Along the Saltwise Sea

by A. Deborah Baker

  “Why would you call a country by something that isn’t its name?” asked Avery.

  “Where are you from again?” asked Niamh.

  “America,” said Avery, and “The United States,” said Zib, and Niamh nodded, looking satisfied.

  “Sometimes a thing’s name is too big to use all the time, because if you did, you might attract its attention,” she said, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. She picked up her fork and stabbed it into the strange, glossy lettuce of her little salad, spearing a tomato the color of the sunset. “All the countries have proper names. The Saltwise Sea is part of the country of Hyacinth—most of the country of Hyacinth, in fact, because Hyacinth is water, and this is the biggest water in all of the Up-and-Under. The King of Coins rules over the country of Meadowsweet, and the Queen of Swords rules the country of Crocus. She hates that name so much! She says it’s too small to describe her glory, and she’d change it if she could. But she won’t be Queen forever, because no one is a King or Queen forever, and that means she can’t change the parts of her country that came before her and will last so much longer than her. Her name and her element are both fixed. So is her season. She’s winter, or she would be if she allowed herself to be, or if she ever took the Impossible City, and she’d freeze as only the cold north wind can freeze. She’d set the world in ice if she had the opportunity. She doesn’t, yet, and so she can’t.”

  Zib frowned. “But the King of Cups was where all the cold was. The Queen of Swords was just sad and lonely.”

  “The Queen of Swords makes monsters,” said Niamh. “Never forget that. The Queen of Swords transforms things that don’t suit her exactly as they are, and she’s not sorry to have done it. She’s never been sorry for anything in her life, not even the things that leave her sitting alone in the forest, wondering why no one loves her. She’d freeze you to the core if she had the chance, and she’d laugh when people asked her why she’d done it. Cold is more than just a little ice and snow. Spring can be so cold it burns. But in the end, spring will thaw. In the end, the King of Cups can be convinced to let his victims go.”

  “What about the Page of Frozen Waters?” asked Zib, and shivered. “She doesn’t want to let her victims go.”

  “But she isn’t the spring, or the keeper of the Cups,” said Niamh. “She only has a few weapons to her name, and she doesn’t claim the country. She never could. Her nature is better suited to Crocus than to Hyacinth, but she hates the Queen of Swords and refuses to serve her in any capacity, however temporary.”

  Zib blinked, looking faintly dazed. “I never thought there’d be so many rules to keeping a fairy tale world going.”

  “Child, who told you we were a fairy tale?” Niamh frowned. “Fairy tales are all about magic and morals. You won’t find any morals here. Not that a parent would whisper to you at bedtime before they kiss your forehead and turn the lights out.”

  “But we climbed a wall that wasn’t supposed to be there and fell into a country where a person can be a season and flocks of crows can turn into girls,” protested Zib. “This has to be a fairy tale!”

  “It doesn’t have to be anything except for what it is,” said Niamh. She took a delicate bite of her grilled cheese sandwich. “Nothing has to change its nature to suit what someone else decides it’s going to be.”

  “Nothing?” asked the Crow Girl, in a small, surprised voice.

  Niamh blinked at her, and then nodded, slowly. “Nothing,” she said.

  The four ate in silence after that, and all of them cleared their plates to Maddy’s satisfaction and were hence rewarded with fat, hot slices of bonberry pie. There was no cream to go with the pie, but it was fresh and buttery enough not to need anything extra.

  Zib was the first to finish eating and Avery was the last, and all four of them paused to catch their breath and sip their orange juice. The whole meal had had the feeling of a pause between calamities, an opportunity to take a moment and remember that the world was not a constant case of tumbling from one crisis into the next. Now the pause was over, and it was time to go back to falling, at least for a little while. So they rose reluctantly, and delivered their plates and cutlery to be washed, Zib dancing away from the washwater like a splashed cat, while Maddy chuckled at the girl’s reluctance to be roped back into the chore.

  “You be good, children, and if you see any runaway dishes while you’re out and about on the ship, be sure to bring them here so I can wash them up,” she said.

  Avery and Zib nodded, although neither of them could have said whether she was talking about dirty dishes that had been misplaced by careless sailors, or actual dishes that had somehow found the ability to run off on their own, and the four children left the mess together.

  On the walkway, there was still no sign of the stairway to Lýpi’s cell, and so they were able to put the question of her confinement to the side for a little while longer as they walked toward the door that would take them out onto the deck. Avery glanced at Zib, and startled. “Where’s your sword?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The sword Niamh pulled out of the river when you were locked in the cage. She gave it to me and you took it, because I’m not suited to swords.” It was a small and simple truth that neither of them questioned. They had both learned the pointlessness of arguing with the truth. “Where is it?”

  “I left it in my bunk,” said Zib. “It seemed rude to walk around all day with a sword at my hip if we’re among friends, and if we’re not among friends, I’d rather they not look at me and think, ‘that little girl has a sword, I’d best take her out first if I’m going to fight them.’ I can go get it, if you think I need it.”

  “Oh.” Avery glanced at Niamh. She was looking at the grain of the walls, apparently unconcerned. He had learned to pay attention to her reactions.

  If she wasn’t concerned, neither was he. He turned his attention back to Zib. “That’s fine. I just realized you weren’t wearing it, and that seemed strange. You like having a sword.”

  “I do,” Zib agreed, and opened the door.

  The deck was a disaster. Ropes and shreds of sail dangled everywhere, and sailors rushed back and forth as they cleaned up the damage done by the storm. The mast still stood straight and tall, which was probably the only good thing Avery could say about the scene; once the sail was mended, they would be able to keep sailing. He wasn’t sure when that had become the most important thing, but it was. This was still their first day onboard, after all. They had to sail for six more before they could get back to the search for the Queen of Wands, who would be able to send them home again.

  Captain Άlas saw them standing in the open door and came striding in their direction. “My little cabin rats,” she boomed. “I thought for sure that you’d been swept out to sea and were dining in the palace of the fishes tonight!”

  “Do the fish actually have a palace?” asked the Crow Girl. “If they do, I would very much like to dine there tonight. I’m sure they can do amazing things with kelp and oysters, and oysters probably wouldn’t have any place in the government of fish. They’re all belly and no brain. On second thought, that might make them perfect politicians.” She laughed, and if there was an element of harsh cawing in the sound, no one was going to be rude enough to point it out to her.

  “I wouldn’t put it past them, the slippery things,” said the captain. “That’s why when you miss one fish, your catch drops until you sail to different waters. They go back to their palaces and send out the word that someone’s trying to catch them for the dinner table.”

  “Supper didn’t have any fish in it,” said Avery, with the air of someone who was starting to unsnarl a great mystery. “Grilled cheese is nice, but it’s strange for a ship in the middle of the sea. Is it because the fishing’s been bad?”

  “The fishing’s been bad since I became captain of this vessel,” she said. “They seem to know we’re coming. We take on produce at every port, just to make up for the lack. Half of what we
pillage from the King’s ships goes straight into filling the bellies of my crew.”

  Avery privately thought that the food on offer was rich and overly fancy for a pirate ship. But as he was going to be eating it for the next six days, he wasn’t going to be the one to suggest simpler fare.

  Zib took a half-step forward. “Pardon me, captain, but we had something we wanted to ask you.”

  Captain Άlas shifted her focus to Zib, previously mild expression taking on a hard edge of annoyance. Zib blinked.

  “Why don’t you like me?” she blurted, thoughts of the woman at the top of the stairs going quite out of her head.

  She was used to people not liking her once they’d gotten to know her. She was loud and impulsive and unpredictable and messy. She had often thought she would have been better liked if she’d been born a boy, but when she looked down to the bottom of herself, all she ever saw was “girl.” So when she wished on stars, she wished only to be better at being the thing she seemed condemned to be, and not to be something else altogether, which she sometimes thought would have been easier, if only it had been something she could believe it was possible to aspire to. So someone not liking her was far from a shock. What was a bit of a shock was that the captain had seemed to dislike her from the moment they met, and she was a charming little girl, with big eyes, thick lashes, and hair that seemed less “wild” and more “artful” on first meeting, until adults figured out that she had absolutely no control over what it did. It normally took people time to realize that they wanted nothing to do with her.

  The captain blinked, slowly. “I’m sorry?”

  “You don’t like me,” said Zib. “Why don’t you like me? I haven’t done anything to make you not like me.”

  “You’re doing something right now,” said the captain.

  “But that’s not the way things work. You can’t be mean to someone and then say them being mad at you for being mean justifies being mean in the first place. Time has to be a straight line or it stops meaning anything. Cause and, um, effect.”

  The captain frowned. “You are small and uneducated,” she said. “Who are you to lecture me on cause and effect?”

  Zib, as a storm cloud stitched into a little girl’s body, had had plenty of opportunity to learn about causes and effects. Even before she’d been too young to fully understand them, she’d been learning about them, a lesson contained in every broken window and raised adult voice. Perhaps that was why she was able to square her shoulders, stand up straight, and look the captain in the eye as she said, “Whoever knows more gets to explain the thing. It doesn’t matter how much older you are, or how much smarter you think you are, if you don’t know the thing, you don’t get to be the teacher.”

  The captain blinked again, this time in visible surprise. The edge of annoyance melted from her face as she studied Zib. “All right,” she said. “I won’t teach, then, and I’m sorry I tried. I don’t like you because you’re not of water, at all; you’re of air if you’re anything, and air children who come here are usually trying to spy for the Queen of Swords. She’ll not make monsters of my crew if there’s anything I can do to intervene.”

  “The Queen of Swords tried to have me, and I told her no,” said Zib. “Where we come from, children don’t belong to just one element. We’re people, and I guess we have all the elements in us, but mostly we’re made out of blood and bones and meat. So I’m not a child of air, whatever that means, and I’m not spying for anyone. I wish you’d said something before you just decided not to like me. I could have told you I wasn’t hers a long time ago.”

  The captain sighed and shook her head. “If I’d straight-up told you, you might have said you weren’t hers even though you were. Sometimes approaching things in the most straightforward way means that you can’t get a real answer, only the answer people think you want to hear. I’m sorry you felt I didn’t like you. It was never my intention to make you uncomfortable.”

  “But you did,” said Zib.

  “I did,” agreed the captain. “That is why I am apologizing. But you are all members of my crew for right now, and a captain can’t apologize too much to members of their crew without weakening their place, so I’m done saying I’m sorry to you. I made a bad assumption. I’ll try not to do that again.” She turned as if to walk away.

  “Please wait,” said Avery. “We still have something to ask you.”

  The captain glanced at him quizzically. “What did you need to ask me? She”—and she gestured to Zib—“said you had a question, and then she asked a question, and it was a big question, and I answered it.”

  “We have a different question.” Avery shot a heatless glance over at Zib. He understood why she had asked what she had asked, and he couldn’t blame her for needing to know. It was difficult to be disliked by an adult, especially when you hadn’t done anything at all to earn that dislike. The captain had been kind to the rest of them and barely tolerant of Zib, and he would have asked why in her place. Some things stung too much to be ignored.

  “All right,” said the captain, with barely concealed impatience. “What do you want to ask me?”

  “Who is the woman in the locked little room at the top of the stairs?”

  The captain froze, absolutely and completely. For a moment, Avery wasn’t even sure she was breathing. Then, stone-faced and low-voiced, she said, “No.”

  “But we’ve seen her and spoken to her,” said Niamh. “She’s very much there, and her stairway keeps appearing to us.”

  “So do not climb the stairs,” said the captain. “She is not for you to speak with, or to speak of. She is a shadow, a story of the sea, and she should be left alone to fade away. Stories only vanish when they are forgotten.”

  Zib and Avery exchanged a glance, horrified. Neither of them wanted to vanish, or wanted to think about people they’d met, even if only briefly, vanishing. “But she’s real,” protested Zib. “We saw her! She told us her name! Shadows don’t have names, they’re just shadows!”

  The captain took a step backward, away from them, into the full glare of the sunlight, and for the first time, Zib saw that she cast no shadow. She was a tall, imposing woman, but she might as well have been standing in darkness, for the light could coax no shade from her feet.

  “Shadows are just shadows, and should be left alone,” said the captain. “Only the ones who cast them have any right to say what they can and cannot do. Leave her alone. If you see the stairs again, do not climb them, but turn your backs and wait for them to disappear. This is an order from your captain. Now, all of you, find something that needs to be cleaned up. We need to get shipshape and ready to sail again.”

  She strode off across the deck, sailors scattering to get out of her way before she could turn her darkening temper in their direction, and into her cabin, slamming the door behind herself.

  NINE

  AFTER THE STORM

  Storms are dangerous things, whether they happen on the land or out at sea. They can break down tree limbs and snap ropes, tear holes in sails, and scatter barrels and other essential supplies without regard for where they actually belong. The four children exchanged a look and scattered, doing as they’d been told, finding things on the deck that needed to be put to rights.

  Zib swarmed up into the rigging with the sailors who were dedicated to retying all the knots and securing the loosened sails. Her hands were quick and clever, and in short order, she had done the work of three men, aided by her frustration and by her narrow, nimble fingers. She flipped around, hanging upside down from the rigging, and beamed at the sailors around her.

  “All right,” she said. “What else needs to be done?”

  Niamh looked at the deck itself, where pools of seawater had been left by the lashing waves and crashing rain, smiled, and began to dance. It was a slow, swirling thing, and she raised her hands as she moved, and the water began to move with her. It collected from all corners of the deck, rolling together until it formed pools large enough to shape them
selves into short humanoid figures, the tops of their heads barely coming up to her shoulder. The puddle-people began dancing with her, forming a complicated pattern of turns and spins. Niamh danced closer and closer to the rail, until, with deep, respectful bows, each of the puddle people slipped through the rail in turn, dropping into the sea without a sound. Niamh stopped dancing and stood on the perfectly dry deck, smiling to herself.

  The sailors nearby stared for a moment before putting their mops down and moving on to other tasks. They knew better than to object to something that made their lives so much easier.

  The Crow Girl couldn’t fly or even burst into birds, but she was still a murder at heart, all black wings and clever claws and sharp eyes designed to spot things from the air. She began roving over the deck, pausing every few feet to pick up a nail or a grommet or a bit of ship’s hardware that had been broken loose by the wind. She dug a belt buckle out of a crack in the wood. It was neither as showy as Niamh’s water-ghosts or as daredevil as Zib’s ascent into the rigging, but it was still profoundly useful, at least based on the grateful cry of the sailor into whose hands she tipped her treasures, smiling brightly at him before she scampered off to make another pass. The sailor promptly filled his pockets with metal bits, looking faintly astonished, and wandered off to transfer them to a more secure box.

  Avery watched his friends as they got to work, feeling suddenly useless. He had been exactly what the captain needed when she wanted to have her books sorted, but out here, in the sun and the spray, he couldn’t think of a single thing he could do to contribute. His hands were too soft for tying ropes or moving fallen timbers; the water was all gone, danced away by the drowned girl; there was no way he could find any other sparkling bits of metal on the deck, not with the Crow Girl’s constantly scanning eyes fixed at her feet. So what could he do?

  Hesitantly, he took a step toward the captain’s cabin. No one rushed to stop him, and he took another, and another, moving more quickly with every step, until he was standing in front of the closed door. The books had already been falling from the steps when the storm had been young and he had been sent below with the others. Surely they must be scattered everywhere now, in dire need of some solemn, studious child to pick them up and put them away.