Much thanks to Absalem131 and LoveSeasons for letting me know that Something Went Wrong posting this chapter the first time. Sorry about that! Hopefully this time it actually works.

Anyway, a time skip will be happening during this chapter because I don't want to bore you all with the entirety of Apple's childhood. Enjoy!

Chapter Three

Blink of an Eye

Cathedral and Chapel set sail again only days after they arrived. Both promised to write me, and write they did. Chapel sent poems, disjointed thoughts and snatches of observation alongside sketches of the islands they visited. Cathedral instead sent rubbings of hieroglyphs, copies of texts, and maps of ruins.

Church shook his head when he saw her letters to me. Marron laughed, but started training me harder than ever before.

"If you want to dig into secrets like that, you'll make enemies. It won't be enough just to know your way around a bar brawl. You've got to know your way around a battlefield now."

But neither of them stopped me, for which I was grateful. If I lost hold of this wild dream of mine, I probably wouldn't have survived.

I studied. I trained. I worked.

And through all of it I strove toward this mysterious ability Cathedral believed me capable of. I made little headway until the year I turned thirteen. That was the year Church pulled me aside and said he'd be taking over my training.

"I have a few tricks up my sleeve your mother never got the hang of," he said, and that was all the explanation I got before he threw me headlong into practice.

The trick was called Armament, and Church could cover both his arms in it. Me, I was lucky after years of practice to cover more than a finger. But that was later. At thirteen, I worked myself to the bone without any visible headway and got frustrated with the whole process.

I lay on the cool, springy grass of the orchard after training one day, feeling every muscle in my body scream out complaints. Exhaustion seemed to drag my body into the dirt beneath me. Anger set in quick, followed by self-reproach.

Eyes closed. Deep breath in, one-two-three-four. The trick Mango had taught us all. Hold one-two-three, exhale one-two-three-four. Inhale one-two-three-four. Feel the ground beneath you, how it holds your weight. The air around you, how it displaces to make room for your body. Draw the energy in with each inhale, and let go of your doubt with each exhale. One-two-three-four.

I sank into the pattern of it bit by bit, let myself float on the feeling. There was a science behind it, I knew from years of dealing with anxiety disorder. Breathe in the right pattern and you engage the paralimbic system, soothe the fight-or-flight response, calm the racing heart, etcetera. It worked, at least. My mind cleared, my body relaxed, and beneath everything I heard the faintest strains of music.

And then the voices.

—hungry, hungry, where food where hungry—

—there prey mouse dive—

—hatchlings mine protect nest mine—

A violin. The deep strum of a guitar. The clear chime of a bell. A rumbling voice like a rockslide, like ocean waves, forming words I couldn't make out.

Someone speaking as soft as the whisper of silk, familiar enough to rip at the blanks in my memory: There you go, now, ink-stain of mine.

I sat up with a gasp, and the world went quiet again.

o

At fourteen, I could call up the Voice of All Things consciously, though it took time and effort.

At fifteen, I could cover the first knuckle of my pointer finger in Armament.

At sixteen, it only took a thought and a breath to start hearing the song of the world around me. I could read the ancient texts Cath sent like they were written in my native tongue.

That was the year Mom and Dad got nervous. Well, I think they'd been nervous for years, but tat was the year it all came to a head.

It happened like this: Bethel and I were out in the front yard. I was sitting criss-cross on a kitchen chair, one of Cath's gifted books in my lap, while Bethel wielded razor and scissors against my dark brown hair. At his direction, I'd already chopped his gold locks down to brush against his shoulders instead of his elbows.

He'd just finished shaving my sides down to a length I could stand (that is to say, a fine stubble) when Mom came down the road from town and saw us. At first, she smiled. Then she saw what I was reading and her expression fell like a thundercloud.

"Uh-ohhhh," Bethel sang in my ear, one long-fingered hand on my thin shoulder. I tilted my head up to look at him and he gave me a comforting smile. Nothing ever fazed him, but I was still carrying the weight of a lifetime spent as a disappointment. Mom's angry expression struck me in the chest.

She stormed up, snatched the book from my hand.

"What were you thinking?" she snapped, then modified her voice to something softer. "Apple, sweetie, you can't be reading things like this out in the open. If it'd been someone other than me coming down the walk, you'd be up shit creek."

"It's just a book, Mom," said Bethel. My own voice had frozen in my throat. I curled in on myself, shoulders at my ears, knees drawn up to my chest, eyes down.

"It's not just a book!" Again, her voice rose and then fell into a gentler tone. "Look, I know Cath has given you this impression that treason isn't a big deal, but this sort of thing is forbidden for a reason. If someone were to catch you with it, every Marine in the world would be after your head. You're my kid, Apple. You're my kid. What do I do if you get yourself executed, huh?"

Mom's voice hitched, and I raised my eyes from my knees to see tears rolling down her face.

In the years I'd been with her, I'd never seen Hamelin Marron cry.

I unraveled, then, fell against her and started crying too. "I'm sorry, Mom, I promise I'll be more careful, please stop crying, I'm sorry."

Dimly, I was aware of Bethel pulling the book from Mom's hand and retreating inside with it, leaving the two of us alone to blubber on the grass. I'd known it was dangerous, what Cath had gotten me into. But she approached everything in life with such blasé confidence, it was hard to take the danger seriously. If my big sister wasn't worried, why should I be? Sometimes, for all my knowledge, I could be pretty naive.

o

At eighteen, I met the man who would change my life.

His name was Trafalgar Law, and he was a pirate.