The Language of Ghosts

by Heather Fawcett

  Noa could see Reckoner from her elevated position on the ship, but the mages could not. The lead mage rounded the corner, tripped over him, and went sprawling into the sea in an impressive somersault.

  You would have thought that Reckoner would move out of the way. But the dragon just sat there like an enormous green barnacle, blinking his blurry eyes as the mages tripped spectacularly over his thick hide. Eventually, the mages at the back of the mob figured out what was going on and stopped to help the others, but by then Julian’s reflection had escaped to wherever loose reflections escaped to. Maybe there was a special town where they lived, Noa thought dazedly, and walked around with their limbs flapping and their ripple faces grinning at each other. She tried to put the image out of her mind.

  “You couldn’t have just swept them out to sea?” she demanded, because if Julian could create a hideous water twin, surely he could handle a simpler—and far less flashy—spell.

  Julian blinked. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Noa groaned.

  Once the mages had all gone, Julian called Reckoner’s name. The dragon’s ears pricked up and he ambled over. He tried to jump onto the boat, but Reckoner’s problem was that he never remembered how big he was, and he only made it halfway. He hit the water, sending up such a geyser that it soaked all three of them. Julian was too exhausted from the last spell to cast another, so they had to throw a net around Reckoner’s flailing body and haul him up. It took a long time, and Noa was scared that, in saving Reckoner, Julian would get them all captured. But then she saw how Julian wrapped his arms around Reckoner as he sat dripping and sneezing on the deck, and buried his face in the old dragon’s neck, and she didn’t say anything.

  Julian raised the sail and the fishing boat drifted out to sea. Noa helped him—they both knew what to do, for even princes and princesses were expected to learn how to pilot a boat in Florean—and then she sat with Mite until Mite fell asleep with her head in Noa’s lap.

  Mite cried a bit in her sleep, but Noa just stared straight ahead, her eyes dry. She’d cried enough. It grew windy as they reached the open sea, the waves stretching and pulling the thumbprint of the moon, and she was happy for the chimney sweeps’ huge coat, even if it smelled like Reckoner’s breath.

  She looked at Julian. There was a cold expression on his face that Noa had never seen before. He barely even looked like himself. Their eyes met, and it was one of those times when Noa knew they were thinking the same thing. She felt a rush of relief that she had Julian and Mite, that Xavier hadn’t managed to take them from her, too. We’ll find the little one first. If Noa met those assassins now, she would tear their hearts out with her bare hands.

  The dark fishing boat glided on, and Noa watched the palace slip below the horizon. Something inside her hardened. The palace belonged to them, no matter how many banners Xavier strung up. It belonged to the Marchenas, and so did the rest of Florean.

  And somehow, someday, they were going to get it back.

  Part I

  Astrae

  1

  An Island Loses Its Directions

  Noa carefully arranged the map upon the sand, weighting the corners with rocks. She pulled two pencils, a ruler, and a compass from her cloak, twining one of the pencils through her long hair to keep it out of her eyes.

  She had almost finished the map of Astrae. It had taken her several months—though the island was small, measuring only four miles in length and a mile across, Noa had wanted to be thorough. Maps were always useful. Knowing exactly where things were, and where other things might be, was powerful. Noa squinted at the beach, which was pebbly and dotted with tide pools like scraps of fallen sky, and added another mark.

  The island gave a rumbling groan, and Noa’s pencil skidded across the paper.

  “What was that?” The island made a lot of strange sounds—it was an enchanted island, after all—but in the two years they’d been living there, she’d never heard it groan. Mite, crouched over something farther up the beach, made no reply. Mite was seven now, and had only two interests, as far as Noa could tell: insects and getting dirty.

  “Look, Noa!” Mite held her hands closed in front of her, an ominous sign.

  Noa grimaced. “If it’s another spider with hair longer than yours, Mite, I don’t want to see it.”

  Mite chewed her lip. “My hair isn’t very long.”

  “Go put it in the grass.”

  Mite glowered, but she moved to obey, muttering to the creature under her breath. That was the other thing with Mite—she didn’t just like bugs, she talked to them. Noa was certain Mite was going to end up living alone in a forest somewhere, cackling to herself.

  Noa eyed the map critically, tracing the familiar contours of the island with a sandy fingertip. At the south end of Astrae was a dormant volcano called Devil’s Nose, dark red and forested with a maze of scalesia trees that were home to hundreds of finches and geckos and lava crickets. The village on Astrae was also called Astrae, and amounted to seven shops and a few dozen whitewashed houses encircling a garden. The eastern side of the island was dominated by sea cliffs, the west by a reddish beach punctuated by little black coves.

  Of course, “east side” and “west side” were now useless from a navigational standpoint, because soon after the Marchenas reached Astrae, Julian enchanted it so that the island could move about like a ship. This was exactly as complicated as it sounded, and the early days of Astrae’s mobility had not been pleasant. The island would give an awful jerk at unpredictable moments, like a dog with fleas, and it rocked constantly. If you fell over on the beach during a particularly bad list, you would roll right into the sea. Once Julian got those things sorted out, the island began to spin calmly on its axis. The spinning phase was worse than everything before it, and for Noa it passed in a haze of nausea.

  Noa tapped her finger against the map. Julian had enchanted the island to hide them from Xavier—now King Xavier—who wouldn’t rest until he found Julian and killed him. But as the weeks passed, and Astrae went from cantankerous toddler to graceful denizen of Florean’s thirteen seas, Julian stayed alive, and he began to set up a makeshift court on the wandering island. Some magicians who had been loyal to the old queen came to live on Astrae at Julian’s invitation, ignoring the rumors Xavier spread about Julian being wicked and corrupt. Julian’s plan was to recapture the islands of Florean one by one, and slowly, that’s what he’d been doing, frightening away Xavier’s soldiers and fortifying each island with defensive magics and his own magicians.

  Astrae gave another groan, quieter this time. Frowning, Noa abandoned her map and went to the water’s edge. She squinted through her spyglass at the islets drifting by. They were hard to see through the mist that lay over the sea in woolly tendrils. Mite skipped up behind her, pausing to examine clumps of seaweed for reasons Noa didn’t want to know, because those reasons likely had too many legs.

  The island gave a violent shudder. Then it went wooshawooshawooshTHUNK.

  Noa fell over. Mite went sprawling into a tide pool. Astrae jerked a few more times, less dramatically, and then it stilled.

  Noa pushed herself up. The island wasn’t moving anymore, and a great rippling wave extended out from the shore like a wing. Noa’s heart thudded—Astrae had hit something. But what?

  “Come on, Mite,” Noa called. Mite clambered dripping from the tide pool with seaweed in her hair, and they took off at a run.

  They flew over the sand and climbed over the black rocks that bordered the cove. There the castle where they lived with Julian on the now-only-sometimes-west side of the island came into view. It had been abandoned for many years, and was rather tumbledown and woebegone, with pelicans nesting in the roof and layers of volcanic ash griming the stones. The beach below it was full of Julian’s mages, some of them arguing with two strangers in a fishing boat. Looming above Astrae was the island they must have collided with, which Noa didn’t recognize.

  Julian himself
stood talking to one of the mages, rubbing his hand through his dark hair and weaving it into ridiculous tangles. He faced the sea and began a complicated spell that calmed the fierce waves stirred up by the collision.

  In the two years they’d lived on Astrae, Julian had thrown himself into his spellwork with a focus Noa had never seen in him before. Despite being the only person in the world who could speak all the languages of magic, he had never been particularly interested in mastering his powers, apart from a few showy tricks to impress the young lords and ladies at court. Now, though, he spent most of the time with his grimoires, practicing spells. He even traded in the colorful silks and jewels he had favored as crown prince for head-to-toe black, though he did wear a lot of impressive rings and had enchanted a dragon tattoo onto his face, curved around his temple. Noa considered this pointless vanity, but at least it was less pointless vanity than usual.

  Noa squinted. The mystery island was perhaps twice the size of Astrae and densely forested. Astrae seemed to have collided with a sandy spit extending off the tip—Noa guessed that the first groan had been the sound of Astrae running over a shoal.

  It wasn’t the first time Astrae had gotten itself stuck. There were treacherous basalt pillars in Ripple Pass that the island had hit more than once, and then there had been the memorable occasion when it had plowed through the dust of a volcanic eruption and into a pool of fresh lava, melting one of the beaches. Banging into an island wasn’t so bad by comparison. They were probably only stuck because Julian had ordered Captain Kell to go too fast—he was always ignoring the advice of the sailors who steered Astrae.

  But if that was true, why did Noa have a knot of dread in her stomach?

  She watched Julian’s magicians take up position on the sand, murmuring spells in Salt to detach the enchanted floating island from the ordinary stationary island it had run into. Astrae was reasonably safe—they were in the Untold Sea, which was full of pirates. Any royal ships that ventured into the Untold Sea were unlikely to come out again, which made it the safest place in Florean for fugitives. The pirates never gave Julian any trouble, probably because they assumed his heart was as black as theirs, if not blacker.

  The fishermen were still yelling at the mages. Noa couldn’t really blame them—if somebody nearly ran you over with an island, you were bound to be upset about it. But where had the fishermen come from? The other island looked uninhabited. As the men continued to shout abuse, Julian let out a frustrated noise and stormed down the beach, his black cloak billowing behind him. He spat out a spell that flung one of the unlucky fishermen into the sea—especially unlucky because it had been days since Beauty, Astrae’s resident sea serpent, had eaten her last meal. The splash the poor man made was almost immediately followed by an awful gulping sound. Noa shuddered.

  “How would you describe this?” she mused as she watched Julian stomp dramatically away. “You can’t say we’ve run aground, because Astrae is ground. We’re shipwrecked, but this isn’t a ship.”

  Mite made no reply. She had quickly lost interest in the spectacle on the beach and had started overturning pieces of driftwood.

  Noa knelt by the water’s edge, brushing her hand through the lapping waves. The current was oddly warm—it swirled along the spit, which was now a causeway joining the islands. A school of bottlenose dolphins drifted past the beach. They chittered indignantly at Astrae, not at all impressed by a moving island.

  Noa’s brow furrowed as she eyed the undulating currents. She prided herself on being the practical one in the family—not that this was saying much, given Julian’s penchant for drama and Mite’s overall weirdness. She noticed things other people didn’t. It had been her idea to capture the islet of Delphin before attacking its bigger neighbor, Gray Sisters, which had allowed Julian’s magicians to simply wade over to Gray Sisters at low tide. The thought hadn’t even entered Julian’s head.

  That was Julian’s problem—he was the least practical person on the planet. Having more magic than anyone else made him think he could simply blast his way through obstacles instead of bothering with strategy. Well, Julian wasn’t going to defeat Xavier and become the king of Florean by going about things that way.

  And Noa intended to make him the king of Florean if she had to tie him down and beat some strategy into his head.

  That was Noa’s primary mission, anyway. She also had a secret mission that she didn’t tell anyone about.

  Specifically, stopping Julian from going bad.

  It wasn’t that Julian was cruel. It was more than he did cruel things without thinking—tossing fishermen to a ravenous sea serpent, for example. Julian used to toss people to Beauty only as a last resort, but these days, he didn’t hesitate, and sometimes gave off the distinct impression that he was enjoying himself. Noa was used to hearing fanciful stories about Julian’s black deeds. He was, after all, the Dark Lord that most people in Florean would only whisper about in low tones, or blame for bad harvests or other misfortunes. Those stories were no more Julian than his shadow was. But increasingly it was difficult to separate Julian from his reputation, as if shadow and brother were no longer distinct. And the fact was, as a dark magician, Julian was more likely to go bad than your average person.

  In short, Noa had her hands full.

  “Princess Noa?” a voice said. Renne, Julian’s second-in-command, was hovering behind her.

  “Yes?” she said coldly. She hated being called “princess.” For one thing, it wasn’t accurate—she wouldn’t be a princess again until Julian defeated the king and all his mages and took his rightful place on the throne. Calling her “princess” was like saying her mother’s death was something you could push aside and forget.

  “Well,” Renne began, stretching the word out. He fiddled with the edge of his cloak. Renne should have been intimidating—he was a big man and, like all of Julian’s followers, wore the same ferocious dragon tattoo that Julian did. But there was something small about him.

  “The island seems to have run up against a coral reef,” he finally elaborated. “It’s going to take a while to work our way free.”

  Noa didn’t know why he was telling her—Renne usually seemed barely aware she existed. Then she sighed. “You want me to break the news to Julian.”

  “If you’re headed to the castle,” Renne said with a relieved smile.

  “I wasn’t, actually.” But Renne was already walking away. Noa blew out her breath and turned her back on the strange currents.

  “Mite,” she called. Her sister bounded out of the tall grasses, her dark hair a bird’s nest framing her tanned cheeks.

  “Is it lunch yet?”

  “You just had breakfast.” Mite had three interests, Noa amended. Bugs, dirt, and food.

  Noa didn’t go to the castle right away. Instead, she followed the path from the beach to Devil’s Nose. Noa and Mite had to step over several iguanas warming themselves on the dark soil. They just lay there, peaceful as logs.

  “Where are we going?” Mite complained. She had to run to keep up with Noa’s long strides.

  “If you’re tired, you can wait for me by the rocks,” Noa said.

  “No, I’m okay.” Mite darted ahead, her bare feet quiet against the dirt.

  Noa heaved a sigh. Looking after Mite hadn’t always been her job—in the terrible first year after they fled to Astrae, it had been Julian’s. But gradually, as he gained power and followers, Mite had become Noa’s responsibility. Not that she had ever agreed to it. Not that she didn’t sometimes try to give Mite the slip—after all, wasn’t seven old enough to look after yourself, especially on an island as safe as Astrae, with so many magicians to keep an eye out? Noa had tried ignoring Mite, she had tried bossing her around, but no matter what she did, Mite followed everywhere she went, like a shadow that sometimes had bees in its pockets.

  Noa spent most of her days exploring Astrae. As a princess, her life had been tightly structured into lessons with tutors, public appearances with her mother and Julian, banq
uets, and playdates with stuffy royal children. As a fugitive, though, Noa didn’t have a schedule. She didn’t have guards following her everywhere. At first she had found it strange, but then, once she got used to it, she drank in her new freedom like a cactus did the first rains of winter. She drew maps of Astrae’s topography and flora and landmarks. She listed every tree and bird and animal that had names, and gave names to the ones that didn’t. In short, she cataloged everything she could think of. The information wasn’t just interesting; it helped Julian. When he needed a weird spell ingredient, such as bark from a lightning-struck tree or the feather of an aged parrot, she knew where to find it. She could tell him where the best viewpoints were on Devil’s Nose, where the walruses slept on sunny days, and where the goldenberries grew fat and gleaming on the hillside like spilled coins.

  Sometimes, particularly after a long day of tramping through tide pools and crunching over lava rock, with her hair wound into fantastical tangles by the sea winds, her old princess life felt like a dream. At other times, she felt guilty for enjoying herself at all, because it seemed like a betrayal of Mom. On those days, she shut herself up in her room with Willow and refused to talk to anyone.

  After a lot of huffing and sweating, Noa and Mite reached the peak of the volcano. Noa took out the Chronicle and tried to pretend she was alone, a general surveying her domain. The Chronicle was a roughly bound notebook where she cataloged her daily observations about the state of Astrae and its defenses, like a ship’s logbook.

  She read over her observations from the previous days, which were neatly organized into categories like weather and lookout rotations and miles traveled. As she had suspected, the water temperature had remained steady, and there was no mention of strange currents. She squinted at the beach far below—she could just make out the tiny figures of the magicians, their hands linked as they chanted the spell to free the island again. The roiling currents were even more pronounced from above—they looked like dark snakes lurking beneath the water. The mystery island was densely forested with matazarno trees and bore no signs of villages or harbors. And yet they had run into a fishing boat, which could scarcely have come from anywhere else, given that there were no other islands within miles.