Page 79 of Search for the Lost

“You got it, boss. One disappointing human city coming right up.”

The mirror’s surface spiraled, and then they were falling, sucked in by its eldritch powers and Thea’s guidance.

Falling, falling, falling toward the prow of a broken ship. Crispin put his arms over his face⁠—

Bam. Bam bam bam bam bam.

The members of the party slammed against the wooden deck of the ship, shattering it and sending it flying across the room in a thousand pieces.

Crispin lay amid the wreckage, stunned for a moment. What in the Ghost Moon was the prow of a ship doing inside this cavernous room? The windows around the edge of the room showed darkness; they must have arrived late at night. Only a few scattered ceiling lights provided illumination. Maybe the ship was in for repair, but the rest of it was nowhere to be seen, and this part…. Well, this part is beyond repair now.

Leo bounced up onto his feet, looking around the room, absentmindedly plucking splinters out of his palm while a couple pink noses sniffed the air from his T-shirt pocket. “Hey, I know this place.” Then his features sagged. “Oh no.”

“Oh no, what?” Crispin got up carefully, stepping off of a rocking remnant of the ship onto solid ground. That was a rough landing. Thea was usually more careful than that in her transitions.

“This is….” Leo gulped. “Well, this was the Arabia.”

Cypher dusted off his flanks. It was strange seeing the faun as a human, and a fairly handsome one at that. “Going to need more….”

Crispin chuckled softly. Rarely did anyone ask Leo to talk more.

“It’s… it was a steamboat. They found it underground on this guy’s farm. It was preserved in a peat bog for over a century.” He sounded sad. “The Arabia was a supply boat bound for a bunch of the new towns out here in the 1850s. They even found a jar of pickles so well preserved they could still eat them⁠—”

“The Arabia?” Crispin put a hand on Leo’s shoulder.

Leo blinked. Adorably. And nodded. “Right. This was part of the original steamboat. They say it took, like, ten years of spraying it with a preservative day and night to stop it from deteriorating… and now….” There was a hitch in his voice. He picked up a piece of broken, blackened wood and caressed it. “Now, we’ve broken it.” He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “I came here with my parents as a boy.”

Crispin closed his eyes. He knew what that felt like, reliving those precious memories you held onto from childhood, as one of his own slipped past his guard and into his consciousness….

* * *

“Mamma, what is it?” Crispin looked up, wide-eyed, at the behemoth before them.

They stood on a long wooden dock next to a choppy sea, the wind whipping his hair wildly, like the invisible fingers of an air demon. The queen had brought him along with her on a special voyage to christen a ship at the Royal Port of Esphair, on the mostly water world of Coralain.

It was a stormy day, pregnant purple clouds blocking most of the world’s orange sky.

The ship in question, the Rebel Diver, bobbed up and down on the waves, her sleek silver hull surely made from the terralin trees, fuzzy giants with frothy pink fronds that danced in the wind all along the shore. The Coralainians had paid dearly for his mother’s blessing of their new vessel.

Crispin reached out to touch the boards of the hull, in awe of the fact that the ship had been made—built, not magicked—by someone’s hands. Many someones, apparently. How had they ever conceived of, let alone actually put together such a glorious and complicated thing?

His mother knelt next to him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

He nodded. In that moment, he wanted to become a sailor more than anything in the whole Connected Worlds, to ride the bucking ship over the waves, to discover magical new places. “How…?” but he couldn’t put his wonder in words.

Still, she understood. “Community. People working together are their own kind of magick.” And she’d leaned in to kiss his cheek.

In that moment she was just his mother, not the fearsome Queen of the Fae.

It was one of the few times they had been alone together away from home, without Aspin or the Royal Court, and he would treasure it always.

* * *

“We’re our own kind of magick.” Crispin blinked. He hadn’t thought about that moment in years. “But why here?”

The little troop—his own community—had regrouped, though little-boy Minkis was picking through the wreckage, maybe looking for an acorn to snack on.

“What do you mean?” Aspin frowned. “Maybe Thea needs an attitude adjustment.”