Engle kept staring. “I think something is…” He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“What is it?”
Engle turned away from the water and blinked long and hard. “Nothing. Just those stupid nightmares. I think they’re seeping into true life and making me paranoid. Making me see things…”
Melda took a break from reading her new mermaid book and made her way over to them.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Tor asked. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—”
Engle shook his head again, then waved away Tor’s concern with a lazy hand. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just need to sleep better at night.” Melda neared and he said loudly, “Melda’s snoring certainly hasn’t helped.”
She gave him a look. “If anyone snores, it’s you, and you also talk in your sleep,” she said.
Engle paled. “I do?”
She smiled deviously. “Yes, and I can hear it all right through the walls.” Melda regarded her nails. “What interesting things I hear…”
Engle stormed off, and Melda laughed. She turned to Tor. “He doesn’t talk in his sleep,” she said.
“I know. I’m in the cabin next to his, remember?”
She sighed, grin disappearing. “I’ve tried to talk to him about it, you know. He refuses. He doesn’t think the nightmares are a big deal.”
Tor watched his friend walk to the opposite side of the ship and peer into the water again. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.
She nodded. Then, she motioned toward her new mermaid book. “Apparently, there are several species of mermaid.”
“Captain Forecastle said so, too.”
“Each is as deadly as the next. Only very few are the friendly, helpful type. Some are green with nails as long as spikes, some are half human, half octopus, some are such beautiful singers they make sailors jump off their own ships—the Melodines we’ve already encountered, in the middle of a desert of all places.”
Tor laughed without humor. He remembered their purple gem eyes and voices like maple honey. They would have drowned him in the oasis if it hadn’t been for Melda and Engle.
Melda continued. “Some, like the story in your mother’s book, sing nightmares to life.”
Tor stilled. Was that what was tormenting Engle? Was a siren whispering nightmares into his ear from the sea, making him see terrible things in the daylight?
“It says that they can affect one during sleep, too,” Melda said, nodding like she was thinking the same thing. “Maybe that’s why his dreams have been so bad on the ship.”
“Okay—how do we stop them?”
She opened the book to a dog-eared page. “An elixir for bad dreams. It’s in this book and works to banish them, no matter the cause.”
They spent the next hour putting together the mixture. It required a handful of sea foam, a silver hair (which Vesper begrudgingly provided), a slice of moraberry, wood from a ship, and spit from a pirate, all mixed in an oyster shell.
Though elixirs could typically only be made by those with elixir emblems, the sea seemed to have its own rules. Tor stirred the mixture once, and it bubbled blue, then green. Then boiled away, leaving only a thin, transparent paste.
“We rub it on his pillow…and no more nightmares,” she said. “From a mermaid or otherwise.”
They decided not to tell him. Engle had been rather defensive about his nightmares recently, no need to embarrass him further, Tor reasoned. During dinner, when Engle was ravenously finishing off an ear of charred, buttered, and nut-crusted corn on the cob, Melda excused herself. She returned without the elixir and nodded silently at Tor.
And that night, for the first time, Engle slept in silence.
Maladies at Sea
Sicknesses at sea can be far crueler than those on land. Disease spreads with ease in close quarters, and soon the entire crew is covered in scales. Stormscale is known to kill in less than a day. Grimgrey takes its time, crumbling bone until the skin just sags. Palestye starts with a pain in the side, then ends in coughing blood.
Many a pirate have gone to distant lands in search for cures—and some have found them. But many more have succumbed to their malady, and now rest in their watery graves beneath the sea.
9
Bluebraid
The next morning, Engle was grinning. He stretched his arms high above his head as he strode across the deck, then came to a jumping stop in front of them. He disheveled Tor’s hair with one hand and pulled Melda’s new braid with the other.
She looked like she was trying very hard not to smile. “You look well.”
Engle bounced around on his toes like someone about to go into a battling ring, full to the brim with energy. “I feel amazing. Refreshed. Had my first good sleep in a while.”
Tor and Melda shared a quick look. “Good,” Tor said. “Today’s important.”
Perla was just a few miles away. While Engle had snored loudly next door, Tor hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. His insides had been twisted up—hope, fear, and worry all intertwined.
Today, they could have the pearl. If everything went right.
Tor swallowed. By now, he knew things rarely went as planned.
“So, sightseer, anything on the horizon?” Melda asked. She was fully smiling now, watching Engle run across the ship, staring out at every direction.
Tor was smiling, too, watching Engle trip on an uneven board, then burst into laughter. He hadn’t seen his friend look so high-spirited in a while. Maybe he was okay now. Maybe, just maybe, they could put the past behind them.
Captain Forecastle surfaced from below, a finger in his ear. “What’s all the commotion?” he said. He opened his mouth to say something else, then gasped. His head twisted unnaturally upward, chin to the sky, as if his hair had been pulled back. Melda screamed, her head whipping back the same way.
And Tor felt the unmistakable smoothness of a blade across his throat.
* * *
Captain Forecastle grinned. “Hello, Bluebraid,” he said. And like a curtain falling, a dozen pirates suddenly appeared beside them, swords drawn. A vessel was anchored nearby, with thick ropes strung between it and Cloudcaster.
The pirates had swung aboard
