Noa tapped her finger against the map. Julian had enchanted the island to hide them from Xavier—now King Xavier—who wouldn’t rest until he found Julian and killed him. But as the weeks passed, and Astrae went from cantankerous toddler to graceful denizen of Florean’s thirteen seas, Julian stayed alive, and he began to set up a makeshift court on the wandering island. Some magicians who had been loyal to the old queen came to live on Astrae at Julian’s invitation, ignoring the rumors Xavier spread about Julian being wicked and corrupt. Julian’s plan was to recapture the islands of Florean one by one, and slowly, that’s what he’d been doing, frightening away Xavier’s soldiers and fortifying each island with defensive magics and his own magicians.
Astrae gave another groan, quieter this time. Frowning, Noa abandoned her map and went to the water’s edge. She squinted through her spyglass at the islets drifting by. They were hard to see through the mist that lay over the sea in woolly tendrils. Mite skipped up behind her, pausing to examine clumps of seaweed for reasons Noa didn’t want to know, because those reasons likely had too many legs.
The island gave a violent shudder. Then it went wooshawooshawooshTHUNK.
Noa fell over. Mite went sprawling into a tide pool. Astrae jerked a few more times, less dramatically, and then it stilled.
Noa pushed herself up. The island wasn’t moving anymore, and a great rippling wave extended out from the shore like a wing. Noa’s heart thudded—Astrae had hit something. But what?
“Come on, Mite,” Noa called. Mite clambered dripping from the tide pool with seaweed in her hair, and they took off at a run.
They flew over the sand and climbed over the black rocks that bordered the cove. There the castle where they lived with Julian on the now-only-sometimes-west side of the island came into view. It had been abandoned for many years, and was rather tumbledown and woebegone, with pelicans nesting in the roof and layers of volcanic ash griming the stones. The beach below it was full of Julian’s mages, some of them arguing with two strangers in a fishing boat. Looming above Astrae was the island they must have collided with, which Noa didn’t recognize.
Julian himself stood talking to one of the mages, rubbing his hand through his dark hair and weaving it into ridiculous tangles. He faced the sea and began a complicated spell that calmed the fierce waves stirred up by the collision.
In the two years they’d lived on Astrae, Julian had thrown himself into his spellwork with a focus Noa had never seen in him before. Despite being the only person in the world who could speak all the languages of magic, he had never been particularly interested in mastering his powers, apart from a few showy tricks to impress the young lords and ladies at court. Now, though, he spent most of the time with his grimoires, practicing spells. He even traded in the colorful silks and jewels he had favored as crown prince for head-to-toe black, though he did wear a lot of impressive rings and had enchanted a dragon tattoo onto his face, curved around his temple. Noa considered this pointless vanity, but at least it was less pointless vanity than usual.
Noa squinted. The mystery island was perhaps twice the size of Astrae and densely forested. Astrae seemed to have collided with a sandy spit extending off the tip—Noa guessed that the first groan had been the sound of Astrae running over a shoal.
It wasn’t the first time Astrae had gotten itself stuck. There were treacherous basalt pillars in Ripple Pass that the island had hit more than once, and then there had been the memorable occasion when it had plowed through the dust of a volcanic eruption and into a pool of fresh lava, melting one of the beaches. Banging into an island wasn’t so bad by comparison. They were probably only stuck because Julian had ordered Captain Kell to go too fast—he was always ignoring the advice of the sailors who steered Astrae.
But if that was true, why did Noa have a knot of dread in her stomach?
She watched Julian’s magicians take up position on the sand, murmuring spells in Salt to detach the enchanted floating island from the ordinary stationary island it had run into. Astrae was reasonably safe—they were in the Untold Sea, which was full of pirates. Any royal ships that ventured into the Untold Sea were unlikely to come out again, which made it the safest place in Florean for fugitives. The pirates never gave Julian any trouble, probably because they assumed his heart was as black as theirs, if not blacker.
The fishermen were still yelling at the mages. Noa couldn’t really blame them—if somebody nearly ran you over with an island, you were bound to be upset about it. But where had the fishermen come from? The other island looked uninhabited. As the men continued to shout abuse, Julian let out a frustrated noise and stormed down the beach, his black cloak billowing behind him. He spat out a spell that flung one of the unlucky fishermen into the sea—especially unlucky because it had been days since Beauty, Astrae’s resident sea serpent, had eaten her last meal. The splash the poor man made was almost immediately followed by an awful gulping sound. Noa shuddered.
“How would you describe this?” she mused as she watched Julian stomp dramatically away. “You can’t say we’ve run aground, because Astrae is ground. We’re shipwrecked, but this isn’t
