by Carrie Ryan
“Anna!” Ardent reached for her. But his fingers found only echoes and shadow.
Marrill pressed her face against Fin’s shoulder. She couldn’t stand to see whatever nightmare the Stream had inflicted on their friend. But at the same time, she kept one eye uncovered—she didn’t dare to truly look away, either.
Annalessa’s image flickered, dimming to almost nothing. Then it surged back to life, so vibrant she could have been in the room for real. Her eyes went wide. “I can’t—” She dropped the cup and staggered back, falling to her knees. “What have I—”
Ardent ran to her, his hands passing uselessly through the image as she doubled over. The echo of Annalessa shook her head violently. Her long black hair whipped the air, twisting around her. The strands of it seemed to thicken, lengthen.
“Ardent!” she cried. It came out strangled, almost a screech.
The echo faded—or had Annalessa herself faded? The very color drained away from her, leaving nothing but lines, like a drawing brought to life. Then even those lines twisted. Her body seemed to snap into scribbles. The scribbles reordered themselves, turning into wings. The wings stretched wide, flapping furiously.
A moment later, a familiar bird burst into flight, wheeled once around the chamber, and came to perch on the lip of the Font.
It was Rose.
Or rather, it was the echo of Rose.
Marrill gaped, not quite sure she could trust her eyes. “I… she…” She shook her head. “Annalessa… became Rose?”
Beside her, Fin seemed equally stunned. “So when Rose guided us to the pieces of the Map back when we first met… that was Annalessa?”
Marrill frowned, struggling to come to terms with what had happened. “She was the one who first brought me to the Stream… and brought us together way back in the Khaznot Quay.” Her mind raced. Annalessa had been with them from the very beginning. Fused, somehow, into the Map to Everywhere.
“Ardent?” she asked, hoping he would help her understand. But Ardent didn’t even look at her. His eyes were focused on the bird. His lips curled in a sneer. “Ardent!” she tried again.
Without even glancing her way, the wizard squeezed his fingers into a fist. The words she’d been about to speak lodged in her throat until she choked on them. For a moment she struggled to breathe, her eyes watering with panic.
Fin raced to her side. “Ardent, what’s wrong with you? Let her go!” Ardent snapped his fingers, and Fin’s voice cut out, too. For a beat there was just the sound of them choking, the tightness of Marrill’s chest growing painful. Then the wizard’s fingers loosened, and with a cough, her airway cleared. She fell to her knees, gasping.
She tried to tell Fin she was okay, but she was too terrified to speak. Too terrified to invite the wizard’s wrath once more.
When she glanced toward Ardent, a sense of betrayal cut through her, so sharp it was almost physical. Ardent the Cold, she thought. So this was what that meant. This was what he’d been like, back before Annalessa vanished. Back when he was a Wizard of Meres, Serth’s right hand, helping—arranging even—for the ceremony that would lead to the Meressian Prophecy. All the rumors of him being selfish and single-minded flooded her mind. She hadn’t wanted to believe any of it, but it was true nonetheless.
A sickening realization dawned on her: Denial doesn’t change reality. Just because she wanted something to be true didn’t make it so. Marrill had to face the truth: No matter how much she wanted to believe otherwise, Ardent wasn’t who she thought he was.
CHAPTER 31
The Man in Iron
Fin crouched by Marrill, his arm around her trembling shoulders. Her eyes brimmed with tears. But Fin was furious. No one treated his best friend that way, even if he was a centuries-old, powerful wizard. He stood, ready to take Ardent on.
But Marrill grabbed his hand, pulling him back down. “No, Fin,” she whispered. “He’s not himself.”
Fin couldn’t believe she was making excuses for him after what he’d done. “Marrill, are you kidding? He just—”
“I mean he might kill you,” she snapped.
Oblivious to them, Ardent reached trembling fingers toward the echo of Rose, tracing the air around her feathered form. “This is all my fault,” he whispered to himself. “I failed her.” He dropped his head to his hands. His shoulders shook softly. “Oh, Annalessa, my love. Why do this stupid, stupid thing?”
Rose lifted from the Font and spun twice around the chamber. For the first time since entering, the echo of the Master of the Iron Ship moved. He lunged, reaching for the scribbled bird. She fluttered away, just barely escaping his metal fingers, inky wings beating against the air as she careened out of the chamber.
The echo of the Master turned to watch her go. As ever, if he had emotions, they were buried deep beneath a shell of iron.
Fin understood, then, why he’d been holding the empty cage. He’d come for Rose. To take her like he’d done at Margaham’s Game. The difference was that then he’d had perfect timing, as if he knew the exact moment Rose would fly toward the door, whereas this time she’d remained elusive.
Fin shook his head. If the Master had succeeded in capturing Rose back then, when she’d originally transformed, before she’d made it to the crew of the Kraken… Fin would never have met Marrill. They would never have assembled the Map or stopped Serth from opening the Gate back on the Black Dragon. The very Stream might have ended, with no one there to stop it. He shuddered at the thought.
“He missed her here,” Marrill said, her thoughts clearly following the same trail as Fin’s. “Did he do everything else—sinking the Black Dragon, starting the Wish Machine, freeing the Lost Sun—just for another chance at catching her?”
Fin shook his head. He didn’t even know what to think anymore. But one thing was clear: Every step of the way, the Master had been involved. Even the storm surge that had brought Marrill to the Stream in the first place was his doing.
“He was the architect of everything,” he concluded. “All of it. All along.”
They just didn’t know why.
At the edge of the dais, Ardent pulled his head from his hands and pushed himself to his feet. “I should have seen,” he whispered. “I should have been able to stop her.” He turned to look at them. The man seemed truly, deeply broken.
Behind them, iron clanked. Fin whirled to find the echo of the Master, cage dangling from one hand, standing just where Fin had seen him last. Only something was different now. The cage jangled. Black scribbles flapped and fluttered within it.
“That’s not an echo,” Marrill breathed.
“It’s the real Master!” Fin shouted. He spun toward Ardent. He didn’t know if he could forget how callously the wizard had treated them just moments ago. But right now, it looked like that would have to wait. “Okay, Ardent,” he said, “time to go!”
But Ardent didn’t move. No lightning crackled across his fingertips. He didn’t look ready to fight—or even seem to be thinking about it. Instead, he simply stared down at the Master, and the Master, in turn, looked up at him.
“So here we are again,” Ardent said at long last. “Back to where we began.”
The Master nodded slowly.
Ardent gestured to the cage. “You have her,” he said. The iron head nodded once more. “I have to save her,” Ardent added.
The Master nodded again.
Fin caught Marrill’s eye. The worry on her face made it clear that she wanted to say something, to intervene, but feared what might happen if she tried. Fin didn’t blame her; he felt the same way.
“This magic is too powerful,” Ardent murmured. “It can’t be undone. Annalessa and the Map are fused… but…” Ardent sprang down from the dais, landing like a cat. “She can be saved,” he muttered. “There’s a way. I know it! The Stream touches not just all places but all times.…”
He paced back and forth furiously as he talked, forcing Fin and Marrill to move across the chamber just to stay out of his way. “But
you know that, don’t you?” he said, turning to the Master. “You found a way to travel back to the very dawn of the Stream. How? The sheer power involved…”
The Master moved. Slowly, he held out his hand, turning it upward. Gripped in his sharp metal talons, pulsing light and dark like the beating of a heart, sat the wish orb.
Fin’s stomach twisted. He cursed himself for not grabbing the orb the second the Lost Sun had been sucked inside. The new prison of the Lost Sun, the key to the cage of the Salt Sand King, and the barrier holding back the Iron Tide, all in one. Now the Master alone controlled the fate of the Stream.
Fin slipped his hand into Marrill’s, waiting for the Master to wish and release it all. But instead, the cold figure pushed the orb toward Ardent, as if in offering. Inside it, flecks of black marred the golden glow.
The two wizards stood face-to-face, the gleaming sphere between them. Ardent stared straight at the Master, as though seeking out the eyes that peered from within the cruel visor. Blue eyes, just like Ardent’s own.
Fin wondered what he saw in them, standing so close. If there was any humanity left. Or if the Master truly was just a dark wraith of the Stream, as Ardent had long ago surmised.
“I know who you are,” Ardent said at last. His gaze dropped to consider the wish, his head tilting to watch the black flecks dance and spiral. “It is a weak prison,” he mused. “It won’t hold the Lost Sun for long. So much power, and yet not enough.”
He looked toward Rose in her iron cage. His chin trembled and he sighed, shaking his head. Then, almost cautiously, he took the orb from the Master’s grip. The flecks inside it began to swirl, streaking the golden light with trails of darkness. Ardent slowly turned, holding it aloft before him, eyes fixed and staring as the contents of the orb spun faster and faster. The dark streaks grew thicker and grayer, until Fin realized they weren’t darkness at all.
They were metal.
“I will save her,” Ardent stated simply. “If I must undo all of the Stream to make it happen.”
And before Fin could even shout, the orb in Ardent’s hand melted. Horror gripped Fin as gold and iron coated the wizard’s fingers, flowed down his wrist, raced up his arm.
“Oh no,” Marrill breathed. “Ardent, no.”
The liquid metal flowed over Ardent, consuming him. Encasing him. Even as it swallowed him, it hardened, turning his fingers into sharp-tipped claws, covering his skin in impenetrable armor. Cold darkness closed over his face, encasing it in a mask of wrought iron.
Fin stumbled backward, tugging Marrill with him. His entire body shook with shock and horror. “It can’t be,” he whispered, his voice tight.
“Ardent!” Marrill screamed. But even if he could hear her, it didn’t matter. The iron enveloped him, leaving no trace of the man they had known. No trace, save for his long white beard and his cold blue eyes.
Ardent was gone. In his place stood a familiar ironclad figure.
Ardent had become the Master of the Iron Ship.
“This can’t be real,” Fin choked. His mind scrambled to make sense of what had happened. There were two Masters now, identical in every way. The same flowing white beard. The same cold eyes. The same stance. The only difference was the iron cage dangling from the first Master’s hand, with Rose still trapped inside it.
Outside, the world itself seemed to let out a howl, a sound at once so shrill and deep that it raked fingers down Fin’s spine. The new Master reached out his hands to either side, red lightning bursting from them. The walls of the chamber, already cracked and weakened by the Lost Sun, exploded in every direction.
Marrill screamed and grabbed Fin, dragging him toward the dais. Fin shook his head, clearing the confusion to focus on self-preservation. As the ceiling fractured, raining stone and rubble down around them, they scrambled for the small shelter the Font provided, pushing past Serth’s lifeless form to crowd themselves beneath the lip of the bowl.
“What’s happening?” Fin cried over the cacophony of destruction.
Marrill’s eyes brimmed with tears and terror and disbelief, all meshed into one. “Ardent used the orb,” she choked. “He wished.”
From the Font above, Fin could hear the Stream water churning. Outside, embers and lightning swirled through the air as the chamber collapsed. Walls and ceiling crumbled, until nothing remained but the dais, the Font, and a patch of fractured floor perched at the tip of the spire.
Everything else was gone save for the new Master and the old, standing side by side, surveying the carnage.
Fin’s gaze swept across the utter devastation surrounding them. In the chasm below, Stream water twisted and roiled as it spun in a current around the spire. Waves formed, crashing against the cliffs as the current grew fiercer—the whirlpool of Monerva, reborn by the power of the wish.
To the south, the void had left a hole in reality, covered now in a thick fog that seemed to swallow the Stream. To the north, a fire ravaged the forest of Meres. The Rise army streamed through the burnt and broken trunks, racing toward the cliff edge, where a cloud of glowing embers gathered into the outline of a man.
The Salt Sand King had returned to take his place at the head of his unbeatable army.
Fin let out a shudder. But before he could truly even comprehend the depths of the disaster around them, Marrill dug her fingers into his arm, wrenching his focus back to the threat at hand.
The new Master stalked toward them as his twin watched dispassionately. Fin grabbed Marrill tighter, pushing her behind him as the iron figure neared. Wind buffeted across their tiny perch, howling around them. It whipped the new Master’s white beard like a windsock as he stepped over Serth’s lifeless body and approached the Font.
Marrill scooted backward, pulling Fin with her. But the new Master seemed to care little for either of them. Without even glancing their way, he plunged his hand into the magical waters that were the very source of the Pirate Stream.
There was something vicious about the act; it reminded Fin of Vell plunging the knife into the Crest’s back. The horrible brutality and awful finality of the gesture. A hissing sound erupted from the stone bowl as the water in the basin, already churning, frothed and boiled. A dull film tarnished the golden bubbles.
Almost instantaneously, a new sound rose from the chasm below. The roar of the Stream waterfalls changed pitch as though flowing more forcefully. Fin risked a glance over the fractured edge of the chamber floor toward the base of the spire.
His heart froze with dread. Metal marred the once-bright cascades that carried the Font’s magical water out to the Stream. The whirlpool below grew streaked with dark slashes of metal.
The Iron Tide was rising.
Rose cawed and beat her wings madly in her cage. Her captor looked at his twin and pointed with his free hand toward the whirlpool. The new Master stepped from the dais without acknowledgment, and made his way toward the edge of the platform.
Fin clutched Marrill, struggling to keep from being swept away as the storm around them gained force. The monster who’d so recently been their friend glanced toward them once more. But if there was anything of Ardent left in him, Fin couldn’t see it.
And then, without warning, the new Master stepped over the edge, dropped into the heart of the whirlpool, and vanished.
“Ardent!” Marrill cried, tears streaking down her cheeks.
The remaining Master turned to them, staring, but he made no move. Fin forced himself to meet those blue eyes, knowing now who they belonged to. He wasn’t sure how this magic worked, but he knew the two Masters were one and the same. That somehow, the Master who had menaced them had been Ardent all along.
No, Fin mentally corrected himself. There was nothing left of their friend in that creature. Ardent had been right: The Master of the Iron Ship truly was nothing more than a dark wraith of the Stream.
“Fin!” Marrill shouted, pointing toward the Font. “We have to get out of here now!”
Sure enough, metal crept across the stone b
asin, spreading down toward the dais. Apparently the Iron Tide wasn’t just pouring from the waterfalls. If he and Marrill hoped to survive, they needed to get out of there before the entire spire was swallowed by it.
As far as Fin could see, there was only one option for escape. He reached for the ties to his skysails. Marrill’s eyes widened as she followed his movements. “Oh no,” she said. “There’s no way you can carry us both across the chasm!”
She probably had a point, but Fin felt like it was best to ignore that. It wasn’t like they had a choice. “Give you three seconds to come up with a better plan,” he said.
She frowned, looking at the creep of the Iron Tide. “Uh…”
“One…”
Marrill bit her lip, turning to the Master. He tilted his head slightly. Curiously, even.
“Two…” Fin counted. He forced the Master out of his mind and turned to brace himself for the jump.
“Oh, just do it!” Marrill wrapped her arms around his neck as she situated herself on his back.
“You got it,” Fin said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes everything!” He ran as fast as he could with Marrill clinging to him, threw his arms wide, and leapt off the edge of the platform, praying they wouldn’t drop like a stone or be blasted to bits by the Master.
The massive whirlpool created enough of an updraft that the wind caught them instantly. Marrill let out a whoop of success. Fin allowed himself a moment of euphoria.
But it didn’t last. They started to sag almost immediately. Marrill had been right—there was no way they were going to make it. Fin’s heart thundered in his chest. Below them, the whirlpool yawned like the maw of a hungry animal.
Then something slammed into them. They spiraled, starting to plummet.
“Fin!” Marrill screeched. Her grip around his shoulders slipped.
Fingers wrapped tightly around Fin’s ankle, a hand dragging them down even faster to their doom. Heart in his throat, Fin glanced down as a second hand circled his leg. His blood ran cold.