Along the Saltwise Sea

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Along the Saltwise Sea Page 10

by A. Deborah Baker


  As he walked, he started to feel a little bad about what he’d said. He’d been telling the truth, sure, but he’d also been choosing the parts of the truth he focused on to be as pointed as possible. He’d been being mean, and he’d known it even as he was doing it, and he hadn’t been able to quite tell himself to stop. It was like the mean Avery and the Avery who knew Zib was already his best and truest friend, and probably would be for the rest of both their lives, were different people, split almost entirely in two. He didn’t know where that other Avery had come from, but he wanted to hope that he wouldn’t come back again the next time he was afraid.

  Everyone has another self inside them who comes out when they feel the time is right. For most people, that second self is summoned by fear or panic, which are similar and not the same. For others, that second self is brought out by the feeling of love or safety. The trick with second selves is not learning how to get rid of them—which can’t be done, no matter how hard a person tries—but finding a way to teach them to be kinder, one simple step at a time. Even second selves can be taught the way of walking through the world transmuting harm into healing; even second selves can grow.

  Avery looked at his second self and was ashamed. So when the walkway he had been following Zib along became a flight of stairs, he was well-prepared to climb them, and at the top he found a narrow wooden door with a hatch set into it at just his eye-height. That struck him as somewhat odd; he was, after all, shorter than the average pirate by a good bit, and what use was a peephole too short for most people to use it?

  There was no sign of Zib. He could hear the wind howling from the other side of the door; the storm had closed the distance between itself and the ship, and the squall was now well and truly underway. But there was another sound, beneath the storm, a more familiar, more painful sound: when he pressed his ear against the wood, Avery could hear a woman weeping. She sounded pained, like she had been crying for days with no hope of stopping, and had no hope of stopping even now. For her tears to carry over the storm, it seemed obvious they must be powerful ones, and painful ones, and ones that should be soothed away.

  “Zib?” he asked, trying the door. It refused to budge, having been locked tight. He opened the hatch, peering through into the room on the other side. “Zib, are you in there? I’m sorry about the things I said before. I didn’t mean to—”

  He stopped as the woman in the room raised her head and looked at him. She wasn’t Zib. She was too old to be Zib, older even than the Crow Girl, as old as the girl his parents sometimes called to babysit him when they wanted to go out on the weekend. Her hair was white, like clouds in the morning, and her eyes were both huge and the color of shallow water, which was to say, they were no color at all. He had never seen a person with eyes like that, not ever once in his life.

  Tears were running down her cheeks, as heavy and unceasing as the rain outside her chamber’s single window.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for my friend. She’s my age, with hair that looks like it wants to steal anything that’s not nailed down.” He remained reasonably sure that Zib could produce anything she needed just by reaching into her hair and tugging it free.

  The woman in the room started to shake her head before catching herself and nodding hesitantly. “I saw her before, with the black-haired girl. They came to my door. I asked them to help me. They said they couldn’t. Then they closed the hatch and they went away, and they left me here. Please.” She spread her hands, reaching for Avery without moving from her place on the floor. “Please don’t leave me here. My name is Lýpi. I’m a person. I don’t deserve to be locked up like this. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I don’t think you’d deserve to be locked up even if you had done something wrong,” said Avery uncertainly. His parents didn’t talk much about political things, but he had heard his father talking about the immorality of keeping people imprisoned without a proper trial. There wasn’t anyplace on the pirate ship to hold a proper trial, and even if there had been, he couldn’t see how locking someone in a tiny room all by themselves could ever be the right thing to do. If she’d committed a crime, she should have been sent to a real prison, not kept sealed away here. “But this door is locked. I don’t know how I’d get you out. Even if I said I’d help you, I don’t know if I could.”

  “The captain of this ship has the key. She wears it at her belt. If you were to get it from her, you could let me out.”

  Avery frowned and drew back, feeling suddenly wary. Captain Άlas had been reasonable so far, giving them shoes and food and a safe place to sleep, and jobs that were not too difficult for them to do. He understood why they needed to serve her for a week, to repay her for trespassing and touching her things without asking. If he’d had the power to make anyone who snuck into his room and used his things without asking serve him for a week, he would have done it in a heartbeat. Even intangible things must be balanced if the world is to remain anything resembling fair.

  “Why did she put you here?” he asked. “What did you do?”

  “She wanted to forget me,” said Lýpi. “She said I wasn’t a person at all, just a story of the sea, but look at me! Look at my fingers, look at my hands. These are things stories do not have, for stories do not need them! But here I am, and here I’ll stay, until some clever child acquires the key and comes to let me go.”

  “Oh,” said Avery. He paused for a moment, pondering her words, and followed it up with a mild “No,” and closed the hatch again, taking a step backward. He felt like the air grew lighter as he moved, and when he was well clear of the door, he turned and fled back down the steps, intending to go as far as he needed in order to find Zib.

  He nearly collided with her at the bottom of the stairway. Grabbing her upper arms to steady himself, he gasped, “Zib! I’m sorry I was mean, I was frightened of the storm and afraid that if you went outside you would be swept away and I’d never be able to find you again and you’d go to the bottom of the sea and be a drowned girl like Niamh and then you’d go live in her city at the bottom of the lake forever and leave me all alone!” His words came out in a gasping flow with no breaks for breath, so that by the end, he was wheezing, holding her to remain upright.

  Zib blinked. Once, twice, and three times, before she asked, in a strangely solemn voice, “Did you see Lýpi?” Her pronunciation of the woman’s name was not perfect, could have used more time to find perfection, but as she had only heard it once and did not know where the woman’s accent had come from, it was as close as could reasonably have been expected.

  There is nothing wrong with pronouncing a word incorrectly when you have only heard it once before, but when that word is something as personal as someone’s name, it matters more that you try, that you listen hard for the place where each syllable bends and blurs into the next, and that if necessary, you ask for the proper pronunciation. Zib, who had been blessed from birth with a name that many people found unusual and complicated, would normally have made more of an effort, but she hadn’t been able to find the stair until Avery was descending it, and besides, she was afraid to talk to her again.

  “Yes,” said Avery. He hesitated before adding, “She tried to convince me that she was a person, and not just a story of the sea. She said that was what the captain called her, and that I should steal the key to the room where she’s been locked. But I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t know either,” said Zib, sounding relieved. “She asked me to do the same thing. I suppose she must ask everyone who comes close enough to talk to her, and everyone must tell her ‘no,’ or she wouldn’t be locked up there anymore.”

  “If we were supposed to stay away from her, I think the captain would have told us so,” said Avery. “We could ask.”

  Asking adults sometimes had the opposite effect of the one that he was looking for, but it was still the best way to learn more. Even a snapped “Don’t ask about that, it’s none of your concern” was better th
an nothing.

  Zib bit her lip. “But what if she doesn’t like us asking?”

  “She can’t put us off the ship without breaking her own bargain,” said Avery. “And she can’t keep us here longer just for asking a question. That wouldn’t be fair. The captain cares a lot about being fair.”

  “Not so I’ve noticed,” grumbled Zib, glancing at the ladle still clutched firmly in one hand.

  “What?” asked Avery.

  “Nothing,” said Zib. “Where are the others?”

  “I left them back by the entrance,” said Avery. “They were really upset about me being mean to you. They sent me to apologize.”

  Something in Zib’s face fell. “Oh,” she said. “You didn’t apologize because you thought you needed to?”

  Avery felt suddenly small and ashamed. “No,” he admitted. “But I think I had to. I feel like I had a second self who came out for a minute to be mean to you, and then as soon as he went away, I started having second thoughts that should probably have been first thoughts. I should have thought them before I said anything at all.”

  “I wish you’d apologized because you saw why you needed to,” said Zib, with exquisite care. “But you apologized, and sometimes that has to be good enough. Let’s go find them.”

  She walked down the path toward the door. Avery followed, head spinning. Zib had accepted his apology. Did that mean everything was good again? Were they done fighting? Had they ever been fighting in the first place? Sometimes people said mean things, but saying a mean thing didn’t always mean having a fight. Fights took both people deciding they were happening to really work, otherwise it was just one person being mean for no reason.

  He was still trying to decide whether it had really been a fight when they reached the end of the walkway. Niamh and the Crow Girl were still standing right where he had left them. Niamh watched the pair approach with a perfectly neutral expression on her face, as if doing anything else would be picking sides and she wasn’t entirely prepared to do that yet. The Crow Girl was nowhere near as calm.

  As soon as Zib reached the others, the Crow Girl flung her arms up over her head, exclaimed, “There you are! I missed you!” and embraced the smaller girl, squeezing her hard enough to knock the air out of her lungs. Zib laughed and wheezed and patted the Crow Girl on the shoulder as she tried to pull away.

  “I need to breathe,” she protested, laughing. The Crow Girl finally let go. Zib took a step backward, out of reach, her shoulder bumping against Avery’s chest. She glanced over her shoulder, looking startled, as if she had forgotten he was there.

  She did forget, whispered the voice of his second self. It was low and sweet and oddly compelling, like it understood the situation better than he possibly could. You don’t matter to her. Look how quick she is to run away when she thinks there’s an adventure to be had. You only climbed that wall because she talked you into it. You’d be safe home in bed right now if it weren’t for her.

  The things it said were just true enough to make him want to keep listening, to make him want to believe. But that didn’t mean listening or believing would have been the right choice. With a wrench that would have been difficult for many people twice his age, Avery shoved the voice of his second self as far to the back of his mind as it would go and mustered a smile for Zib, putting a hand on her arm to steady her. After a beat, Zib smiled back.

  The storm was still raging outside, loudly enough that it echoed through the hull. The four of them exchanged a look.

  “Let’s go to our cabin,” said Zib. “We have beds there. If the storm doesn’t stop, we can go to sleep, and when we wake up, the storm will probably be over.”

  Avery, who was still exhausted from their adventures so far, nodded more vigorously than he normally would have at the prospect of going to bed in the middle of the day. Naps were for babies … and adventurers, he supposed. All that extra work had to mean getting some extra sleep. That was only reasonable. “I know the way from here,” he said. “Come on.”

  Together, in a ragged, exhausted line, they walked back to the cabin they’d been assigned and collapsed into their respective bunks. None of them intended to fall asleep, but between one heartbeat and the next, all four of them did, and no one came to wake them.

  EIGHT

  STORIES OF THE SEA

  The ship was sailing smoothly on calm seas when the children woke again, first Niamh, then Avery and Zib almost at the same time, and finally the Crow Girl, pulling herself bodily out of a dream of soaring over endless forests filled with trees whose branches reached, in yearning welcome, toward the summer sky. They sat up, one by one, rubbing at their eyes and listening for signs that the storm was coming back. When she heard no whistle of wind or crack of thunder, Zib slid out of her bunk and grabbed her iron shoes from the floor, jamming them onto her feet.

  “Storm’s over!” she chirped brightly. “I bet there’s food in the mess!” She didn’t wait for the rest of them before she went barreling out of the cabin and down the walkway, fully rested and hence once more filled with the seemingly inexhaustible energy that had been her primary weapon against the world since she’d been born.

  Moving more slowly, Avery got his own shoes on, beckoning for Niamh and the Crow Girl to follow. “We should hurry before she finds some new kind of trouble to get into,” he said. His teeth felt fuzzy. He had never in his life gone this long without brushing them, and he was starting to slowly realize that his parents hadn’t just been being mean when they made him pick up the toothpaste every morning and night. Soon he would be able to pet his molars like kittens, he was sure, and while he had always liked kittens, he was less sure he liked them inside his mouth.

  “Whazzit?” asked the Crow Girl, sounding like she was still more than half asleep and not quite capable of making decisions for herself yet. She climbed down from her bunk, and Niamh did the same, both of them collecting their shoes and falling in behind Avery. Niamh looked the same as she always did, damp and a bit disheveled, as if she had been swept in from someplace upstream. The Crow Girl’s dress was in profound disarray, feathers sticking out in all directions, and her hair was even wilder, until she could have given Zib a run for her money.

  “We’re going to go get food,” said Avery reassuringly. Like Zib before him, he didn’t name the meal, didn’t say “lunch” or “dinner,” because there was no way of knowing, in their windowless cabin, what meal they would be walking into.

  The Crow Girl brightened, a little light coming into her eyes. “Food?” she asked hopefully.

  “Food,” Avery assured her, and led the pair out of the cabin, down the walkway to the mess door. There was no sign of any stairway, which seemed like a good sign; they wouldn’t have to deal with an imprisoned woman who might or might not exist if the stairway to her cell wasn’t there.

  Avery pushed open the door to the mess, and the smell of frying cheese rushed out, savory and greasy and impossibly good. He licked his lips as he stepped inside.

  As yesterday, there were sailors seated at the long tables, and Maddy was manning her station, filling plates for anyone who approached. Zib stood off to one side, chatting animatedly with the cook, a plate in her own hands. She turned when she heard the sound of iron shoes against the floor, and smiled so brightly it was like her friends were the best things she had ever seen in her life.

  “It’s dinner!” she said brightly, as if this were the answer to some great mystery—and in a way, perhaps it was. Either they had only been asleep for a few hours, or they had all slept an entire day away, but regardless, now they knew what time it was, or at least the vague neighborhood of what time it was, and other things could be accordingly decided. “Maddy made grilled cheese sandwiches!”

  “And salad, don’t forget,” said Maddy. “Young things like you need to eat some greens if you want to grow big and strong. There’s orange juice on the tables. Drink up. You need your vitamins when you set off to sea.”

  “Grilled cheese sandwiches and sala
d and there’s bonberry pie for afters,” said Zib, voice still bright enough to sound almost giddy. “Get your plates, I’ll get us seats.” She started for the nearest table, plate in hand.

  “She’s a happy one, isn’t she?” asked Maddy, beginning to dish up plates for the other three. “I thought sure she’d run out and be swept off in the storm.”

  “So did we,” admitted Avery. “I don’t think Zib has ever seen an adventure she didn’t want to have as quickly and completely as she possibly could.”

  “Well, you’re good friends for stopping her. The storms we get here on the Saltwise Sea are a collision of Cups and Coins, and they cut deeper than the storms you get on the land, I think because the King of Cups doesn’t like that he does not have sole claim here.” Maddy shook her head, handing over the last plate. “No element is ever purely pure. There’s salt in the sea, and salt comes from Coins, and there’s fire in the clouds, however much the Swords will try to sweep it aside. Don’t ever hold out for purity, my ducklings, unless you want to live your lives in profound disappointment.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Avery, voice blank with confusion. He turned toward the table where Zib was already seated, giving Niamh a hopeful, questioning look. The drowned girl seemed to understand the Up-and-Under better than any of the rest of them, and unlike the adults, she didn’t make assumptions that left holes in her explanations. Niamh caught his look and sighed, nodding, but didn’t begin to speak until they were seated alongside Zib.

  “The Up-and-Under is a kingdom made up of four countries,” she said. “Each of them has its own ruler, and stands for its own element. So the Queen of Wands, before she disappeared, stood for the element of fire, which is how she could also be the summer incarnate, and ruled over the country of Aster. Most people call it the country of Wands, but that’s not really its name.”

 

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