The Reader: Chapters 25-32

While Archer lay on the cabin’s long table with the tattered remains of his shirt sheared away, Sefia watched Doc tend to his wounds.

She made each suture perfectly—one neat stitch after another—until they were lined up across Archer’s wounds like sharp black letters, as if every set of stitches was a healing word Doc had written to keep his skin together.

She had been excited to see him—the real Captain Reed!—but at the sight of him her excitement congealed in her stomach. He was angry.

The black gun was beautiful, all gold inlay and ebony carved like dragon scales, but up close she could see how damaged it was: pitted and scratched, flecked with age and long-forgotten acts of violence.

Then her Vision shifted, and she saw the former captain of the Current, a man with a kind face and a bulbous nose, put the Executioner to his temple.

“Cooky and Horse’ve already vouched for you, and Doc . . . Well, I still got questions that need answers. Here’s the deal: you tell me your story—who you really are, what you’re after, what you know about this buck—and the strength of your story’ll determine whether you stay or go. Them terms acceptable to you, little lady?”

Sefia recognized her from the legends about the Current: a stalwart sailor with skin like sunlight on honey and arms tattooed with birds and flowers.

The wooden box was stamped with the insignias of all the ships it had traveled on: each stamp was painted with a black slash after the crate was dropped off, and then it was stamped again before being loaded onto the next ship.

Sefia tensed and glanced at the mate, but his grim face was impassive.

Echoing marble corridors and a round vault door of burnished steel.

The hurried search of the decks, her frustration ceding to worry and abyssal panic when she realized the Assassin was no longer on board.

Escalia was a formidable woman, broad as a man across the shoulders and chest, with an upright bearing that made every room seem to shrink as soon as she entered.

Escalia was a formidable woman, broad as a man across the shoulders and chest, with an upright bearing that made every room seem to shrink as soon as she entered.

She stared into her gray eyes and tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, summoning the words of her oath as if they were an incantation.

“I shall fear no challenge. I shall fear no sacrifice. In all my actions, I shall be beyond reproach.”

In exchange for their assistance with the woman in black, their honesty in retelling their remarkable tale, and the assurance of their continued services, Sefia and Archer had been granted passage to Jahara under the provision that Sefia’s book and lock picks be kept in a safe, with special dispensation for reading when she wasn’t on watch, until she disembarked, at which point they would be returned to her in their original condition.

There was no shortage of duties for her and Archer to perform—scrubbing decks, scouring pots, trimming artichokes for Cooky, who shouted at them if it wasn’t done quick enough—and they were kept so busy that when she did have a free moment, she would fall exhausted into her hammock and sleep until her next watch.

Every so often, the acrid smell wafted over the ship.

They came accompanied by soldiers in blue uniforms with silver epaulets.

Her fingernails dug thick gouges in their skin.

A gaunt man of fifty, the helmsman never left the deck.

Archer was on the mainmast, and the sun shone through the brittle sticks of his hair, turning them gold as sheaves of wheat.

She picked up Archer’s feather, gleaming iridescent green and fuchsia, and ran it along her cheek before tucking it into her hair.

Someone took hold of her. They had her! This wasn’t how it had been. She writhed in their grasp.

“What’s wrong, Sef?” A voice like the bellows of a forge. Large arms and hands like hammers clasped her from behind. “What happened?”

“What’s wrong, Sef?” A voice like the bellows of a forge. Large arms and hands like hammers clasped her from behind. “What happened?”

From the walls, the painted eyes of former Directors seemed to follow him, their faces austere, their lips unmoving.

Their countenances were so lifelike that sometimes he was sure they would leap out of their frames in the deep of night, flat hands grabbing, clothes rippling behind them in unseen winds.

He had at least two hours before the Master Librarian woke from his fitful sleep and came padding among the bookshelves to check a cross-reference, a footnote, a scribble in the margins.

Although at nineteen she was away from the Library more often and their lessons were infrequent, under her tutelage, he finally felt like his progress matched his ambition.

His gaze fell to her hand. It was covered in scars. Notches in her skin. Welts. Nicks and pink punctures. Glittering with history.

Freckled and bespectacled, with unkempt cinnamon-colored hair, Theo was something of an amateur biologist, and had recently adopted Harison’s red lory, a small parrot with blue-tipped wings, which could now often be found perched on his shoulder.

The carpenter held the name between his thick tarry fingers and murmured, “You miss a man so much. ”

Sefia bent over her work while the others anted up coins of varying sizes and degrees of cleanliness: loys from Deliene, caspers and angs from Everica, someone even had a single squint coin from Roku.

“They say he will lead a great army, and he will overcome many foes. He will be the greatest military leader the world has ever seen, and he will conquer all Five Islands in a bloody altercation known as the Red War.”