PELLA

Not long after we parted ways with Healy, the cry of “LAND HO!” went up from the crow’s nest. Soon enough, the mountains came into view, a distant range of jagged blue peaks. Racker turned the Thrush parallel to the coastline, and we followed it through the night and into the next morning.

It dawned foggy and gray. We couldn’t see mountains anymore, or anything at all through the haze. By late morning, I was starting to wonder if we’d strayed off course when a massive fortress appeared out of the gloom, flying the purple and orange of the Cartager royal flag.

Its giant walls were brown and smooth, like they were made of clay, and the whole thing seemed to float on the water, unattached to anything. It wasn’t until we cleared the far side that I realized it was built on a long finger of rocky land that jutted out at the end of a large bay.

We continued into the bay, and ships began to appear at anchor. There were a few familiar schooners, but mostly they were strange and exotic-looking: giant galleys with dozens of oars and curved hulls as round as sausages, or lopsided single-masters with towering sterns and squared-off bows so low they didn’t look seaworthy.

As we got farther in and the whole port came into view, I counted over a hundred ships, moored in the bay or docked at one of a dozen long piers. Tied up at the northernmost piers, by the finger of land that led to the fortress, were three gargantuan Cartager men-of-war, their triple decks bristling with cannon.

Then the city itself peeked out of the fog, starting with a ragged line of buildings, some as high as six stories tall and all made of the same smooth brown material as the fortress. They were packed so close together that at first I thought they were all one building, like some sort of giant rectangular anthill.

We dropped anchor in the middle of the bay, and Reggie used signal flags to hail a few distant figures on the docks. Guts fetched the rucksack full of our weapons from the hold, and we fidgeted on deck as we waited for a boat to row out so we could hitch a ride to shore.

I thought about asking Guts for one of the guns from the pack, but I was so keyed up my hands were shaking, and I didn’t want to accidentally shoot anybody.

The Cartager soldiers came out first, in four long boats. There were two of them in each boat, big men with tiny ears and jowly necks, all so overfed and sleepy-looking I never would have guessed they were soldiers if they hadn’t been carrying rifles and wearing long purple uniforms that most of them left unbuttoned over their swollen bellies.

“Don’t look like killers t’me,” Guts scoffed. “Look like purple slugs.”

I had to agree. They seemed too lazy to hang anybody dead. None of them did a lick of work—as best I could tell, they were only in the boats to keep an eye on their Native laborers, who couldn’t have been more different from the soldiers.

The Natives were lanky and trim, with copper skin and wide, flat noses. They went barefoot and shirtless, dressed only in pale cotton breeches that hung loosely off their hips. Two of them manned each boat, handling both the rowing and the loading of the big crates of ugly fruit that just barely fit in the boats.

“Okalu?” I called to a couple of the Natives, but they didn’t even look up at me.

I wasn’t about to get on a boat with armed soldiers, no matter how fat and sleepy they looked, so once Reggie promised us civilians would be coming out, too, we stayed put and waited for a better option.

Half an hour after the last of the soldiers pushed off, a much smaller boat arrived, manned by a pair of Natives. One of them looked like all the other Natives, skinny and shirtless, but I would’ve mistaken the second for a Cartager if it hadn’t been for his ears, nose, and skin—he wore a frilly silk Continental shirt over a big belly, and he didn’t even bother to get up when the fruit crate proved too wide for the boat and nearly capsized them.

That sent a few dozen ugly fruit into the water. Fortunately, they floated—and although the silk-shirted Native produced a short club that he shook at the skinny one, he didn’t end up using it, because Skinny dove right in to recover the fruit.

Eventually, Skinny got it all loaded in—not just the fruit that had gone overboard, but the entire contents of the crate, which he dumped directly into the boat, filling it almost to the gunwale before he sent the empty crate back up to the Thrush.

I didn’t like the looks of Silk Shirt’s club, so we decided to wait for the next boat. We were watching them cast off when Racker turned to us.

“Change your mind about Pella?” he asked.

“Just waiting for the right boat,” I said.

“Right or not, that’s the last one,” he said. I looked back at the deck and realized there wasn’t any ugly fruit left on it.

“Wait!” I yelled down at the Natives in the rowboat, who were pushing off from the Thrush’s hull. They looked up at me, confused. Then Skinny raised the oars to row away.

I was just starting to panic when Guts jumped over the deck rail and down into the boat, the rucksack strapped to his back.

He landed ugly, nearly swamping the boat and turning it into a chaotic tangle of fruit, limbs, and angry Natives. I stood there gaping at the sight until I realized the boat was already too far from the Thrush for me to make it at a jump, and getting farther away with every passing second.

I took a deep breath and went into the water.

When I broke the surface, I could hear Guts and the Natives yelling at each other. With a few frantic strokes, I managed to make it to the boat and grab hold of the gunwale above my head. It was too high for me to lift myself up into the boat, and from the angle I was at, I couldn’t see much except the bare back of the skinny Native.

The yelling was getting worse. Guts had used up his whole supply of Cartager curses, and the Natives clearly understood them and didn’t appreciate it.

“HELP!” I called.

That got Skinny’s attention, but not the way I wanted. When he turned and saw me, his eyes flashed with anger, and he raised one of the oars to clock me.

“DON’T, YE —!” That was Guts.

“— —!” That was Silk Shirt, giving a panicky yell in a language I didn’t understand.

Skinny’s oar froze in midair. He looked over his shoulder, and I heard him gasp.

“Help him up, ye —!” That was Guts again. He had to repeat himself a few times, because Skinny didn’t understand Rovian. But eventually, Skinny put down the oar and turned around to help me.

His eyes were wide with worry, and once he’d managed to haul me into the boat—which was so overflowing with ugly fruit there was barely any room for me—I saw why.

Guts had one of our guns in his good hand. He was sweeping it back and forth at the two Natives, like he was trying to decide which of them to shoot.

“Grab a gun,” he told me. “Can’t cover ’em both where I’m sittin’.”

“Are you mad!? You can’t shoot them!”

“Don’t have to—just gotta look like we might. C’mon! In the pack!”

He was in the middle seat, the ugly fruit piled so deep around him I couldn’t see his lower legs. Our pack was on his lap.

“This is bad,” I said. “This is really bad.”

“Could be worse. Could be them holdin’ the guns. C’mon!”

He jostled the pack with his leg. I didn’t much like his plan, but I didn’t have a better one. So I took a gun from the pack and pointed it in the general direction of Silk Shirt, who was sitting up at the bow.

Then I shoved some ugly fruit aside with my free hand and wedged myself into the middle seat next to Guts, facing forward. Guts was facing the other way, his gun on Skinny back in the stern.

“Get rowin’!” he barked, gesturing toward the oars.

Skinny got the point. The boat rocked as he turned us toward the piers.

Silk Shirt was staring at me like he was terrified I’d pull the trigger. I wanted to tell him not to worry, but I figured that’d defeat the whole purpose of pointing a gun at him.

Even so, I didn’t want to be unpleasant about it.

“Hello,” I said, trying to sound friendly.

He just kept staring—still scared, and confused now on top of it.

“Okalu?” I asked him.

“Neh,” he said. “Flut.”

I vaguely recalled Racker mentioning the Flut in his list of cannibal tribes. But sitting there in a frilly silk shirt, he didn’t look much like a cannibal.

“Okalu grawa,” he added.

I was about to ask him what that meant when he pointed to my head.

“Wanaluff, neh?”

Wanaluff was Cartager for “cow-ears.” I put a hand up where he was pointing and realized that with my hair wet and slick from the water, my ears were exposed. Before I could respond, Guts exploded.

“STUFF IT, YOU!” He whipped around and pointed his gun at Silk Shirt, who reared back in terror and started frantically apologizing.

“Se booya! Wanaluff booya!”

Skinny chimed in from behind me. “Booya wanaluff! Booya, booya!”

The way they said it, booya might have meant “good,” or “okay,” or even “calm down”—but whatever it was, they clearly didn’t want any trouble.

“Will you take it easy?” I hissed at Guts.

“Ain’t nobody calls me cow-ears without a fight.”

NONE OF US talked much after that. Guts and I kept our guns on the Natives the whole way in, which felt more and more ridiculous. I couldn’t imagine shooting an unarmed man, and except for the moment when Skinny was about to clock me with the oar, they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

And when I thought about it from their angle, I realized if it was my boat, and two kids had jumped in it without an invitation, I’d get riled up, too. Especially if they pointed guns at me.

I started to feel terrible about the whole situation.

“I think we should pay them,” I said.

“Fer wot?”

“Giving us a ride.”

“Doin’ it free!”

“Because we’re holding them up! It’s not right. We should at least give them something.”

“Only got five silver left.”

“How about one?”

“Comin’ out o’ yer half.”

“That’s all right.”

Guts dug in his pocket and handed me a silver piece. I passed it on to Silk Shirt.

He looked a little wary at first, but he took it.

“Gadda.”

I didn’t know how to say “you’re welcome” in Cartager, so I just smiled.

He smiled back, but it was more of a “please don’t shoot me” smile than a real one, and I still felt lousy.

Given the gun situation, I didn’t want to take my eyes off Silk Shirt for too long to stare at the city as we rowed in, but I managed to sneak a few glances. The fog was burning off to reveal a reddish-brown forest of buildings that seemed to go on forever.

The place was massive. I’d only ever been to Blisstown and Port Scratch in my life, and you could have fit ten of those towns into Pella Nonna with room to spare. What I could see of the waterfront was thrumming with people, ships, cargo, and livestock, all going every which way.

We tied up on a crowded pier in between two fishing boats. The Natives were thrilled to see us go—there were a lot of friendly-nervous booya!s and gadda!s from them as we climbed the ladder onto the pier. I repeated the words back to them, trying to smile when I did, and wondering if I shouldn’t try to get Guts to give them a second silver piece.

Still holding the guns, we hurried down the pier toward the city.

“Let’s try not to shoot anybody unless we have to,” I told Guts.

He shrugged. “See how it goes.”

We turned onto the boardwalk and found ourselves in a churning whirlpool of people, alien-looking and strange in flowing robes and Native breeches and curious hats over weirdly shaped noses, tiny ears, exotic skin…all bartering over sacks and crates of things in unusual shapes and colors, along with strings of livestock like none I’d ever seen, needle-nosed pigs and furry long-necked horse-type creatures and powerful little dogs with wide, stubby snouts who barked at us as we passed.

No one so much as looked at us. They were too busy buying and selling and jabbering at each other, mostly in what I guessed was Cartager. There wasn’t a single hard letter in the whole language—I tried to listen for the individual words, but they all ran together like liquid dribbling out of people’s mouths.

We started up the main road, dodging not just people, but wagons and horses and more strange livestock. On either side of the road, cloth awnings on long wooden poles shaded the storefronts, where men and women in colorful, loose-fitting Native shirts sat slouched on log benches. One or two met my eye as we passed, but most paid us no mind at all.

I was wondering if any of them were Okalu when Guts gave me a sharp elbow in the side.

“Soldiers!” he hissed.

I looked up ahead. Coming toward us was a pack of five purple-uniformed Cartagers, most of them heavyset but still a lot tougher-looking than the ones in the boats.

They all had rifles slung over their shoulders. And they were too close, and the street was too crowded, for us to duck the encounter.

The lead soldier’s eyes fell on me, and they widened in surprise as he stared at my ears.

I gripped the pistol so tight my hand hurt.

He was three steps away when he broke into a grin.

“Booya damai, wanaluff!”

I didn’t know what “booya damai” meant, but there was no mistaking his tone. He was being friendly.

The rest of the soldiers repeated the greeting as they passed.

“Booya damai!”

“Booya damai!”

“Boo…ya…damai,” I mumbled back, hoping it was the right thing to say.

The last of the soldiers gave me a friendly clap on the arm as they passed.

Guts and I turned to watch them go. Cartager soldiers, the kind we’d been told would kill us on sight…

They couldn’t have been nicer.

“Figure those men on the Thrush were wrong about this place?” I asked.

“Dead wrong, looks like. Here—stow this.” He held out his pistol.

I took the rucksack off my back and put away the pistols. Now that I was a little calmer, I realized I was starving.

“I could use some food—”

“Shhh…” Guts had his head cocked to one side, a curious look on his face. “Hear that?”

There was music coming from somewhere. It was too far away to make out anything but the rhythm—a steady, off-kilter chug that sounded as exotic as everything else looked.

Guts grinned. “That’s a Cartager beat.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means it’s good. C’mon! Let’s find it.”

We followed the sound up the road into the heart of the city. I hadn’t heard much music in my life. Growing up, we didn’t have instruments in the house, and when I passed the occasional pirate sawing on a fiddle in Port Scratch, it always sounded like a cat getting tortured. When I lived with the Pembrokes, I’d listened in on Millicent’s piano lessons, and while they weren’t as hard on my ears as the pirate fiddles, the music she played made me want to take a nap.

This was a whole other thing. It had a kind of rolling energy that got my head nodding with the beat as I walked. I looked over at Guts and saw him doing the same, a smile playing across his face.

That was odd. Guts wasn’t the type to smile.

As we continued on, the rear corner of an enormous,
Continental-style palace came into view. It had soaring windows and fancy trim, and unlike most of Pella Nonna’s brown-clay buildings, it was made of gleaming white marble. We followed the street around the side of the palace, and a set of wide steps came into view, spreading across the whole front of the building and leading up to a grand portico fit for a king.

Stretching out in front of the palace steps was a giant courtyard, hemmed in by a tall, fortified city wall and filled with an open-air market that made the bustle down at the docks seem quiet and sleepy. Half the city seemed to be there, either trading, talking, eating, or just lounging around.

At the foot of the steps, we found the source of the music we’d been hearing—a band of ten musicians, both Cartager and Native, half of them pounding various drums, a couple strumming guitars, and the rest on pipes. A loose cluster of people surrounded them, either dancing to the music or listening with smiles on their faces.

Guts headed for the band so fast I almost lost him in the crowd. When I caught up, he’d snaked his way to the front and was staring at the feet of one of the guitarists.

I followed Guts’s gaze to a wide-brimmed hat, upside down on the ground and half full of coins. As I watched, a Cartager girl about my age stepped forward and tossed a coin into the hat. One of the guitarists looked up from his instrument long enough to wink at her, and she blushed as she sank back into a group of other girls, all of them giggling with excitement.

Guts made a noise that sounded like a laugh. Then he elbowed me. “Ain’t gonna have no money trouble.”

“How do you figure?” I didn’t feel right about stealing from them, and anyway if we tried to swipe the hat, fifty people would see us do it.

Instead of answering, he turned back toward the market. “Starvin’. Let’s eat.”

THE NUMBER OF THINGS for sale in the market was staggering, and there were almost as many kinds of sellers as there were goods—not just Cartagers and Natives, but dark-skinned men with almond eyes who wore long robes and must have come from across the Southern Maw, and Continentals who I could’ve sworn were Rovian but answered in a strange tongue when we tried to speak to them.

After shopping around for the tastiest-looking food, we used hand gestures to negotiate with a lanky Native for a few cuts from a spit-roasted pig, seasoned with such a delicious hot spice that I swore to eat it for every meal if I could.

But the food cost us two silver—minus some tiny, smooth shells that must have been a kind of money, because the Native handed them to us like he was giving change—and when he wanted a third silver for a jug of water, I realized we were going to be broke by sundown.

“Buy it,” said Guts. “Money ain’t gonna be no problem.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

He’d wolfed down his food ahead of me and was fiddling with Lucy, tightening and retightening the strap under the hook’s leather cowl. Finally, he stopped.

“Get yer water an’ I’ll show ye.”

I bought the water, and when I did, I asked the Native my standard question:

“Okalu?”

He shook his head. “Neh—Dorono. Okalu grawa.”

That again. Still wondering what it meant, I followed Guts.

The music had stopped while we were eating, and the musicians were taking a break. One of the guitarists, a black-haired Cartager who looked about eighteen, was stretched out on the steps, drinking from a gourd as the cluster of giggling teenage girls fawned over him.

Guts went straight up to the guitarist and barked, “’Ey! Speak Rovian?”

The guitarist eyed him with a grin, then answered with a few slippery words of Cartager.

Guts raised his voice as he looked around.

“Who speaks Rovian here?”

Another young Cartager, a tall kid with a nose as big as his ears were small, looked up from counting the coins they’d collected in the hat.

“I speak. What you want, man?”

He had a thick Cartager accent, so what he said actually sounded more like “I sbee. Wa’ yew wa’, ma’?”

“Make a bet,” said Guts. He pointed at the guitarist with his hook. “Ten gold says I play guitar better than him.”

The big-nosed kid burst into laughter, and I felt my stomach clench. Even if we had money, which we didn’t, ten gold was a fortune.

“You go’ one hand, man!”

“’S’all I need.”

“Wha’s you name?”

“Guts.”

“Gu’s? Like”—the kid pointed to his stomach—“on you insides?”

“Guts like I got ’em, ye bada pudda palomuno porsamora.”

The big-nosed kid just laughed at the mouthful of insults. The guitarist, who’d been turning his head from side to side as he tried to follow the conversation, perked up at the curses and asked his friend a question in Cartager.

Big Nose explained, and the guitarist started to laugh, too.

I expected Guts to blow up at that. But he just smiled bigger.

“Ten gold. Wot ye say?”

I nudged Guts, then whispered in his ear.

“Is this a put-on?”

He shook his head. “Just wait.”

Big Nose was shaking his head, like he felt sorry for Guts.

“You wan’ lose you money, man? Illy play bes’ guitar in Pella.”

“Not no more.”

The other musicians chimed in, speaking Cartager. I looked around and realized we’d started to draw a crowd. People were trotting over, whispering and chuckling to each other as they pointed at Guts’s hook.

Big Nose gave Guts a helpless shrug.

“Okay, man. Ten gold. Hope you can pay. ’Cos we got big friends.”

I whispered to Guts again. “How are we—?”

“Shut up. Gonna be fine.”

He was still smiling. In fact, the grin hadn’t left his face since he’d first heard the music on the street almost an hour before. In the whole time I’d known him, I’d never seen him smile for more than a second or two.

It was kind of unsettling, to be honest.

The guitarist sat up straight, put the guitar across his lap, and played a short run of notes, his fingers skittering over the strings. Then he paused for a moment, fiddled with a couple of the tuning pegs, and launched into a song.

Like the rest of the music I’d heard that day, it had a hypnotic, chugging rhythm, over which he played a dancing line of notes that I would’ve found beautiful if I weren’t so worried about what Guts had gotten us into. As the Cartager played, I looked around at all the happy strangers and wondered how many of them would help beat the ten gold out of our hides when it was over.

Some of the men were pretty huge.

The guitarist finished his song, and the crowd clapped and hooted their approval. He stood up, handed his instrument to Guts with a wink and a smile, and motioned for him to take his place on the steps.

Guts sat down. A hush fell over the crowd. I took a quick look around to figure out the best direction to run when it was over.

Straight back, toward the far corner of the courtyard.

I waited for Guts to look up at me so I could signal the getaway route.

But he kept his head down, focused on the neck of the guitar, where he was testing the straight edge of the hook against the strings. It was just long enough to cover them all, and as he ran it down the length of the neck, it made a squeaky noise that didn’t sound much like music to me.

There were titters in the crowd. Big Nose shook his head and sighed, half-amused and half-pitying.

Guts stretched out the fingers of his right hand. Then, with the hook pressed against the strings on the neck, he picked out a few tentative notes.

One of them struck false. Guts stopped smiling.

There were a few more titters, but also some pained looks.

I hoped I could run on a full stomach without throwing up.

Guts pulled Lucy away from the guitar’s neck. Reached under the cowl to loosen the strap. Readjusted the hook. Tightened the strap one more time.

Then he took a deep breath and began again.

It started with a single note—a long, keening wail that shimmered in the tropical air before it slowly fell away into silence.

Then another. And another. And another, rising to a patter that slowly built into a flood, the notes sliding in and out of each other as the hook flashed back and forth across the neck while the fingers of Guts’s good hand tripped the strings in a fast-rising blur of movement.

I don’t know what he played, what kind of music it was or where it came from, but it was gorgeous and ecstatic and terrifying, sometimes all at once, ranging in size and shape from towering shards of barely controlled fury all the way down to delicate, plaintive whispers so quiet I could hear the rustle and creak of people in the crowd rising up on tiptoe as they strained to hear.

There was a moment of silence when he finished, followed by a roar of pleasure like I’d never heard before. People were stamping and cheering, crowding around Guts to congratulate him. Even the guitarist he’d beaten couldn’t stop himself from flinging his arms around Guts in a friendly hug.

In the middle of the celebration, Guts caught my eye. His grin widened as he gave me a knowing look that said, Gonna be fine.