Chapter Three

Clouded Views

While the darkness had swallowed them quickly, their blue-sky world returned in the way details slowly filter through a thinning cloud—a sailing simile that would have been lost on Elias up until a few days ago. But new experiences were finding him faster than he could have bargained for, and bargained for them he had.

His first clear view was of Bertrand patting his chest and stomach, apparently checking that he had not lost some part of himself in the void. Elias suffered a spell of vertigo but, like everyone else on board, nothing that would leave a scar. Not a physical scar anyway. He couldn’t recall the last time he had experienced such dread, nor such excitement.

Captain Fairweather was first to fully regain his composure, staring out from the bow at their Valshynarian rescuers, who had once again reappeared ahead of them. Aside from the second ship, the scene looked like the one they had left behind. The snow-capped mountains were back, still stenciled against a clear sky, though its cobalt color was dimming to a darker navy. Time had indeed passed in the portal, and dusk would soon steal the light of day. At least their oil lamps were already burning.

And yet, upon closer inspection, Elias concluded that these weren’t the same mountains as before, similar though they might be. Had they passed through space as well as time?

He reached into his vest pocket once more—and felt nothing but the copper he kept for coin tricks. Where was his relic, he wondered? He had gripped the coin a minute ago, right as they passed through the portal.

Bertrand must have witnessed his confusion. “Missing something?” he asked once he was done patting himself.

“My relic,” Elias said. “The captain took pity on me this morning and refunded me a single relic after I mentioned I’d spent all of mine to come aboard this ship. He said I’d need it in Sailor’s Rise. Anyway, the relic is gone.”

“Perhaps you misplaced it,” Bertrand said.

“That’s the thing: I was holding onto it just a minute ago when we passed through the portal.” Elias surveyed the deck below his feet. “Could I have dropped it somehow?” He asked the question to a reality that wasn’t conforming to expectation, but neither person could spot a relic anywhere around them.

“Did you recognize that woman?” Bertrand inquired after a moment of searching.

Elias was taken aback as he grudgingly gave up on the coin. “I’d never met a Valshynarian in my life before today.” The cool wind once again tousled his chestnut hair.

“Just strange, is all,” Bertrand said, softening his tone.

“What’s strange?”

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“The attention she gave you. Everyone was watching.” As their conversation carried over the gusting breeze, it became uncomfortably clear that everyone was still watching, their attention gravitating toward the two teenagers quibbling on the main deck. “Sorry, Elias. Not trying to interrogate you. The Valshynar are weird. That’s pretty much their defining quality.”

“Honestly, I wish I knew why she spoke to me,” Elias said, which was certainly true. He desperately wanted to know why that woman had paid him so much attention while ignoring everyone else, whether it meant something or nothing at all. He wanted to believe it meant something, but he couldn’t surmise even a single satisfactory explanation, and so he told himself that it was probably the latter—perhaps a joke he didn’t understand. The Valshynar were weird, like Bertrand said.

But The Sleeping Sparrow’s nosy crew were growing ever nosier, until one man inserted himself into their conversation. “You got the same eyes as them,” he said as others nodded, craning their necks to get a better view of the exceptional eyes in the question. “Goddamn eyes are greener than”—he racked his brain for things that were green—“a very green frog.” There were more nods.

Now the sailors were forming a circle around Elias. Bertrand may not have intended an interrogation, but an interrogation this had quickly become. Elias felt at once worried and frustrated. He had done nothing to warrant their unspecified accusations. At least Leon had already been escorted below deck. Still, he wasn’t the only foolhardy sailor aboard The Sleeping Sparrow.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Elias said, and he really didn’t.

“What did she whisper into your ear?” another crew member asked.

“She didn’t whisper anything into my ear.” Elias’s incredulity was now plain. “You all heard every word of our exchange. She just asked where I’d come from and where I was going.”

“Seems like a suspicious coincidence, doesn’t it?” a voice added. “You being here, us nearly eating the black.”

Elias was unfamiliar with the phrase, just as he was unfamiliar with sky rifts and the Valshynar and everything else tangled up in this knotted conspiracy.

“By that logic, our salvation is the greater coincidence, is it not?” Elias pointed out, exchanging glances with every one of them, for it was the crowd that needed convincing. “Bertrand told me that very few ships make it out of sky rifts. If anything, maybe you should be thanking me.”

Alas, his rhetorical argument failed at its purpose, further fueling their suspicion, adding to the pile of coincidences that added up to his supposed guilt. Only Bertrand seemed to follow anything resembling logic, his remorseful gaze apologizing for starting this. Though Elias suspected that, if not his acquaintance, someone else was bound to have started something. It’s just how people were. He was young and untraveled and inexperienced, but that much he knew.

“And how exactly did you afford this trip?” The accuser was the man who had hurled the first proverbial stone, now hurling another. “I’ve met piss-poor boys from Acreton just like you. They can barely buy their next meal, let alone passage to Sailor’s Rise.”

“That’s enough.” Captain Fairweather’s booming interjection forced their silence.

Elias felt a sense of relief, followed by a rising wave of concern that the captain might have inquiries of his own—not that Elias had anything to hide. Still, questions were often more dangerous than their answers.

“This young man is a paying passenger aboard my ship.” Captain Fairweather emphasized the latter half of that sentence as their circle disbanded around him. “He has done nothing wrong, and he has a right to his privacy.”

“I’m not trying to be private,” Elias felt the need to say. “I’m not hiding anything. Really.”

“Then how’d you scrape together enough coin for a trip like this?” a scarred woman asked.

The captain curled his lip at the mutinous question, but while Elias had little wealth—in spite of whatever they might think—he did have yet another tale worth telling.

The young traveler searched for a beginning on the horizon. Oddly, the Valshynarian ship was nowhere to be seen, having departed without so much as a proper goodbye. Elias wondered how the vessel could have possibly vanished already as he turned to face an eager audience.

“Perseverance,” he told them.