“Welcome to my nightmare,” Engle whispered from Tor’s other side, eyes fixed in front of him.
They were still rowing, but Tor saw something move below. Something he and his friends in the boat were blissfully unaware of.
Engle shook—his teeth clattered together, his words stumbled. “It’s—it’s coming,” he said beneath his breath. “It—”
Tor stepped in front of him. “It doesn’t kill you,” he said. “Melda saved you, remember?” He pointed at her face. “She gave up her drop of color, for you.”
Melda took Engle’s hand, then Tor’s. “I would do it a million times over because you lived, Engle. And the bonesulkers will never hurt you again. I swear it.”
Engle swallowed. “I know. I just can’t stop seeing them, feeling their nails cut across…” He shivered, and his hands gripped his chest.
There was a scream. Tor turned in time to see one of the bonesulkers reach into the boat and pull Engle out by his neck. He was gone in an instant.
Engle fell to his knees, mouth open, hands shaking at his sides.
From their view, Tor could see underwater. Could see the bonesulkers dragging Engle down, down, down. Could see his friend, reaching up for help.
Tor knelt, trying to sink into the water, but it was hard as glass beneath him. He watched Engle get pulled deeper below, watched his friend struggle. And he couldn’t help him. He banged on the water, knowing it wasn’t real, but still unable to just sit and do nothing.
Engle, beside him, was silent, eyes wide as he watched himself nearly die.
No, this was bad, this was making things worse—
There was a crack close by, like a mountain splitting in half.
Vesper appeared, coated in gold, a falling star wrapped in flames. She walked past them, then flung her hands down against the water.
Gold flashed through her fingers, in wide sweeps of color. A hundred screams ripped through the dream, and, in a flash, the bonesulkers disappeared, fracturing into a million balls of light. Even the lake seemed to shatter.
And Vesper sank down into the Lake of the Lost, still glowing. She swam quickly, right to Engle. The bonesulkers hadn’t yet sliced across his chest in bloody streaks. She pulled him up out of the water, into the boat.
“You’re okay,” she said. “You’re fine.” Then, she pressed a hand against his chest.
Light billowed out of him in streams like woven gold, and Tor saw that they contained memories. Little pieces from Engle’s mind, from the time he rode the zippy to the moment he broke his arm on the Twinetrees. Most were bathed in light, but a few, small enough that he couldn’t see what memories they held, were tinged in darkness. Vesper handled the moments with care and stretched them out like wet fabric. She worked quickly, making the good ones bigger and the bad ones smaller. Then, finally, she came upon the dripping memory of the Lake of the Lost. It was folded a dozen times, and when Vesper expanded it fully, Tor saw it was huge, taking up most of the space in Engle’s mind. Once unfolded, she shrunk it down, so small that all of the others smothered it.
Then, she walked out of Engle’s nightmare, leaving only a trail of sunlight behind.
The Pirate and the Turnip
Once, there was a cruel pirate, obsessed with the sea. He refused to port, even when his crew was sick, opting instead to throw them off the ship. When his men threatened to rise up against him, he procured a talisman that forced them to be loyal and unable to ever try to leave him again.
The pirate, though enamored with the sea, loved a land food more than any other—a root vegetable. Turnips. He ate them by the barrel and always wanted more. He forced the cook to put them in his every meal and made his men buy barrels of them at the shore.
He would trade any treasure for the vegetable, so sailors made a habit of stopping by his ship when they went past, to make advantageous deals. This made the crew hate their captain even more. They watched him exchange gold coins they had gone to great lengths to find for the turnips he adored.
The crew wanted the pirate dead, so they devised a plan. They set a net with bait and waited for months.
Until one day, they managed to catch a mermaid.
They presented the siren to the captain, and the pirate knew it meant he might be granted a wish. “I wish to live beneath the sea, like you,” he said.
The ship buckled beneath him, and he fell right through its hull. For instead of turning into a merman, the pirate had become a giant, hideous fish.
The crew had counted on the captain’s foolishness. But when they refused to release the mermaid, wanting wishes of their own, she turned them all into sea creatures.
And so the crew was doomed to follow the pirate captain wherever he roams.
18
Last Chance
That night, Engle slept peacefully, without the elixir on his pillow. Tor was not so lucky.
The Night Witch visited him once more.
He was back on the cliff, in front of her castle. She stood outside it, staring at Tor with a strange expression on her face.
She looked pained. Afraid.
“Tor.” Someone touched his chest, and he gasped, almost falling out of bed.
Melda was standing there, hand still outstretched. “It’s me,” she said. “Are you okay?”
He nodded. Sweat dotted his forehead. “Yeah, you just surprised me.” She was still wearing her nightclothes, and her ribbons were knotted in her hair. “Is something wrong?”
“We stopped,” she said.
Tor stilled for a moment. She was right. He got out of bed immediately. “Have we already reached the northern tip?”
Vesper was waiting in the hallway. Her silver hair was in a braid, tied up with a piece of ribbon Melda had lent her.
