The world beyond the Fate had changed. Valletta Harbour was gone, replaced by a shocking sight: a wide expanse of deep red sea.
“I’ve heard of waters like this,” Melusine whispered. “I’ve heard sailors talk about them, but I’ve never seen one.”
“Look.” Lowe tugged her arm, and Melusine turned to follow his pointing finger across the expanse where, if Valletta had been where it ought to have been, the Mediterranean Sea would’ve met the Ionian. But Lowe was pointing not at whatever sea was there, but at what was creeping out across it toward them: a thick white fog, borne on a cold wind that told Melusine they were no longer anywhere near Malta. Lowe whispered, “I can hear it; can’t you?” Melusine cocked her head into the silence and listened, and yes, she could hear it—or she could hear something, just barely, in the sea smoke: a rustling, clinking, almost like ice when it fell from the rigging. As if concealed within the fog were bits of solid matter that clinked and clattered quietly as the mass rolled across the red waters toward them.
This is when Melusine realized that, under normal circumstances, she should never have been able to hear anything so quiet, not at that distance. She could hear it only because the ship was silent. No voices, no footfalls, no whistles or bells. As far as Melusine knew, the Fate had not been empty of sailors since the day she’d been launched, and probably not even before that. There would never, not ever, be less than a skeleton crew aboard, and in any case, she could think of no circumstances under which their father, the captain, would have left the ship without passing word to her and Lowe. But Melusine knew, abruptly and certainly, that despite the impossibility, despite the fact that mere minutes before, there had been at least seventy-odd sailors aboard, somehow she and Lowe were now alone on the ship.
“What’s happening?” she whispered, fighting down terror. The silent ship was more than she could process. Nothing else—not the disappearance of Valletta Harbour, nor the nightmarish color of the sea, nor the strange creaking and tinkling sea smoke—was as frightening as the sudden emptiness of the Fate.
Lowe lifted his storm bottle in both hands. Inside, the oily, metallic hard snow was weaving impossible, branching patterns like frost on a window as it climbed the sides of the glass. “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “I don’t know what the bottle means to say.”
“It’s saying something, that’s certain.” Fear would get them nowhere, so Melusine folded hers up and mentally shoved it in a pocket. The cold sea smoke rolled closer. Lowe shuddered. “Go and get yourself a jacket,” Melusine said. “And get Papa’s glass from his desk.”
Lowe nodded once and darted away. While she waited for him to return, Melusine walked the length of the vacant ship and back to the low rise at the stern that passed for a quarterdeck, and as she did, the mist reached the Fate and wrapped everything above the red sea in cold, pale gray. Somewhere out there, the crystalline tinkling was coming closer, too, but not quite at the same rate as the fog. Melusine leaned over the starboard rail and stared out, looking for . . . well, she wasn’t sure what. For something. Anything.
Her brother came scrambling awkwardly up the ladder, with their father’s spyglass under one arm and the homemade storm bottle still clutched in his fist. He had forgotten the jacket. “Papa’s not there,” he said softly. “Where have they all gone?”
Melusine said nothing. Her eyes had picked out a smudge of rose in the fog, something riding above the water and reflecting its scarlet color. She held out a hand, and Lowe put the glass into her palm. She stared through it, following the sound and searching—and there. There it was, and it was a ship. A xebec, she thought. In that case, perhaps they were still somewhere in the Mediterranean. Its hull was red, but everything else, from the gunwales to the tops of the masts, was shadow and shroud. And it carried no lights that Melusine could see, despite the thickness of the fog. She passed the glass to Lowe and pointed.
“A ship?”
“A xebec.” Now she could see it without the glass, with its unusual forward-sloping mast and the strange angle of its bowsprit. And she could hear that the tinkling noise was definitely approaching with the xebec, as if the other ship was parting not water, but shards of ice. And yet she still could see no lights, and she could hear no voices.
She glanced down at Lowe’s storm bottle, which he’d passed her when he’d taken the spyglass. The hard snow lay all over the inside of the glass in patterns like sharp-horned, haloed moons. Wind and rain, the sailors would say to that, if they’d been there. But what would they say about the strange ship? Melusine didn’t really have to wonder. She knew.
Phantom. Ghost ship.
It came closer, and Lowe took the spyglass from his eye. “There’s no one on her deck or in her rigging,” he whispered. “She’s empty as the Fate is.”
Emptier, Melusine thought. Because at least the Fate has Lowe and me.
Her brother fiddled with the end of his pigtail. “Will she ram us?”
“Not unless the wind shifts quite a bit. Not that there’s much we could do if it did.”
“And perhaps she can’t, anyhow,” Lowe said.
“Perhaps.”
They watched the ghostly ship approach, making as if to cross the stern. And then, just as it drew level with the Fate, the xebec drifted to a halt. The cold wind that had brought both it and the sea smoke toward them kept on blowing, but the sails
