by Traci Chee
Reed sat down beside the mast and unscrewed the cap of his canteen. The woman looked at it curiously, like she’d forgotten what it was for.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What happened to your ship?”
A flicker of understanding passed over her face. Her mouth worked; her tongue came unstuck from her teeth. “Catarina Stills,” she croaked. “Captain of the Seven Bells.”
You’ve heard of the Seven Bells, of course. She was known for exploring the deep south, venturing farther and farther beyond Roku into the Everlasting Ice. Captain Cat had inherited the ship from her father, Hendrick Stills the Southern Explorer, who died of pneumonia on his last voyage.
What no one knew was that since her father passed, Captain Cat had been quietly exploring the west, sailing closer and closer to the edge of the world.
“I’m Captain Reed,” he said. “You’re safe now.”
She let the bone fall from her hands, and Reed went to her, cradling her stinking emaciated body, and put the canteen to her lips, letting drop by drop slip into her mouth, wetting the cracks. Wide-eyed as a newborn babe, Cat stared at him, wondering, disbelieving, as he signaled to the crew, who began hoisting the survivors onto the deck of the Current.
The survivors remained in the sick bay with the doc for the rest of the day, but the crew couldn’t stop talking about them. They kept sneaking glances toward the main hatch, where the sick bay lay belowdecks, though they never looked directly at it. Sailors are mighty superstitious, and as they went about the day’s business, they were careful to avoid it, as if they’d catch cannibalism, or bad luck, if they strayed too close.
Against the doc’s advice, Captain Cat insisted on eating dinner in the great cabin that night, though her man Harye was still laid up in the sick bay. “Delusional,” Doc said, polishing her glasses. “I caught him hoarding bones, you know. Aly and I thought we’d gotten them all, but I found them stuffed up his shirtsleeves. I don’t even think he knows he’s been rescued. In his mind, he’s still out on that boat.” She ran her dark fingers over her close-cropped hair and sighed. “I’ll be surprised if he makes it another day.”
Captain Reed asked Meeks to join them in the great cabin. A teller of tales if there ever was one, the second mate could soak up a story and wring it out later word for word, and he was always happy to oblige. He sat across from Captain Cat, toying absentmindedly with the ends of his dreadlocks as he committed her tale to memory.
Cat had been cleaned up, her wounds washed and bandaged, but she was skinny as a beanpole, and her hands shook when she picked up the silverware.
“Believe me or don’t,” she began, “but this is how it happened . . .”
The chief mate leaned in, examining her with his dead gray eyes, scanning for falsehoods the way he’d scan the Current for leaks.
But she didn’t lie. Sometimes truth is more gruesome than fiction.
The Seven Bells had been at sea one hundred and twenty-two days searching for the western edge of the world, when a long crack appeared in the black sky, drowning the stars and the dark seas with cascades of light.
“Lightning?” Reed asked.
Captain Cat shook her head. “It was like the sky had split open at the seams, revealing some bright world on the other side. As we approached, the whole sky grew pale, and the Seven Bells was lit up, clear as morning. I never felt so tiny. A speck of dust in an infinite ocean. And there was something so beautiful about that, it nearly brought me to my knees.”
But then the light went out, and it went out with a bang, and it let such a storm loose upon them as they’d never imagined in their darkest dreams.
Captain Cat was shouting orders, but the noise had deafened them all. The wind churned up the waters, snapped the masts. The Bells was breached, taking on water so fast they barely got out with half of what was in the holds . . . and that wasn’t much, not after sailing out there so long.
The men were scattered. The wind had ripped some of them right off the yards. Others went down with the ship. Out of a crew of forty-two, only eleven of them survived.
At this point in her story, Captain Cat was silent for a long minute. When she spoke again, her voice was harsher and more brittle than before.
She described the dehydration, the cotton-mouth thirst. Under the beating sun, their bodies blistered, and soon they were so wasted away that even sitting was agony.
Slowly, painfully, the remaining members of her crew began to die.
At first they tried to use the bodies as bait, chopping them up and trolling the pieces behind them. But they were attacked by a monster with milk-blue eyes and sawtooth skin and teeth like spears jutting from its lower jaw. Bigger than a whale, meaner than any shark. Within seconds, it had killed half the remaining crew, and, well, they didn’t bait any lines after that.
Captain Cat paused again, panting. Sweat shone on her brow. The words tumbled out, faster now, as if a dam inside her had broken, and the story was roaring through her.
In the fifth week their provisions ran out, and it was decided they would cast lots. They tore up scraps of canvas, placed them in a hat, and drew, one for each sailor.
The black spot meant death. It marked you. It meant you were going to die.
When Farah drew it, they killed her and ate her heart immediately. The rest of the meat spoiled in two days, and after that they only had bones to pick at.
A week and a half later, they drew lots again, and the black spot came to Waxley. He lasted them another twelve days, until it was time to draw again.
And so it went.
It had to be one of them, so the others could live. You do things to survive that you never would’ve done otherwise, just to keep going another week, another day.
“I don’t regret doin’ what we did,” Cat said, “but I regret takin’ my crew so far west in the first place. I regret bein’ so scared of the south, after it took my dad, that I couldn’t go back. Maybe if I hadn’t been so scared, they’d still be alive. Maybe they would’ve been the first to cross the Everlastin’ Ice to whatever lies beyond.”
“I don’t reckon they blamed you,” said Reed. “They chose to follow you.”
For the first time, Captain Cat looked at Meeks, whose dark skin went ashen under her gaze. “How much choice do our men have?” she asked. “They’re our men.”
She was growing weaker and weaker with the effort it took to continue speaking, but the story inside her was bubbling up again. It wouldn’t let her rest until she’d finished telling it.
Eventually, there were only two left: Captain Cat and her man Harye. Two scraps of canvas, and one would kill you. Either one of them could’ve drawn it, but the black spot came to Harye. He was marked. Their seventieth day since the wreck, and he was going to die.
But then the Current of Faith came along, and for the first time the black spot didn’t mean death.
“Forty of my crew died,” she said. “Only two of us survived. Forty men . . . Forty of my men . . . Forty . . .”
She was shrinking back into her emaciated body, shoulders slumped, wrists limp. She seemed to have deflated with the telling of her story, as if for a little while the story had filled her out and held her up, but now that it was gone, she had collapsed, and there was no more strength in her.
At length she said, “We’re in debt to you, Captain, for returnin’ us to civilization.”
“What?” Meeks blinked, looking from Reed to the chief mate and back again. “Cap, we ain’t—we’re turnin’ back?”
Reed sucked in a long breath and tapped his forefinger on the table. Eight times. He could feel Cat watching him with her yellowed eyes.
“No.” He sighed. “We ain’t turnin’ back.”
Chapter 15
Stories and Stones
Sefia slammed the book facedown in the dirt. The pages bent. She didn’t care. Standing, she drew her k
nife in one smooth movement and flung it at the nearest tree, burying it point-first in the trunk.
Archer looked up from where he stood waist-deep in the water, washing their clothes in a pool rimmed by flat stones.
She ignored his doe-eyed expression and stalked over to the tree, wrenching her knife from the bark. Flipping it in her hand, she pivoted and hurled it again.
The blade lodged in another tree.
Ignoring the pain in her bare feet, Sefia stomped through the undergrowth. Yanking her blade out of the wood, she closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose, conjuring up the memory of dishwater eyes and a stippled face, the metallic sting in the air, and a voice like smoke.
She opened her eyes, took aim, and flung the knife.
But as it left her fingers, her memory of the woman in black was replaced by the crooked face of Palo Kanta. A man who feared the ocean. A boy who rescued cats.
Her knife clattered off the bark and landed sideways in the mulch.
Cursing, Sefia went to retrieve it, but Archer got there before she did. He rubbed the dirt from the steel and pressed the cold handle to her open palm.
She took it, but she didn’t throw it again.
Archer touched his temple with his fingers and held the blades of his hands together, opening and closing them like the covers of a book.
Sefia closed her fingers around the knife. “Because Captain Cat was a coward,” she said, “and her men paid for it. She said it herself: If she hadn’t been so scared of the thing that killed her father, she never would have put them in danger. They died because she was afraid.
“I could have stopped them from taking Nin. I was right there. But I’d seen what they did to my father . . . and I couldn’t move.” She looked away. At the ground. At the waterfall trickling into the pool. Anywhere but at Archer. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive. But if she is . . . I have to stop them. I can’t let them hurt her anymore. I can’t let them hurt anyone anymore.” Tears sprang to her eyes as she sheathed the knife.
Archer nodded, and she followed him back to the edge of the pool, where he picked up the book, smoothed its wrinkled pages, and placed the green feather between them so she wouldn’t lose her place.
Sefia curled up by the edge of the water and he sat beside her as he dried in the sun. He had gained some weight in the past couple of weeks, but his back was freckled with scars. It would take years for some of them to disappear—and others would never fade.
Hatchet’s men had left the lake three mornings ago, and she and Archer had continued following them north. They were probably heading for the port city of Epidram, situated in the northeast corner of Oxscini.
Since that night with Palo Kanta, she’d been practicing her vision. She could feel it all the time now, shimmering beneath the surface of things. If she focused just right, and blinked, then it appeared before her. But every time she entered that world of light, she was overwhelmed with images, memories, history, until she was flailing through the endless fragments of time, fighting off headache and vertigo and nausea.
It felt like drowning. Sometimes she got so lost in the flood of sights and sounds and infinite moments in time that she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to find her way back to her own body again.
She looked over at Archer. She’d been able to see all of Palo Kanta’s life in one quick blur. Maybe she could find out who Archer really was. His story must have been lurking inside him, caged by his silence, even though the marks of it were all over him: the scars at his throat, at his back and chest and arms.
She narrowed her eyes and felt the vision rising around her.
Fifteen burns, lined up like ridges on his right arm.
Fifteen marks.
She blinked, and the golden world unfurled around her.
Fifteen counters.
Threads of light rippled around his arm. They pooled and swirled, sparkling with thousands of tiny motes of light. She fought for control of her vision as images rushed past her in a slipstream of history.
Then she saw the fights.
They had been held all over Oxscini: in circles of hard-packed earth cleared of brush and rubble, outlined with torches that stained the undersides of the leaves black; in basements where the floors smelled like clay; in cages of iron bars through which the spectators prodded the fighters with sharp wooden poles, jeering and shouting.
They always fought in a ring, and someone always died.
Sefia saw them flash before her eyes, quicker than she could follow, making her dizzy and sick: boys with snapped necks; boys skewered by spears; boys bleeding from dozens of deep gashes, dying on the ground; boys with bashed-in, unrecognizable faces.
And Archer standing over every one of them. Archer holding the spear, the dagger, the rock. Archer wrestled to the ground by men twice his size and pinned in the center of the circle while someone burned him with a blazing-hot iron. It happened over and over again. Archer’s body hitting the floor. The side of his face in the dirt. The stink of sizzling flesh. His right arm collecting burns like trophies. The pain. The cheers. A mark for every fight he won.
He’d been branded because he survived.
Sefia blinked again, and the light washed away, leaving her gasping. The fights were a blur inside her, but she had seen enough to know what had happened to him, what he had done, why the story was locked up inside him like an animal. She felt like she had been inside his skin, and his blood was her blood—his heart, her heart—a closeness she’d never felt before, and hadn’t earned.
It was a cruel kind of thievery, stealing into someone’s worst memories. She held her aching head in her hands, fighting back the throbbing at her temples and behind her eyes. She wouldn’t do that to him again.
But she understood now, some of it anyway. Digging into the pocket of her vest, she fished out her coin purse and dumped its contents into her palm: some gold colbies, an uncut tourmaline, and a piece of rutilated quartz as long as her thumb.
The crystal was shot through with streaks of black and gold like shooting stars, and when you held it to your eyes the whole world seemed to be blasted with fireworks.
Archer looked on with interest as she held out the piece of crystal in the center of her palm.
“I want to give you something.”
He touched the quartz with his forefinger.
“Nin gave me this when I was younger,” she explained. “She called it a worry stone. And whenever I got caught up, remembering all the bad things that had happened . . . my mother dying . . . my father . . . You rub it with your thumb and it reminds you that you’re safe. That you’re not back there anymore.”
As he took the crystal, his thumb brushed her palm, leaving a drop of water in the creases of her hand. He held the stone to the light, where it sparked black and gold, and rubbed his thumb across it once before tucking it deep in his pocket. He grinned at her. He had a huge, handsome smile, with sharp canines.
Sefia was suddenly aware of his skin, of the dips where the water pearled and the sheen of bronze on his bare arms. And she didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she hugged her elbows and smiled awkwardly back. She could still feel the water in her palm like a tiny gleaming star.
Archer made the sign for the book, flapping his open palms like wings.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’ll read now. But if Captain Cat continues to act like a yellow-bellied coward, we’re skipping it.”
Captain Cat and Her Cannibal Crew (Continued)
He saw the news go through her like a bolt of lightning. Not turning back? Captain Cat gaped at him, thunderstruck.
Before she could respond, there was a crash from belowdecks.
“Help!” The cries exploded across the ship. “Help!”
Reed was at the door before the other three had even left their seats, out of the great cabin and onto the deck, where th
e crew had gathered around the main hatch.
“It’s the captain,” they murmured, parting for him. “The captain’s here.”
As he descended into the hold and approached the sick bay, a deep sense of dread rose up in him. He began tapping his fingers together—thumb and forefinger, thumb and middle finger, thumb and ring finger, thumb and little finger. One, two, three, four . . .
He reversed the order, starting with the little finger. That made eight. Eight taps. He reached the door.
The doc looked up from where she knelt beside a huge man cradling a limp, skeletal body in his massive arms. It had lost most of its hair, and its hands were thin and overlarge on its wrists.
Harye. He barely looked human.
Doc closed Harye’s eyes with two long fingers.
The man holding the body was Horse, the ship’s carpenter. He had broad shoulders and bulging arms, hands like hammers, and the leathery skin of a man who’d been sunburned so many times his naturally creamy complexion had grown tough and brown as rawhide.
“I came to check on him.” Horse nodded at the large flask lying on the floor next to him. Sniffling, he pulled the yellow bandanna he wore on his forehead down over his eyes. “You know, maybe give him a little pick-me-up. But when I came in, he took one look at me and charged. I didn’t know what was happenin’. He came at me outta nowhere. He was crazy, screamin’ something . . . I don’t know what. I—I hit him. To get him off me, you know? But he’s so light. He went flyin’ across the room into the wall.”
There was blood on the wall next to him, but not much. Maybe Harye didn’t have much blood left in him.
“He wasn’t gonna last the night anyway,” Reed said, squeezing his shoulder. It was never easy, taking a life. Especially for a man like Horse, the kind of man who’d drop in on a total stranger to cheer him up. “Right, Doc? We took him off that boat too late. He wasn’t gonna make it.”