The Storyteller

by Traci Chee

  Sees her—June—her limp brown hair pulled into a messy bun, her pinched face smudged with ash.

  June watches her Master die.

  I watch her watch her Master die.

  I’m sorry, June. For that. And for this.

  Her gaze meets Sefia’s across the Library, and she teleports.

  Sefia lets her come. She’s already taken a life tonight. She doesn’t want to take another.

  But she doesn’t have to, does she?

  Archer is there.

  And someone is coming for the girl he loves.

  He doesn’t have time to think before he reacts. As June appears in the greenhouse, carrying with her a cloud of heat and sparks, Archer draws Lightning.

  He shoots her, and the light in her eyes dies.

  Erastis was right. Lon and Mareah’s love was the beginning of the end, and now, with the destruction of the Library and the killing of three Guardians, Sefia and Archer’s love will soon bring the Guard—and this story—to a close.

  Part of the mountain begins to crumble.

  Dotan, the Master Administrator, is in the Main Branch somewhere, but he isn’t going to die here now. No, he and the four remaining Guardians survive this night.

  Shakily, Archer steps closer to Sefia. Puts his arm around her, as much to comfort himself as to comfort her. Born killer. The words haunt him.

  He won’t be able to escape his nightmares tonight.

  And neither will Sefia, though her nightmares will be of a different kind. For she can’t unsee what she’s seen, can’t unknow what she knows.

  “Let’s go,” Archer whispers to her. “The others might need us.”

  She nods. She has no words. Not now.

  But she will have them later. With me.

  She summons her sense of the Illuminated world, and through the charging waves of light, she finally looks up . . . at me.

  Though one of her eyes is concealed by her eye patch, her gaze is venomous—filled with such resentment and malice and hatred that it could kill.

  But I cannot be killed, by looks or mortal weapons. I’ve been here since the beginning, and I’ll be here when it ends.

  They disappear.

  Somewhere on the southern side of the world, they reappear on the deck of a red ship with white markings, among their friends.

  But here, as the Library burns, there’s a disturbance in the greenhouse shadows. A slender, well-dressed figure. It’s Dotan, and he’s wearing that same look of resentment and malice and hatred on his nearly symmetrical features.

  Oh, Sefia. I wish you could have seen him.

  I wish you could have stopped him here.

  But it wasn’t written.

  CHAPTER 33

  Now Is All You Have

  For all they’d done—stealing the power of the Scribes, destroying the Library—Sefia and Archer were too late to stop the Guard.

  Oxscini had fallen to the Alliance. The Guard, diminished as they were, controlled four of the Five Islands, and as soon as they recuperated, they would come for Roku, the Volcanic Kingdom.

  But the Resistance had grown too.

  Of the seventeen ships that sailed in to break the siege of Tsumasai Bay, fourteen sailed out again, including the Brother, the Current, and the Crux, and they were accompanied by triple their number in allies: rebel redcoats who’d disobeyed their queen’s order to surrender and Delienean defectors who’d rallied to their king when he emerged from the battle to reclaim his throne.

  All told, there were fifty-eight ships fleeing from the Alliance forces in Oxscini when Sefia and Archer appeared on the deck of the Brother, smelling of smoke.

  Sefia was silent while Scarza told them the Resistance was retreating to Roku. She barely stirred when Archer told him that Stonegold and three more Guardians were dead, that the Library was burning even as they spoke.

  She allowed Aljan to take the poisoned Book from her custody without protest. For she’d seen the truth of their world, and it had rendered her speechless.

  That night, while Archer thrashed in his sleep, she sat by the lantern and pored over the pages she’d taken from the vault, hoping to find answers.

  Everyone in the Guard knew the Book was a record of the world, but only the Scribes had known the world itself was a book.

  She was in a book, and the end had already been written.

  No wonder all of her plans to beat the Book had failed. You couldn’t change the story if you were trapped inside it.

  To use Alteration, the Scribes had cut passages from the Illuminated world, rearranged words, revised history, but even their power had limits.

  They could make some changes, as Sefia had done in the Rokuine highlands. They could erase pebbles and plant entire forests on barren hillsides. They could invent weapons, alter the courses of rivers, massacre wave after wave of people.

  But they could not change the outcome of the story without destroying the world and everyone in it.

  The story would always end the same way.

  Shoving the pages back into her pack, Sefia crept from the cabin, up onto the main deck, and climbed out onto the Brother’s bowsprit, with the water racing beneath her and the cold wind fast around her body. There, she summoned her magic.

  The world, once dark, blazed to life before her eyes. Past. Present.

  Future.

  She flipped ahead to the ending—to a world without color, shape, or shadow. To the world of the dead.

  For years, for endless years, they would be suspended in the void, unable to tell if they were fixed or moving because there would be no landmarks for them to recognize. There would be nothing to tell them where they’d been or where they were going. They would be alone.

  But, at last, they would hear the call. Someone was summoning the dead from the black edge of the world.

  They would rise, shooting upward through the darkness like bolts of light.

  They would return—to the deep blue, the world just below the surface, the white flashing underside of the sky.

  They would remember. The unforgiving blue. The wind. The sound. The people.

  Sefia gasped. Someone was going to use the Resurrection Amulet, she realized, but it wouldn’t save them. It wouldn’t keep anyone from dying. It would summon the dead.

  As the rivers of light cascaded past her, Sefia caught words in her hands, pulling them from their streaming sentences, and put them together again.

  is this a book

  And for the first time in ages—in thousands of pages—I answered: YES.

  She looked up.

  And again, she found me.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  I’M THE STORYTELLER.

  I don’t have a voice the way you do. I don’t have a tongue or lungs or a heart. I spoke to her in light, taking the threads of the Illuminated world and twisting them into shapes—letters—punctuation—explanations—apologies.

  “Have you been here the whole time?” she asked.

  YES.

  Since the first sentence—Once there was, and one day there will be—I have been here.

  I KNEW YOUR FATHER, I told her.

  AND YOUR MOTHER.

  AND THE LOCKSMITH.

  Sefia’s fingers tightened on the running lines. I suspect she wanted to keep from crying. Mareah had died nearly twelve years ago, and the grief was still so fresh.

  “Can you bring them back?”

  NO. If I’d had a voice, it would have broken.

  “Why not?”

  IMAGINE THERE IS A WALL BETWEEN THE WORLD OF THE LIVING AND THE WORLD OF THE DEAD, AND IN THIS WALL, THERE IS ONE GATE.

  “The sun,” she said. “Captain Reed and the Current of Faith passed through it.”

  FOR THE DEAD, WHO SO LONG TO RETURN, THE GATE OPENS IN ONLY ONE
DIRECTION.

  “What about the Resurrection Amulet?”

  Don’t you know by now? I wanted to ask. Haven’t I said it enough?

  Some stories are lovely. Some stories are lies.

  I told her the Resurrection Amulet was never supposed to keep a person from dying. It was supposed to bring one soul—and only one soul—back from the dead.

  “‘To tether his love to the living world,’” Sefia murmured.

  The blacksmith who created the Amulet wanted to restore life to someone who was already dead. When he wore it, he would summon her soul from the place of the fleshless, and to keep her here, he would give her some of his own life force.

  But he didn’t know that you can’t come back from the dead . . . not really.

  She was a phantom, like the ones Captain Reed had encountered beyond the edge of the world. He couldn’t touch her without her draining his warmth and breath. He didn’t even know if she was really herself or some amalgam of his own memories of her.

  So he sent her back to the world of the dead, severing their connection, and split the Amulet in two, burying it where he hoped no one would ever find it, so no one would be tempted to use it again.

  Sefia shuddered.

  DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT ERASTIS TOLD YOU HE LEARNED FROM YOUR PARENTS? I asked.

  She closed her eyes, dismissing her magic—dismissing me—and when she opened them again, the night was dark and the sea was black.

  “‘Love what’s in front of you, right now,’” she said, “‘because now is all you have.’”

  But she didn’t return to her cabin right away. Instead, she teleported from the Brother’s bowsprit to the Current of Faith. The green ship was battered after the battle in Tsumasai Bay—rails shattered, hull pitted with bullets, chunks of Cooky’s galley and Horse’s workshop missing. As she crossed the splintered decks, the chief mate found her in the dark.

  “You made it,” he said.

  She nodded. “What happened here?”

  “Serakeen.” His lip curled as he spoke the name. “He has new guns.”

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “No.”

  Old Goro was dead. Others were gravely injured. Horse was barely hanging on, while Doc watched over him in the sick bay.

  “I’m sorry.” Sefia looked down at her feet, where a bloodstain hadn’t been completely scrubbed out.

  “Something else troubling you, girl?” the chief mate asked. With one thick finger, he tilted her chin up.

  Tears sprang to her eyes.

  Everything was wrong. The burning of the Library. The deaths of June and Erastis and Tolem and Goro. And Archer . . . no, she couldn’t even think it. The world was wrong. Unfair . . . and unbeatable.

  Roughly, the mate patted her shoulder with one callused palm and waited for her to stop crying. “There,” he said when her tears had dried up, “now that you’ve stopped your blubbering, go see the captain.” Holding her at arm’s length, he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “I suspect it’ll do you both some good to talk.”

  Then he put his hands behind his back and paced across the broken ship, into the dark.

  Sefia found Captain Reed in the great cabin. The back windows had been boarded up, and bullet holes riddled the walls. Shards of the glass cases littered the floor, the treasures inside tilted on their stands. One of the rubies was chipped. The Thunder Gong and the mallet Dimarion had gifted to Reed lay together on the floor.

  Reed was sitting at the long table, counting his tattoos in the lamplight. “You get what you wanted?” he asked as she sank onto the bench across from him.

  Wiping her eyes, she told him how Archer had been framed for Stonegold’s death, how she’d killed the Apprentice Administrator, how the Library had burned and the Librarians with it. And she told him about the storyteller, the world, the Book.

  “Well . . . shit.”

  She laughed. Or sobbed. Some combination of the two. “Yeah,” she said.

  “You know, though . . .” Reed rubbed his jaw. “That explains a lot.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He turned his palms up, exposing the tattoos on the undersides of his arms. “I’ve been lucky, haven’t I? To have done all this. Only a main character coulda racked up stories like these.”

  Sefia tried to smile, but it faltered on her lips. Archer was important too. But he wouldn’t get the chance to have half as many adventures.

  Which reminded her why she’d come. To tell Reed the truth about the Amulet.

  As she spoke, the captain pulled the Resurrection Amulet from inside his shirt. “You mean I’ve been wearin’ this ugly hunk of metal for months, and it don’t even do what I thought it did?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why’d Tan lie?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know the truth.”

  “You remember the fuss you kicked up about this thing? How you were so sure fate wanted Archer to have it so he could fulfill his destiny?”

  In the light, the red stones winked like dozens of little eyes.

  Sefia reached out, the tips of her fingers almost brushing the dull metal. “Maybe fate wanted me to have it, so I . . .” So she could call him back from the world of the dead when he died. But there were so many other people she wanted to see too.

  Her father.

  Her mother.

  Nin.

  She missed them so keenly she’d do anything to see them again.

  But the Resurrection Amulet would summon only one soul from the black world beyond. Not three.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, drawing back her hand. “It won’t work if it’s incomplete.”

  Reed touched his chest, where the location of the missing piece had been buried beneath years of ink. “I gave up on findin’ that,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He began tapping each of his tattoos again, one after another. “Because it happens soon.” The water had told him, he said. He thought it might have been in Tsumasai Bay, but since he’d survived it, he suspected it would be at Roku, whenever the Alliance came for them.

  “You and the outlaws could still run,” Sefia said, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. They were in too deep to leave now. “We could all run.”

  “We threw in our lot against the Alliance the day we set sail for Oxscini. There’s nowhere left to run now, and no one left to stand against them . . . except the Resistance.”

  She watched him trace the lines of ink that covered his skin like letters covering a page. “I think . . . ,” she began quietly, “I think I could find the last piece.”

  He stopped, mid-count, staring at her with his sea-blue eyes. “How?”

  “With magic.” She’d done it before, hadn’t she? Removing strains of mold from a page. She could remove strands of ink from flesh. “I think I could take all your other tattoos, except that one. The first one. Although . . . I think it might hurt.”

  Captain Reed looked down at his arms. He flexed his fingers, studying the images inked onto his knuckles. All his adventures. All the stories he’d worked so hard to collect.

  She could take them. If she did, she’d be able to find the last piece of the Amulet and make it whole. Make it work.

  “I didn’t want to die,” he said finally, “but if I was gonna die, if my heart was gonna stop beatin’ and my body was gonna turn to ash, I wanted to be remembered, because that was the only way I could live forever. And I was gonna live a life so big, so fast, so bold that I’d never be forgotten.”

  Removing the Amulet, he placed it on the table between them. “You think I accomplished that? You think I did good with the time I had?”

  She nodded. “Better than anyone, Cap.”

  With a sigh, he stood and crossed the cabin, placing the metal disc in one of the broken glass cases.
“Then I’ll keep what I have,” he said. “And you should too, while you have it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Those Who Will Die

  Archer was dreaming again, and in his dreams the Library was still burning. Smoke billowed from the broken stained glass windows and gaps in the crumbling stone as pages flew, blazing, into the sky like firebirds, trailing sparks.

  He was standing in the greenhouse again, but it was Kaito with him and not Sefia. The boy’s skin was dark—with ash?—and in the light of the flames, his eyes seemed to glow red.

  As if he could sense Archer watching him, Kaito looked over, rolling his neck at an unnatural angle. Under his scarlet eyes, he wore a hang-jawed smile, his teeth eerily white.

  But before Archer had the chance to recoil, Kaito had moved. He was quick as lightning. He was standing in front of Archer now. He was crouching over the Apprentice Librarian, withdrawing his blade from her chest.

  He was still smiling.

  Archer gasped. Did he speak? She was just a kid. She was innocent! What’s the matter with you?

  Kaito only shrugged. “We kill people and we get people killed,” he said, though his voice wasn’t his own. “You better come to terms with that now if you’re going to lead us.”

  Then he was dissolving, his edges melting into the shadows, the red light dying in his eyes, leaving only the echo of his words:

  . . . if you’re going to lead us.

  . . . you’re going to lead us.

  . . . lead us.

  Archer woke with a start, still feeling the heat of the fire on his face, still smelling the smoke.

  But he wasn’t back there anymore. Dawn glinted in the portholes, glancing off the tops of the waves as the Brother and the Resistance ships raced south toward Roku. Archer reached for the worry stone at his throat. He was safe.

  And Sefia was there, sitting at the other end of the bunk, with the pages from the vault crinkled in her lap. “Archer,” she said softly, “there’s something I have to tell you.”

  He listened as she told him the truth. What their world really was. How the ending had already been written. How they were approaching it even now. As she spoke, he traced the facets of the crystal hanging around his neck.