Текст книги "The Assassin's Curse"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Marjani taught me the basics of navigation in the evenings, mostly, after mealtime when the bulk of the crew was up on deck drinking rum and watching the sun disappear into the horizon line. It was a lot of measuring and taking notes, and at first she just had me work off the records she took so I could learn how to do the calculations. And Naji gave me practice equations during the day, when there wasn't no sailwork for me to do. He came up on deck and everything, and we sat near the bow of the ship while I worked through them.

  The crew ignored us the first few days, just went about their business like we weren't there. Then Ataño picked up on us and took to swinging down when I was working, asking me what I was writing for but staring at Naji while he asked.

  "Ain't none of your business," I told him, scribbling with Naji's quill. It didn't work no magic for me. Wouldn't even tell me the answers to the equations.

  "I dunno, looks like you're charming something." He dropped to his feet and squinted at Naji. "You know magic, fire-face?"

  "Ananna's learning mathematics," Naji said.

  Ataño howled with laughter, too stupid or too intent on acting the bully to notice that Naji hadn't answered his question. My face turned hot like it had a sunburn but I kept scribbling cause I wanted to learn navigation more than I wanted Ataño to like me.

  "The hell?" Ataño asked. "That's even better'n the idea of her writing spells." He laughed again.

  "Don't you got deck duty?" I muttered. It was hard to concentrate on the equation with him standing there gaping at me.

  "You can't tell me what to do," he said.

  "She will once she learns navigation," Naji said, "and you're serving under her colors."

  I stopped writing, embarrassed as hell but also a little bit pleased that Naji thought I could be a captain someday.

  There was this long pause while Ataño stared at Naji. "She ain't never gonna be my captain."

  "Yes, that's probably true," Naji said. "Since I doubt she would require the services of someone as incompetent as you."

  I bit my bottom lip to keep from laughing, but then I noticed Ataño staring at Naji with daggers in his eyes. Naji didn't seem to care much, but it occurred to me that we probably shouldn't be stirring up trouble when we were riding on this boat as guests.

  Fortunately, the quartermaster stomped up to us and cuffed Ataño on the head before he could say anything more. "Get your ass to work," he said to Ataño, before fixing his glare on me.

  "Doing something for Marjani," I said real quick, which was what she'd told me to say if any of the other officers caught me practicing. The quartermaster wrinkled up his brow, but he nodded and sauntered off.

  "You shouldn't have said that to Ataño," I told Naji. "You made yourself an enemy just now. You see his eyes?"

  "I'm not afraid of children."

  I frowned and started working real hard on the next equation so Naji wouldn't see my face. The ink blotted across the sail.

  "You're pressing too hard," Naji said.

  "I ain't a child," I muttered.

  "What?"

  "Ataño's the same age as me." I didn't mean to tell him but it came out anyway. "And I ain't a child."

  Naji stared at me. I stared back as long as I could but Naji was always gonna win a staring contest. I dropped my gaze back down to the equations. They looked like scribbles, like nonsense.

  "You're the same age as him?" he asked.

  "Uh, yeah. Seventeen."

  This long heavy pause.

  "Hmm," Naji said. "I put him at thirteen."

  "Oh, shut up. You did not."

  "Well, I'd put him at thirteen by his actions. Thirteen or seventeen, it doesn't matter. He can't hurt me." He hesitated. "I won't let him hurt you–"

  "Oh please." I tossed the quill and sail scrap down to the deck. "You think I'm scared of Ataño? You really think–"

  Then I saw that sparkle in Naji's eye and knew he was laughing at me.

  "See?" he said. "Now you know how it feels."

  I glared at him for a few seconds. He looked so pleased with himself, but he also looked kind of happy, and that was enough for me to turn my attention back to my equations. I was happy, too, about finally learning navigation, and the possibility that I could become an officer on a ship, which was the first step to having my own boat. And there hadn't been any whispers about the Hariri clan, either. I was starting to see my future again.

  As long as I didn't think about the Isles of the Sky. As long as I didn't think on how Naji's curse was an impossible one. Cause I knew that just cause I could see my future again, that didn't mean it was going to happen.

After a while, Naji started coming with me to my lessons with Marjani. He didn't ask – of course he didn't ask – but he did show up at the captain's quarters one evening after dinner looking sheepish. Marjani had me perched over the maps with a divider, tracking a course from Lisirra to Arkuz, the capital city of Jokja, where she told me she had been born. She'd asked me my birthplace but I just said Lisirra, cause the stormy black-sand island where I'd been born wasn't even on the map. And then Naji was banging on the door, asking to come in.

  "I hope you don't mind if I join you," he said. "But I find the crew…" He hesitated. Marjani looked like she wanted to laugh.

  "A pain in the ass?" I offered.

  "Tiresome," Naji said. He tugged at his hair, kind of pulling it over his scar, and I frowned, wondering what the crew had said to him.

  "I have to go with Ananna on this one," Marjani said. "But you can sit in here if you want."

  Naji settled down in this gilded chair in the corner and watched me and Marjani work without saying nothing. It took me awhile to chart the course from Lisirra to Arkuz – I was using some calculations Marjani had given me, from an old logbook. I felt like I'd taken way too long to get it done, but when I finished Marjani looked sorta impressed.

  "Nice work," she said. "You're a quick learner." She smiled. "You would've done well at university."

  That made me real happy, cause nobody had ever said nothing like that to me before.

  "Yes," Naji said. "She would have."

  Marjani glanced at him. "Where did you attend?"

  "In Lisirra. The Temple School."

  "Oh." She flipped through the logbook and handed it back to me. "Lisirra to Qilar," she told me. "Go."

  I sighed like I was annoyed but really I thought the drills were fun. Marjani turned to Naji. "The Lisirra Temple School," she said. "That's a school of sorcery, isn't it?"

  Naji nodded and said, "I didn't study ack'mora there, if that's what you're asking."

  "I'll admit I was curious." Marjani smiled. "I've no ability for sorcery, myself. I studied mathematics and history. At the university in Arkuz."

  "I've been there. It's lovely."

  "The city or the university?"

  "Both."

  It was like they were speaking a whole other language. Universities and history and sorcery. I wondered what I would've studied if I'd got to go to university. Piracy's probably not an option.

  "I've been to Arkuz," I said. "We sailed up the river into the jungle to trade with some folks there."

  "Really?" said Marjani. "I always hated the jungle. You never know when it's going to rain." She leaned over the map. "Oh, good work," she said.

  "I've got it?" I'd been so wrapped in listening in on Marjani and Naji's conversation that my hands must've kept on working while my brain lagged behind.

  "You've got it," Marjani said.

  After that, Naji came to my lessons about every day, I guess cause he and Marjani had bonded over both going to university. He didn't have a lot to offer in the way of navigation, but he and Marjani would tell me about other stuff they'd learned, like all these weird stories about the different emperors over the years, or how to calculate the volume of an empty container without having to fill it with water first. It was fun.

  Then Marjani got me to start helping her with the true navigation, the navigation that was taking us around the sirens and three weeks out of our way and, as far as me and Naji were concerned, delaying the trip to the Isles of the Sky. One morning she called me down from the rigging and handed me her logbook and a quill and the sextant.

  "I need measurements," she said. "You know how it works. Get going."

  The crew stared at me while I stood there fiddling with the sextant. Marjani trotted off to speak with the captain up at the helm, and I felt real conspicuous with everybody's eyes on me. But then I lifted up the sextant and peered through it up at the sky and the whole boat fell away.

  I stopped doing as much work in the rigging after that, since Marjani had me taking measurements for her every day. Seems that charting a new course on the water's a bit risky, as you're creating a new path in addition to the usual work of checking where you are in the water. But we stayed on course, still moving up toward the north and to the east, and Marjani said it was partially cause I helped her. I didn't necessarily believe that, mind, though I suppose I had no reason not to.

  One afternoon I crawled up on deck to make the usual round of measurements and noticed immediately that something was off. There were a lot of voices shouting and yelling, but it wasn't about rigging or wind or none of the usual complaints. At first I thought we must be under attack, that some tracker from the Mists – or worse, the Hariris – had followed me and Naji all the way to sea. Immediately my heart started pounding and I went for the knife at my hip. Which I still hadn't replaced. Stupid. I needed to ask Naji for his knife or nick it off him while he slept.

  But then I realized I didn't hear the clank of sword against sword, or the pop of a pistol. And nobody'd sent out the call to arms, neither. It was just yelling. And jeering.

  And my heart started pounding all over again.

  I raced across the deck to where Ataño and a couple of his cronies were crowded around the railing. Naji was there, too, staring at them stone-faced. Ataño said something I couldn't make out, on account of the wind blowing in off the waves and beating through the sails, but he pushed up the skin of the left side of his face until it snarled the way Naji's face did sometimes and his cronies laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd seen in a year.

  Me, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.

  "Fuck off!" I screamed. All three of 'em turned toward me and I took off running. Half the crew was up in the rigging or clustered over on the other side of the ship, not participating but not doing nothing to stop it neither.

  And then Ataño was flat on his back, Naji crouched on his chest with his sword at Ataño's throat.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  Naji made this hissing sound through his teeth and pressed his sword up under Ataño's chin. A trickle of blood dripped onto the deck, glistening in the sunlight. Ataño whimpered, his eyes clenched shut.

  "Look at me," Naji said in a voice like an ice storm.

  Ataño opened his eyes.

  "This is the last time you will ever look at my face. If you see me coming, look the other way. Because if you look at me again, or speak to me again, I'll make sure your face comes out worse than mine."

  Nobody on deck was moving. Even the wind had stopped. In the silence, all you could hear was Ataño's pitiful little moans.

  "Do you understand?"

  "Y… Yes," Ataño said.

  Naji pulled his sword away. Ataño scrambled backward, his head twisted over to the side, looking everywhere but at Naji. His cronies stumbled after him.

  Naji wiped the blade of his sword on his robe.

  And like that, the spell broke. A couple of the bigger crewman bounded across the deck and grabbed Naji by the arms, pulling him into a lock, though I could see that Naji didn't have no intention of fighting back.

  I could see that if Naji had wanted to fight back, both of those crewman would've been dead.

  And anybody else he wanted, too.

  When he'd attacked Ataño, he'd covered close to five feet so fast I hadn't seen him move. He hadn't even moved that fast during the fight in the Lisirran pleasure district – this time, I hadn't seen him go for his sword, or even noticed the twitch in the arm that meant he was thinking about it. One second he'd been standing there like a victim, the next he could've slit Ataño's throat before anybody knew what was happening.

  The two crewmen dragged Naji down to the brig, and all I could think about was that night in the desert, and how he hadn't done what he just did to Ataño – to me.

The brig smelled like rotten fish and piss and the air was thick with mold. Saltwater dripped off the ceiling and down my back as I made my way over the dank floor. I had Naji's desert-mask tucked into the pocket of my coat.

  He was curled up in the corner of his cell, sitting with his chin on his knees. His eyes flicked over to me when I came in but he didn't say nothing.

  I stared at him for a minute, his hair all tangled up from the sea wind, the lanterns illuminating the lines of his scar. Looking at it I got this phantom pain in the left side of my face.

  "They take your knife off you?" I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  "Can I see it? I'll give it back."

  Naji stared at me.

  "C'mon, I ain't gonna do nothing bad."

  He reached into his cloak and then there was a thwap and the knife wedged into the wood of the ship a few inches from my head. I was real proud of myself cause I didn't even blink, though I did see him go for it this time – something told me it was cause he wanted it that way. I yanked the knife out of the wall and walked up to the lock on the bars. Shoved the knife into the keyhole and wiggled it around like Papa'd taught me. When the lock clicked I snapped it open and stepped into the cell with Naji.

  "I brought your desert mask," I said, pulling it out of my pocket and dangling it in front of me. Naji didn't move. I started thinking this might've been a bad idea.

  But then he took the mask away from me and straightened it out on his knees.

  "You sure it won't look suspicious?" he asked, his voice full up with sarcasm, and I looked down at my feet, shamed.

  "I'm sorry." My voice kinda cracked. "I didn't think – on Papa's ship they would never–"

  "Forget it." Naji pulled the mask across his face, hiding his scar. "Of course you're correct, the young men on your father's ship never once jeered at a disfigurement. Upstanding citizens the whole of them, I'm sure."

  I didn't know what to say. My face got real hot, and Naji kept glaring at me.

  "You have no idea what it's like," he said. "To look like me. To be what I am on top of that – people think I'm a monster."

  "I don't." But I said it so soft I'm not sure he heard me.

  I wanted to get out of the brig. I wanted to run up on deck till I found Ataño so I could pummel the shit out of him. Instead, I sat down next to Naji, the floor's cold damp seeping up through the seat of my trousers. He didn't talk to me or look at me and the air was heavy with his anger and I tried to think of a way to fix it. I couldn't come up with nothing.

  After a while, Naji said, "I'm sorry."

  The sound of his voice made me jump.

  "I'm sorry I was cold with you," he said. "I don't think it was your fault."

  "Oh. That's good." I chewed on my lower lip and looked at the pool of scummy seawater that had collected over near the bars. "I tried to stop it–"

  "I know you did."

  We sat for a few moments longer.

  "Can I ask you a question?" I said.

  "Depends on the question."

  "It's not about–"

  "Just ask it, Ananna."

  I took a deep breath.

  "You could've killed Ataño and been down below before anybody saw you. I ain't never seen a man move as fast as you."

  Naji didn't say nothing.

  "I get why you didn't kill him, that's not my question. But…" I forced myself to look over at him. "Why didn't you do that to me? Before I started up the curse and everything? In the desert? You could've laid me out faster'n a jungle cat. I know there was a protection spell but it must've worn off by then, cause you did cut me and all…"

  My voice kinda trailed off. Naji stared straight ahead.

  "It's true," he said. "There wasn't a protection spell on you in the desert."

  "Then why…?"

  Naji took his time answering.

  "Because," he said. "I didn't want to kill you."

  I stared at him. My heart was pounding all fast and funny, and I felt like I'd forgotten how to speak.

  "Ananna! Get the hell out of there before the captain comes down and sees you."

  Marjani. I jerked up in surprise, banging my head against the back wall. Naji glanced at me but didn't ask me if I was alright or nothing. His voice kept echoing around in my head: I didn't want to kill you. I'd no idea what to make of that.

  Marjani pushed the cell door open and stood there expectantly. She didn't say nothing about Naji's mask. I handed him back his knife, and once I'd stepped out she slammed the bars shut. The clang of metal against metal rang in my ears.

  "Crew's saying you move like a ghost," she told him, leaning up against the bars.

  Naji didn't reply.

  "Fortunately, the captain doesn't believe in ghosts."

  "He ought to," Naji said.

  "Is he gonna toss Naji overboard?" I asked.

  "The captain?" Marjani looked at me. "No."

  Over in the corner, Naji didn't even stir.

  "Ataño's a worthless little shit," Marjani said. "But it seems he's done more work in the past three hours than he's done in the past three days, so – the quartermaster's happy." She smiled. "Captain's letting you out tomorrow morning."

  "Wonderful," Naji said, though he didn't sound like he meant it. "Curses and darkness, I want off this ship."

  "Well, it's four weeks till Qilar. You've got awhile. Whispers are gonna be worse. You need to remember that you're here on the captain's good graces. You're lucky he's not a superstitious man."

  Naji lifted his head a little. "No, I'm lucky he has a navigator clever enough to dispel any residual belief in ghosts and ghouls."

  Marjani didn't say nothing, but I could tell from the way she tightened her mouth that he was right.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Whatever magic Marjani worked on the captain held fast; he released Naji at sunup the next day. I filched a knife off the cook when he wasn't looking and made sure I was down in the brig when it happened, tucked away out of notice in a back corner. Ataño wasn't nowhere to be seen.

  The captain had a couple of crewmen standing by with a pair of pistols each, all four barrels pointed at Naji's forehead.

  "I see any hint of magic," the captain said as he unlocked the cell. "Any hint of weirdness, I'm tossing you out to sea."

  He didn't say nothing about tossing me off the boat along with Naji, but then, I can't kill a man in less than a second.

  "I understand," Naji said. He'd kept his mask on but his words came out clear and even.

  The captain nodded like this was good enough and pulled the cell door open wider. The crewmen kept their pistols trained on Naji as he strolled up to the ladder. Naji glanced at me when he walked past but didn't say nothing. The captain stopped, though.

  "What're you doing down here?" he asked.

  "Checking up on my friend."

  The captain chuckled. "Ain't gonna hurt him, little girl. Not unless he pulls a knife on me."

  "He won't." I shifted my weight from foot to foot. "Sides, and with all due respect, sir, I was more worried about Ataño striking out revenge."

  The captain roared at that. Even his cannon-men kind of looked at each other and laughed. I frowned at them.

  "Ataño ain't gonna cause no more trouble," the captain said. "Can't believe I put a man in the brig for scaring some discipline into that boy." He laughed again and all three of them climbed up out of the brig.

  Things got back to normal after that. I kept on working for Marjani, taking down measurements and tracking our course toward Qilar. Naji went back to spending all his time in the crew's quarters, scribbling over the sail scraps left over from my mathematics lessons. I went down there once or twice to keep him company, but he didn't much talk to me, just muttered over his work.

  "What're you writing?" I frowned. "It ain't magic, is it?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. When I said I wanted off this ship I didn't mean I wanted to be thrown into the open sea." Naji handed me one of the sail scraps. It was a story – an old desertlands story about a little boy who gets lost in the desert and has to strike a deal with the scorpions to make it back home.

  "Why're you writing this?"

  "I need something to do." Naji leaned back in his hammock.

  "Nobody writes down stories."

  "They do when they're trapped at sea and bored senseless." Naji hunched over his sail scrap and wrote a little swirl of something. "I hear from Marjani you're plotting part of our course each day."

  "Getting us to Port Idai as fast as possible." Not that I liked the idea of leaving the Revenge. Any boat crazy enough to take us to the Isles wasn't one I'd want to work on.

  Naji stopped writing and looked up at me, all dark hair and dark mask and the little golden strip between them. "I appreciate that." He looked down at his sail scrap. "Although I can't say I'm much looking forward to our second journey north."

  "Me, neither."

  Naji picked up his quill and began writing again.

  "You think it'll work?" I asked him.

  "Will what work?"

  "Do you think we'll find a cure?"

  Naji's hand twitched, but he kept writing, and he didn't look at me. "I don't know."

  That was not the answer I wanted to hear. I left him to his stories and stomped back up to deck, where Marjani was waiting for me with the logbook and a quill, and things fell back into their routine, ocean and wind and salt and sails.

  It felt like the beginning of the end.

A week later, the weather turned.

  I was helping with the rigging, cause the wind had been strong all afternoon, blowing in from the south, hot and dry and tasting like dust and spice. It had everybody in a mood, especially the more superstitious fellows in the lot, and so there were a lot of charms getting tossed around, and certain words getting uttered. And everybody was drinking up the rum, superstitious or not. I'll admit that my hands kept going to my throat that day, rubbing at Naji's charm.

  The wind picked up, and it howled through the sails, flattening 'em out and then billowing 'em up. Water sprayed out from the sea, huge glittering drops of it. Not a cloud in the sky, though, the sun hot and bright overhead.

  Crewmen were crawling all over the rigging, and Marjani was up at the helm, throwing her whole body into keeping the ship steady. A big green wave splashed over the railing and slammed into me, and I fell across the deck, hitting up against old Chari's worn-out boot. He hardly offered me a glance as he pulled at the rigging, shouting curses and prayers alike. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed hold of the rope to help him out. The whole thing felt like a typhoon if not for the sun and the weird spice scent on the wind. Maybe it was that noble from the Mists, drawing the worlds together like Naji had said…

  For a half-second, I caught a whiff of medicine, sharp and mean, like spider mint, and I shot back to Lisirra, to the entrance of the night market. The rope slipped out of my hands.

  "The hell's your head, girl!" shouted Chari. "Hold on tight if you don't want to get knocked overboard."

  The smell of Naji's magic disappeared. He can't, I thought, scrambling to pick up the rope. It has to be the Mists. He can't be doing this. It'd put me in danger–

  And then another wave crashed over the side, and I managed to hold on tight, and all thoughts of Naji's magic washed away with it. I had a ship to keep afloat.

  By then somebody was ringing the warning bell, the clang clang clang that meant an attack or a storm or just plain ol' trouble. Seawater showered over us like rain, the salt stinging my eyes and the sores in my hands. Chari turned around and grabbed my wrist and shoved me over to the foremast. "Get up there!" he shouted, jabbing his hand toward the rigging. Water streamed over my face, blurring my vision, but then I saw it: The storm sail had come loose.

  "Shit!" I scrambled up the rope, slipping and crawling, my clothes plastered to my skin. The wind threatened to knock me off the rope but I dug my nails into the fibers, clinging with every bit of my strength. The sail flapped back and forth, snapping like a whip, though at least it was dry up here, away from the fury of the waves. I reached out and made a grab for it. Missed. Righted myself. Took a deep breath. Watched the sail and waited for it to snap back toward me. This time I caught the edge and yanked on it one-handed even though the wind had other ideas. My arms shook. My eyes watered. I screamed, trying to gather up the will to do this without dying.

  And then I had it. That split-second between wind gusts and I had it. I tied the sail back into place, looping the rope with aching fingers.

  The boat jerked, tilted, and I fell, grabbing at one of the riggings before I crashed down on deck. I cried out but the wind swallowed my voice right up and no one down below even noticed me.

  I kicked out my feet, swinging up like a monkey. The wind kept on howling. I started crawling back down, my arms hating every second of it. Every part of my body ached.

  And then I heard this low creaking groan, and I knew they were shifting the boat so we could run with the wind to safety. Under normal circumstances it ain't nothing I can't handle but with the wind and the hurt in my body it was too much. The movement knocked me loose. I managed to hang on with one hand, swinging out over the deck. What with the seawater and the sunlight, everything down there was covered in rainbows.

  Then I lost my grip, and I fell.

I woke up and all I knew was the hurt. Pain vibrated through my body, all the way out to the tips of my fingers and toes. My head throbbed. But I was laid out on something soft, a pile of rope and old sails, and I guess that was why my brains hadn't spilt out all over the deck of the Ayel's Revenge.

  She was moving, at least, soft and smooth, and there wasn't any wind or water splashing over the railing. No voices, neither, only the purring ocean, the occasional snap as the sails rippled overhead. I pushed myself up on my elbows, and when that wasn't the bone-breaking trauma I expected I forced myself to sit up halfway, my back aching, my head lolling.

  The air was cold.

  That bothered me. Ain't no reason for us to be anywhere near coldness, not at this time of year, and not where we were sailing. Don't care how bad that storm knocked us off course.

  Not a storm, I thought, remembering the sunlight, the scent of spider mint, but I shoved the thought out of my head.

  I took another few moments to pull myself up to standing, and then took even longer to recover from it, standing in place and swaying a little. Then I shuffled forward, limping from a twinging pain in my left thigh.

  We were someplace else. I knew that soon as I came out from the under the shadow of the rigging. The sky was the color of a sword's blade, and the water lapping up at the sides of the boat was dark gray, nearly black, and everything smelled like metal and salt. We were north, up close to the ice-islands, maybe. I'd only been there a few times in my life but I remembered the smell of the air, that overwhelming scent of cold.

  A handful of crewmen were bunched up at the port bow of the ship, all huddled together, not talking. Chari was there, and Marjani, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. I limped toward them.

  "Hey!" My voice came out strangled, raspy. Nobody turned around. "Hey, what's going–"

  I stopped. We were in sight of land. Way far off in the distance was a line of green, that vivid darkalmost-black green you only get in the north.

  And below the line of green was a line of black beach and below that, a strip of gray. The sky. A gap between the island and the sea.

  And like that, all the pain in my body got replaced with the icy grip of dread, and I remembered how I'd smelled medicine back during the storm, before I–

  Marjani glanced over at me, her eyes widening. "Ananna!" she said. "Oh, Aje, I thought you'd been thrown overboard! I–" She stopped, covered her mouth with her hand. "You look like hell."

  I tried to choke out some kind of nicety, something about falling into the rope, something, anything to make her think I had nothing to do with us being within swimming distance of those horrible islands.

  Instead, I turned away from her and hobbled over to the ladder that'd take me down below.

  "Ananna? What're you… Stop, it's flooded–"

  "Stay there," I said, cause what else could I do? She didn't listen, of course, and came chasing after me, grabbing hold of my arm. Pain shot up through my elbow.

  "Let me go! I need to…" Do what? I didn't want to put it into words.

  "Need to what?"

  "Naji." It was all I could bring myself to choke out. I jerked away from her and half-slid, half-climbed down the ladder. Down below the floor was covered in a half-foot of dirty water, rum bottles floating by like they might hold some kind of message for me, and scraps of clothing and pieces of dried fish. I splashed through the water, the chill setting my whole body to shaking. Marjani had stopped at the ladder.

  "Ananna, come back!" she said. "It's too cold. You'll get hypothermia…"

  I didn't have the faintest idea what that was, and I didn't care, neither. I pushed my way into the crew's quarters.

  The first thing that hit me was that horrible medicine smell, stronger than anything that ever soaked its way into the air of the crew's quarters before. My eyes watered and my throat burned and my skin prickled from all the leftover magic. The ship walls down here were all blood-red, transformed by magic.

  And there was Naji, slumped across a hammock, blood trailing down his arms, his skin white as death. Bits of sail floated in the water around him like flower petals, leaving streaks of red in their wake.