more rare than wine and songbirds.”
“Knowledge,” I guessed; in my lap, my fingers twisted in the lace of my dress. “That’s what I came for.”
“Alas, that’s not the gift, but the request.”
I froze in my chair, blinking—the request? But it was Blake who spoke. “And what is it you want to know?”
“The same things you do.” Crowhurst set down his glass and clasped his hands together. His face took on a grandiose expression as he looked around the table, taking us all in one by one. At last, his gaze settled on me. “Ever since my first revelation, when I was nearing the end of the race, I’ve wanted to discover the secrets of what you call Navigation. I’ve spent the last year exploring the limits of our abilities. So far, anything seems possible—”
“Anything, Father?” Dahut’s question was pointed.
“Almost anything,” Crowhurst amended without missing a beat. “But of course, there’s a holy grail in this quest for knowledge. The question we all want to answer . . . all of us who chart courses through time—”
“Changing the past,” Blake said.
“Yes. I’ve done it here, in Ker-Ys, it’s true. But myths are strange things. Malleable. Uncertain. And what I really want to know is whether I can change history itself.”
“What is history but a fable agreed upon?” I said softly—the words were Napoleon’s. But Slate grimaced.
“No, no, no,” he said, putting his hands on the table. “We didn’t come here to help you discover gold in California or buy stock in Apple or whatever scheme you’re dreaming up.”
“Oh, come now, Captain!” Crowhurst tapped the heavy crown on his head. “Money is easy. My dreams are much grander than gold!”
Kashmir shifted in his chair. “What gives you the right to try to alter myth or history?”
“The right?” Crowhurst looked surprised; he glanced from me to Slate, as though we would understand. “The three of us . . . we’re cosmic beings. We might even be gods.”
His voice was pompous, grand. Was it only delusion? But the changes he had wrought were very real; I could still taste the wine on my tongue, and smell the oily scent of the ortolan.
“Christ.” Slate picked up his glass and downed the contents. “You’re even crazier than I am.”
Crowhurst held on to his composure, though his eyes were stony. “Genius is often mistaken for madness, Captain, until the method’s proven. That’s why I need you.”
“You’re not convincing me.” Slate refilled his glass. Wine sloshed onto the table, but Crowhurst waved his words away.
“I wasn’t trying,” he said, meeting my eyes.
I swallowed. “Me?”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to shape the world, Nixie?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Slate said, but I ignored him.
Across from me, Blake sat rapt, his eyes full of wonder; beneath the table, Kashmir took my hand. I squeezed his fingers. “Is that your request, then?” I said. “My help?”
Crowhurst nodded. “It is.”
“Nixie . . .” My father had a warning in his voice, but I didn’t even glance his way.
“Then what’s the gift?”
Crowhurst watched me for a long moment. Then he smiled. “It’s yours either way.” At his gesture, a servant opened the side door. “But maybe I should have called it proof.”
Kashmir seemed to coil in his chair, but Crowhurst was watching the captain, whose hand had stopped, the wine halfway to his lips.
In the doorway stood a strange woman dressed in a simple linen gown. She was clearly not local; her face was delicate and made pale by the black hair hanging loose, like a curtain, to her waist. She was Asian, Chinese most likely, like me.
Or rather . . . half of me.
Slate’s glass shattered on the stone floor. I felt the wine splash my hem, but I didn’t even glance down.
“What do you think, Captain?” Crowhurst’s voice seemed to echo in my ears, from very far away. “Genius or madness? Or does it matter either way?”
My father did not answer. He was white and weak as smoke; his hands shook, but not for opium, not this time. He stood stiffly, quietly, and then, suddenly, with a sob like a shout, he stumbled around the table, glass crunching under his feet.
The woman was smiling.
My mother was smiling.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I don’t know how long they stood there—my mother and my father—compressed beyond fusion. I was on the perimeter, on the event horizon, where time seemed to stop. And then she looked at me, and all of the air was pulled from the room and the gravity was so strong it was nearly impossible to break away.
But I managed.
My chair fell over with a crash, but I didn’t look back; I was already through the closest door and into an unfamiliar corridor. I took a turn at random, then another, then a left—perhaps it was a right. I stopped paying attention; my only goal was escape. I saw an open archway then, and burst out into the bailey, past guards who watched with impassive eyes. The cold air seized my lungs. Finally I slowed, coughing, panting. My legs shook. The world spun. The air tasted like torch fire and frost. I sank to my knees on the rough granite cobbles.
It was impossible.
But he’d done it.
But it was impossible.
But there she was.
Joss had told Slate he would see Lin again someday—and so he had. A laugh clawed its way up my throat. I hadn’t known that I would too! We’d both thought it would be in Honolulu in 1868, on the map he’d sought all my life. The map he’d found and lost.
The map Crowhurst had taken.
My god.
And all this time, we had thought she was dead.
My gut twisted like a rag wrung out. What had I done, giving Crowhurst the map of New York?
I wrapped my arms around my shoulders—I was shaking; was I cold? And there was an odd feeling, or a lack of feeling, a numbness behind my ears and along my scalp and at the tips of my fingers. I was breathing much too fast. I closed my eyes and tried to slow down, watching colors like fireworks swirl and fade behind my lids.
“Nixie . . .”
I whirled around; Crow
hurst put his palms up, placating. Though the bailey was wide, the walls were high, and I felt trapped with him so close. For a moment, I wanted to run again, all the way back to the ship.
Instead I pushed myself to my feet, thrumming like a mast under too much sail. “You did this,” I growled, starting toward him, fists clenched. “You stole her.”
“I saved her.”
“You what?”
“I saved her life! Nixie—”
“Stop calling me that!” My shout echoed off the walls of the keep.
Crowhurst took a step back, concern on his face. “She needed help,” he said softly. “Penicillin.”
I shuddered to a stop. The words made no sense at first. The emotion was still coming in waves over my head; I took a deep breath, trying to keep an even keel. “You saved her. . . .”
“We did. You and I.”
“Me?”
“You got the map into my hands, and I went back to help. Your own father couldn’t do it,” he went on. “He told me so the night we met. He said he didn’t want to risk losing you.”
“He said that?” My heart trembled in my chest—a bird against the cage. I had doubted him, but he had chosen me; in the end, he always had. “Did he . . . did Slate ask you to go to her?”
“He wasn’t in any sort of condition to make requests, but I saw a need. I recognized his pain. You must understand,” he said, his voice soft. “I lost my family too.”
I stared at him, not comprehending. “But . . . they’re still alive on your timeline,” I stammered. Why did he look away? “I read that, in the articles. They waited for you—they’re waiting. All you’d have to do is go back.”
His face paled, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed. But before he could speak, I heard my father’s voice. “Nixie?”
My heart leaped—my stomach churned. There they were, my mother and Slate, walking across the bailey hand in hand; it was as painful to look at them as it was to stare at the sun.
Still, I couldn’t look away. I could see, now, the parts of me that were hers—the curve of her lips was the same as mine when I smiled. The tilt of her eyes—looking into them was like looking into a mirror. She couldn’t have been more than a decade older than I; she’d been in her mid-twenties when I was born—when we’d thought she’d died, when I had saved her, or lost her, and all because I’d chosen to give Crowhurst a map.
An emptiness opened in my chest, like the tide pulling back the water before a tsunami, and my belly felt like a fish flopping on the wet sand. But my feet felt as though I’d grown roots. There were myths about that—girls turning into trees to escape some terrible fate. How long would I have to be still before I would never move again? But then my father reached for me, smiling. “Nixie. Nixie, come meet your mother.”
I tottered toward him on wooden legs; he took my hand and squeezed my fingers, and I was human again.
She had looked so small, next to Slate, but when I got close, I realized we were the same height. Her hand went first to my cheek—her palm was calloused. Then her fingers alighted on my shoulder, then my chin, like a butterfly, fickle. Her eyes bored into mine, with a deep curiosity that was terribly familiar. “Are you really mine?” she said then.
My spine stiffened and I took a breath to tell her that I wasn’t anybody’s, but when I opened my mouth, what came out was a sob.
Tears filled my eyes; I tried to wipe them away, but they flooded in, too fast to bail. My breath hitched in my throat, and I shuddered like the ship in a storm. A terrible weight crushed the air out of me, and sobs struggled up through my chest like bubbles from a rift in the floor of the sea. When she wrapped her arms around me, I clung to her as though she were a raft. The world spun inside my head, and fragmented thoughts popped up like flotsam from a wreck. She smelled like cream and incense. Her arms were cool. She was crying too.
Finally the tide of my own tears ebbed, and I blinked away the last of them. My face was hot and I felt strung together with loose twine; I lifted my chin and took deep, tremulous breaths. The others had followed them to the bailey, I realized—Blake and Kash, and Dahut too. Over my mother’s shoulder, I caught her yearning stare before she turned away. Distantly, I realized I had told her an untruth, though not on purpose—I had missed my mother after all.
The rest of the world faded into the background—my father thanking Crowhurst over and over, his modest replies. An offer to stay the night; the ship would be crowded, he said, and the walk to the dock was dark and cold. In response, Slate wrapped the man in a bear hug.
Crowhurst sent a servant to the ship to fetch Bee and Rotgut; they would be eager to see Lin. Another servant showed us to a suite of rooms surrounding a central parlor. There, my father swept my mother off her feet and carried her the rest of the way. She laid her head against his shoulder as he whispered into her hair, kicking the door shut behind them.
The rest of us stood in the parlor. It was well appointed, with soft chairs and a woven rug over the stone floor, but I had no eyes for luxury, not now. I floated across the room like a bubble, hollow, fragile, and lowered myself gently onto a velvet chaise. My whole body ached with the echo of my emotions—shock and guilt, but also a lightness, a relief, a tentative tendril of something strange. Joy?
Kash knelt beside me, close but not touching. I was the one to reach out, taking comfort from his steady presence as his hand folded around mine. It was so easy now—so natural. I stared down at his hand in wonder. What had I been waiting for?
“So?” Blake’s question interrupted my thoughts; he was full of energy as he paced before the fire. “Which do you think it is?”
There was a long silence. Lifting my head took an enormous effort, but when I did, Blake was staring at me with those blue eyes. I cleared my throat; it was raw and rough. “Which what?”
“Genius or madness, Miss Song. Or does it matter?”
Kashmir gripped my hand more tightly. “What’s that saying? Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
“It’s not madness if he gets the result he’s after,” Blake said.
“The man claimed to be a god, Mr. Hart!”
“Gods, witches, Navigators—different words for the same things.”
“Hustler is the word that comes to my mind,” Kash shot back. “We should leave the table while we’re up.”
“Leave? Miss Song.” Blake turned to me, an appeal in his eyes, and the color was high in his cheeks. “Certainly you understand. We have to know more.”
“Amira—”
“I have to go.” I stood abruptly; I was completely drained, as empty as a sail on a windless day. “It’s late. I have to go to bed.”
Without waiting for an answer, I fled across the parlor to a room farthest from the captain’s . . . from my parents’ room. Shutting the door behind me, I sagged against it, but when I closed my eyes, I saw my mother’s face.
Had I truly saved her by giving Crowhurst the map of New York? It was hard to imagine. All my life, I’d been the reason she was gone—though I supposed I still was. And what might have happened if Crowhurst had left her in Hawaii? I would never know. I would never have to worry.
It was a gift, indeed, and a rare one. A life I’d never thought possible—a future that included my mother without erasing my past. And what now, on the horizon? They’d had a flat in Honolulu. Slate had told me that once; he’d been quite willing to trade the sea for true love. Could I bring them back to Hawaii on my own timeline? Perhaps Kash and I could take the Temptation then, out and over the deep blue sea to make our fortune, and come back home for the holidays.
The thought made me giggle—it was almost unreal, mundane and extravagant all at once. And yet Crowhurst had made it possible.
Why? Had he truly seen a need, or was Kashmir right? Was Crowhurst only reeling me in?
I pushed myself off the door as though I were poling a barge. The room was cozy enough, the walls washed in white plaster and the high ceil
ing made of wooden beams. There was a banked fire on the hearth and a lantern on the side table, and when I sat on the edge of the bed I sank at least four inches. I stood again, struggling with my dress before giving up and flinging myself down among the pillows.
As I lay there, Blake’s words echoed in my head—we have to know more. And it occurred to me that Crowhurst hadn’t told me how, exactly, he wanted me to help.
CHAPTER TWENTY
KASHMIR
After Nix went to bed, I too stood to leave. Mr. Hart was still afire with dreams of remaking reality, and the tension between us was so thick it left room for only the smallest of talk. Or so I thought.
He watched me stand, his expression cool. “Best to let her be, don’t you think?”
It took me a moment to understand what he was getting at; when I did, an anger I’d never felt sprang up in me like a flame. “I’m not going after her,” I said, articulating each word.
“Where, then?”
“To get some answers,” I said. “Since Crowhurst isn’t giving us any.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in changing the world.”
“There are things I’d change, Mr. Hart, but not with a magic map.”
He peered at me the way he had that last night in Honolulu, looking down the barrel of his gun. “What bothers you so much, Mr. Firas?” he said softly. “Is it that Miss Song might regret her choice in Hawaii?”
“No,” I said, opening the door and slipping into the hall. “It bothers me that you might.”
I shut the door in his face, softer than I felt like. Out in the hall, the candles flickered in their sconces. I leaned against the cool stone wall and took a moment to breathe. Then I rubbed the skin of my throat—behind my eyes, I could still see Mr. Hart taking aim. How many times had I cheated death? Would our next dance be my last? For the first time in my history, I was concerned about my future, and about my past as well.
Khodaye man. Did Navigation truly have the power to destroy—and to create? I shuddered at the memory of the look in Crowhurst’s eyes as he’d claimed to be a god. Had Nix only made me in her image? Had I sprung fully formed from her head?
