It was evening, and the ship plunged into purple-blue twilight, its lanterns glowing red-orange along the deck. Dameon was curled in a ball in his room, angry with Gabriella because she had insisted on serving him only his ration of water. She avoided him, sitting alone on the stern, chewing a biscuit slowly. Her tongue was dry as paper, and her lips swollen and cracked.
The boards beside her creaked, and Mortimer half sat, half fell down next to her. They all were dizzy. His back was to the companion ladder, and he faced the wyvern that followed off the Elawn’s stern.
“The elk is watching the course,” he said, his fingers tapping the planking beneath him. Long, white cracks had appeared in the skin of his hands. Gabriella had them too. Finally, as if he had reached some resolution within himself, he cursed and began speaking.
“My father was a whaler. He took our family out in a skiff one afternoon for a picnic on the point. But the tide turned against us, and we were caught by a squall as we tried to make it back into the harbor. The ship capsized. I was inside the cabin, near the door, so I swam first for the surface. But when I broke through to the air, there was no one behind me. My mother, my father, and my brother were trapped in the ship. There was still air inside. I could hear my family pounding to get out. I climbed on top of the ship. I tried pulling the boards loose, but I was too weak. I listened as they pounded and pounded, I was sure my father would be strong enough to burst through the hull. But he wasn’t. The pounding stopped. The ship sank.”
Gabriella sat frozen. She wondered if he had gone mad to share so much. But on second look, he had his eyes closed and sighed as if relieved to speak about something she suspected he had never spoken of to anyone. He pulled his knees close to his chest, as Dameon would when upset. It was a strange pose for a grown man. His hands clasped one another as if somehow he could comfort himself through it.
“I would never see my mother again,” he said. “She was beautiful, you know, one of the most beautiful women in Harkness. Always wore flowers in her hair.
“I was sucked under with the boat,” he continued. “I thought I would die, too, but I woke on my back on the beach where some other children digging for clams found me. I vowed never to go to sea again.”
“Mr. Creedly, I’m so—”
He cut her off by raising his hand and shaking it, as if he had more to say and he did not want to stop. “That was why I hated the tapping that day on the deck of the ship. Reminded me, it did . . . .”
She wanted to apologize again but held her tongue. Mortimer shook his head and looked out at the wyvern visible against the glowing red horizon. His voice was a bit stronger now, “Cursed creatures. That silver one would have had me while we were in the narrows had you not warned me. Thank you.”
“Well, you saved my brother in the river.”
He moved suddenly and produced a corked bottle that he had been keeping on the other side of his body. It was half full of water.
“I found this under one of the beds. It had rolled beneath, I guess, in all the chaos.” He set it down beside her. “Take it for yourself.”
The next day, the sun was hidden. Low clouds rolled across the deck. Gabriella found Adamantus speaking to Mortimer while the hunter served his watch behind the wheel. Adamantus was describing four precious stones of four different hues—one crimson, one emerald, one sapphire, and one violet. They were called the “Eyes of Garmr” and were worth more than all the gold in Nicomedes’ treasury. The gems got their name because they had been cut to decorate a stone statue of Garmr, the four-eyed dog that guarded the underworld. And according to Adamantus, they were somewhere in the treasure that they were seeking.
To Mortimer’s questions about their size and their worth, Adamantus answered, “One could fit in your fist, but not two. Their worth? You could cover the decks of the ship with gold and still not have the price of one.”
Gabriella cleared her throat to announce her presence. Mortimer went below, his eyes glazed and distant with dreams of gemstones. Gabriella took the wheel and gazed out at the gray sea, checking over her shoulder to locate the mother wyvern. After some time had passed, she asked the elk, “Why do you whet Mr. Creedly’s appetite with stories of riches?”
“He asked for a story to distract himself from his thirst.”
This gave Gabriella pause. It was likely that Mortimer was now even thirstier than she or her brother.
“And better he covet those prizes than me,” the elk said. “For I see how he eyes my antlers, the way only a hunter might.”
“Let him covet gold. There will be plenty of that,” Gabriella replied. “He will become obsessed with four little jewels we cannot find.”
“I don’t intend for him to find them. I intend for us to do that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did not tell all. The stones were presented to Nicomedes as part of a sculpture of Garmr, but they are not set in his eyes. I did not describe the rest of the sculpture, for Garmr is only a small part of it. It is a depiction of Garmr and Falik, Falik and three of his furies.”
Gabriella winced. Such a gloomy day was not a day to evoke the furies. The furies were cursed beings made of mismatched body parts from other creatures: legs of horses, torsos of men, shells of tortoises. Lepas, one fury, had the head of a wolf; Alkeron, that of a spider; and Catab, that of a boar. Their limbs were too confusing to recall. Their leader, Falik, who was unparalleled in his cruelty but also his cunning, had the head of a cobra.
Gabriella remembered the story of how Falik and his minions blinded Garmr. A human inventor, Carder Oak, wanted to enter the underworld to retrieve his dead wife. Carder knew Falik had a weakness for trinkets and inventions. So Carder made Falik a device that would spin and throw light upon the cave walls where the furies lived. Carder lied to Falik and said the toy would run forever. In return, Falik and his furies stole the eyes of Garmr so that Carder could enter the underworld and find his wife. However, when the spring ran out on the toy, Falik realized he had been tricked. One does not double-cross a fury. Falik stole Carder’s wife for himself, ripped her limbs off and traded them for horse and pig limbs, then made her a fury and slave to him.
“What a horrible story to commemorate,” Gabriella said. “So the full sculpture depicts the furies stealing Garmr’s eyes?”
“Yes, and we will find the stones in their hands, not Garmr’s sockets.”
“Poor Garmr. Why would Nicomedes have such a statue in his tower?”
“It is a story about an inventor whose reach exceeds his grasp, who oversells an invention, who does not keep his word. It would be a sobering tale for a man like Nicomedes.”
“Why must we find the jewels before Mortimer?”
“To bargain. They are small, so we can conceal them. If it comes to bribing him when we return, these may pay dividends. But first he must know their worth.”
Gabriella nodded, moved the wheel a bit in her hands, then shared Mortimer’s story from the night before.
The elk turned his head and looked at her. If she did not know better, she would have read remorse in his expression. “You may have done more with kindness, Gabriella, than I did by appealing to avarice.”
The elk walked away and stared out into the gloom.
Tending the fire around the egg was especially unpleasant. The heat only made Gabriella yearn for cool water. The sight of white ashes in the tripod made her feel as if her mouth were turning to ash. She missed many of her turns checking the fire. Mortimer did as well.
When they had been two days without water, he tried drinking oil from a lamp. It caused him to double over in pain for the rest of the afternoon. His body heaved until he vomited. The yellow oil mixed with his bile spread out on the deck in a slimy puddle. He did nothing to clean it up. Gabriella offered him some of the last of the water he had given to her. He took the smallest of sips, then pushed the bottle away.
Night came, but no one slept. Adamantus watched the wyvern. He was the only one who would even pace the deck anymore. Without water, they were unable to eat so there were no meals. Gabriella knew she was weak from hunger, but she did not feel any pain, only thirst. She imagined hollows in her body, within her skull, in the soft organs of her body, the bones in her legs, the joints between her fingers and toes, all going dry, all becoming empty and parched.
She remembered once seeing a dog gnaw at a cow bone. Bones were not solid. They themselves were riddled with cavities, cavities that she now imagined in her own bones. Cavities that felt vast as caverns, waiting to be refilled. Wind-swept, desert caverns. She felt entire chambers within her, calling out for flooding. A desiccated fish skeleton resting on the floor of a bone white cave.
She snapped her head up. She was losing all sense of proportion. She tried to bring herself back to the present, but all she could think of were her blistering lips. It took all her resolve not to pick at them. She licked them with her tongue, which only made them worse. Dameon, when she had checked on him, had not refrained from picking. His lips were red, raw, bloody.
Another night came. The wind, which she usually welcomed, was cruel, robbing them of remaining moisture. The sails flapped. They fell loose more and more often as the ship wore out, and Gabriella possessed less and less resolve to fix them. Adamantus did his best to help her as she would stagger up and try to tie knots through her dizziness. She could not even pull the ropes taut any longer; for that she relied completely upon Adamantus, who gripped their fraying lengths in his teeth.
All the while, the black bat of the wyvern followed.
Gabriella contemplated the ocean water below. So much water. She yearned for it in her body so that she leaned into the railing. Before she knew it, she lost her balance. But as the ocean swept upwards towards her, Adamantus was her savior. Through clenched teeth—teeth clamped on the collar of her shirt—Adamantus said, “Let’s move away from there.” He dragged her back over the railing and to the wheel. Her head rolled, and she saw that her efforts to trim the sail had hardly made a difference. They were slowing when they needed more speed than ever.
“The sail,” she whispered. She could not believe that they had once been so profligate with water as to spill it over the deck. In her confusion, she became sure that there was still water within the boards. She reached for them, running her hand along the wood.
“Careful there,” Adamantus said. He staggered slightly as he pulled her. Was he showing sign of weakness now as well? She did not want to know. She closed her eyes. She felt him pulling her under the awning of the wheel well.
“Don’t bury me,” she heard herself croak. She knew she no longer made sense. Then she realized a scrap of sail was in her hand and she was trying to suck the moisture from it. The taste was terrible and it woke her from her madness. It was no sail but only her sleeve. She watched as Dameon came outside, urinated into a cup and tried to drink it. What a mess they would leave for people to find, she thought. Three corpses splayed beside their own vomit and excrement. She had no urine to pass. The last time she did, it had been as dark as tea.
The wyvern flew closer now. Adamantus placed himself beside the egg, the picture of vigilance. But even this picture was troubled. The elk’s head nodded often, as if he were fighting sleep. His eyes blinked slowly, the lids sticking together.
Gabriella could now only see white. White clouds stretching above the sails of the Elawn. Then the sky became the earth, and she stepped on a cloud only to find that it was sand. She stood in a scalding desert with no trees, no oases. White as far as she could see. White in the sun, white underfoot.
If sand grew hot enough, it became glass, and glass walls emerged from the sand up into the sky, closing her in like an insect trapped beneath a bowl. The sand under her was spiraling downward into a funnel. In the whirlpool of sand, the mother wyvern circled like a shark behind the Elawn. The Elawn shuddered, the magnetic stone drifted out, like a soul released. The decks collapsed inward, crushed by an invisible hand.
There was Ghede, quickly disintegrating in the white sand as he had in the blast of white light, Omanuju withering away in a bed of darkness. There was her brother, picking his blistering lips, her parents and her grandmarm’s faces filling with sand.
Outside the glass bowl that trapped her, Gabriella saw Mab Miller laughing, eager to sell his lands to the Servior. Swords of the Servior rose up from the sand like weeds at their feet. Next came more faces from the sand. The dry eyeless faces of the dead, bereft of their tower—they were left to drain off into the abyss of time. They whispered her name, sand sifting from their mouths, through their empty eye sockets, as sand had through the bones on the beach of that cursed island.
Then all the white coalesced into the spark of a wand. The wand was held by Sybil. Something about the sight of the princess, in her outgrown, tattered dress, her knotted hair, was at that moment so repulsive, so contrary to what Gabriella knew was right. Her own anger gave her strength. She sat up to take the wand, but her hand landed on something different, thicker.
She struggled to open her eyes. She knew she was dreaming, but her lids were heavy. It was like pushing a boulder uphill. She had no strength.
Now she saw a figure walking towards her—Ghede! He told her to hold the wheel, they were almost there. She opened her eyes. To her surprise, she was indeed holding the wheel. Through the railing, she saw the russet colors of trees in autumn. Streamers of mist waved between the boughs. The scent of the air had changed, replaced by the soft, fresh smell of trees shimmering with leaves.
Land. Land. Land. Land as far as she could see. North and south, fat, solid, real, land. She understood what she saw, even if her mouth could not form the words.