by Heidi Heilig
“They’re fine,” I said quickly. “Everything’s fine, I’m just . . . I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m not used to being indoors.”
“Well,” he said, setting the tray down on the wide table. “There’s a beautiful library on the second floor, and the ceiling is painted with stars. May I show you?”
Blake looked to me for the answer, but I could see the eagerness in his expression. It had nothing to do with paintings or books—I knew, for it must have mirrored my own. “I’d like that,” I said.
“Excellent.” Crowhurst clasped his hands and ushered us back toward the stairs. “Safer this way.”
“Oh?” Blake cocked his head. “I thought Ker-Ys was supposed to be a utopia.”
“Don’t you think it is? A healthy population. Rare goods. Beautiful architecture.”
And man-eating wolves, I did not add, nor did I mention the mermaid tails nailed above doorways, or the suspicious stares of the townspeople. “Yet you worry the town is dangerous at night.”
“I don’t want to risk it,” he said, leading us into another long hall. “Not after I’ve spent so much time looking for you!”
Blake frowned. “Looking for . . . Miss Song?”
“Well. For others like her,” he amended, glancing at me. “Like us.”
The torches guttered in the drafts, and shadows played like dark sprites in the corners. I pulled Blake’s coat more tightly around my shoulders. “When I was younger, I thought my father was the only one in the world who could do what he does.”
He chuckled. “Daughters are like that with their fathers, aren’t they?”
“I guess,” I said, trying to keep my face neutral. If Crowhurst noticed my dubious tone, he didn’t give any indication.
“It is a solitary endeavor, I suppose. I might have drawn the same conclusion myself,” he added. “Except that I met another on one of my first journeys.”
“Another Navigator?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Where?”
“Ancient Greece. Boeotia, to be specific.”
“Boeotia? Near the oracle? Why was he there? And how did you know he was a Navigator?” The words tumbled out of me, one after the other; as they did, a smile spread down Crowhurst’s face. “I’m sorry,” I added then, breathless. “I just haven’t met many others and I—I have a lot of questions.”
He waved away my apology. “There were . . . certain signs. The clothing, for example. Wasn’t from the era. But we didn’t talk much. Still, after that, I knew I wasn’t the only one. Here’s the library,” he added then, pushing open a heavy wooden door and ushering us inside.
The room was rectangular, with a barrel-shaped ceiling, and it was indeed painted with the constellations: the boreal hemisphere stitched with the signs of zodiac. The wall on the right was made of tall Gothic windows; an ornate desk sat beneath them, angled to catch the best daylight. On the left side of the room, just beneath the cove and all the way to the floor, the wall was lined with polished wooden shelves filled with books.
They were bound in leather and skin, thick with paint and ink and gold leaf. There must have been hundreds—truly a king’s collection, every row full from end to end. But Crowhurst’s revelation was much more impressive. How many other Navigators did history hide? Blake’s own thoughts echoed my own. “Have you met many others?” he asked.
Slowly, Crowhurst lowered himself into a chair by the desk, as though trying to decide what to say. “It’s not an everyday occurrence,” he said finally. “It must have been fate that brought you here.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” I said quickly. The answer was so automatic, I hardly noticed it was a lie.
“No? Well. When your ship appeared on the horizon, it was almost enough to convince me.”
“When the ship appeared?” Blake frowned. “How did you know she was a Navigator then?”
“You both seem quite clever,” Crowhurst said, his eyes still on me. “How do you think I knew?”
His scrutiny made me uncomfortable. I turned to the shelves, trailing my fingers along the spines of the books. How would Crowhurst know what I was? Had he seen us sail out of the fog? He’d spoken to Slate the night we arrived; the captain must have mentioned it then. Or had he?
I stopped before a gap between two quartos, the empty space where a book had once been, and suddenly I remembered torn pages drifting like snow in the wintery wind of the square. The answer came to me in a rising tide. “Something changed when we arrived.”
There was a buttery feeling to the silence. I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, Crowhurst was smiling, smug. “I have a theory about Navigation and probability,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat? It’s a bit convoluted, but he developed a theory that possibility is infinite until the moment of observation. I think Navigators might be the great observers of the universe. Our arrival shapes the world according to our expectations.”
“Expectations?” Blake glanced from him to me. “What changed, exactly?”
“When I first came to Ker-Ys, everything was very like the original myth.” Crowhurst waved a hand. “There was a rather forward princess, and a king who wore a brass key around his neck. He seemed a good enough man, and he invited Dahut and I to stay here, at the castle, as his guests. Of course, his existence put me in a bit of a quandary. After all, I knew what he and the princess were going to do to the city. But when you appeared, they vanished, Nixie. As though they’d never been.”
“Vanished?” My thoughts scattered like minnows, darting in all directions, then schooling again. “No. I met him.”
“Who?”
“The king. The old one. He was outside the castle the night I met you. He was raving. I—I thought he was mad, but maybe he only remembered his past as a dream. Maybe . . .” I trailed off. The look on Crowhurst’s face was less surprise than calculation.
“We found him the next day,” Blake added then, his tone more certain. “Murdered.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Crowhurst said smoothly. “But I wouldn’t mourn long.”
To my surprise, Blake laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t! You were the one who stole his throne!”
Crowhurst stiffened in his chair. “I beg your pardon?”
“Navigators shape the world,” Blake said. “But so do mapmakers. We arrived on a map you gave us. You used that map and Miss Song’s arrival to overthrow the old king.”
My eyes went wide at his bold accusation, but Crowhurst lifted his chin. “What’s wrong with that? You know what he was going to do if he’d stayed in power. He was going to drown the city. He would have killed his own daughter.”
“His daughter.” I bit my lip. “What was her name?”
“Ahes. Why?”
My breath hitched in my throat. The myths mentioned them both—one drowned, one turned into a mermaid. Hadn’t the madman said his daughter was taken by the sea? And Slate had seen a woman in the water, singing—perhaps it wasn’t a hallucination after all. My thoughts churned as Crowhurst stroked his necklace—the flask with the Greek key design . . . the key . . . the key around his neck. My god. All the different versions now made sense—even the monster in the castle. That was the wolf the old king had mentioned. All except one thing . . . one missing piece. “Do you know anything about a man in a pit?”
Crowhurst froze in his chair, as though my words had turned him to stone. Was it a trick of the light, or did he blanch? “No.”
“Nothing?” I watched him for a long time. There was something here, something he was not saying. Trying to piece it together, I raised my eyes toward the ceiling; above me, the painted stars shimmered in the firelight. There was Cetus, the sea monster, and Aquarius, Pisces, and Eridanus the River. “You say you’ve been able to change the past, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“What do you mean, Nixie?”
I ticked off the names on my fingers. “We have the saint, the dark horse, Dahut, and Grandlon. What’s to guarantee there won’t be
a flood at the end of it all?”
“You think I would destroy my own city?”
I bit down on a glib response—but I’d read the articles. Rather than coming clean at the end of the race, Crowhurst had abandoned his family, his ship, his old life. The man was not known for his loyalty, but it wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to point out. “If the past can’t truly be changed, you might not have a choice,” I said instead. My voice was bitter with the truth of it.
Crowhurst raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think I can change things? What about your mother?”
I shook my head. “Slate never saw her dead and buried. He came back, and she was simply gone. In fact, this might be how it was always supposed to happen.”
Crowhurst showed his teeth in a smile. “I thought you didn’t believe in fate.”
“No one does, until it catches up with them.” Outside, the wind rose, sending a gust down the chimney and stirring the flames on the hearth. I folded my arms and watched the embers glow.
“You could take Dahut and go back to your timeline,” Blake said then. “Burn the maps of Ker-Ys. That way the story can’t end as written. If you do that—if you can—we’ll all know whether a man can change the past as written.”
“Yes.” My heart leaped at the suggestion; hope returned. “And you’ll see the rest of your family again. You said you missed them.”
Crowhurst did not seem to share our excitement. Instead, he turned to stare out the windows—or at our murky reflections in the glass. “I saw my past in your future,” he said at last. “I read what they said about me. The world thinks I’m a madman. A liar. A failure.”
“So it’s not about your family after all,” Blake said. “You want fame. Fortune. You wish you’d won your race.”
“Fame? No.” He shook his head, still staring at the window. “You misunderstand.”
“Then what?”
He sighed. “I want never to have set out on the journey.”
Blake’s eyes softened then, and he dropped his chin. But I shook my head. “That’s a paradox,” I said, though I don’t know which of them I spoke to. “Your setting out is what brought you here.”
Crowhurst was the one who replied. “And what brought you here, Nix? There must be something you want to change.”
My mouth twisted; the words were bitter. “I still don’t know if it’s possible.”
“Why don’t you stay and help me find out? I’ll have proof in two days’ time.”
“What happens in two days?”
The fire was fading on the hearth, but even in the dim light, he must have seen the look on my face. Curiosity. Desperation. The wind moaned again, and his eyes glittered. “You’ll have to stay and see.”
Blake pressed his lips together. “You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Not only the goodness of my heart,” Crowhurst allowed. “But Nix is a Navigator, and I need confirmation. After all, only a Navigator would remember how things had been. Nixie, I need you to tell me I’m not just . . . misremembering.”
“Not crazy, you mean.” At my words, he winced, but he did not protest. “Is this your request?”
“Not so onerous, is it? To help me learn? You’ll know then too.”
“It might not be safe to stay, if the flood is coming. And we could know in an hour if you take Dahut and leave.”
“You might know,” he countered. “But I’d be gone—having stepped into the paradox you mentioned without knowing what might happen to me. Please, Nixie. I need your help, and I hope I don’t flatter myself to think you need mine.”
There was silence; the fire popped. Crowhurst watched me as I weighed the balance. I did not trust him—but did I need him? Maybe. Maybe not. But I nodded anyway; best not to give him reason to distrust me. “All right.”
“Excellent,” Crowhurst said, but it was Blake’s smile that caught my eye—bright and unexpected. His words came back to me from earlier in the evening: genius or madness? I still had no answer.
Suppressing a shudder, I turned toward the door. “It’s very late. I’m going to bed.”
“Do you need me to show you the way back?”
“I remember it.”
“Good night, then,” he called after us. “Pleasant dreams.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
By the time we left the library, it was so late it was early. The candles had burned out in the halls, but Crowhurst had given us a taper to light our way back. In the soft light, Blake’s expression was hard to discern, and he waited until we were back in the parlor to speak.
“I can’t tell if you’re brave or foolish,” he said at last. “But I admire your choice to stay.”
I met his eyes. “You don’t trust him either.”
“No,” Blake said. “But I want to know what’s possible.”
“Me too.” I sighed, handing back his jacket. “Good night, Blake.”
He gave me a little bow. “Nix.”
I blinked at him. He hadn’t used my first name since Hawaii; it was good to hear. Smiling, I opened the door to my room and slipped inside, casting shadows before me. On the far side of the room, one of them unfolded into flesh. “He cuts out her memories, amira.”
“Christ, Kashmir!” Hot wax spilled over my knuckles as I jumped back; I swore and set the candle on the table beside the bed. Peeling back the wax, I shook my hand to ease the sting. “You scared me.”
He was leaning against the mantel; at my words, he cocked his head. “I scared you? I seem to be the only thing that does.”
Making a face, I sat on the bed. “I know, I know. Crowhurst is dangerous.”
Concern flickered across Kashmir’s face. “What happened?”
“Nothing! Nothing yet. But something will in two days, though he won’t tell me what.” The mattress sank as Kash sat beside me, and his shoulder brushed mine. He had taken off his red coat; I could feel the warmth of his skin through the thin cotton of his white shirt. My hands held each other in my lap, though I longed to hold his instead. “What do you mean, he cuts out her memories?”
“In her diary. He tears out pages and writes in his own stories. He altered the myth of Ker-Ys and named himself as king.”
I swore under my breath, the curse a hollow susurration in the room. “So that’s how he does it.”
“You already knew?”
“Crowhurst admitted as much. Now I know why he hasn’t helped her get better.”
“Help her?” He raised an eyebrow. “Is that possible?”
“It should be. We have half a dozen maps that we could try.”
“Then we should do it.” His voice was urgent; he turned to me with new energy. “Take her away with us. Give her back her memories.”
“Take her away?” I leaned back. “You mean kidnap her?”
“If we asked her to come, I think she’d say yes.”
I frowned as something clicked in my mind. “You were with her tonight?”
“Earlier.” He shifted, suddenly cautious. “It wasn’t like that, amira—”
“I know.” I held up my hand to forestall his explanation. “But when?”
“A few hours ago.”
“Crowhurst told me they were having tea together.”
“So?”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “So he’s lying.”
“We already knew that.”
I sighed and let my hand drop, folding it around his. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should take her somewhere else. He might never know, but I would.”
“Know what?”
“Whether or not the past can be changed.” Running my thumb over the white scars on his knuckles, I stared down at our fingers, entwined, remembering how Kashmir’s hand had slipped from mine in the Margins—how I’d thought he might be gone. I tightened my grip. “If we take Dahut away from Ker-Ys, she can’t open the sea gates. The city is safe and the myth is altered and I’ll know for certain that fate isn’t inevitable
.”
“Is that the only thing that matters to you?”
“Not the only thing. But it’s close.” I looked up at him, filling my eyes with the sight of his face. “I can’t lose you, Kashmir. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What?” A cold feeling in my chest—unsettled. “Kashmir, you know how I feel—”
“Tell me then, so I can hear it from you.”
“I . . . I . . .” I bit my lip, the words were there, in my heart, but they stuck in my throat. As the moments passed, the hope in his face turned to sorrow.
“Do you regret it, amira?”
“Regret . . . what?”
“Meeting me. Knowing me.” He searched my face. “Loving me.”
Everything seemed to stop at the word; it hung in the air between us, tangible and real. “No,” I said at last. “No.”
“But you fear you will someday. That’s why you hold back. That’s why you want to know you can change things before you commit.” He let go of my hand and stood. The distance between us ached like the cold of a winter sea. “You watched your father chase your mother for years, and you wished he didn’t love her. What will you do to my memory when I’m gone? Will you chase it like a dragon? Or will you banish it like smoke?”
“I’m not going to lose you!”
“I know when you’re lying, so tell me the truth. Why am I the only thing in your life not worth any risk?”
“No. Kash—” My voice broke. “Kashmir, that’s why we’re still here. I would risk anything for you.”
“Anything but loss.”
I felt the blood leave my face. Words deserted me.
Kashmir shook his head. “I’m going to the ship. I can’t sleep under this roof.”
“Wait—” But he had already opened the door, slipping out without even the decency to slam it behind him. “Come back!”
He did not.
Grabbing the candle, I yanked open the door just in time to see the one to the hall closing; Kashmir wasn’t there in the parlor.
But my mother was.
She was kneeling at the hearth, pulling a copper pot off the coals of the fire. She rose and turned toward me, every movement graceful. “Only lovers fight like that.”
