I sat at dinner with my family, my father and mother seated side by side at the broad head of the table with the rest of us on either side - the girls sat to mother's left and the boys to father's right, terminated by Chiaro and me seated across from one another at the smaller base of the table, as per Selenite tradition. I sat at dinner in my fine, frilly dress as Aschli, our kitchen maid, carefully placed a cold mug next to my plate.

"What have you got there, juli?" my father asked me affably - juli meaning 'sweet' or 'my sweet' in Selenic.

"It's a beetle crème, papa!" I said, taking a nice big gulp of the beverage, black chitinous legs still wriggling as they made their way down my throat… but the taste was quite good!

My mother sighed. "Honestly, I don't know where she gets these foreign ideas from… I recognize her less and less every day."

"I drank one with my friends Mailyn and Aldo," I said, treading carefully. "They're… um…" my voice dropped to a whisper… "they're poor."

"Ah… well… that's no worry," my father said. "We're poor, too."

"What?"

Looking past my parents, I could see through the big palladian window and out into the courtyard, where the trellis for mother's rose vines was aflame, the flowers black and dead and blowing away in the wind.

Next to my father, my eldest brother, Chansone, squared his shoulder and raised his pointer finger, as if to lecture me. "We've given our estate to Duke Orsino - he has requested and we've delivered. It's our duty as his subjects."

"I'm not anybody's subject!" I stated. Across from me, Chiaro started crying. Heavy boots tromped about upstairs. Wood cracked. Glass shattered.

"Everybody is somebody's subject," my mother stated. "It's only right that we subjugate ourselves to our betters…"

"They're not my betters! They're worse! Much worse!"

"No, juli. Act like a lady. Is that any way to speak to your duke?"

The dining room doors opened and a trio of Lapis-Crowns strutted into the room. The one in the middle was tall and portly, his dark mask smooth and glassy like obsidian. Upon his head sat an actual crown of solid, sky-blue lapis lazuli - the Crown of Barsoa. He lifted his mask slowly, and beneath it was only indistinct, terrible darkness.

"Alvie, give him your seat," my mother commanded.

Before I could object, I realized that all three Lapis-Crowns had taken seats, and that they now sat at the broad head of the table, my parents smiling vacantly to either side of them, their fine clothes gone to dirty rags, their hands bound in heavy chains. Then Duke Orsino and the Lapis-Crowns began to eat, and with a cold thrill of terror I realized they were devouring me! Each jab of a fork produced a dull throb of pain, and I tried to call out but my voice had been silenced. Even though their faces were inscrutable shadow, I could feel it as they chewed me, my body crushed and severed by sharp teeth. And as they swallowed bite after bite, my vision dimmed… dimmed… and I realized I was fading away. My whole self devoured one bite at a time, the colors washing out, and the world growing dark and indistinct.

In the end, there was only darkness - but the pain remained.

I awoke in a jumble of sheets and limbs with Mailyn sprawled halfway across my body and bending my elbow and wrist into a very uncomfortable sleeping position. With a yelp, I threw myself out of the small bunk and gracelessly tumbled to the floor, fortunately without injury to anything other than my pride. As I shook the painful pins and needles from my arm, Mailyn was already stirring. In the bunk above ours, Aldo slept the sleep of the innocent, as peaceful as you might imagine. He snored softly, a ship's cat curled up and purring upon his chest. I shook the fug of sleep from my head and took in the room, if only to ensure that we weren't back on the Black Swan.

Ours was a small, two-person bunkroom, otherwise unoccupied because a contingent of the Hawk's crew had transferred over to the Auspicio to see it into port at Mizzen. Even though ours was a common sailor's cabin, it was well-apportioned in dark wood, a wall mirror fixed to the bulkhead, four built-in footlockers and a bureau, and three - three! - glowglobes to provide light, only one of them currently alit. I imagine the room was a somewhat cramped space for two adults (four sailors would share the room, but only two would sleep in it per shift), but compared to anything we'd experienced aboard the Auspicio, it was the height of luxury.

With me out of the bunk and tending to my tangle of bed hair, Mailyn stretched out with a contented sigh. "Now I know how them rich passengers feel. You reckon we're still on Captain the Hawk's ship?"

"It's just Captain Hawk," I said.

She rolled her ember-flecked eyes. "Even I know that. It was a joke."

I giggled, and it didn't even feel forced. "It is a little funny that people call him 'the Hawk' like he's an actual bird. Why don't they just call him 'Hawk'?"

"'Cause there's only one of him? You'd have to ask Captain the Hawk."

"There's no way I'm asking him that…"

"Yeah, me either," Mailyn smirked. "What time is it?"

"Only the archangels know," I said. The bunkroom door was unlocked, and the moment I opened it sunlight and warm sea breeze filtered through. After donning my shoes, I padded out, ascended the stairs, and ventured out onto the above decks, squinting against the late morning sun.

The wind whipped in our faces as the Black Swan cut through the water, my hair immediately a mess despite having just reined in my bed head… I really needed to get some hair pins.

"There they are! Our little VIPs," one of the sailors quipped as he passed. He mussed my hair, making it even messier than before. Alas, he was already below decks before I could say anything.

There were only six sailors on the deck, but they went about their jobs with an easy expertise far different from the frenetic hustle I'd observed among the Auspicio's crew - they moved like a well-oiled machine, each aware of what the other was doing and needing no calls or orders to move from one task to the next. Instead, they conversed and joked with one another as they worked. Two women in brown leathers climbed the mainmast in tandem, dangling ten meters up without a care in the world, dexterous as jungle monkeys. They adjusted the rigging, unfurling two smaller sails to either side of the mainsail and invigorating them synchronously, chatting the whole time.

"…so I told him I wasn't even going to consider it until I got back from the tour, and what does he do?"

"He gave it to Margalotta instead, didn't he? The cheeky bastard!"

"He did! I didn't tell him I knew the bracelet was a fake, though - everyone knows real emberglas goes dark in direct light…"

"Ha! Serves him right! Does that mean you two are through?"

"Might give him a second chance… haven't decided yet."

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I leaned over the gunwale and looked out over the open ocean, no land to be seen anywhere on the horizon. As noon approached, the golden sun peeked through fluffy white clouds, and we were well on our way to Floria, making for Floria after parting with the Auspicio on its way to the Mizzen shipyards. A fully-invigorated cargo ship with an expert crew can only make about 15 knots on the open ocean, about 650 kilometers per day, but the Black Swan could go up to 18 once it left the larger ship behind. It took a day and a half to make it from the easternmost reaches of Perdita's waters to Floria, Jewel of the Perditos. While I slept, we'd passed within sight of the Cabezos and threaded between Lerutania and the Admiral Isle, substantial islands in their own right, before we made Perdita, by far the largest island in our archipelago.

"Who wants to learn how to tie a buntline hitch?"

"Ah!" I almost leapt out of my socks - one of the sailors had landed right behind me, silent as a jungle cat.

"I do, miss!" Mailyn volunteered.

Mailyn and I learned half a dozen knots, broke for lunch, and were helping to check ropes for rot or fraying before Aldo finally joined us, stumbling up from our bunk, his sandy blond hair standing up like he'd been struck by lightning. The fix for that was easy enough - he dunked his head in a water bucket, slicked his hair back, and suddenly I was somehow the only one in our trio with messy hair.

We spent the afternoon getting tricked into doing all of the most boring work on the ship in the guise of it being a game or friendly competition. They even had us scrubbing the deck under the excuse that it was some kind of race - we were quickly swept up in a betting competition to see who could swab the most deck in half a bell (one bell being thirty minutes). For the record, I won the competition.

"Looks like Vix is the first among our future Shadows!" Iron-heel observed. My prize was a Durecht bitmark, the rarest coin of negligible denomination that any of the sailors had.

Throughout the day, all of the sailors referred to us as 'future Shadows' and 'young Shadows', though I now know that was half in jest. Of the five hundred or so Scamps enrolled in the Collegium each year, about twenty go on to become Shadows and another one hundred twenty matriculate as 'mere' Greycloaks, all of them considered full Fellows of the Perdita Free Collegium. While most of the Hawk's enlisted sailors were former Scamps, none ever made it past Sneak to Greycloak, let alone full Shadow.

Iron-heel, in particular, seemed to take a liking to us, possibly because her girlfriend in Floria also hailed from our home isle of Barsoa and she wanted to know what to make to give her a taste of home and I was all too happy to give her Mister Rod's recipe for Barsoan-style fish cakes. She steered away from any mention of the Lapis-Cloaks after the first time I became visibly upset by her questions, but asked us to recount our prison-break at least five times. I was a bit embarrassed because Aldo's tales of his own exploits got wilder and wilder with each retelling.

"So I took his sword and… kshhh!" he pantomimed a slicing motion. "His head popped off and sssssssss…" he pantomimed a fountain of liquid. "Blood everywhere! And there was a girl with a broke arm, but I splinted it, an then I was like, 'we gotta go help those guys topside!'"

"It was a knife, Aldo, and it didn't go ssssssss," I said.

Iron-heel giggled. "You're not sore about being separated from your friends, I hope?"

"What friends?" I asked.

"The other kids? On the Auspicio? Barber sailed the ship over to Mizzen on the Admiral Isle - better for processing and refitting. If you bring a ship of refugees right into Floria Harbor, half of 'em will disappear right into the city and you'll never hear from 'em again. Best to get everybody processed the right way before bringing them in."

"We ain't hardly knew those kids anyway," Aldo said. "We met most of 'em the same day we escaped."

"Coulda been friends, maybe," Mailyn added. "There's other kids in Floria, though, right?"

"Oh, yeah, tons," Iron-heel said with a smile. "I came over from Mouldevica when I was a Scamp. Do you know where that is?"

Aldo and Mailyn didn't, but I was always happy to fill them in on politics and geography. I nodded vigorously and recited Elzie's lesson from memory: "I know, Miss Iron-heel! It's a country on the north-western coast of Slartibarica. Mouldevica is a, um… con… confederation of principalities ruled by high king… that's like our prince in Gionia. Um… like their prince in Gionia. Only the last high king got killed before I was born and nobody can decide who the next one is."

The sailor chuckled. "Exactly right, young Shadow. I assume you're most comfortable with Gionian, as that's what you're speaking?" We all nodded and Iron-heel smiled. "You'll find plenty of Gionians in Floria, and there're are folks from all over the place at the Collegium. You'll make lots of friends!"

We ate supper with the crew and drank watered-down ale, which I didn't care for. I still don't care for watered-down ale, though I like the regular article just fine and the extra-strong stuff even better. Then, with the sun setting low over the western waters, we sailed along Perdita's southern coast, along the stretch of semiarid scrub, ancient crumbling hills, and tiny, threadbare fishing villages. Anything further inland than the salt marshes was bone-dry, desiccated by the same deep ocean current that gifts Floria's breadbasket to the east with plentiful rains.

In the russet sunset, fishing boats headed back with their day's catch. Some of the fisherfolk recognized the Black Swan as a member of Perdita's fleet, and they waved at us and we waved back, hopping up and down on the deck and feeling like visiting royalty. Some of them even had the audacity to sail right up within conversational distance. The Black Swan's crew negotiated to trade two octavos and a fistful of tollos for the choicest bits of one boat's catch and, once the catch was hauled aboard, the crew went about partitioning the fish with the same fluid expertise they did everything else with. With flashing blades, they divvied up choice cuts, smaller cuts for breakfast fish cakes, the tithe for the ship's trio of cats (important members of any ship's crew), and leftover bits for stew - in descending order of meat quality.

By half first watch (that's eight o'clock in the evening to most folks), the sun had finally set, fading to a dull violet dusting the distant sea, and not long afterward, Rose Argent strolled out with four steaming mugs of hot chocolate. She sat with us by the ship's wheel near the poop deck and explained how the wheel worked to move the ship's rudder and how you could navigate by the stars if you knew which ones to look for.

"That one is called brankhihez," she said, pointing to a bright smudge near the western horizon. While it was brighter than any nearby star, the faint corona around it suggested that it was a cluster rather than a single star. "This time of year, it points right to the Western equator… its name means 'white cloud' in Perditalog."

"I wish I knew Perditalog," I sighed.

"I bet somebody has a book you could borrow," Rose said off-handedly, perhaps not realizing that this amounted to a sworn promise as far as a seven-year-old was concerned.

"Really?" I was so excited I sloshed hot chocolate onto the wheel.

"Erm… well, probably," she said, and spent the next ten minutes wandering the deck and asking the first shift whether anybody had a Gionian-to-Perditalog phrasebook. Eventually, she found one, bringing it to our little huddle on the poop deck with the smile of a conquering hero. "The assistant quartermaster had one," she said, handing me a creased yellow paperback.

"The Mariner's Primer," I read. The cover boasted writing in three languages, only one of which I recognized.

"It's a phrasebook!" Rose explained. "Each page contains triplets of three lines that say the same thing in Gionian, Perditalog, and Wext."

"Thank you, Miss Rose!" I said with a curtsy.

"Oh… I think I saw a yawn," she said. "I think it's high time for you three to get to bed. Otherwise I won't be able to wake you bright and early when we sail into Floria Harbor tomorrow morning!"

"But I didn't yawn," I said, glancing accusatorially at Mailyn and Aldo, who both shrugged. Perhaps Rose was imagining it?

Regardless, I didn't want to disappoint Rose, who was currently in a several-way tie for the people I wanted to be like when I grew up (racing neck and neck with Herrick the Hawk and the mostly-fictional gentlewoman thief, Silvia Valia). I 'allowed' Rose to escort me back to our bunk, whereupon I opened the primer and began devouring the contents of The Mariner's Primer.

Mailyn sat to my right, her head resting upon my shoulder, her finger tracing along some of the passages as she read them aloud. Meanwhile, Aldo sat atop the bunk's built-in footlockers, a complex expression on his face. I glanced up from the Primer, my eyebrows raising in questioning.

"Am I the only one who don't read?" he asked.

Mailyn shrugged. "Mama…" her expression darkened. "That woman made me learn so I could read scripture."

I can only imagine what paltry instruction the youngest daughter of farmhands become lowly-paid city laborers would have received. However, I don't imagine Mailyn needed much help putting things together once she knew what sounds the letters made. She was already a good reader, if not as fast as I was.

I patted the mattress to my left. "Come on, we'll read it together."

We got through the first ten pages of the book before my eyes grew droopy and my mind begin to fail as I tried to make connections between my native Gionian and the Perditalog translations - the two languages have Old Turan influences, but Perditalog is a mongrel tongue that takes other languages, chops them up, and throws the (arguably) best bits into the constantly-evolving stew of linguistic recombination. Though, as with fish stew, it's often the least appealing bits that give it the most flavor. Soon, the book grew heavy in my hands and my eyes couldn't focus on the text.

"Did your father get a discount from your mother?... Fattrii zu diskontten pistrah 'im ni mattrii zu?" I yawned and set the book aside as Aldo tapped the glowglobe off and we all fell asleep in a jumbled pile on the lower bunk.

Did I emphasize that it was a sailor's phrasebook?