“Those are not questions you should be asking,” Margaham responded. “You should turn back now.” His voice escalated, growing more insistent. “Leave, and be safe; find some kind of happiness in ignorance. Trust me—” His voice cut out abruptly.
This did nothing to dampen Ardent’s ire. The whole board—the whole table—seemed to shake with his anger now. He snatched the envelope from the game board and tore it open, yanking the card free. He scratched out what he’d written earlier and furiously scribbled something new. “I will have my answers!” he shouted, holding the envelope aloft.
Suddenly Fin had a very bad feeling.
There was a pause. “Ardent the Cold.” Margaham sounded almost resigned. Even a little sad. “Who can’t leave the past behind.”
“Maybe we should listen to him,” Fin suggested. “He doesn’t seem to be the Master. Let’s move on to the next name on the list.” But it was like he’d never even spoken. As soon as Margaham mentioned Annalessa, the stakes of the game had changed. Ardent had been searching for her for years—if he had a chance to learn what happened to her, he was going to take it, and there was nothing any of them could say to stop him.
Fin couldn’t blame him for that. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to find his own mom, after all. If there was one thing that linked Fin and Ardent, it was their continued search for someone they loved.
“We will play your game,” Ardent insisted, waving the envelope. “And these are my stakes.”
Margaham’s pewter piece let out a sigh. “Very well. Welcome, player one.” And with that, the envelope clutched in Ardent’s hand disappeared in a snap of light.
Ardent resumed his seat before the board and took a deep breath. Then he raised one of his pieces into the air. “Game on,” he said grimly.
Almost instantly, the world seemed to explode in noise and motion. Around the Kraken, the painted water changed color. In front of the ship, dark lines raced across the flat bay, resolving into the circles of the game board.
But unlike the flat game board on the table before Ardent, the rings in the bay began to twist and turn against one another. Margaham’s castle rose, pulling the rest of the board up after it so that it turned into a vertical, terraced spire.
It looked like a massive tiered cake, each layer peppered with its own obstacles and spinning in different directions at different speeds. It towered before them like a mountain, the castle perched on the very apex. Squinting, Fin could just barely make out the outline of Margaham inside.
“Okay, that looks a lot more like your sketches,” Marrill conceded to Ardent. “Only a bit more—”
She didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence because at that moment the Kraken shuddered, her deck tilting. A massive stone hand thrust up from the bay, clutching the ship and lifting her into the air.
Fin raced to the railing to get a better look. Through the fingers of the statue, the golden waters of the Pirate Stream poured down in a torrent.
“What’s happening?” Marrill yelled. Fin shook his head. He glanced back to Ardent. The wizard’s jaw was clenched, his eyes intense.
He was taking it seriously, Fin realized. His gut clenched. The wizard himself had warned them not to. “Ardent, don’t take it—”
“KNIGHT, GO!” Ardent shouted, slamming one of the pieces onto the board.
And the next thing Fin knew, he stood on the bottom layer of the game. The giant stone hand clutching the Kraken towered above him. “Shanks spinning!” he cried, darting away from the flow of golden water still running off the ship. One step, two—
And then he stepped into nothingness. He twisted backward as he fell, landing against the ground with a harsh smack that took his breath away. Fin rolled, staring at where he’d nearly fallen.
He was lying on the checkerboard pattern of the outermost ring of the game. But the square he’d just stepped on was missing; below it, the magic waters of the Pirate Stream glimmered, threatening. If he hadn’t controlled his fall, he could have been turned into a winding country lane or a common domestic pinch wren.
Understanding dawned. He was the game piece. The game was real. The board was real. Which meant the danger was real as well.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to focus. He didn’t see anyone else around, which meant his move probably wasn’t over yet. He popped to his feet and was about to start toward the next tier when he remembered what Ardent had said. Knight, go.
Fin closed his eyes and struggled to remember the rules. The Knight moved in an L pattern. He toed the square before him carefully. It vanished at his touch.
He gulped. “Okay, I’m the Knight, then.” He skittered sideways four squares and stopped, holding his breath.
“End of movement!” Margaham’s voice cried from far above.
Fin let out a sigh of relief.
“LION TAMER, GO!” Ardent yelled.
With no warning, Marrill popped into existence in front of him, the orange fuzz of her cat balled up in her arms. “What the—oh, hi, Karny,” she said.
“Marrill,” Fin said, grabbing her. “Be careful. We’re the pieces! We have to move like the pieces!”
Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean, ‘we’re the pieces’?” She looked down. Then back up. Their eyes met. “We’re on the game board,” she said. “We’re the pieces!”
Fin nodded. “Right. I’m the Knight. I’m pretty sure you’re the Lion Tamer, which means you have to move in a Z.…”
Just then, his eyes locked on Fig, creeping across the squares nearby. As soon as he saw her, the square she was about to step on vanished, dropping away to the Stream below. “Fig, watch out!”
She froze, staring back at him, her mouth twisted with fury. “Brother! I’m the Blackguard! I can’t move if you see me!”
Of course she’d ended up as the Blackguard. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to mess up your move.”
“End of player one’s turn!” Margaham announced.
Fin let out a long breath. They’d made it through one round pretty easily. Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all. He rubbed his hands together, studying the board and planning his next move. “Okay, so it should be my turn again. I think maybe this time we should try to—”
He was cut off by the boom of Margaham’s voice announcing, “Welcome, new player!”
“New player?” Fin glanced uneasily toward Marrill. “I thought we were playing against Margaham.”
Marrill chewed her lip. “Ardent did say there could be more than one attacker.…”
“Maybe another player will liven things up a bit?” Fin offered. “Make the game more fun?” The reassurance sounded hollow even to him.
“Somehow I don’t think so,” Marrill said, pointing into the distance.
Past the great arm, past the rain of magic falling from the Kraken, a ship raced down the last torrent from the Ravingorge. Fin recognized it instantly. The broad bow, the square sails. He didn’t even need to see the side of it to know the Salt Sand King’s sigil would be etched there.
The other half of his people were coming. The unstoppable army, who existed for one reason: to conquer all of the Pirate Stream.
The Rise had joined the Great Game.
CHAPTER 7
(Un)Friendly Competition
As the warship bore down on them, Marrill could see the expert sailors moving like clockwork through her rigging. Along her bow, rows of honed warriors stood at stiff-backed attention. The gleam of their daggers didn’t make it seem too likely they’d come for a tea party.
Once the ship grew close enough, another giant stone hand thrust from the Stream, lifting her into the air as its twin had done with the Kraken. The two stone arms rotated around the board, coming to rest on opposite sides so that the ships faced each other like competitors across a table.
“Welcome, player, to my Great Game!” Margaham’s voice boomed.
A lone figure strode confidently toward the bow of the warship, but with the angle and distance, Marrill could
barely make it out. From the outline, she could tell it was a woman. From the stance, she could tell it was a warrior.
“I am the Crest of the Rise. I speak the will of our people.” The woman’s voice echoed, clear and loud and calm even across the distance. “Here are our stakes,” she said, holding a crisp white envelope aloft. “We will play the game, and we will not be beaten.”
There was a soft buzzing and a flash of light. The envelope in the woman’s hand disappeared, and three figures appeared on the opposite side of the giant tiered game board. They were too far away to see clearly, but they moved with a confidence that Marrill completely lacked.
“Looks like the Rise have their pieces.” She gulped. “But why are they here? How did they find us?”
Fin said nothing. Instead he spun, skewering a young girl standing several tiles away with a glare. “Yeah, Fig, how did they find us?” Marrill was surprised by the vehemence in his voice, especially to a total stranger.
The girl held up her hands defensively. “Wait—it’s not what you think.”
Fin crossed his arms. “I think you found a way to tell the Rise where we were going so they could ambush us here.”
The girl swallowed. “Okay, so maybe it is a little what you think.”
He shook his head sadly. “And I’m going to guess you told them all about the wish orb, too, so now they’re here to take it?” The girl opened her mouth to protest, but Fin cut her off with a sweep of his hand. “But you feel like you kept your promise to me because you didn’t personally try to steal the orb?”
“Okay,” the girl admitted sheepishly. “Maybe it’s entirely what you think.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Marrill said, interjecting. “What do you mean?”
“The wish orb, Marrill,” Fin explained. “The Rise know about it now. Fig told them, and they’ve come to take it and free the Salt Sand King.”
Marrill inhaled sharply. Of course! What else would a leaderless army want but to free their king? “We can’t let that happen.”
“You’re right,” Fin said. “Which is why we totally have to win.” He actually grinned at that.
“No, Fin,” Marrill said, grabbing his arm. “This is serious. We can’t play against them if the orb’s at stake! We have to drop out of the game.” She drew a breath, about to shout that they conceded when Fin clapped a hand over her mouth.
“There’s no dropping out,” he told her. “They’ve already joined the game. The orb’s already at stake.… We’ll just be giving up our chance to save it.”
He had a point. Marrill bit her lip, trying to figure a way out of their predicament. This was bad. They were stuck on a giant, magical game board, playing by rules they barely understood, with a good dip in the Stream waiting for literally any misstep. And now they had an opponent who was, by definition, unbeatable.
Suddenly, the game seemed more serious than ever.
“We just need to win,” Fin said matter-of-factly.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Marrill grumbled.
“I prefer Colonel Obvious,” Fin replied, waggling his eyebrows.
“Lion Tamer, go!” Ardent cried from the bow of the Kraken, far overhead.
“Great,” Marrill muttered. “Just great.”
She had no option but to keep playing. With a quick back-and-forth of her finger, she mapped out a course that would take her up to the twelve-foot wall leading to the next layer of the game. But when she reached it, the flat surface towering before her offered no purchase, no way to climb. She pressed one palm against it. The stone was cold and unyielding, an odd contrast with Karny’s warm fluff pressing against her other palm.
A thought jogged through her head. Karny. If she was the Lion Tamer, he was her lion. And wasn’t it in her power to have him find secret paths between rings?
Marrill held her cat up like a rag doll, looking him eye-to-one-good-eye. “Okay, Karn. It’s all on you. Do your thing!”
She set him on the ground at her feet. He strolled lazily over to the next square, and promptly dropped right through it.
“Karny!” Marrill shrieked.
The cat struck the surface of the Pirate Stream with a splash, then shot into the air like a rocket, straight up the wall of the next ring. His feet left a trail of fire zigzagging back and forth up the vertical surface. When he reached the top, he sat and stared down at her, like he was the Cheshire cat.
To the King of Salt and Sand, I leave a wish ungranted, an ambition unfulfilled, an army leaderless, and an orb of gold, its waters as pure and true as the headwaters of the Stream itself.
“Shanks,” Fin called from behind her. “Karny’s still Stream proof! Are we going to get another line of the Dawn Wizard’s will every time he gets doused?”
Marrill shook her head. She didn’t exactly intend to let her cat get doused with Stream water again. But she had to admit, she was curious.
Amazingly, after Karny’s blazing trail died down, it left behind perfect footholds Marrill used to scrabble up after him. When she reached the top she found Karny cleaning himself leisurely, apparently completely reverted to normal catness.
“All right,” Marrill said to herself. “That’s one ring down. Just…” She stopped and counted. There seemed to be several more layers to the game here than when it was flat, she realized. “…a bunch more to go,” she murmured.
She turned and surveyed the tier ahead. Her stomach dropped. The game board squares on this level were decorated with pictures of the elements: flames, lightning, water, and wind. Past the maze of elements, the next ring was suspended in the air above, spinning slowly, with two glass staircases supporting it on either side.
The upside was that there wasn’t another wall to climb. The downside, however, was that the Rise were already almost to their staircase. The other team was winning. By a lot.
“Hey,” Fin called from below. “A little help down here?”
With a defeated sigh, Marrill peered back over the side. Fin was scrabbling at the wall, slipping and sliding each time he tried to use the handholds. For a second, she didn’t get it. Fin was an awesome climber. Maybe the best ever. How could she climb those handholds and he couldn’t?
Then she remembered the rules of the game. The Knight couldn’t move between rings without help.
“Oh, right.” Dropping to her belly, she reached as far down as she could. Fin stretched toward her, and the moment their hands touched, he practically flew up the wall to land beside her.
“That was spiff,” he said. His smile faltered, however, when he caught sight of the Rise and how much farther ahead they were. “They’re beating the pants off us,” he said, sounding incredulous.
“Thank you once again, Colonel Obvious,” Marrill mumbled.
Fin fisted his hands. “We’ll see about that. I’m not finished with my move just yet.” He stepped toward the next square, and the flames painted on it exploded into real ones.
Fin jumped back, straight onto a square painted with the lightning bolt. Marrill grabbed him, pulling him out of danger just as a blast of real lightning arced through the air. “I guess that’s what Ardent meant about the game growing more dangerous the more seriously we take it,” she pointed out.
Fin threw up his arms. “How are we supposed to not take this seriously when it’s threatening to kill us every second?” He slumped, his expression sour. “This game is the worst. I’d rather play Drop Things into the Pirate Stream and Guess What They’ll Turn Into any day. A pepper shaker turning into a kraken is less dangerous than this, and way more fun. At least if we give up, we can do that while we wait for the Salt Sand King to burn the world down.”
Give up… have fun… A lightbulb went off in Marrill’s head.
“That’s it!” she cried. “That’s what we need to do: Give up and have fun!”
Fin arched an eyebrow. “For real?”
Marrill jumped up and down. “Totally! Fin, we’ve been taking this super seriously, and in the end we’re going to lose a
nyway because the Rise are unbeatable, right?”
He nodded. “Sure looks that way.”
“So if we’re going to lose no matter what, we might as well have a good time doing it!” Marrill poked him on the arm. “We’ve been in crazier places and ended up laughing. This is actually a game! Let’s play it.”
She scooped up Karnelius and jumped onto a tile marked with water. “Race you to the staircase!” she called as a tidal wave lifted her, carrying her sideways across the squares.
“You’re on!” Fin leapt onto a wind square and popped his skysails, swooping in an L-shape. “Heat makes wind go farther!” he yelled, touching one foot downward to tap a fire square. The flames blazed to life, lifting him up to sail past her.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho no!” Marrill yelled, jumping for lightning. The charge shot her around the board, only stopping when she rolled off onto a water square. Electricity surged through her, rattling in her teeth and setting her cat’s hair on end. “Bad move,” she whispered to herself. “Bad, bad move.”
Somewhere nearby, she heard another girl laughing. “You guys!” the girl called. “The lightning tingles!”
They zigzagged and L-walked and slid across the tier, joking and jibing each other the entire way. Finally Marrill found herself at the foot of the staircase, with Fin only a few squares away. She was about to dash up it when she remembered he couldn’t move between tiers without help.
“Gibbering Grove!” she called. That was all she needed to say for him to understand. He leapt onto her back, and she raced up the stairs, laughing (and puffing) the entire way.
Even though she didn’t know the girl at the top of the stairs, she bum-rushed straight into her, collapsing them all into a snorting, laughing pile. “This game is so much more fun when you’re having fun,” Marrill said, struggling to control her giggling as Karny pulled himself free, flashing them a dour look.
She rolled to her feet, taking a moment to steady herself as the tier spun beneath them. They were almost level with the ships now; indeed, the Rise warship was coming up fast. As she took in her surroundings, she realized something was missing. Or rather, someone was missing.