Melusine never knew how far they sailed, or how long it took. There seemed to be no time and no distance on that foggy red sea. But the xebec, with its glowing violet light, stayed with them the whole way, and the two ships sailed in company for what seemed like hours.
At long last, something changed. It took Melusine a while to figure out what that something was, but at last she realized it was the color of the water. The sea had gone from red to purple, and now it was darkening to a much more ordinary indigo. Something about the sea smoke had changed as well. The breeze was warmer, and it had a familiar tang to it, a scent Melusine’s senses instantly identified as one of the base notes of the odor of any harbor anywhere. Up ahead there were shadows in the murk: the hills, spires, and masts of Valletta Harbour.
“Oh, thank heavens.” Melusine sighed.
Lowe said, “Look.” She turned and followed his pointing finger. The fog was melting away, and with it, the violet glow of the storm bottle in the rigging of the ship behind them was fading too. It dwindled as the final remnants of the cold wind carried the xebec into the harbor. The phantom crew saluted again as they drew abreast of the Fate. Melusine and Lowe stumble-ran forward the entire length of their ship as the xebec sailed on past to vanish into the much more ordinary mist that drifted across the waterfront.
They ran as far forward into the bows as they could, leaning over the gunwales to catch a last glimpse of the red-hulled ghost ship as it swirled into nothingness, a last glimpse of the storm bottle before it vanished. Then they looked at each other as they became aware of sounds on the deck behind them, rising out of the silence: the shouts of sailors and the slapping of bare feet on the floorboards, the flap of sails, and all the ordinary sounds of a ship at anchor in a harbor.
The Fate’s crew, wherever it had gone—well over a hundred souls—had come back, and everyone was going about his task as if nothing strange had happened at all. “Or did we come back?” Melusine murmured, confused.
Lowe, whether thanks to his age or to his ancestry, was much more comfortable with the miraculous and not inclined to waste time discussing matters of the uncanny when there were more pressing things to worry about. “Melusine!” He pointed across the harbor, and from the tremor in his voice, his sister half expected to see the xebec or some other ghostly craft pulling toward them again.
But no, it was only the cutter returning with the cook, the purser, and . . . oh, dear . . . the steward.
“What do we do?” Lowe fretted. “I haven’t time to find more hard snow now.”
“We?” Melusine shook her head decisively. “Lowe, I’ll follow you to a ghost ship and back, but as far as telling Garvett his storm bottle’s gone, you’re positively on your own.”
INTERLUDE
CAPTAIN FROST HARRUMPHED, blushing a bit through the applause that followed his tale, then turned his half-hour glass and hurried out of the parlor. Masseter, thoughtful, made as if to follow him, then seemed to remember the captain would be going out into the rain, and instead went to refill his glass.
Jessamy got up from her spot on the hearth to make room for Mr. Haypotten to slide a covered silver toasting dish under the fireplace grate. It had a perforated lid, but Sorcha’s well-kept fires always seemed to know better than to let any ash drop into the toasted cheese.
Tesserian helped Maisie complete a cupola with four cards: two from his deck of saints (a woman holding a flat scepter and draped in a deep red robe, and a bearded, tonsured man cupping a square-rigged ship in his left hand) and two from a more standard deck (the queen of seas and the knave of candles). “The captain mentioned the coin that pays the ferryman upon the river Styx,” he said, neatening the stack of remaining cards from the several decks they were using. “I know a story about a ferryman right here on the river Skidwrack, if that would be of interest and if no one minds my telling it.” He nodded up to the big map over the mantel.
“On the Skidwrack?” Sangwin said, setting down his knife and wood and brushing the castoff curls from his whittling into a little pile on the table before him. “And you not from Nagspeake at all. Where did you come across a Skidwrack tale?”
“An occasion much like this one,” Tesserian said, “only it wasn’t a flood that kept us from leaving; it was a cheater we all badly wanted to catch in the act.” He grinned at Maisie. “Do you like riddles?”
“Yes,” she retorted, in a tone that added, Who doesn’t?
Frost returned. The windowpanes rattled. Tesserian leaned back against the hearth and murmured, “Jacta alea est.”The die is cast.
Really, though, it was cast long before this particular story.
TWELVE
THE FERRYMAN
The Gambler’s Tale
I’VE HEARD—perhaps Captain Frost will confirm this for us—that the same sea can seem to be a different place from one day to the next. And I am not from Nagspeake, as Mr. Sangwin has rightly pointed out, so you can all tell me if I’ve got this wrong, but I’ve heard that the Skidwrack, though it’s a mere river, is just as changeable as the sea. I heard it from a friend who’s a Nagspeaker born and bred, and I had no trouble believing him. For there are rivers in the middle country that are like that too: they change their shapes when the fancy strikes them; they take tribute from those who work on ’em, and they cling to their dead; their waters run blue here and green there and brown over there and red farther down around the bend. They say
