Wayfarer

“And you believe her? After the trick she pulled?” Sophia pressed. “She told us all that nonsense about the Thorns to get us to trust her enough not to question the terms of the deal. Forget her. I’d rather travel to Carthage on a chance than believe her ever again.”

She was right. If nothing else, they needed to leave this infernal place. Nicholas straightened, cracking his knuckles at his side to try to release the pressure that seemed ready to shoot from his hands.

This is shameful. I’m falling apart like a boy during his first boarding. Pull yourself together, man.

Nicholas passed through the alchemy workshop at a near run, and took the stairs two at a time. Sophia kept pace with him, plundering the depths of her extensive knowledge of profanities as she misjudged the distance of a step and fell forward, catching herself on her hands. She sprang up the last few steps, nearly spitting on Nicholas’s offered hand. “I don’t need your bloody help!”

“Then you won’t have it,” he shot back.

The golden-haired boy didn’t look up from his book as they passed. With a chill that sank into his bones, Nicholas realized the woman was behind the counter again, the bloodred candle glowing beside her.

“Come again, your business is appreciated!” she sang out.

He and Sophia made matching rude gestures.

“Tell your mistress I’m coming back to skin that overgrown dog of hers,” Sophia said to the boy, “and turn it into my next coat!”

He looked up, pale eyes shining with tears at the mere thought. “Selene?”

“All right, no, I won’t,” Sophia called back. “But tell her I said it!”

Nicholas chased his anger as he left the store, trying to master it before it mastered him. Rain rushed down the back of his neck, soaking him through in moments. He would have welcomed a bitter wind, anything to cool the monster of grief sweltering inside of him. Instead, the heat that started in his right hand, the ring finger, seemed to throb like a second heartbeat in his body. When he finally looked up, the city was lost to the fog, disappearing like the beautiful dream it was.

“Which way?” he asked Sophia. “How do we get to Carthage?”

“Follow me,” she said, turning north.

And with no other choice obvious to him, he did.

RATHER THAN WASTE WEEKS TRAVELING BY SEA, Sophia charted a journey for them across the years and continents that involved a considerable amount of danger, but—blessedly—less vomit from her seasickness.

First, a journey back, yet again, to the swamps of Florida, and several hours of navigating murky waters and wasting coins to bribe the pitiful guardian punished with watching the passage there. That deposited them in Portugal, in what Sophia claimed was the thirteenth century. From there, they walked to yet another passage, this one leading to Germany in the tenth, and finally, after stealing a pair of horses and nearly bringing the wrath of a whole village down upon them, they found themselves in 1700, this time in Tarragona, in the region of Catalonia.

Of course, as seemed to be their lot, Nicholas and Sophia spent hours following the shoddy dirt roads on foot in the hope that her memory would serve them better than his own judgment. To pass the time, he tried to muster up what details he could about Carthage after years of the memories collecting dust. Perhaps the facts that remained would offer some protection against what might lie ahead.

Much of said knowledge had come from Hall, whose retention of maritime history remained relatively sharp, if slightly rusted by age and exposure to too much sun. The ancient city of Carthage, once Rome’s great rival, lay in a supreme position on the northeast coast of Africa, with sea inlets to the north and south. Its immense wealth, without the flash of Rome’s opulence, was owed to the fact that all ships passing in and out of the Mediterranean sailed through the gap between it and Sicily.

There had been three separate Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage; the one Hall recalled best, the second, had produced Hannibal, who had been a great favorite of Chase and Nicholas during the captain’s post-supper tales. The ingenious general had sailed with an army of nearly a hundred thousand men and dozens of elephants, and together they’d torn open Spain and marched through the Alps to Italy. As boys, he and Chase had even attempted to re-create the crossing of the Rhône River by Hannibal’s army, using discarded siding from Hall’s ship as rafts, and rats in the place of elephants.

He tried to take some refuge in those lantern-lit memories, but the longer they walked, the easier it became to slip inside his darker thoughts and dwell there. Save for a few hares, they’d yet to encounter another living soul; while he’d taken careful count of the weapons Sophia had strapped to her body, he could no longer be sure there wasn’t yet another knife hidden somewhere on her person—or that she wouldn’t use it to strand him here and continue on without him. Or worse.

She cannot kill me without the nearby passage closing, he thought. How comforting.

The deception from the Belladonna had rattled him, but now he found himself regretting how easily he had trusted Sophia when she’d argued in favor of traveling to Carthage; he’d followed her to this spot, which might not lead them to Carthage at all, but a grisly death or yet another ruse.

Nicholas’s hands curled into fists at his sides, bunching the already-tight muscles of his shoulders. He was useless as a traveler. Why couldn’t he have pushed harder to learn the locations of the passages? Why did he have to place his trust back in an Ironwood, especially one who hated him with a force that could grind whole mountains to dust?