The Reader (26 page)

I
t's the same with stories as it is with people,” Meeks said, his brown eyes gleaming in the dwindling light of the sunset, “they get better as they get older. But not every story is remembered, and not all people grow old.

“It was thirty-two days since we left the turtle island, and the night was still as death. I remember the stars had a particular brightness to them, like snowflakes on a black table. You could see the whole blasted sky reflected in the water, and us too, all our sails and the lights of the watch, like we was in two places at once: aboard the
Current
cuttin' through the sea, and below the surface, upside down and starvin' for air.

“We felt the breeze first, and scrambled to bring in the sails, but we were too slow. The wind came bellowin' great guns out of the northeast, the waves washin' over the bow, beatin' against the hull like the hands of giants come risin' out of the sea.

“Then the sky opened up, all jagged along the edges, and the light just pourin' through it, bright as dawn. What an uproar! We were on the yards, and the winds were battin' us about like leaves. There wasn't no time to stare into that hole in the sky like Captain Cat and her cannibal crew, or all our sails would be torn to shreds and the masts snapped in two.

“Then came the thunderclap, and the world went dark. The sound of it knocked all the noise right out of our ears, and we were workin' in complete silence—couldn't hear the wind, couldn't hear Cap or Jules or Theo callin' out, couldn't hear nothing.

“The ship was plungin' into the troughs one after another, the sails gapin' in the wind. The staysail was blown to ribbons; the main topsail, split earing to earing. We was all scramblin' to the bowsprit or up the mainmast, the wind slashin' at us, roarin', though we couldn't hear it. I was sure the whole blasted ship was gonna be shaken apart, and us dropped into the waves like fish bait.

“Then the main royal came loose from her gaskets, flappin' and makin' the mast quiver like a bean stalk.

“Cap was shoutin' orders. I could see his mouth wide open and his eyes wild. The mainmast was gonna snap if someone didn't take in that royal or cut it loose.

“Somewhere in all that chaos, it was only Harison who knew what to do. He sprang aloft, gatherin' the sail with his long arms. There was times the wind was so bad he was nearly shook off the mast, but he kept at it. Through the pitchin' of the waters and the impossible soundlessness of the night. All by his
lonesome, he sent the yard down. Saved the mainmast—saved the ship—all on his own.

“It was bold moves like that one that got us through the night, till the winds lost their spite and the waters cooled down. We had a job the next few weeks, fixin' all the damage those winds had done, but thanks to Harison we had another few weeks to do it.

“That boy earned his place with us that night, all right.”

T
hings were good.

The sun was blazing down upon the ship, and the clouds were puffs of cotton in the sky. The
Current of Faith
was clipping along at tremendous speed, smooth as silk through the water. At this rate, they'd reach Jahara in ten days.

In exchange for their assistance with the woman in black, their honesty in retelling their remarkable tale, and the assurance of their continued services, Sefia and Archer had been granted passage to Jahara under the provision that Sefia's book and lock picks be kept in a safe, with special dispensation for reading when she wasn't on watch, until she disembarked, at which point they would be returned to her in their original condition.

Until now, she hadn't had time to read. There was no shortage of duties for her and Archer to perform—scrubbing decks, scouring pots, trimming artichokes for Cooky, who shouted at them if it wasn't done quick enough—and they were kept so
busy that when she did have a free moment, she would fall exhausted into her hammock and sleep until her next watch.

But after three days of backbreaking work, she was finally adjusting to life at sea, and today she was going to see the book again. Sefia prodded the calluses forming on her hands and waited on the quarterdeck.

Above her, Horse and Archer were on the yards with little wooden pails, tarring down the rigging. Their hands moved along the lines, stiff-bristled brushes dripping. Every so often, the acrid smell wafted over the ship.

These past few days on the
Current
, Archer had looked happier and more relaxed than she'd ever seen him. His smile was broader and he was quicker to laugh—a sort of silent breathy laughter that showed in his eyes.

As if he could sense her watching him, Archer looked down. Silhouetted against the flat blue sky, he rested easily on the yard, as nonchalant and perfectly balanced as a cat. Though at this distance she couldn't see his eyes clearly, she felt his gaze on her, probing, questioning, lingering on her eyes, her lips, her face.

Sefia blushed and glanced away. For some reason, she couldn't stop smiling.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs startled her, and she looked up to see the chief mate crossing the quarterdeck, his arms outstretched, holding the book as if it were a live and dangerous thing, like a snake. She laughed as he dumped it into her waiting hands.

Gathering the book to her chest, Sefia inhaled its familiar smell, felt its edges on the insides of her arms. “Why do you hold it like that?” she asked.

The mate shook himself like a dog and crossed his hands behind his back. “Don't know what's inside it,” he said. “The farther it is from me, the less likely it'll get me, if something comes crawling out.”

“All that's inside it are words,” she said.

“Have you seen everything that's inside it?”

She shook her head.

“Then how can you be sure?” His tone was quiet, matter-of-fact.

Sefia peered up at him. The chief mate was a handsome figure, with his square jaw, his wide mouth, though the skin around his neck was beginning to sag, and the wrinkles in his face were like ravines. As she studied him—the gray of his hair, the notch across the bridge of his nose—she felt the world of gold and light swirling just beyond her line of sight—

“You're a nosy one, aren't you?”

Her sense of the Vision faded, and she sat down abruptly. “I didn't mean—”

“Sure you did.”

Sefia swallowed. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't do it again.”

“No, sir.”

He sighed. “I see things too. Anything that happens on this ship.” When she nodded, he continued, “I recognized what happened to you the other morning. You almost lost yourself.”

“Yes.” She leaned forward. “Although my Vision works differently, I think. I can't see the present like you, but sometimes I'll catch a glimpse of what's happened before.” Even after finding Archer, she'd been so alone in this, muddling through
the words, struggling to control the Vision, with no one to help her understand what was happening, what it meant. “And history is huge,” she said faintly.

“When I first joined the crew, I used to get seasick, not from the rocking of the ship, mind you, but from pure sensory overload. I can sense everything on the
Current
, not just the people, but the cargo too. And the rats.” He grimaced. “People aren't meant to take in so much.”

“How'd you learn to control it?”

He shrugged. “Same as you control anything else. Practice.”

“But only the ship, nothing else?”

A flicker of grief crossed the mate's face. “No, nothing else.”

Sefia peered up at him. “Why?”

“It's the trees,” he murmured. “The trees tell me everything.”

They were silent, listening to the stretching and groaning of the timbers, the hissing of the wind in the sails. Setting the book securely inside a coil of rope, she climbed to her feet and dusted off her hands on the thighs of her trousers. “Will you teach me?”

He stared down with his gray eyes, and she felt like he was peering inside her. What did he see? Was she as brave, or as good, as she hoped? Or did he see a stupid, reckless girl who'd gotten Nin kidnapped? Who'd killed Palo Kanta? She straightened her shoulders and met his unnerving dead gaze.

Finally he nodded. “All right, girl. Pay attention and do as I say.”

She grinned. Normally she hated it when people called her
that, but the way the mate said it reminded her of Nin, who'd rarely used her name. But every time Nin called her “girl,” it meant she was cared for. It meant she wouldn't be left behind.

“How about we start with this scar?” The mate tapped the dent on his nose.

She nodded.

“Don't let yourself look at the whole thing. You'll make yourself sick doing that, and you won't be able to make sense of anything when you're flat on your back trying to keep down your breakfast. Just focus on my scar. Tune the rest out.”

She blinked, and the world filled with gold. Trails of it wove across the chief mate's square features, in and out like sparkling currents. She saw his childhood, before his sight was taken: the rocky Everican shore, an old woman laughing, the tangy smell of mulch, and trees, trees, trees whispering and creaking and laughing and speaking. The sights and sounds and smells churned around her, blurring into one bloody streak of memory.

“It's like picking out one person in a crowd.” The mate's words cut through the chaos. “One voice. The one you're listening for. Let everything else become background noise.”

The dent in his nose. All the threads of his past spun around her, faster and faster the longer she looked, but that one gleamed more brightly than the others.

“Do you have it?” he asked.

His grandmother had been able to talk to the trees. She had lived her whole life among them, in the green-gold light and the minty fragrance of their bark. And when his parents were killed in a mining accident, the mate went to live in the grove
with her, learning to nurse the tender shoots into towering giants with rustling fan-shaped leaves.

When he was eleven, the men came. They came with saws and axes and rifles and carts. They came accompanied by soldiers in blue uniforms with silver epaulets. The navy needed ships, they said, and it didn't matter what his grandmother said or how she begged—they cut the trees down. The chewing and hacking of their axes. The mate saw one of the oldest trees in the grove topple, groaning, branches grasping at its neighbors as if they could stop it from falling.

His grandmother spat at the soldiers, cursing them. Her fingernails dug thick gouges in their skin. But she couldn't stop them. They barricaded her inside her own home and set it on fire. The
crackle
and
hiss
of burning wood. The smell of singed hair and blistering flesh.

The mate ran after her, but the soldiers caught him before he could enter. He thrashed at them with his scrawny fists. One of them raised a rifle. The butt end came smashing into his face. Explosions behind his eyes. Blood. Smoke.

When he awoke, he was blind, and the trees were gone. He couldn't hear the whispering of their leaves or smell the medicinal scent of their bark. All he smelled was ash and upturned earth.

Someone—a man with a voice like suede—adjusted the bandages over his eyes and nose. “They didn't have to blind you,” he said sadly, “but people are cruel.”

The mate nodded. His face burned as he tried to stop himself from crying.

“You have a choice now,” the man said. “Come with me, and
you'll be safe. You'll have a good life in the Library.” He described all the ways the Library was suited for the blind—the routine, the unchanging furniture, the textured knobs and cupboards in the kitchen. He'd be given a home, and all he'd have to do was care for it. Dust the tables. Tend the garden. A simple life, away from the cruelty of men. “Or you can try to make it on your own,” the man said finally, “but the world will have no pity for a blind boy.”

“Now you know,” the chief mate said.

Sefia blinked as the lights whirled and faded away. Swallowing tentatively, she waited for the nausea, the headache, but none came. She beamed. “Who was that man? Did you go with him?” The questions bubbled out of her in her excitement. “To the Library? What's a Library?”

The chief mate shrugged. “I never found out.”

“You turned him down? Why?”

He rubbed his hands over the smooth woodgrain of the rail. “I was in no shape to go with him then, so he left me in the care of a family from a nearby town while I recovered. I don't know if he came back, because as soon as I was well enough, I left.”

“Why?”

“When my grandmother died, she must have passed her power to me, because I could hear her trees calling to me, faintly at first, then louder and louder. Across the entire kingdom, I could hear them calling my name.” The mate closed his eyes, and Sefia realized he was listening to the ship, to the very timbers it was made of. “And I had to go to them. I had failed them once, but I couldn't let them be taken from me again.”

This wasn't the same magic as her Vision, but it was closer than anything she'd found yet. Maybe the mate could help her master it, so she'd be good enough to catch the answers she needed, next time.

Sefia twisted a couple of locks of hair in her fingers and looked to the book, where it lay in the nest of rope like an egg, ready to hatch. “Let's get to work,” she said.

• • •

T
he chief mate made her practice for hours: sinking into the Vision and spinning out of it, studying the capstan, the chase guns, the amber ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand. She needed a mark. A dent or a crack or a scratch. Something to focus her Vision on so she wouldn't get swept away. By the time four bells struck, Sefia was exhausted, but she could wield her Vision with the precision of a filleting knife. If she'd wanted to, she could have seen the history of the sixteenpounders at the gun ports, the ship, maybe even the sky, the sea, the very air that whipped around her.

“Not yet, girl.” The mate grunted. “Not by a long shot.”

She laughed.

“Get out of here. Go bother someone else.” He dismissed her with a flick of his fingers, and she gathered up the book and wandered down to the main deck.

Stumbling a bit on the last step, Sefia waved to Jaunty. A gaunt man of fifty, the helmsman never left the deck. No matter the weather, he'd be out there in furs and oilskins, only leaving his post a few hours each night to sleep in a tiny closet on the quarterdeck, a few feet from the wheel. He'd never done more than grunt at her when she greeted him, and none of the crew
much enjoyed his company, but he could steer a ship better than anyone in Kelanna.

On the main deck, she plunked herself down among the spare ropes and buckets of tar Horse and Archer had left on deck. Hugging the sun-warmed book to her chest, she leaned back.

Archer was on the mainmast, and the sun shone through the brittle sticks of his hair, turning them gold as sheaves of wheat. She watched him for a moment, painting the rigging black, his brush moving quick and sure on the ropes while the shadows shifted along his arms.

There was such grace to his movements; she wondered why she'd never noticed it before.

Smiling, she flipped open the book.

Her bookmarks were piled in one place between the pages, their stories gone. She picked up Archer's feather, gleaming iridescent green and fuchsia, and ran it along her cheek before tucking it into her hair.

The letters crackled with a sense of possibility. What would she read next? What grand adventure would come to her now? Leaning over the book, she began to read.

As she sank into the page, submerging herself in the words, at first all she saw was fog—thick fog, like snow, that shut out the sounds of the everyday world—and the noises of the wind and the waves seemed to fall away around her.