Of course if this were a Fillory novel the ship he needed would already be tied up at the docks, awaiting his command, just like that. But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.
“I need something not too big and not too small,” he said. “Mediumsized. And it should be comfortable. And quick. And sturdy.”
“I see. Will you require guns?”
“No guns. Well, maybe a few guns. A few guns.”
“A few guns.”
“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if for some reason I don’t, you tell me. All right?”
Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.
Whitespire stood on the shore of a wide, curving bay of oddly pale green sea. It was almost too perfect: it could have been carved out of the coastline on purpose by some divine being who took a benevolent interest in mortals having somewhere to put their ships when they weren’t using them. For all Quentin knew it had been. He had the driver drop them at one end of the waterfront. They clambered out, all three of them, blinking in the early morning sun after the swaying dimness of the carriage.
The air was ripe with the smell of salt and wood and tar. It was intoxicating, like huffing pure oxygen.
“All right,” Quentin said. “Let’s do this.” He clapped his hands together.
They walked, slowly, all the way from one end of the docks to the other, stepping over taut guy ropes and squashed and dried fish carcasses and weaving their way around massive stanchions and windlasses and through labyrinths of stacked crates. The waterfront was home to an astounding variety of vessels from all points in the Fillorian Empire and beyond. There was a gargantuan dreadnought made of black wood, with nine masts and a bounding panther for a figurehead, and a square-snouted junk with a brick-red sail crimped into sections by battens. There were sloops and cutters, galleons and schooners, menacing corvettes and tiny darting caravels. It was like a bathtub full of expensive bath toys.
It took an hour to reach the far end. Quentin turned to Admiral Lacker.
“So what did you think?”
“I think the
“Probably. I’m sure you’re right. Julia?”
Julia had said almost nothing the entire time. She was detached, like she was sleepwalking. He thought about what Eliot had told him last night. He wondered if Julia had found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Maybe she was hoping she’d find it on the Outer Island.
“It does not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”
They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the
“What about those ones out there?”
Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.
“They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”
Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.
“Come on,” she called.
Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.
“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”
It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun- and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.
As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.
“What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.
“I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”
“I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”
A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.
“That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”
“Nevertheless.”
It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.
“Let us return to the
“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”
It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines—something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.
He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.
“What do you think?”
The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.
“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”
“What do you think it was?”
“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”
Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.
“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”
“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”
He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.
“Really?” Quentin said.
“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”
“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”
“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”
“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made
