Chapter Eight

Crystal Clarity

For Elias, home had long been an idea. Home was what he brought with him. Home was his mother’s legacy. Home was everything she had dreamed of for her son and everything he had dreamed of for himself. No, home wasn’t the bed he slept in. Home was the notebook tucked under his pillow.

But for the first time in nearly three years, Elias wondered if he might grow attached to his newly rented bedroom. He shouldn’t, he told himself. This was Bertrand’s house, not his. He was paying for the privilege of being here, even if it was at a discount.

Still, he had never enjoyed accommodation such as this. Bertrand insisted they were not a wealthy family, merely a “comfortable one.” Perhaps that’s what Elias had been missing all these years: comfort. In the room he’d been renting in Acreton, he had heard every footstep thundering past his paper-thin door, every drunk protesting their drunkenness outside his window. Every creak. Every snore. Now he scarcely heard a sound. Comfortable he was.

As was the featherbed once slept in by Bertrand’s sister. There was an oval painting of Sorea Fairweather collecting dust atop her emptied dresser (Elias had only filled a single drawer). He thought she looked pretty and perhaps adopted, though he never relayed this observation to her brother. It was just a painting, after all. Much like the best coin tricks, people in portraits were seldom as they appeared.

But more than any other piece of furniture, it was the wooden writing desk centered beneath the bedroom’s sole window that Elias appreciated most. Mornings dappled its oak surface with hues of gold as the eastern sun slipped through the yellowing maples outside. Evenings colored the wood a flickering orange as he scribbled away by candlelight.

More often than not, he took notes. Lessons he had learned. Ideas worth further consideration. Questions in need of answers. When his brain tired of deep contemplation, Elias drew. He thought he might sketch more scenes from Sailor’s Rise, but now that he knew what the city actually looked like, he lacked the inspiration. His hand followed his heart, and his heart followed roads yet traveled.

On one particularly inspired evening, Elias drew an airship. It wasn’t The Sleeping Sparrow or any airship he had ever seen. Rather, it was the airship he carried with him. He added scale-like patterns to the ship’s hull, a detail he recalled from the Valshynarian vessel that had saved them a month earlier.

Elias cracked his cramped fingers and placed down his dull pencil, staring at his latest drawing alongside the many others he had sketched in recent days, arranged chaotically across his desk or else propped against the window.

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Alas, drawing a dream was infinitely easier than achieving said dream.

He poured out the contents of his coin purse and counted eight relics. He’d been employed at Fairweather Provisions for a month now, and this was what he had to show for it. Elias’s aim was to save half the relics he was paid, but life had undermined that plan on a couple of occasions.

He still did not know what exactly he was saving for. His last goal had been so clear: save for a ticket to Sailor’s Rise, and then—and then he would figure out the and then part. At least he had an objective now, an aspiration against which he might measure himself. He would create a business like no other. Still, there were a thousand steps between the one he stood on now and that outrageous fantasy.

Elias picked up a single relic and stared into it. How many of these would he need along the way, he wondered? No doubt more than could be counted by one man.

Relics had always fascinated Elias. They were, as their name suggested, relics from the past, each one a translucent chunk of mineral roughly the size of a bullet. No two were exactly identical in size or shape, but as the material was unbreakable and could thus not be reforged into precisely equal parts, empires and traders alike simply agreed that a relic was a relic.

After all, relics were the perfect currency, as impossible to counterfeit as they were to destroy. Some said they were a gift from the gods, intended for their very purpose. Elias wasn’t sure what he believed.

In the sunny streets of Acreton, where countless coins were counted and haggled, the iridescent mineral was an accidental sun catcher in the palms of weary traders. And yet the colors that emanated from inside relics sometimes surprised Elias. There was something special about the material, though Melo and Ginger had always claimed they couldn’t see it—that he was simply searching for treasure in the mundane. A relic was a relic, they said, nothing more.

In the halo of his oil lamp, Elias caught twinkles of jade and amber as he pinched the mineral between two fingers.

He considered all that this relic meant to him. An idea had placed itself in his mind, though from where he could not say. He imagined his dreams had coalesced into a single, colossal crystal, only to be shattered into a million shards just like this one. Piece by piece, the idea went, Elias might repair what was once a great gemstone. He might repair what was once whole. As he imagined what that moment would feel like, how such power would ignite his smoldering soul, Elias wrapped his fingers around the relic and squeezed.

He squeezed until he felt its jagged edges dig into his flesh.

He squeezed until—until he felt nothing at all.

Elias opened his hand to an empty palm.

Bertrand knocked on his door, opening it at the same time.

“Ready for the Night Market?” He leaned in, sporting the black leather tricorne he’d purchased that afternoon. “I mentioned tonight was the Night Market, no?”

Elias was still recovering from what he had just witnessed. He shook his head a few seconds too late. “Bertrand,” he said, “remember that relic I lost on The Sleeping Sparrow, right after we came out of the sky rift?”

It took Bertrand a moment. “Sure. What of it?”

“Did anyone ever find it?”

“If they did, it’s a good bet they kept it. Probably already spent it on rum.” Bertrand eyed the pile of relics on the desk beside Elias. “Looks like you’ve acquired some new ones, in any event. How about bringing a few to the Night Market? I take it you don’t have other plans.” Bertrand peered at the pencil rolling off Elias’s notebook.

Elias caught the pencil as it crested the ledge and shook his head once more, his eyes still fixed on his empty palm.