The boy handed it over and climbed out, radiating reluctance. “Thank you for the passage, Mr. Ferryman.”
The Ferryman finished tying up the boat and offered his hand. “The name’s Isaac Knickpointe. And you’re welcome, Cas.”
A flicker of violet-blue came to life on the dock they’d just left: someone summoning the Inferus from the Nagspeake side. The mist separated just enough to show the shape of a tall man standing on the pier. A flash of lantern light glinted off something shiny in the vicinity of his left eye, and Knickpointe recognized a passenger he’d carried before.
The Ferryman sighed and started undoing the cleat hitch he’d just tied. Then he had an idea.
“Cas, what are your thoughts on telling riddles?” he asked. “Fun or boring?”
The boy sat up a little straighter, interested. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Think about it.”
Cas scratched his head. His eyebrows knitted themselves together. Then he said rapidly, as if it had come to him all in a rush, “Silver sky, silver sea, silver road between the trees. But if you should hear a crack, silver death amid the wrack . . . I know they don’t have to rhyme,” he added, “but it sounds nice.”
“It does, you know.” Knickpointe nodded, pleased. “That’s good.” He aimed a thumb over his shoulder at the light on the opposite bank. “Want to try it out?”
“Absolutely, I do.” And Cas hopped eagerly back aboard.
Rather to his surprise, Cas discovered that telling riddles was almost as much fun as answering them. He began to turn up at the ferry dock regularly after that, and Knickpointe found himself looking forward to seeing the emerald light flaring to life on the Fiddler’s Green side of the Tailrace. The boy, it turned out, had a knack for inventing new riddles to tell, although sometimes when he wanted to solve a puzzle or two himself, he would change things up and ask potential passengers to tell him one. Like Knickpointe, he developed a system: if the passenger was someone whose crossing they wanted to help along, Cas merely asked to be told a certain number of riddles. If it was someone who required more of a challenge, Cas would demand a hard riddle from the passenger. Very rarely—usually only with the approval of the Ferryman—he would demand to be stumped.
The boy turned out to be a trickster of the first magnitude, in fact, but after that, it was never quite as easy to cross as it had been, for Cas loved riddles too much to tell an intentionally easy one as frequently as the Ferryman himself had done.
One morning, when they’d been at this for a few weeks, Knickpointe surprised Cas at the wharf with a peaked hat the Ferryman had stitched with the words FIRST MATE, and he offered it to the boy with much gravity and pomp. Cas, of course, accepted, first with a yelp of delight and then with a much soberer “Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” And the two of them piloted the Tailrace ferry together for many years after that, the younger crewmate handling the riddles while at last the Ferryman got to do what he’d always wanted to: spend his retirement messing with his boat.
INTERLUDE
“I RATHER FEAR we’re going to need a Ferryman ourselves just to get out of here,” Jessamy said, kneeling beside Petra on the sofa and leaning over the back of it to face the windows that looked out over the river. Petra scooted just a tiny bit closer to the center to give her more room. Sullivan pretended not to notice. Tesserian and Maisie used a saint wearing a short tunic and holding a long sword and another with a miter-shaped hat and a curling, crooked staff to finish a new balcony. When it was completed, Maisie moved a wooden tiger from a lower perch up to this higher vantage.
“No, indeed,” Mr. Haypotten said, taking the toasting dish from the fire by its ivory handle. “Water won’t rise past a blue stair, after all. The rain’ll stop overnight; you see if it doesn’t.” Blissfully unaware of Captain Frost’s rolling eyes, the innkeeper wrapped one hand in his handkerchief and, thus protected, opened the perforated lid of the covered dish. “Done to a turn,” he announced, relieved that it wasn’t remotely possible to tell that he’d had to resort to slightly stale bread and the last, mixed shavings of cheddar and rind to make the toasted cheese. They weren’t going to run out of things to eat, but the fresh stuff was nearly gone.
As he served portions around, along with crackers and a plate of sliced, slightly winy apples, Sorcha spoke up from the hearth, where she was tending a second toasting dish. “May I tell one, sir?” she asked, directing the question at the innkeeper.
He looked up, surprised. “Well, of course, my dear,” he answered, his reply nearly drowned out by the voices of his wife and a handful of the guests, all saying variations of the same thing.
“Will it be a tale with fires?” Negret asked, his smile a flicker of brightness, like the first stick of kindling to catch.
Sorcha’s cheeks flared, but sitting on the hearth as she was, she knew her face was already red, so she met his eyes despite the flush. “Perhaps. I can certainly think of more than one.”
“You were raised with firekeeping traditions, weren’t you?” Petra asked.
Sorcha nodded. “With old ones from my mother’s ancestors in Scotland, and newer ones born here, passed down through my father’s family, who were Nagspeakers from all the way back. We were raised to know all the fires that burn, all the ways to conjure them and keep them, to learn from them and to live with them as neighbors.”
“And fires can do so much more than people understand,” Petra said dreamily, tucking her feet up under her on the sofa
