Wayfarer

Nicholas was, in fact, rather curious to see if anything had been altered in the course of the war, due to the timeline shifting to its original state. But he was equally as frightened to search out the answers.

“He wasn’t defeated on Long Island.” Chase’s lower jaw, heavy with blond whiskers now, jutted out as his pale blue eyes narrowed on Nicholas. “It was a strategic relocation of his forces.”

Nicholas laughed, his first true laugh in quite some time. “Now you sound like Etta, turning over manure and calling it soil.”

Nicholas did not understand the rise of Chase’s brows, the suggestion tucked into his smirk. “Etta?”

The spray of seawater against Nicholas’s face did nothing to ease the rush of hot blood there, the clench of his heart. “That is—”

“Ehhhh-tah. Etta, Etta, Etta.” Chase toyed with the name, rolling it over his tongue. “Who is this lovely Etta? Oh, do not be cross with me about that—of course she’s lovely, if she caught your eye. Where is she? In Charlestown? Is that who was keeping you from us?”

Nicholas pressed his hand to his throat, pulling the tie loose to bring more air into his chest. Hall was a guardian, but Chase and the rest of the crew were not. And now there was no recognition at all on Chase’s face as he spoke, as he’d turned Etta into a stranger.

“I said to the others, a simple sickness would not have kept Nick from the fight, I did! Tell me, did she issue tender…ministrations?”

He closed his eyes, the feel of her smooth cheek against his own still so close to him. The gates were down now, and the flood of feeling and memory devastated him as any hurricane would. His mind had not let him dream of her, unless it was a nightmare—her mother slowly bleeding to death, her wrenching sobs, the future she returned to alone. He was caught by those thoughts, hooked clean through his center, and he could no more escape being wrecked by them than he could avoid Chase’s concerned gaze.

“Nick,” Hall called from behind him. “A word, please.”

Chase put a hand on his shoulder, but Nicholas dodged it neatly, his eyes fixed on the black ribbon that gathered the captain’s faded red hair. He trailed several steps behind him to the cabin, and let the man shut and lock the door behind him. Without needing to be prompted, Nicholas took one of the seats in front of the imposing table that served both as a place to eat supper and a place to spread out the charts and maps.

The captain pressed a glass of amber liquid in his hand, and came around to lean against the desk. Nicholas sniffed at it, but was too wary of the knots lingering in his stomach to drink it just yet.

“You look worse than when I found you,” the captain said at last. “I cannot bear to see you this way. If you won’t tell me what’s the matter, I’ll keelhaul you until you’re picking barnacles out of your teeth.”

“I’ve healed,” Nicholas said, his eyes on the map of the colonies, on the narrow harbor of Manhattan. “Even my hand.”

“However, the bruising runs deep,” Hall said. “You told me of your travels, the auction, Ironwood’s death. But nothing of what you intend to do now with your…newly acquired gift.”

“And I never shall,” Nicholas said.

“My dear boy,” Hall began, crossing his arms over his broad chest, “am I wrong to say that perhaps something unexpected has happened? That, if we were to take account of the night of the auction, we might discover that you walked away with…”

“Don’t,” Nicholas begged, his voice cracking. “Don’t put it into words. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand the stars. I cannot…It cannot be.”

He could not hope for it. If his resolve cracked just once, he would scour the earth for the means to open a passage to Etta, to her future. And that would defeat the very reason he had destroyed the astrolabe in the first place.

I cannot be selfish. No man is meant to have everything.

His life had merged with the very thing his family had hunted and killed for. This ancient thing—the astrolabe—born again. As stubbornly resistant to death, it would appear, as Nicholas.

Was Etta alive? Was she safe in her future? Sophia, Julian, Nicholas, Li Min…all of them flung across the centuries, forever out of one another’s reach.

But not mine.

Nicholas batted the thought away, gripping the arms of the chair tight enough for the wood to creak.

“But you worry for the others, don’t you?” Hall had read him flawlessly. “It weighs on you, not knowing their fates, when it is within your power to.”

My power. When he considered the weight of that, his heart seemed to thunder as the passages had.

“It is not as easy as that,” he managed to say. “The passages were the source of strife, the heart blood of it. I would need to open them again, to spend years searching out the others, and by then, anything might happen to the other travelers.” The skin of his palm was still stiff, thicker than it had been before. He clenched his fist again, trying to hide the markings burned into it. “I understand so little of what’s happened. The terms of it are beyond my fathoming. The ancient ones who toyed with us extended their natural years by consuming the other astrolabes. Is that what’s to become of me?”

“Did they bear a mark like yours?” Hall asked. “Or did they consume the power of the astrolabes some other way?”

Nicholas could not recall any such markings on the ancient man, though he vaguely recalled markings of some kind on the Belladonna, who—he was sure of it—had drawn them all to that temple for some purpose other than an auction. The true picture eluded him, but he could guess. He wondered if, perhaps, the alchemist’s daughter had survived in the same manner the son had.