Fire blooms in my chest, then spreads inward, burrowing into my bones. My skeleton shifts. Literally shifts, the architecture of my body rearranging itself with a series of wet cracks I hear from the inside. I'm shrinking. My spine compresses, my legs shorten, my hands curl as the fingers thicken and stub. The pain is extraordinary, a deep wrongness, every nerve in my body screaming that this isn't how I'm supposed to be shaped.
My vision whites out. When it comes back, both Thalia and Peeble are looking down at me. Way down.
Peeble begins to laugh. A full-body, wings-buzzing, mandibles-wide cackle that makes them tip sideways. Except they're no longer on my shoulder. They're hovering at what used to be my chest height.
Thalia covers her mouth with her hand, but her eyes are dancing.
Peeble wipes a tear from their eye with one leg. "Oh, that Sage. That was achoice."
"What happened to me?" I snap. Except my voice has gone up approximately two octaves. It comes out thin and reedy, likesomeone stepped on a pipe and air is whistling through the dent. "What is sofunny?"
They both collapse again. Peeble is wheezing, which I didn't think beetles could do.
I look around wildly and catch my reflection in a shop window.
A forest dwarf stares back at me. Four feet tall. Maybe four-one if I'm being generous with myself, which I am not inclined to be at this moment. My front teeth jut over my bottom lip and cross over one another at awkward angles. My eyes are two different colors: one muddy brown, one an unsettling yellowish green. There are bald patches on my head where hair has given up entirely, and what remains sticks out in tufts that suggest a longstanding adversarial relationship with any form of grooming.
I am, without question, the least attractive creature I have ever seen. And I have seen Auradelle.
I wheel on Thalia. "What kind of joke is this? I would almost have preferred you murdered me."
Peeble is still laughing. "Well, I can guarantee no one will recognize you now. What shall we call you? Oh, oh—I know. Frank. I think it has a really nice ring to it."
I am going to squash that beetle into paste.
"Look," Thalia's voice cuts through the chaos, and the urgency in it pulls my focus back. "I know this isn't ideal. But we are out of time."
As if the universe were conspiring to prove her point, a voice bellows from the docks below. "All aboard! Last call for the Crimson Emerald! All hands report!"
Thalia grabs my arm. She has to reach down to do it, which is a humiliation I will process for the rest of my probably short life, and locks those green eyes on mine. "Kaelren. You must not fail. Remember. Leap of faith."
"What does that even—"
But she's already moving, stepping backward into the shadows between buildings, and between one blink and the next, she's gone. Like she was never there at all.
Peeble tucks themselves into the collar of my shirt, which is now enormous on me, hanging off my new frame like a sail, and says, "Come on, Frank. Let's get moving. That ship isn't going to sail itself."
We make it to the docks with seconds to spare. The Crimson Emerald is exactly what I'd expect from a pirate vessel run by a version of me. It's large, fast-built, armed to the teeth, and painted in deep reds and greens that are either a bold aesthetic choice or a complete lack of one. Crew members are hauling lines and securing cargo, shouting at each other in the organized chaos of departure.
I march up the gangplank with as much authority as a four-foot forest dwarf with crossed teeth can muster, which is not much.
A hand the size of a dinner plate lands on my chest and stops me cold. The hand belongs to a sailor who is approximately the width of a doorframe, with a neck like a tree stump, arms that look like they've been wrestling anchor chains since birth, and a face that has clearly lost several arguments with sharp objects.
"Where do you think you're going, short stuff?"
Every instinct in my body tells me to put this man on the ground. I am a prince. I am a warrior who has fought and killed things that would make this dockworker faint. I am—
Four feet tall with bucked teeth. Right.
I open my mouth to respond, but Peeble beats me to it, whispering from inside my collar.
"Tell him you're a seasoned galley hand with twelve years' experience on the Blackwater Circuit."
"I'm a seasoned galley hand," I say, in this horrible squeaking voice, "with twelve years' experience on the Blackwater Circuit."
"Tell him you can gut a marlin in under two minutes and that your stew has been praised by captains across three ports."
I repeat it. The sailor stares at me like I've grown a second head, which, given my current appearance, wouldn't be much of an improvement.
