Along the Saltwise Sea Read online

  “Ahoy!” called an unfamiliar voice. The rowboat stopped moving, with a little bump that implied it had reached solid ground and was done with its purpose. The rower dropped the oars and stood, stepping out of the boat.

  As they didn’t immediately sink into the water, they had definitely reached land.

  The Crow Girl trembled without bursting into birds, and Zib reached over to squeeze her wrist, which was the only reward that could currently be given for her bravery and forbearance. The Crow Girl shot her a grateful look. Instincts could be difficult things to fight, and the instinct that told her to be birds was very strong. Niamh shifted slightly, squaring her posture so that she was looking directly toward the approaching stranger, her body between them and the children.

  Avery moved a few inches closer to Zib. He didn’t think of himself as particularly brave, and thought he might never begin to, but he could be braver when he was with her. She made it feel almost easy. So he stood by her side, and waited for the stranger to come.

  Through the mist, through the fog, one step at a time, until the man was standing right in front of the foursome. He was young, although older than any of the four of them, too young to be a king, too young to be a father, but easily old enough to be a sailor. He was dressed simply, for the sea, in a white linen shirt, black trousers, boots that Zib envied instantly, and a belt that wrapped three times around his hips before it stopped. He had no hat, and no jewelry, but a wide, honest face that seemed too new for the rest of him. His eyes were the color of the help-kelp from the cave, and his hair was long and tangled. He put a hand on the hilt of the knife at his belt, blinking at the children.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “The King of Coins closed all paths to the sea a year ago, and we’ve seen no strangers since.”

  “Not all paths,” said Niamh. “He owns the land but not the water. We had a helping hand from some of the kelp. It thought we needed to be here.”

  “My captain will be glad to know that it’s possible to come and go if you can breathe water,” said the man. His eyes narrowed. “Wait. Not all of you look like you can breathe water.”

  “You can recognize a drowned girl, but not a Crow Girl?” asked the Crow Girl. “Shame. Shame on your education and your ideals. Shame on everything you love.”

  The man frowned. “We don’t have Crow Girls this far to the west. We don’t have people made of animals at all. The King of Cups forbids them.”

  “The King of Cups made me,” said the Crow Girl, and took a single stiff-legged step toward the man. “I was a girl once. Just a girl, not a murder, and I had a name and knew it, could show it and share it with people when I wanted to. He took that away when he turned me into what I am now, and he did it with my permission, because somehow the idea of wings was better than the idea of standing still. So don’t tell me he forbids the birds to fly. The birds will always fly.”

  “I tell you what I know,” said the man. “So. A drowned girl and a beauty of beasts, and … what? What are you?” He turned his attention on Avery and Zib. “How did you come to be here, and why are you so close to my captain’s cottage?”

  “We’re here because the help-kelp pulled us through a wished-for well,” said Avery. “Nothing in this place makes sense. We’re from America. We’re not from here at all.”

  “We’re not birds, and we haven’t drowned,” said Zib. “We’re children.”

  “Children,” said the man, in a tone that spoke of disbelief and wonder at the same time, as if there were no contradiction between them. “Human children?”

  It occurred belatedly to Avery that while they had met people who looked very human, none of them technically had been, or if they had once, they weren’t anymore—Niamh was very clear that she was a drowned girl, not a human child, and it was difficult to say what the Crow Girl really was. He swallowed, moving closer still to Zib, and said, “Yes, sir. Human children. We climbed over a wall into the Forest of Borders.”

  “We’ve been following the improbable road,” said Zib. “We’re on a quest.”

  “Is that so?” asked the man. He shifted positions, gesturing back toward his rowboat. “The improbable road goes where it likes in the Up-and-Under. That’s part of what makes it so difficult to define. Perhaps now, it leads you to my lady’s ship. I know she would like to meet the human children who have so enjoyed her hospitality.”

  Avery’s cheeks colored red as Zib scuffed her toe against the sand. “Maybe we should,” he said. “It would be the polite thing to do.”

  Niamh cleared her throat. “We travel together or not at all,” she said. “These are my friends. I’ll not have you hurting them because they picked a few berries and drank some water.”

  “All of us,” said the Crow Girl.

  The man nodded slowly. “All of you. Of course. But we have no cisterns or carrion-heaps on the ship. There would be nowhere to your standards for you to sleep.”

  “Drowned girls don’t sleep, and we certainly don’t spend our time in cisterns,” said Niamh.

  “I … I can stay together to be with my friends,” said the Crow Girl. “If I’m always a girl, I don’t need any carrion. Thank you for offering. I do appreciate it.”

  “If we come with you, will you bring us back to shore when we ask?” Zib asked the question earnestly, eyes wide and bright. She was still learning the art of being afraid of strangers. “We need to find our way back to the improbable road eventually, so we can’t go off and be on your ship forever.”

  “Of course,” said the man.

  Zib, who had also not yet learned the art of listening for lies, believed him at once. She nodded happily as she turned back to the others. “We should go,” she said. “We can’t keep using the cottage without permission, and we can’t get permission without going to the ship. We can see more of the shoreline from the ship, so we could scout out our way, and then come back to the shore and keep going.”

  Avery nodded as well, more reluctantly. “We can ask his captain if she knows a way over the cliff and back to dryer land.”

  “Then we go,” said the Crow Girl brightly. The sailor looked at her with darkness in his eyes, and said nothing, only motioned toward the waiting shape of his rowboat.

  The children followed him as he walked, forming a ragged line with Avery and Zib at the front, walking, as they so often did, side by side. The Crow Girl followed them, feet sinking into the sand and leaving prints that barely looked human, and Niamh followed her, leaving a trail of shining dampness behind her, like the slime of a slug.

  One by one, they climbed into the rowboat, and when Niamh was seated, the sailor followed her, pushing off from the shore and beginning the long, slow row toward the waiting shape of the ship in the fog.

  FIVE

  GETTING SOMEWHERE

  The rowboat moved more slowly with the weight of five passengers than it had with the weight of one. It became quickly clear that the sailor was struggling. Niamh leaned over the side and trailed the fingers of her right hand in the water. Almost immediately, a low wave surged up behind them, pushing them forward, toward the ship. The sailor brightened, as if this change in the water had taken most of the struggle from his shoulders, and continued to row. The water grew higher, pushing them faster, until the wake behind them looked much like the wake from an outboard motor.

  The sailor pulled his oars inside the boat, lest they be lost, while Niamh kept her fingers in the water. Avery shot her a look of frank surprise. “Are you doing this?” he asked.

  “I am,” she confirmed.

  “How? And why?”

  “Why, because it seemed cruel to make our host struggle when I had a way to speed things along,” said Niamh. “How, because my city isn’t far from here, as the sardine swims, and the water knows every one of us by name. I can’t go home, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been forgotten. The ocean always remembers.”

  Avery threw his hands in the air as he slumped backward in the boat. “Is there anything in the
Up-and-Under that doesn’t have opinions about things?”

  “Berries, usually,” said the Crow Girl. “Daisies. Oh, and slugs. Slugs don’t have a lot of room in their bodies for brains, and so they don’t tend to think much of anything. They don’t like to be eaten, but I have to assume it’s like that in your country as well. Nothing living likes to be consumed.”

  “But if the water can have opinions, how can we drink it?” asked Avery. “That’s consuming! It makes us vampires!”

  “What’s a vampires?” asked the Crow Girl.

  “People are mostly water, my mother says,” said Zib. “We’re water with opinions.”

  “The water never notices a glass or two,” said Niamh, shooting a quelling glance at Zib. “Humans came from the sea, the same as everything else, and part of what it means to be water is movement. Water is transformation. It becomes fog, it becomes rain, it becomes the blood in a little boy’s veins and the steam rising off a field in the sun. It becomes food. The transmutation of water is constant and undeniable, and water isn’t water anymore when it stops. Drink your water, and don’t worry about hurting its feelings. It wants to be transmuted.”

  Avery, who couldn’t imagine a world where he would want to be transmuted by passing through the body of something other than himself, lowered his arms, leaned against the side of the boat, and said nothing.

  Across from him, Zib leaned over the side of the boat and trailed her fingers in the water, washing the berry juice away. Spray hit her in the face and she laughed, throwing her head back in joy, hair whipping in the wind. She looked like some sort of wild wind-sprite that had settled long enough to enjoy a few minutes sheathed in skin, like she would burn away with the last of the fog, and for a moment, Avery was afraid. He didn’t want Zib to disappear. He still wasn’t entirely sure he liked her—she was nothing like the children his parents had encouraged him to spend time with, who had always been polished and polite and disinclined to run, screaming, toward the nearest danger. Zib was none of those things. If there was something that shouldn’t be approached, Zib was probably already up to her knees in it, and covered in some new sort of sludge. So maybe they weren’t friends, precisely, or at least not the kind of friends they would have been on the other side of the wall, but they were bound now, in some new kind of relation to each other.

  Like eggs and flour put into the same cake, they made something between them that they could never have been on their own, something bigger and better than their solitude. Avery couldn’t call that friendship. He still knew it was important, and that he didn’t want it to end.

  Zib pulled her hands back into the boat as they neared the side of the ship, glancing over at the Crow Girl, who had gone quite pale and a little green around the edges. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Niamh knows she’s water,” said the Crow Girl. “She understands water, and water hasn’t forsaken her. I don’t know what I am.”

  “How do you not know what you are?” asked Zib.

  “Crows are air,” said the Crow Girl. “But humans can be anything. Four humans in a pack can belong to four different kingdoms, follow four different elements. I’m human as often as I’m crows. I don’t know where I belong. I gave that up when I gave away my name. Whatever I am is half-air, because crows, and air and water are friends, but they’re not the same thing. The part of me that’s air is in a panic. It wants to fly away, because I shouldn’t be surrounded by water and not able to stop myself from sinking.”

  “So you do know something,” said Zib.

  “I know a lot of things, but I don’t know which of them is meant to be important right now, and if you know it you should tell me,” said the Crow Girl.

  “You know you’re not water, or you’d feel safe right now, like you were supposed to be right where you are.”

  The Crow Girl brightened. “That’s true! When I find the thing that doesn’t make me feel like this, I’ll know I’ve found the thing I belong to.”

  Niamh also pulled her hands out of the water, and the current that had been driving them forward died back into ordinary waves, leaving them to nestle gently against the side of the bigger ship, like a leaf bumping into the shore. The sailor at the oars looked relieved, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting, “Permission to come aboard!” up at the waiting deck.

  It didn’t sound like a question. It didn’t sound like a command. Zib frowned, looking to Avery for clarification. He shrugged. “Sometimes grownups say things that only matter because they have to be said,” he said. “It’s a ritual thing, that’s what my father says. It’s just doing what’s supposed to be done.”

  “Huh,” said Zib, as a rope ladder unfurled from the ship’s edge, dropping down to land a few feet from the rowboat.

  The sailor gestured to it grandly. “After you,” he said.

  Zib, who had never seen a challenge she didn’t want to climb, was the first to move. She flung herself at the rope ladder with giddy abandon, grabbing hold of the rungs and swarming upward as nimbly as a lemur. The gentle sway and roll of the ship didn’t appear to slow her in the slightest, and in a matter of seconds, she was at the top, climbing over the ship’s rail to the deck.

  Oh, but we cannot stay with her there, for all that things are happening, for we must get the others aboard. Down in the rowboat, Avery and the Crow Girl exchanged a queasy look, both all too aware that they lacked Zib’s talents in this arena. Slowly, Avery moved toward the rope, leaned out, and grabbed hold of it, pulling himself up.

  It was difficult. But the second rung was more so, as his arms and shoulders protested this ill treatment. He forced himself to keep climbing. It was the only way to reach the top. The ladder sagged and then stabilized as someone else hopped on; he looked back to see the Crow Girl pulling herself miserably along. If his arms were unaccustomed to supporting his weight, what must it be like for someone who normally flew away whenever things got difficult? Not many aspects of her bird bodies seemed to translate into her human one; all that flying had done nothing to make her arms stronger.

  And why wasn’t she flying away? She should have done it on instinct if nothing else, rather than struggling with the rest of them.

  The sailor was the next to mount the rope ladder, after a brief argument with Niamh, who remained in the boat as she watched him climb away. Finally, last of them, she took hold of the bottom rung, and grimaced as the natural and integral dampness of her hands soaked it clean through, leaving it too slippery for anyone else to use.

  The sailor and Niamh were better climbers than Avery and the Crow Girl, and quickly caught up with them. The sailor smirked a little as he tilted his head back and called to the top, “Reel us in!”

  The ladder began to move, hauled over the rail by strong, practiced hands, pulling all four of its passengers along. Avery, who was halfway up, swallowed his protests. He didn’t want to climb the rest of the way. His desire not to do that was stronger than the need to yell at the sailor for not telling him that they could be pulled before exhausting themselves.

  He was the first of the three to reach the rail. He grabbed it, transferring his grip from rope to wood, and tumbled onto the deck, landing at the feet of the two men who were pulling in the ladder. They smirked down at him and kept hauling.

  And now we will step back a bit, to when Zib first set foot on that same deck, that we might braid the two experiences together into a single strand of story, unbroken and unbreaking. She tumbled over the rail, unable to quite keep her grasp on the slick wood, and landed on her bottom with a solid thump. Zib was the veteran of a hundred tumbles, a thousand falls, and barely noticed the impact. She was too busy gazing at the woman who was waiting for her there, next to the mast.

  The woman was tall, with broad hips and broad shoulders, and a waist that pinched inward to form an hourglass, no doubt helped by the black leather cincher she wore, which seemed to Zib to be something like a very broad belt that wound the woman in, compressing her into a reduced amount
of space. It did no good, no good at all, for there was nothing that could have been done to make this woman seem small; she was designed and destined to occupy entire oceans. Her face was not what Zib had been taught to consider “beautiful,” being sharp and cold instead of rounded and warm, but her eyes were the color of sunlight on the sea, and her hair was as gray as foam against the beach, falling in a froth to her waist, as wild and unconstrained as the rest of her. A black band that looked very much like the cincher kept the hair away from her face, which was probably safer, for when the ship was in motion, the wind would be high.

  She wore a red vest and tight black trousers and impractical red boots, and Zib fell in love with her instantly. She scrambled to her feet, pushing her own tangled hair back with both hands.

  “Who are you?” asked the woman.

  “Hepzibah,” said Zib. “But everyone calls me ‘Zib.’”

  “Still growing into your name,” said the woman. “You can call me Captain Άlas. This is my ship, the Windchaser. My word here is law. Do you understand, Zib?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Zib, and bowed shallowly, unsure of what else she should do. “I appreciate you letting us come on board.”

  “Don’t make me regret it,” said the captain, and then came the shout from below, and the rope was pulled to the deck, and the two stories reunited.

  Avery fell over the rail with a loud thump and stayed motionless where he fell for several seconds, until one of the sailors grasped his arm and pulled him to his feet. The Crow Girl was next over the rail. She scrambled to her feet almost immediately, looking around with wide, terrified eyes. The feathers of her dress puffed out slightly, as if she was trying to make herself look bigger.