The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl from Everywhere #2)(59)

They were bound in leather and skin, thick with paint and ink and gold leaf. There must have been hundreds—truly a king’s collection, every row full from end to end. But Crowhurst’s revelation was much more impressive. How many other Navigators did history hide? Blake’s own thoughts echoed my own. “Have you met many others?” he asked.

Slowly, Crowhurst lowered himself into a chair by the desk, as though trying to decide what to say. “It’s not an everyday occurrence,” he said finally. “It must have been fate that brought you here.”

“I don’t believe in fate,” I said quickly. The answer was so automatic, I hardly noticed it was a lie.

“No? Well. When your ship appeared on the horizon, it was almost enough to convince me.”

“When the ship appeared?” Blake frowned. “How did you know she was a Navigator then?”

“You both seem quite clever,” Crowhurst said, his eyes still on me. “How do you think I knew?”

His scrutiny made me uncomfortable. I turned to the shelves, trailing my fingers along the spines of the books. How would Crowhurst know what I was? Had he seen us sail out of the fog? He’d spoken to Slate the night we arrived; the captain must have mentioned it then. Or had he?

I stopped before a gap between two quartos, the empty space where a book had once been, and suddenly I remembered torn pages drifting like snow in the wintery wind of the square. The answer came to me in a rising tide. “Something changed when we arrived.”

There was a buttery feeling to the silence. I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, Crowhurst was smiling, smug. “I have a theory about Navigation and probability,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Schr?dinger’s cat? It’s a bit convoluted, but he developed a theory that possibility is infinite until the moment of observation. I think Navigators might be the great observers of the universe. Our arrival shapes the world according to our expectations.”

“Expectations?” Blake glanced from him to me. “What changed, exactly?”

“When I first came to Ker-Ys, everything was very like the original myth.” Crowhurst waved a hand. “There was a rather forward princess, and a king who wore a brass key around his neck. He seemed a good enough man, and he invited Dahut and I to stay here, at the castle, as his guests. Of course, his existence put me in a bit of a quandary. After all, I knew what he and the princess were going to do to the city. But when you appeared, they vanished, Nixie. As though they’d never been.”

“Vanished?” My thoughts scattered like minnows, darting in all directions, then schooling again. “No. I met him.”

“Who?”

“The king. The old one. He was outside the castle the night I met you. He was raving. I—I thought he was mad, but maybe he only remembered his past as a dream. Maybe . . .” I trailed off. The look on Crowhurst’s face was less surprise than calculation.

“We found him the next day,” Blake added then, his tone more certain. “Murdered.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Crowhurst said smoothly. “But I wouldn’t mourn long.”

To my surprise, Blake laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t! You were the one who stole his throne!”

Crowhurst stiffened in his chair. “I beg your pardon?”

“Navigators shape the world,” Blake said. “But so do mapmakers. We arrived on a map you gave us. You used that map and Miss Song’s arrival to overthrow the old king.”

My eyes went wide at his bold accusation, but Crowhurst lifted his chin. “What’s wrong with that? You know what he was going to do if he’d stayed in power. He was going to drown the city. He would have killed his own daughter.”

“His daughter.” I bit my lip. “What was her name?”

“Ahes. Why?”

My breath hitched in my throat. The myths mentioned them both—one drowned, one turned into a mermaid. Hadn’t the madman said his daughter was taken by the sea? And Slate had seen a woman in the water, singing—perhaps it wasn’t a hallucination after all. My thoughts churned as Crowhurst stroked his necklace—the flask with the Greek key design . . . the key . . . the key around his neck. My god. All the different versions now made sense—even the monster in the castle. That was the wolf the old king had mentioned. All except one thing . . . one missing piece. “Do you know anything about a man in a pit?”

Crowhurst froze in his chair, as though my words had turned him to stone. Was it a trick of the light, or did he blanch? “No.”

“Nothing?” I watched him for a long time. There was something here, something he was not saying. Trying to piece it together, I raised my eyes toward the ceiling; above me, the painted stars shimmered in the firelight. There was Cetus, the sea monster, and Aquarius, Pisces, and Eridanus the River. “You say you’ve been able to change the past, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“What do you mean, Nixie?”

I ticked off the names on my fingers. “We have the saint, the dark horse, Dahut, and Grandlon. What’s to guarantee there won’t be a flood at the end of it all?”

“You think I would destroy my own city?”

I bit down on a glib response—but I’d read the articles. Rather than coming clean at the end of the race, Crowhurst had abandoned his family, his ship, his old life. The man was not known for his loyalty, but it wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to point out. “If the past can’t truly be changed, you might not have a choice,” I said instead. My voice was bitter with the truth of it.