“Nolan wants to play,” he says.
My eyes droop from sleep deprivation, but it’s the first time he’s ever said my name. “Of course I do.”
About half an hour passes, and Malia opens the door to her room and kneels to pass my son to me. He yawns, then nuzzles into my shoulder. Michael waits until Malia is out of sight, then leans over to pat John gently on the back.
“Baby nephew can go to sleep now,” he says.
I smile.
“What do you think, Michael?” I ask as we wind a train track through the hallway, the wooden floorboards so much harder on my knees than they used to be. “Do you think I’m making the right decision, leaving all of this behind?”
“Last one to the top’s dead meat.” Michael bounces to his feet and races down the hallway, leaving me stranded with a pile of boxcars and a half-built track.
I consider cleaning it up, but John is stirring in my arms, and frankly, I don’t feel like it quite yet. And it’s still my ship, after all. So I rise to my feet and follow in the direction Michael just took off to.
I have a feeling I know where he is anyway.
Darling meets me on deck, still rubbing her eyes from her nap. When she holds her arms out for our son, I hand him over, and she wraps him close to her chest, rubbing her nose against his head full of hair as a soft smile plays on her lips. “Michael just raced past here. Any idea what that’s about?”
“I might have an inkling.” A quick scan of the deck reveals no Michael, but I wasn’t expecting for it to, either.
Wendy glances at me, a question in her eyes, but I just plant a kiss on her forehead and rub my palm over my son’s head before jogging off.
When I reach the base of the ladder leading up the mast, I let out a groan. Those Darlings and their obsession with heights.
It’s not that I fear the heights, so much as the idea of my wife’s brother falling.
It doesn’t take long to scale the ladder, and when I reach the crow’s nest, I find my instincts led me well. Michael is seated—that part, at least, is a relief—on the floor of the crow’s nest. In fact, the term nest has taken on a different meaning. There are objects strewn everywhere, some of them toys, some of them random items Michael must have collected from around the ship.
“You know I’m going to have to tell your sister that you play up here,” I say, peering down at Michael.
At first, he ignores me, but then he points to a stack of books to his right. When I kneel to take a closer look, I find he has them stacked oddly. Two of the books are upright on their sides, another book balancing across them, two more forming atent atop that one. It takes me a moment to realize he has them arranged to look like a house.
Inside the house are dolls—a man, a woman, a boy, and a baby.
Michael hums quietly, then, without looking at me, takes my hand and moves it toward the imaginary house. As he leads my hand to play with the dolls, I fight the tears welling up in my eyelids.
“I take this to mean you think I’m making the right decision, then?”
Michael continues to hum contentedly. Once he grows weary of playing with the house and moves on to disassembling the house and flipping through the pages of the books, I stand and make my way to the edge of the crow’s nest.
In the distance, beyond the blue-limned horizon, is the vast world. Mine is on deck, swaying back and forth with a child sleeping against her shoulder.
EPILOGUE
There is a manor carved into the mountainside on the outskirts of Estelle. It is whispered among the townspeople who reside at the base of the mountain that inside lives the family of the only woman of this generation ever to have met the Youngest Sister.
She and her husband are rumored to be touched with a gift from the lost Sister herself, matching Mating Marks of gold, one half on the cheek of the woman, the other overtaking the man’s entire torso.
It is said that the husband sacrificed his hand on their venture to meet the Youngest Sister, and when the couple arrived seeking her blessing, the kindest of the Fates was heartbroken to discover the man had harmed himself in order to seek her out.
Still, the Youngest Sister was so touched, she had blessed the couple with not only the Mating Marks, tethers binding their souls forever, but also with a child—a son with all the strength of his father, all the kindness of his mother. Not only that, but the Youngest Sister had been so pleased with the couple, she had visited them only a few years later, this time blessing them witha daughter in the spring. Another little girl followed the next autumn.
The Shade, the being once called by the name of Peter, knows these rumors to be lies concocted by a romantic people in search of something exciting to fulfill their provincial existence.
The Shade remembers that craving—the one for anticipation itself. But the Shade learned long ago that anticipation is a fickle thing.
Better to have one’s desires satisfied.
