The Storyteller

by Traci Chee

  All knowledge. All history. All the answers she wanted.

  They were still weeks from Steeds, the first landmark in the riddle for the Trove, when Sefia heard shouts from above.

  “Archer!”

  Her gaze snapped away from the rucksack. She saw a body go falling past the portholes.

  “Man overboard!”

  She bolted upright in bed.

  Archer. In the freezing water.

  She didn’t care that Doc had forbidden her from leaving the room. She didn’t care that her injuries were still healing.

  She was out of bed. She was running down the corridor. She was racing up the hatchway. She was almost to the main deck when pain lanced through her wounded leg. She collapsed, banging her forehead on the steps.

  Her vision swam, but that didn’t stop her.

  “Archer!” she cried, clambering onto the deck. She blinked, but her magic did not come.

  She needed her powers. She needed to get to him. She needed to lift him out of the water. She stumbled toward the edge of the ship, blinking over and over as her vision grew bright with tears.

  But not with the Illuminated world.

  “Archer!”

  Someone caught her around the waist. Someone was carrying her away from the rail—Horse. “Frey’s got him, Sef.” His voice rumbled through her. “Frey’s got him, and we’ve got Frey.”

  With gentleness unexpected for someone his size, the big carpenter dried her cheeks with the yellow bandanna he usually wore around his forehead as the other sailors hauled up Frey’s dripping, shivering form and, with her, Archer. He was looped to her with rope, and he was soaked, teeth chattering, ice already forming on his eyelashes.

  But he was alive. Gloriously alive.

  For now.

  While the others brought Frey and Archer to the great cabin, plying them with new furs, hot stones wrapped in blankets, and one of Cooky’s restorative draughts, Sefia struggled out of Horse’s arms.

  “Sef?”

  She shook her head, staggering back down the hatchway. A part of her knew destiny would not have let him die. A part of her knew destiny had greater plans for him. A part of her knew she shouldn’t give in.

  But she’d come too close to losing him.

  Back in her cabin, she dug the Book out of her rucksack and flung the waterproof wrapping aside. The curves of the on the cover seemed to smile.

  She caressed the edges of the Book, whispering, “How do I get my magic back?” As she sank onto the bed, the pages parted willingly under her fingers.

  And the Book answered her.

  The poison was called nightmaker, for the darkness you experienced when the Illuminated world winked out, and it was one of Dotan’s concoctions. He made it in small batches, where it fermented for six months in the apothecary, deep in the mountain of the Main Branch. Since Tanin had used the last of it trying to trap Sefia, he was brewing another mixture now, in case they needed it again.

  There was no cure. Either the damage the poison had done to your system would heal, with time, and your magic would return. Or, if the dose had been high enough, you’d be powerless forever.

  Wait, the Book told her. Wait and see.

  But she couldn’t wait. She needed to know if there was a way—any way—to recover her powers. She needed a mentor. Someone who could show her what to do.

  She shut the Book, thumbing the gilt-edged pages, and closed her eyes.

  She needed her father. Rule-breaking, destiny-defying Lon. Lon would never have let a little poison stop him. Lon would never have let his magic slip from his grasp.

  Opening her eyes, she leaned in to the Book again. “What would my father do, if he were me?”

  Laws of the Dead

  Once there was a world called Kelanna, a smooth plane of ocean dotted with islands and little boats that left wakes like scrawling sentences in the water. It was a wonderful and terrible world, filled with creatures as large and ancient as the mountains; unruly, ever-changing jungles that bloomed and wilted and bloomed again; and people, like you in many ways, who lived their lives beneath a curved sky that encased their whole world like a glass dome.

  Most Kelannans believed this was all there was. This little life. For a short time—such a tragically short time—they spoke and worked and loved and died, and when they died, that was the end. Their bodies were burned; their names, in time, forgotten.

  But some of them, a sad and courageous few, wondered what lay beyond the edge of their world, beyond the dome of their sky.

  The answer—as you know, as Captain Reed and the crew of the Current discovered when they journeyed to the far west, to the wild waters beyond all the known currents—was darkness.

  Infinite black waters.

  It was the place of the fleshless, the world of the dead, where all the souls that had ever left Kelanna collected and merged, heaving against the invisible barrier that forever divided them from the vibrant, living world they so loved and grieved and craved.

  In Kelanna, death was permanent. Your body was burned, and your soul was cast out into the endless dark, never to return.

  This, however, did not stop people from trying to subvert death in whatever way they could.

  Terrified of the abyss, a jeweler crafted a diamond necklace that would keep her heart pumping, her organs from decaying, her hair from thinning, and her skin from growing loose, though it also cursed her to a life of misery.

  To tether his love to the living world, a blacksmith forged the Resurrection Amulet.

  An outlaw turned his own life into a story so grand, so worth repeating, that his name would never fade from memory.

  Kelanna may have been a world rife with magic, inconsistencies, exceptions, but no one could break the laws of the dead, not in the way they most desperately wanted.

  Once someone died, they could never return, no matter how much you missed them, no matter how much you wanted to see or hold or speak with them again.

  You didn’t get messages from the dead.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dangerous Wants

  Captain Reed found her poring over the same pages, tracing each word as if it were a code she had to decipher. “Should you be doin’ that?” he asked.

  Sefia looked up, startled, guilty. “No.”

  He sat in the chair by her bedside, elbows on his knees. “The way I see it, the Book’s a weapon, like the Executioner.” He gestured to the black revolver at his side. People said the gun was cursed, crafted of steel and ill intent, for it took a life every time it was removed from its holster, and if you didn’t choose your target, it would choose one for you. “It’ll cut you as easily as it’ll cut your enemy, if you ain’t careful.”

  “I am careful,” she said.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “How many people have you lost ’cause of that thing?”

  Versil—run through by a sword.

  Kaito—dropped by a bullet between the eyes.

  She’d almost lost Aljan. She could still lose Archer.

  “Two,” she said quietly.

  “That careful enough for you?” His words were harsh, but his tone was not.

  “No.”

  The captain shrugged and sat back.

  “I just wanted to see my father again,” Sefia said, fingering the corner of the page. It glinted in the light like a knife. “I wanted to know what he would have done.”

  “And? The Book answer you?”

  She shook her head. “It told me I don’t get to hear what my father would have done,” she said bitterly, “because you don’t get answers from the dead.”

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he was gone. It wasn’t fair that the Book, which had willingly—even gladly—shown her her father before, wouldn’t let her see him now, when she needed him most.

  “But . . . ,�
� she said slowly, “it told me what you and the Current found at the edge of the world.”

  Nothing but death. No wonder neither he nor his crew spoke of it.

  Captain Reed looked at her sharply. “It told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Cursing, he stood and began to pace the tiny cabin. He circled the room once, twice . . . eight times. Eight was his favorite number. He liked the sound of it, he said, and the length of time it took you to count it out. Enough time to think through a choice but not so much you started second-guessing yourself.

  With a sigh, he sat down again and, touching his arm, trailed a finger down the tattoos that told the story of his journey to the world of the dead: the maelstrom where he’d found the Thunder Gong and learned how he was going to die, the skull gnawing its own ulnas for Captain Cat and her cannibal crew, the turtle island where they’d lost Jigo and where Harison had picked up his red lory—now Theo’s, since Harison was gone—the rent in the sky with the light pouring through, and then . . . nothing. An empty circle of skin at his wrist where their time at the place of the fleshless should have been.

  The sun had been a gateway, he told her. They’d passed through as it sank into the waves and passed back through when it returned a day later.

  “How?” she asked. “The Book said you can’t return.”

  “We were still alive.” The captain shook his head. “We left our dead out there with the rest of ’em.”

  The Book had said the laws of the dead could not be broken.

  It had also told her Kelanna was a world rife with inconsistencies and exceptions. And it had fed her information about the Resurrection Amulet: to tether his love to the living world.

  Was there another way to beat the Book, besides outlasting the war?

  Was there another way to cheat fate?

  Or subvert it?

  Would the Resurrection Amulet save Archer?

  “I want it, Sef,” Reed said when she told him the Book had mentioned it. “I want it so bad I can feel it in my teeth. You know how many things I’ve tried so I could live forever?”

  He kept them in the great cabin, in those polished glass cases—the Cursed Diamonds of Lady Delune, the hunk of gold that would make him immortal if only he could figure out how to swallow it whole, the lamp that burned so brightly death couldn’t find you, all the magical objects and legendary talismans that were said to make you immortal. But none of them had worked. Not really.

  “I’d just about given up when Tan told me the Resurrection Amulet was buried in the Trove,” he continued.

  Tan was the captain of the Black Beauty, the quickest ship in the southeast. When Sefia was younger, listening to snippets from market storytellers until Nin dragged her away, she’d loved tales of Tan’s bravery and brazenness. She was eager to finally meet her at Haven.

  “Did she tell you how it worked?” Sefia asked.

  Reed nodded, licking his lips. “D’you know the story of the great whale?”

  It was a myth. It was a bedtime story. It was the tale Lon had told Mareah the night she killed her own parents to earn her bloodsword.

  There are no coincidences.

  “Not the part about the whale hunter,” Captain Reed continued. “The part about why the great whale swims across the sky each night. Tan told me a story when I saw her. She said when you die, something splits from your body—she called it a soul. It’s all the parts of you that make you you—except your skin and bones, of course—your thoughts, your feelings, your memories.”

  Sefia nodded. The Book had mentioned souls too.

  “When you die, the great whale summons your soul and guides you to the edge of the world, where you pass into the place of the fleshless. But if you’re wearin’ the Amulet when your soul takes off, the Amulet draws you back. You never join the great whale. You never cross the invisible wall that separates the living from the dead. You go right back into your body. And you live.”

  She bit her lip. “Do you think it’ll work if it’s missing a piece?”

  Unconsciously, Reed rubbed his chest. He’d inked over it since, but once upon a time, her parents had tattooed a page of the Book into his skin.

  It had described the location of the last piece of the Resurrection Amulet. When Sefia still had the Sight, she’d seen them do it: her mother lifting the page to the light, her father dipping the needle into the ink. Did they know why they’d done it? Or had they simply done it because it was written that they would? She didn’t think she’d ever find out.

  “Doubt it,” the captain said wryly. “It’d be too easy otherwise.”

  Sefia twisted the sharp silver ring she wore on her finger—her mother’s ring, with a hidden compartment and a spring-loaded blade for poisoning her enemies. “I think . . . ,” she began. “I think the Book wants me to want the Amulet. It wouldn’t have given me that information otherwise. I think I’m supposed to think it’ll save Archer. And if that’s what it wants, maybe it’s better if it stays lost at the bottom of the Trove.”

  “Better?” Captain Reed looked at her the same way he had the night he discovered her on his ship—the same way he looked at Dimarion, who might turn on him the second it suited his needs. “That mean you don’t think I should have it either? You think my wantin’ it is part of some trap?”

  Placing a bookmark between the pages, she closed the Book again. “I don’t know. I know I could find it, if I wanted to. I just . . . don’t think I should.”

  “Would you help me find it, if I asked you to?”

  She looked up suddenly—hurt and betrayed. “Would you ask me to, if you knew it might lead to Archer’s death?”

  Reed didn’t answer, but the fact that he didn’t say no convinced her of what she had to do next.

  She had to leave. Archer had to leave.

  She didn’t know exactly how, she didn’t know exactly when, but she knew the Current was full of people they loved, people for whom they would do anything, and that meant every one—Frey or Aljan or Captain Reed or the chief mate or any of the crew—was a lever destiny could push at any time, forcing Sefia and Archer to act, forcing them closer to the Red War.

  And Archer’s death.

  They couldn’t stay. They couldn’t meet the bloodletters at Haven.

  Without her powers, she couldn’t protect Archer. So they had to run. As soon as possible. Somewhere without their loved ones.

  * * *

  • • •

  You read the Book?” Archer asked when she told him.

  “I’m sorry. I know we can’t trust it. I just—”

  I just need to save you.

  “After all that’s happened, I just wish I could see them again,” she finished. While it wasn’t the whole truth, it was true. It had been true ever since Mareah died, and it had only grown truer every time Sefia lost someone else.

  She wished she could see her mother more clearly than in her muddled memories.

  She wished she could talk to her father, who would have known what to do.

  She even wished Nin would yell at her and tell her to snap out of whatever spell the Book had her under.

  Archer sat on the bed next to her. “I can’t blame you,” he said, sighing. “I think I would’ve done the same thing.”

  She smiled, reached for his hand, paused when he shook his head.

  “But we can’t leave just because Cap might want us to help find the one thing he’s wanted for years.”

  “That’s not—” Sefia frowned. “Don’t you get it? The Book wants us to get the Amulet, or try to. That means you shouldn’t be anywhere near it.”

  “C’mon.” He nudged her uninjured shoulder. “Give us a little credit. We’d be finding it for the captain. The only way we could get it would be to steal it from him, and we’d never do that. Even if he asked us to help him, which he hasn’t.”
>
  She shook her head. “But—”

  “Let’s just stick to the plan, okay? You, me, the bloodletters, Haven.” He leaned in as he spoke, his voice lowering until it was just a whisper against her neck. She closed her eyes as he kissed her throat, his lips finding their way down her shoulder as his hands found their way to her waist. “Forever.”

  She blinked up at the ceiling, gasping softly as his fingers splayed over her ribs. Forever.

  * * *

  • • •

  But she would not give up. For the next two weeks, as they neared Steeds, she tried all the ways she could think of to convince him to leave the Current as soon as they made landfall.

  She tried to tell him what their lives could be like in the Liccarine desert, riding horses across the shifting sands, exploring the abandoned gem mines of Shaovinh, visiting the old cottonwood tree like other runaway lovers, sampling foods in the open-air markets, their faces swathed in scarves to conceal their identities.

  She tried to tell him Frey and Aljan were safe on the Current. That the bloodletters were already on their way to Haven. That they didn’t need him anymore.

  She tried. And tried. And tried.

  Archer was patient at first. But when she persisted, their conversations turned into arguments, voices low and tense, and he refused to budge.

  The night before they reached Steeds, she even went to Frey and Aljan to ask them to push Archer to leave with her.

  Frey looked up from a wax slate Horse had fashioned for her to practice her lettering. “He’s our chief, Sefia,” she said. “We want to protect him too.”

  “But?”

  In the bunk, Aljan looked up from the ink and paper he was using to write out exercises for Meeks, Theo, and now Marmalade, who’d gotten the idea to record the lyrics to Jules’s old songs. The boy blinked his gentle hazel eyes. “But we can’t protect him if he’s not here.”

  Sefia stormed out, slamming the sick bay door behind her, and stopped cold.

  Captain Reed was waiting in the corridor, his face in shadow beneath his wide-brimmed hat. She was surprised; he hadn’t spoken more than a few sentences to her in weeks, since their conversation about the Amulet, which, in truth, she’d been glad of.