Prologue
A ship burned on ashen waters.
Zaida sat on the shoreline as the foremast collapsed, a plume of embers erupting high into the night sky.
Lifting a hand to her forehead, she found an open wound trickling blood down her nose and cheeks. Turning, slowly, she stared into the gloom.
The light from the flames revealed the Scorchlands. An endless coastline of empty, blackened earth.
Zaida tried to recall what had happened …
Shadowed figures.
“Help!” The cry came out thin and ragged.
On the ground ahead lay an old man.
“Olin, it’s you,” she said, relieved to recognize her old teacher.
The relief vanished. Olin’s frame shook with a convulsive cough. Thick, black mucus bubbled up onto his chin, veined with red. He didn’t seem to notice. Zaida did. She knelt beside him, already knowing with a cold, steady certainty that he would not survive the journey back North. He would die.
“What happened?” she asked.
Olin only shook his head.
Zaida reached for some half-formed memory and pain answered. The skin at her hairline was swollen and hot; her vision dipped.
“We search the wreckage,” the old man said at last, voice raw and broken, words dragging through the muck in his lungs. “Gather anything useful. Water, cloth, tools. With supplies we’ll make it out of here.”
Zaida nodded. She dropped to a knee beside him, hooked an arm under his shoulders and caught his forearm.
“Come on.”
She hauled him up from the ground.
His feet scraped in the ash before he found them.
Then the world tilted.
A wave of dizziness hit her.
Swaying, she reached out … grasped at empty air, then stumbled forward and collapsed onto her stomach.
Zaida waited for her vision to return. When it finally did, a hollow in the scorched earth came into focus. A footprint.
“There are more survivors,” she said.
The tracks headed inland across the flats. They were marked by blood, and crisscrossed to suggest the owners had been staggering.
“Forget them,” said Olin. “The clouds tonight are dark. The only source of light is this burning ship. If we wander off we’ll be swallowed by the night.”
Zaida flexed her hands at her sides. He was right, but the thought of leaving survivors behind gnawed at her.
“They can’t have gone far.”
She heaved herself to her feet and set forth inland.
Olin cursed. He shuffled after her, breathing in short, rough pulls. “If you vanish into the dark, I’ll not be left alone out here.”
Zaida didn’t want to admit it, but the old man had made a good point. Before long she could barely see ten lengths ahead of her nose. A hot, creeping silence took root. She didn’t know whether that silence belonged to Olin or the question that hung between them.
“How did it happen?”
“Does it matter?” said Olin impatiently.
It did matter. It mattered a great deal. If Zaida was going to die here at the edge of the known world, then she needed to understand why.
Forestalling her repetition of the question, Olin added, “Nothing Dark has ever crossed the Burning Divide. It holds.”
Yet as he said this his head turned ever so slightly, south, as though trying to peer toward these very mountains. A veil of ash drifted down, and through it Zaida saw their enormous shapes looming in the distance. Flickers of red kindled inside that darkness, fire stirring as if behind a curtain. They were no ordinary mountains but a barrier of fire that the world itself had raised.
Zaida kept moving.
Ahead, something dark lay across the ground, a low tangle where the surface should have been smooth.
Where the tracks ended, the shapes resolved into bodies — lying in the ash were a man and two children, clearly unconscious.
“Why have we stopped?” Olin called from behind. His steps scraped the ash; when he reached her he stayed half bent, one hand pressed to his ribs. His gaze found the three people and he flinched. “Are they alive?” He lowered himself only partway, careful not to take a knee. “This is … odd.”
The three were blindfolded and bound together by a thick length of rope.
“I didn’t know there were eyeless aboard,” said Zaida. “Why are they tied together?”
“You should untie —” Olin broke himself off. “It doesn’t matter. Check to see if they have a Lorefell Lantern and leave them. If we’re going to make it back to civilization in the North, we can’t be slowed.”
“We’re not leaving anyone,” said Zaida forcefully. “They might be the only ones left who know how the fire started.”
She reached out a hand and went to prod the man awake. But before she could, his mouth sprang open; Zaida leaped backward onto Olin’s boot.
“The warnings were true!”
The words were clearly in Thean. A Northern tongue Zaida had never mastered. Without knowing why, she had the urge to remove the man’s blindfold and peer beneath it.
“Do you know … why it happened?” she asked, desperately improvising her Thean. “Do you know why the fire began?”
“We are lost! The Felmaux are here! They have breached the Burning Divide!”
“It’s okay,” said Zaida. “You’re safe now.”
“No!” the man raved. “The ships will burn! The ships will burn! THE SHIPS WILL —”
The man’s cry broke off. He slumped into the ash.
Zaida knelt beside him, checking for a pulse. He was still alive. Unconscious.
Olin let out a long, shaky exhale. “Good,” he grunted. “Let him sleep. If we linger, his madness will take root in us.”
Zaida looked up, unsettled. “He’s delirious, not mad.”
Olin set his jaw. “I’ve heard it before.” His thumb worried at the already crusted blood on his chin. He hesitated, as though debating whether to go on. “Jibbran Lorefell raved of shadows stirring beyond the Burning Divide.”
“Jibbran. The inventor?” said Zaida.
“The same. He even claimed the darkness had a name.” Olin gave a humorless laugh. “The Felmaux. Said it had crossed the Burning Divide. They reckon he fled north to some humdrum one-carriage town.”
Zaida stirred the eyeless man back awake, then the two blindfolded children. The three stumbled to their feet, blank and expressionless as half-carved marionettes.
Unsure why she was doing it, she took the length of rope hanging from the little girl’s waist and tied a deadman’s loop around her own waist.
“We head back to the ship,” she said. “We salvage anything useful. Then we set off.”
Olin didn’t respond. He stared at the ash beneath him. Zaida made her way over to the old man, where she found another set of tracks belonging to a single person.
“It’s another survivor,” she said. “They’ll have the answers. If we follow these tracks then we’ll find out what happened to the ship.”
To show that it wasn’t up for debate Zaida took off with the eerily silent family in tow. The longer they followed the trail, the more the heat pressed in. As the ember-wind stung her face and her lungs grew tight she found herself wondering how long someone could survive out here. Not only that, but why would this person have taken off without searching for other survivors?
The impressions in the ground continued to become more difficult to see the farther they traveled from the burning ship. The only positive was that they were straight; in fact, they seemed strangely precise. They didn’t stagger or veer or show anything other than a fixed intent.
A sharp crack rent the air.
Zaida spun around.
The burning ship had split in half and was beginning to submerge.
“No!” Olin croaked. “You fool! We won’t be able to find our way back now!” He drew a long breath that did not quite fill. “Even if we did, we won’t be able to search the wreckage properly. What we have on our backs won’t see us north.”
Olin was right about the light. A near-perfect night dropped over them. Zaida could no longer see a thing. However, as the last of the flaming wreckage went under, a children’s rhyme she had heard rose up inside her.
“What are their signs? Boats afire and shadow Troth. Where will they come over? Burning Divide of South, Jovarn’s wroth. How will you know them? Be ash, ash, ash their cloth.”
Stillness returned for a fraction of a second.
“Where did you hear that?” Olin snapped from somewhere nearby. His voice was sharp but broke at the end.
“My mother,” said Zaida. “It’s about the Felmaux. Isn’t it?”
“So you somehow heard one of the forbidden rhymes, relics of a faith the North buried generations ago — and now you think you have all the answers? Don’t tell me. Because of something you heard cradled on your mother’s knee, you believe that burning ships and shadow Troth are the true signs of make-believe demons?!” Olin practically spat these last words, his voice rasping thin at the edges. Zaida imagined flecks of lung spraying from his mouth. “And now you believe these demons are out here with us in this ruin of a place.”
“How did the ship catch fire?”
Olin ignored the question again.
“The Felmaux exist only in ancient superstition,” he concluded to himself. “The last thing the North needs is old Religion stirring again.”
To her surprise, Zaida then heard the old man begin to shuffle not in the direction of their sunken ship, but rather in the direction of the other survivor’s footprints. Figuring that if they carried on they might stumble across this person by accident, she followed. A gentle pull on the rope around her waist reminded her that she still had three eyeless in tow.
The next tug on her waist, however, was a great deal firmer. So much so that Zaida was forced back a couple of steps and almost stumbled. Thinking that the little girl must have yanked on the rope with more strength than any child could humanly possess, Zaida spun around and swiped the air — The little girl was gone.
Confused, Zaida traced the rope from her waist, to the ground, then thankfully to the girl herself. She had gotten her leg caught in something.
“Olin, help!” Zaida yelled.
Without thinking she dropped to all fours and clawed at the ash around the girl’s ankle. Barbed cinders bit under her nails, hot as pins.
She freed the girl’s leg from a cinder-pitted hollow in the ground. Worried that there might be more of these holes nearby, Zaida rolled over and felt around. And noticed something strange.
What she had taken to be a random hollow was not that at all. It was merely one of the survivor’s footprints they had been following alongside.
Zaida stretched out blindly and put her forearm into the next one of these footprints. It went deep.
“Olin, I think …”
Before she could finish the sentence, her mind was already racing ahead. Zaida doubted that any one person could leave such deep imprints in the scorched ground. It could only be multiple people, two, perhaps three people, each following in the other’s footsteps.
Suddenly the eyeless children began singing in rhyme.
“Single file the Felmaux tread, the Felmaux’s step calls kindred. Single file the Felmaux tread, the Felmaux’s step calls kindred.”
It hit her. She’d been wrong. There was a reason why these impressions were different from the eyeless family’s, a reason there was no blood, no staggering, no veering. They did not belong to a survivor of the ship fire. They belonged to the ones who had burned the ship.
Zaida lifted her head up.
Olin had ignored her calls for help. He was staggering along the trail.
Then she saw them. Cold dread rooted her to the spot. Ahead of Olin, through the void, were the outlines of three tall figures.
The figures were only visible because they wore a deeper shadow than the dark. They were the dull hue of ash. Ash that made Zaida realize she would never see color in the world again.
She tried to call out; her throat closed around the sound.
The ashen figure in the middle snapped its long, thin fingers and a small flame appeared. It burned the same deep red as the Burning Divide.
Olin halted and looked up.
“Have mercy …”
Like their ship, like all those aboard that ship, Olin erupted into screams and flames.
Chapter One
Burning Ships
Tonight was supposed to be the most important night of Everett Dwyer’s entire life, although the morning had been dull. Dark, overcast, and yet uncomfortably warm, it had the weight of summer but none of its brightness. It pressed on him as he lay in his fishing raft. He told himself it was only weather. He had more important things to think about, like the diamond ring.
Even though Everett knew the ring was inside his clenched fist — from the fact he could feel it pressing painfully into his palm — he couldn’t help looking down at it every few seconds. This wasn’t because of how pretty it was, or the hard glint of light it threw off. But, instead, to make sure it was still there. That he hadn’t somehow lost it. For if he lost the ring … Everett cut himself off. That was a stupid thought.
Instead he fell back to thinking about tonight, while also wishing that he had something to stop himself thinking about tonight. He’d never been more nervous in his life, and couldn’t decide what was worse: the night itself, or a whole day of waiting around, doing nothing, and watching it creep slowly, steadily closer. Until the moment came when he had to propose to Isolde Fairweather in front of the entire town.
For tonight was Charring Night. The night when every person in their first year of adulthood who wanted to marry, had to take the stage and propose.
He snatched up his book, Chronicles of Jovarn: Keeper of the Burning Divide, and pressed the page close.
Jovarn was calm and collected as she stepped onto the stage in front of the city of Bellevarde —
He set the book down and dragged a hand through his blond hair. This wasn’t working at all. He’d been trying to read to distract himself, but couldn’t concentrate. There were too many things floating in and out of his mind. Moreover, the fact that Jovarn was being watched by an entire city couldn’t help but remind Everett that an entire town would soon be watching him.
He didn’t have anything against his fellow townsfolk. Quite the opposite. He loved everything about the town of Delwood, from its gossiping citizenry to its rivers and forests and low, smoke-stained cottages. No, he simply believed that a tradition where all proposals took place on one night of the year, in front of the entire town, was a humiliation ritual dressed up as tradition.
He grabbed the book.
Jovarn welcomed the crush of eyes. She spun her staff once and the air cracked, then she conjured a storm so fierce the city answered in a single roar —
Once more the book fell slack in Everett’s hands. He looked up at the clouds. That would be the last thing he needed tonight: a storm. One had just passed, and the raft was still waterlogged, the boards beneath him dark and sodden. He wondered if a storm had ever just turned around for another go? He’d never heard of this happening before; however, in saying that, he wouldn’t rule it out tonight.
But the weather wasn’t the only thing on his mind. What really bothered him was how he was supposed to know who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with when he’d only just reached adulthood. How could anyone? Especially in a place like Delwood. There weren’t exactly masses of people to choose from — the town was so far north it barely counted as part of Gyra at all, and was sealed off by Wulsvil Forest, a near-impenetrable wall of trees. Most of the girls his age ignored him, which didn’t leave many options. In the end, he’d decided to propose to Isolde Fairweather. Not because he felt fireworks, but because she was the only girl who’d ever spoken more than a sentence to him. And he didn’t want to be alone.
But even if he did end up alone, Everett would never leave Delwood. His father Dinn Dwyer had come from the world south of Delwood and called it ugly. And Everett had always believed him — partly because Dinn was his father, partly because Dinn had proof: what happened to Everett’s mother. She had been a sage from the Conservatory who toured Gyra during the famine years. When a riot broke out in the city of Bellevarde, she climbed onto a fountain and began to sing to calm the crowd. Someone threw a stone. Her voice stopped the instant it struck her skull; but people said the square stayed silent for hours, ashamed of what they’d done.
Everett had never known her, yet he had only to look at his father to see how deeply the loss still lived. Everett wasn’t going south.
He sat up and looked out across the water. He had rowed out to the North Sea for the quiet, to put distance between himself and Delwood and the preparations for tonight that made it hard to breathe. The sea lay dark and calm before him. To his right, a familiar headland rose from the shore, its base littered with fallen boulders and Wulsvil Forest running along its top. Beyond it lay the Eastern River, and the town he was avoiding.
Everett put his book and ring down and peered into the water. His reflection wavered beneath him, stretched and broken by wind brushing the surface. Even blurred, his eyes stood out. One was blue, the other amber, something people had commented on often enough that he no longer noticed it himself. He had never known why they were that way, only that they always had been, and that he had never wished them otherwise.
Something drifted down through the reflection. A bucket of bait, slipping from the raft and sinking slowly out of sight.
Perplexed, Everett went to dive in after it when an ear-splitting shriek stopped him. Turning around, he located the source of the noise.
On the rear of the raft, fighting over the bait they had just spilled and knocking things everywhere in the process, were two enormous seagulls.
“Hey! Get off!” he yelled. He went to shoo the seagulls, but his heart stopped: neither his Lorefell Lantern nor the ring was on the raft anymore.
He dove into the water and watched in alarm as both the ring and the lantern raced toward the void below. Without thinking, Everett swam as fast as he could straight down, going for the ring first. He reached the ring moments before it could disappear into the darkness. He then spun around to see where the lantern had gone …
A dozen lengths away and sinking faster, the lantern was almost out of sight.
He went after it.
The world around Everett grew steadily darker; his heartbeat thudded in his ears. Trying to ignore how little air he had left, he swam farther and farther down. He was getting close. He stretched out to grasp the bronze handle —
The lantern suddenly turned on: its light shone so fiercely Everett was forced to draw back. White spots filled his vision; for a moment he couldn’t see a thing. Then, as his eyesight slowly returned, he made out the silhouette of something monstrous rising up toward him.
The water around him seemed to freeze; Everett’s gut froze with it as the light continued to rush toward the mouth of the thing. Every instinct in his body screamed at him, begging him to flee, but he could only watch as it revealed more — until, when he’d expected giant teeth to emerge, out of the darkness rose not a monster, but a mast.
The mast was blackened, swamp-rot green burned away, leaving a deep, brittle char the sea had never washed clean. Ropes hung stiff, fused in clumps like candlewax cooled mid-drip.
“What …?”
The bubbles he exhaled demanded that he follow them back to the ocean’s surface. And yet he was unable to look away. Whether because of the intense pressure so far down or because it knew it was shining its last light, the lantern drew level with the topmast and blazed as brilliantly as a small sun, illuminating the ocean floor.
Skeletal, fire-scarred and ancient, the wreckage of a ship lay beneath him. Planks had blistered back on themselves, timbers cracked and curled as though caught in a furnace before the sea claimed them. However, it wasn’t the ship’s composition that most astonished him — it was its size. The ship was the size of a city. It had so many stories that he soon lost count. Though even one of these decks could have fit Delwood’s entire populace.
The lantern caved in on itself.
With a final flash of brilliant, white light, the ship vanished and everything went dark. For an instant the water filled with drifting black specks, rising slow as ash in still air.
Everett fought the growing impulse to take a breath. He gazed up toward the ocean’s surface, which now looked as though it were a full league away. Still clutching the ring, he swam desperately upward.
His head felt like it was being cleaved apart. He kept his eyes fixed on the light above; he was almost halfway there. His legs had gone so numb that he wasn’t even sure if they were kicking … dark spots filled his vision … ten lengths left … he started feeling rather giddy … five lengths … he fought one final, insane urge to take a breath —
Everett breached the surface of the water and inhaled frantically. He clung to the fishing raft, gasping for air which couldn’t meet his lungs’ demands fast enough.
The image of charred beams and seared rigging clung to him. It was impossible, he thought. A ship that size couldn’t possibly exist. It was bigger than Tallarook’s Riverball colosseum and it wasn’t even a close contest. But how had such a vessel caught fire? Not only that, why was it so close to Delwood of all places?
He floated on his back for some time, how long he couldn’t be sure. Eventually he was brought back to his senses by a soft cooing sound. Looking around, he saw that one of the seagulls had eaten itself into a coma from all the bait and was now dozing off on the raft. Everett considered waking the seagull up with a splash, to get even for almost killing him, but decided to let it go.
He climbed into the raft and frowned as he realized the wooden oars had slipped free and sunk out of sight. For a moment he just stared, then let out a weary sigh. Spotting a coil of rope, he tied one end around his waist and, with a muttered curse, slipped back into the water to haul the raft himself.
The light had turned the color of warm brass, the sun beginning its slow lean toward the horizon. Everett tensed. His best friend Pinchus was due to arrive on the Southland Ferry before sunset, and Everett needed to be there to meet him.
A year ago, Pinchus had left Delwood to see the city of Iramir, and the town had felt smaller ever since. Tonight he was coming back for Charring Night, to stand with Everett when it was time to take the stage.
Seeing how fast that time was approaching, Everett turned upstream and began swimming for Delwood.
By the time Everett had tied the raft to the docks, the sun was lower, a red coin inching toward the horizon, and he was exhausted. His back muscles had locked up. The raft was so waterlogged it had felt like dragging a felled oak behind him. It was a lucky thing that proposals in Delwood didn’t require a feat of strength (as they were rumored to in Tallarook) because right now he doubted he’d be able to lift the ring out of his pocket, let alone a boulder over his head. He glanced down at his clothes. They were wet, but in this heat he figured they’d dry in a matter of seconds.
He didn’t know what to expect when he saw Pinchus. He’d been so surprised when his friend had told him he wanted to go see the city of Iramir that Everett hadn’t really known what to say, and by the time he had come to terms with it, Pinchus was gone. The idea of someone other than Jibbs, the town storyteller, or the Roths leaving Delwood had struck Everett as wrong. And yet if he was honest with himself, he’d always known that Pinchus was a lot like Jibbs. Indeed, his two friends were almost constantly at odds, and Everett was convinced that their similarity was the cause for this. Even Pinchus’s last words, as his ferry departed, had been a promise to discover how many of Jibbs’s stories were ‘complete rot.’
From the crowd of fishermen still with their lines in the water, it was clear that Everett had beaten the Southland Ferry. And although he would have expected this to make him very happy, it didn’t. He had just seen Fessel Handsworth, the Roth family’s footman, standing atop his coach near the water. Though Everett had made it in time for Pinchus’s arrival, so, too, was he in time for the return of Tancred Roth Junior.
Cursing himself for not foreseeing that Tancred would arrive home on this ferry, Everett examined his weary body. He was in bad shape for a fight. After such a long swim towing a waterlogged raft, he could barely stand. Of all nights, it had to be this one. What would the town think if he limped onto the stage with a blackened eye and a split lip, ring in hand? But his upcoming proposal wouldn’t dissuade Roth Junior from unseating his teeth, nor would the presence of onlookers protect him. The Roth family, and by extension Tancred, were practically exempt from the laws of Delwood. Unfortunately for Everett, this had always included the laws of assault.
But as much as he’d rather run, Everett would stay. Pinchus had long since decided against proposing tonight, but he was coming home to stand with him. He wasn’t about to turn tail after his friend had come all this way.
In the distance, the Southland Ferry came into view. The boat’s deck carried only a handful of passengers, which was no surprise because the Ferry Ban kept foreigners from boarding it. The ferry still ran under Gyra’s flag, but no one in Delwood thought of it as a Gyra vessel anymore. To them, it was a local boat that stopped at the edge of the world and took no foreigners back.
“I think that gentleman on deck is Mr. Roth Junior!” exclaimed one of the fishermen nearby. “You can tell by the nose.”
Sure enough, Everett recognized Tancred at the prow, leaning against the handrail with such lofty sensibility as only he was capable of.
“If you can call that sad lump a nose,” commented a dreadlocked woman, which was met by a few snickers. “He’s coming back from the University of Leaconia. He was given a place to study the subject of wardenry of Therrian beasts.”
“No doubt that’s off the back of a hefty bribe.”
“Is that sagework?”
“Have you lost your wits? Not even the Roth family has wealth like that. It’s to do with protecting the magical beasts that roam near Therry. Tancred will be moving out that way after he graduates, or so I hear.”
Everett tuned out the fishermen’s gossip and started mentally preparing himself for the brawl he was not in the mood for. Tancred didn’t appear to be carrying his cane, which was something.
The thing was, Everett knew that Tancred wasn’t likely to let an opportunity like this slip, not when he couldn’t go anywhere, and especially when they hadn’t seen each other for a whole year. While Everett had never particularly wanted to fistfight, ever since they were children, if Tancred threw a punch, Everett had thrown one back.
The ferry began to dock and Everett spotted a boy and a girl standing behind Tancred: the boy incredibly skinny and the girl equally thick. Pinchus had always called them Whip and Anvil, Tancred’s two cronies since childhood, forever trailing after him and nodding at whatever he said. Seeing them again, Everett supposed they had followed him all the way to the University and back, as loyal as ever.
The gangplank was thrust down and its deadened clatter reverberated across the water. Everett ducked, hoping to blend into the crowd, but no sooner had Tancred’s foot hit the dock than a broad smile broke out on his face.
“Hey, look. Mr. Roth Junior is coming this way.”
Everett’s nails bit into his palms. His fists clenched so tightly he threatened to draw blood. He doubted the crowd could have parted any quicker for a plague victim.
“Have you missed me, Dwyer?”
Tancred came to a halt a few steps away from Everett, his face dominated by the flat, morose lump which resided where his nose ought to have been. Every word he spoke was accompanied by a wheezing of air from his concaved nostrils.
“I’m not doing this now,” said Everett. “I’ve come to get Pinchus.”
Whip and Anvil peeled off and positioned themselves behind Everett. He kept his eyes on Tancred, knowing that he would be the one to throw the first punch.
“Pinchus, that dirty rabbit?” said Tancred scathingly. “He must have been hiding below deck. Thought I smelled vermin on board.”
“Leave him out of it.”
“What’s to make me?”
Tancred took a step toward Everett, which Everett matched with a step of his own. There was a collective intake of breath from the fishermen surrounding them.
“All these crofters know their place,” snarled Tancred, gesturing to the crowd. “When are you going to learn yours?”
Everett could almost hear his heart thumping.
“Get it over with,” said Everett through gritted teeth. “I’ve got other problems tonight.”
He didn’t know what he had been expecting, certainly a punch to come from somewhere, or at the very least for one of Whip or Anvil to try to pin his hands from behind.
Instead, Tancred doubled over laughing.
As the laughter rang across the docks, Everett was taken by such surprise that he unclenched his fists. He wasn’t the only one with this reaction: the crowd broke out into a series of confused whispers.
Tancred wiped away some liquid that had dribbled from the lump nose.
“If you have plans tonight, Dwyer,” he said easily, “don’t let me kneel in your way.”
Tancred then did something that Everett never thought he’d see a Roth do in his entire life. He bowed to Everett. Not a mocking bow, but confusingly sincere.
Before Everett could come to terms with the fact that Roth Junior had just bent at the waist for him, in front of a whole crowd of onlookers, Tancred had climbed into the coach with his two cronies.
Everett looked down at his knuckles. He couldn’t believe they weren’t bloodied. Tancred had been away a whole year; was it possible that he had changed? Somehow Everett doubted it. But what if he had? What if he had finally realized that what had happened to his nose hadn’t been Everett’s fault … or at least not entirely?
He turned back around to the ferry. Instantly the crowd exploded into action. Fishermen shuffled this way and that, picked up children, muttered to themselves and generally attempted to look busy tying hooks and baiting lines. Everett ignored them and tried to find Pinchus. While he couldn’t spot his friend on the Southland Ferry’s deck, he had the sneaking suspicion that Pinchus would have been waiting for his and Tancred’s confrontation to end before disembarking.
“Dwyer the Northman!”
Proving Everett right, a small boy (who he guessed was now technically a man) came down the gangplank. Pinchus Harrow’s head barely reached the shoulders of the sailor in front of him. His short legs, however, had always been capable of a remarkable turnover, and so Pinchus flew across the dock.
As soon as he reached Everett, Pinchus flicked a glance westward, at the sun pressing low toward the horizon. Everett knew exactly what that meant. His friend hadn’t forgotten what tonight was. No one forgot. Charring Night was the single night when everyone who came of age and wanted to marry, had to propose. The custom came from the Old Fires, when hidden vows were said to have stirred what lay imprisoned beyond the southern peaks. Whatever its true origin, it meant Everett would soon be standing on that stage with no way to hide.
“Still proposing to Ice Cold Isolde tonight?” Pinchus said. It wasn’t a question.
Everett almost said something — how he hated the whole thing, how the ring in his pocket felt more like a shackle than a promise. But he bit it back.
He then noted two dark shadows under Pinchus’s eyes. It must have been a long trip. His friend looked exhausted.
“So, how many of Jibbs’s stories were rot?”
They slipped onto a narrow lane that took them away from the other foot traffic. The lane ran behind the backs of bakeries and blacksmiths and ellerys and potion stores, passing through the walls of smell that comprised Delwood’s town center, freshly baked bread and coffee being brewed and hot metal and sun-warmed garbage. It wasn’t the quickest route to the square, where the proposals would be taking place, and with the sun already tipping low, Everett felt the press of time. Still, Pinchus seemed to want privacy, so he remained quiet.
“A lot of what I have to tell you about Gyra shouldn’t be overheard,” Pinchus said, glancing behind himself. “People around here love Jibbs’s stories. I don’t want to be responsible for ruining their favorite tales of the world.”
Everett wished his friend would hurry up. Like Pinchus, he had grown up listening to Jibbs Fel’s stories of the outside world, and had also been skeptical of some of these accounts. Now he was desperate to know whether the storyteller had, indeed, embellished a few details here and there.
They wouldn’t be in this position if more people from Delwood went out and saw the world, but alas Delwood had always had a proud tradition of keeping to itself. Most of the townsfolk saw Gyra as a dark and dangerous place to be avoided at all costs. They might live on Gyra’s map, but in their minds they’d long since stepped off it. Traveling for adventure was altogether unheard of.
“Actually, now that I think about it,” Pinchus said, in a stage whisper that added a layer of unnecessary drama, his eyes bright with mischief, “perhaps I shouldn’t spoil them for you either. I know you and Jibbs are such good friends. I wouldn’t want to change that by revealing he’s a filthy liar.”
“Get on with it,” said Everett, grinning.
Pinchus rocked once on his heels, milking the moment. “Last chance to continue believing in changelings.”
“Out with it!”
And so almost one year to the day he had left, Pinchus described a world so unlike anything Everett had heard in story that it was almost as if the storyteller had never seen Gyra and had instead made the whole thing up. True to his word, Pinchus had soon set the record straight on changelings. But it didn’t end there. It turned out that thieves’ candles cut from hanged men didn’t exist either, that wood-witches were only nursery tales, and that vampires were a leechseller’s gimmick. It also appeared that Jibbs may not have skinned wolves for a dying dragon. On this, Pinchus was especially confident. Dragons, he had been told, were made up centuries ago by a farmer stealing his neighbor’s sheep.
“And you can forget that Chronicles of Jovarn book your mum left you,” Pinchus said lightly. “None of it’s true. It’s children’s stories, tidy inventions. The real accounts of Jovarn are kept under lock and key by people far more powerful than you can guess, and they’re darker than you can imagine.”
Everett must have misheard. Jovarn’s chronicles, false? All of it? They could not all be lies.
As if reading his thoughts, Pinchus added, “The real records sit in restricted archives. Conservatory vaults, Expatria custody, rooms where light does not reach. They don’t read like parables. And trust me, they aren’t fit for a child’s bedside.”
As Everett listened, he found himself speechless. While he’d suspected that Jibbs might have told a bit of rot when describing his life before Delwood, he never would have guessed that it had all been rot. Not only that, but his mother’s book appeared to be just as false.
And it felt almost like relief. The world was smaller, plainer — nothing that contradicted what Dinn had always told him. And yet the blackened hulk under the sea loomed in memory, refusing to fit the smaller world Pinchus described.
“What about those ash-cloaked things Jibbs told us about?” asked Everett.
Pinchus paused. “Ah. Those. I meant to find out about them. It slipped my mind.” He gave a quick shrug, eyes fixed ahead. “Probably just another one of our storyteller’s inventions. You know how he is — Now, d’you want to hear how the world really is?”
Even before Everett replied “Go on, then,” a thought struck him. At some point during his time in Iramir, Pinchus might have learned something about this ship. Perhaps the tale of its burning was famous — part of some great historic event that was common knowledge to the rest of Gyra.
“You know how it might rain a handful of times a season here?” Pinchus said, glancing over his shoulder. “Well, listen to this, Everett. Iramir actually goes by another name. The Realm of Rain. It never, ever, ever stops raining.
“I couldn’t believe it at first,” he went on fervently. “I’d wake up every day and it’d still be raining and I’d be thinking, ‘What’s going on here!’ and then I finally asked someone and …”
To Everett’s disappointment, Pinchus did not go on to talk about burning ships. Nor did he speak about any of the other things that would be considered, by most people at least, conventionally interesting, say perhaps natural wonders or foreign magic or even just some exotic foods he might have tried while abroad. Instead, the topic that Pinchus seemed most excited to traverse was Iramir’s weather.
“The whole city had to be designed to be indoors,” he explained, with another glance over his shoulder. “Because it rains so much. You’d have to witness it to understand. But, essentially, every building is connected, which means you can walk from one side of the city to the other without ever going outside.”
Everett shifted restlessly. The light was sliding, and his friend was on about the weather. And yet the longer Pinchus talked, and as he outlined the reasons behind why it rained so much in Iramir (something about the clouds and Iramir’s mountains), Everett realized that there was something different about Pinchus.
“… the clouds dump all their rain on the city before going over the mountains …”
Everett was now only half listening. He tried to put a finger on what exactly was different about Pinchus. The thing that made it difficult was that Pinchus Harrow had always been different. Most people who met him would tell you that, at best, he was a little odd. Others, that there was something seriously wrong with him. A lot of it came down to the pranks and games he constantly played, and the rest came down to the fact he never looked anyone in the eyes.
“… with the amount of rain there is, you can get a sage to put a spell on your cottage to repel water, but it ain’t cheap, and pisses off your neighbors.”
Everett spared a look over at Pinchus as they turned the next corner: the feeling that something was different about him grew stronger. His friend spoke in short rapid breaths. This wasn’t exactly new, though. Pinchus would often speak like this when excited. He was also talking downward, toward his feet. But this wasn’t it either.
Pinchus suddenly whipped his head around. That, however, was new. Pinchus scanned the lane behind them, his gaze darting back and forth across the cobbles and buildings. Unsure of what to do, Everett followed his gaze. Nearby, a couple of children were playing tact on the footpath.
“What is it?” Everett asked.
Pinchus said nothing, just flicked another glance over his shoulder and stared back at his feet.
Everett realized that ever since they’d left the docks, Pinchus had been keeping an eye on what was behind him.
Deciding it was time, Everett told Pinchus about the ship he had seen.
“So, what d’you think a vessel like that is doing on the ocean floor so close to Delwood?”
It turned out that Pinchus wasn’t as interested in the ship as Everett was. Nor had he heard anything about it during his travels. And the more Everett tried to talk about it, the more uninterested Pinchus became.
“There’s probably dozens of ways it could’ve gone up in flames,” Pinchus said dismissively. “A cook knocks over a candle, forgets his stew’s on the boil. Poof, there goes the kitchen, then the ship.”
“A dropped candle doesn’t char a hull the size of a city,” Everett shot back. “It wasn’t one galley fire, the whole thing was blackened. Ropes fused into lumps, planks blistered all the way down.”
“Alright then,” Pinchus countered, “lightning strike. One storm, a big bolt, sets it ablaze before anyone can douse it.”
“And not one sailor thought to throw a bucket of seawater on it?” Everett said, incredulous. “A storm large enough to spark a fire is a storm with rain.”
Pinchus gave an exaggerated shrug. “Well, fires happen. Doesn’t mean much of anything. Someone was careless, or unlucky, or both.”
Everett shook his head, still seeing in his mind the scorched mast, the ash drifting up like smoke through the water. “Carelessness doesn’t turn a floating city into a funeral pyre. Something else did that. I think that ship was burned.”
Pinchus opened his mouth as though to argue, but for once no words came. His gaze flicked over his shoulder, and his face tightened.
“We need to get you to the stage,” he said briskly. “Best forget all this talk of burned ships and ash-cloaked things. Doesn’t concern us, does it?”
For once, Pinchus sounded a little like Dinn, and Everett let himself agree. If he wanted answers he’d have to try Jibbs — the only bridge left between Delwood and Gyra, though one he no longer trusted after everything he’d just learned about the storyteller’s tales.
“Alright, let’s get going,” said Everett. But still worried as to why Pinchus was acting so oddly, he added, “Thanks for being here for me tonight.”
There was a brief moment when he thought Pinchus was about to say something. A pained expression crept across his face. As quickly as it came, it went, and in the next second Pinchus wore a gentle smile and set off. Whatever it was, Everett figured his friend would tell him tomorrow. And so Everett, too, was silent, as he took his own look at the lane behind them, and followed him around a corner.
There they found the stage.