As Melusine was trying to work out how any of this was possible, Lowe tugged at her arm again. “Remember you told me once that a ship was meant to have a coin under the mast, so as to be able to pay a pilot if it had to cross a river to enter the courts of the dead?”
“A ferryman to cross the river Styx, yes.”
“Well, what if they haven’t got one?”
Lowe, in his practical little-boy fashion, had somehow moved past the question of whether it was a ghost ship to what they were supposed to do about it now that it was there, drifting just beyond the Fate’s stern. Melusine passed Lowe the storm bottle and took back the spyglass. Somehow looking through it didn’t make the ship appear any larger.
“Well, I don’t know the route to . . . what did you call it? The courts of the dead? I don’t know what we can do about it.”
“If you didn’t have a pilot who knows the channel—a ferryman, if that’s the word—” He looked across the red water at the lightless ship. “You’d need a lamp, at least. To try to see where you were going.”
They glanced at each other. Lowe held the storm bottle up between them. It was glimmering faintly now from within with violet light, the glow slipping out through the gaps in the pattern that had climbed the glass the way candlelight slips out the holes in a punched-tin lantern.
“How would you do it?” Melusine asked, and then, before Lowe could reply, she added, “Because you’re not boarding her. Not for all the world.”
Lowe shook his head. “I have an idea.” And he disappeared down the companionway ladder again. When he came back this time, he had a folding stand under his arm and a firework in one hand. A small rocket, one of the many he made himself and was emphatically not allowed to shoot from the ship any longer.
But those were rules for worlds without red waters and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships. “Carry on, then,” Melusine said helplessly.
Lowe lashed the glowing storm bottle to his rocket and set the rocket in the stand. He took a cylinder of homemade matches from his pocket, lit one, and whipped it across the fuse. The spark climbed the cotton line, and a moment later, the rocket burst from the deck of the Fate and shot skyward.
It sailed up and arced over the other ship’s sloping foremast, and then, like a fly caught mid-flight in a spider’s web, it stopped as if trapped at the top of the mainsail. It hovered there for a moment, and then it began to descend: a violet glow moving slowly down the vertical length of the mast. And as the plum-colored light from Lowe’s storm bottle spilled out across the deck, Melusine saw them. She saw the shadows first, and then the men they belonged to: scores of sailors, on the deck and in the rigging, all of them ghostly, and all of them looking across at Melusine and Lowe.
Some bad omens—like, for instance, a whole crew of the dead—weren’t hard to spot. Ordinarily Melusine would’ve reached out instinctively to scratch the nearest bit of rigging, but there was nothing right in reach, so without thinking, she hawked up a mouthful to spit for luck. But before she could do it, Lowe whacked her arm urgently. “Ghosts are afraid of human saliva,” he whispered.
She swallowed. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Everybody knows that,” Lowe hissed. Melusine stared. “Or maybe that’s just back home—back in my mother’s homeland, I mean. But just in case, be polite.”
“I don’t want to be polite.” But just in case he was right—after all, dead or not, they had a full crew and Melusine didn’t—she raised one hand in a shaky salute.
One by one, the ghostly crew returned the gesture.
“See?” Lowe said, pleased. “And I told you lights coming down the mast were good.”
But the ship didn’t move.
“Why aren’t they going?” Melusine asked after a moment. “They have their light.”
Lowe scratched his head. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they still need a pilot.” He looked meaningfully from Melusine to the Fate’s tiller. “We could lead them.”
“But I can’t do it,” Melusine sputtered. “I don’t know where to go! I can’t steer a ship this size! And anyhow, we have no crew!” But even as she said it, she heard her own thoughts from earlier playing again in her mind: Those were rules for worlds without red seas and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships, and to be fair, in this place and at this moment, with only two children aboard, even their own schooner might be considered a ghost ship.
Lowe shrugged. “If they’ve been lost at sea for long, perhaps any harbor will do. What is the saying about harbors and weather?”
“Any port in a storm.” Melusine looked across at the phantom crew, then back at Lowe. “I’ll try.”
She took the tiller in both hands, and to her surprise and endless relief, it felt real. Nothing else in this place, in this moment, was as it should be, but the vibration coming through the tiller, the hum of the Fate itself, felt right. Melusine and the ship that had been her companion for her entire life could still speak to each other—even, apparently, at the boundary between the lands of the living and the dead.
She hauled on the tiller, and miraculously, the Fate answered Melusine’s request, and even without crew to work the sails, she came about and turned her bows toward Valletta, or at least toward the thick bank of sea smoke where, in the other world, Valletta Harbour had been. They sank into the fog.
“Is she with us?” Melusine asked, meaning the xebec. “There’s not much light for them to see us by.”
Lowe, standing at his sister’s side but looking back over their shoulders, nodded.
