Page 25 of By the Flames of Her Fury

“I didn’t.” I pursed my lips together. “Starke and I were…poking around some caves.”

“Vera,” Odessa warned, giving me a stern look that reminded me of my mother.

I scratched my chin. “We found a tunnel system on the east side of Twin Tides. There was this door we had to break down with a bunch of dead bodies and treasure inside. We got the torn map off one of the skeletons.”

She blinked up at me. “I don’t know why I bother asking. It’s best if I don’t know.”

I pulled the phoenix token from my pocket. “The captain had this around his neck.”

When Odessa’s gaze caught on the chain swinging from my grip, I could’ve sworn the color drained from her face. “What? Do you recognize it?” I pushed.

The disconcerted look disappeared just as quickly as it came. “No.” She shook her head and looked away. “No. But it—it’s a dead man’s relic. It feels wrong to have it.”

“Trust me, I don’t think he minds.”

She gave me a very Starke look, but moved on. “Depending on how old the bones are, we might be able to look through Saltmourne logs to find records of past shipwrecks near east Twin Tides.”

Eagerness stirred in my gut. “Where can I find those?”

Odessa nodded toward the heavy wooden door at the back of the office. “The archives room.”

“Great. Wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight, anyway. Thanks, Odessa,” I said, gathering a notebook and pencil and making my way to the archives room. When her soft footfalls followed me, I glanced back with an arched brow. “I thought you were turning in for the night?”

She smiled with an inquisitive gleam in her eyes. “Oh, this is far more exciting.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course, you’d prefer to spend your evening in dusty shelves than a warm bed.”

The door to the archives room groaned open. The air inside was cooler and drier, more insulated to keep the older records safe. Shelves crammed with scrolls and ledgers lined the narrow room from floor to ceiling. A small window let in a shaft of moonlight, illuminating the dark floors.

I found the shelves with shipping logs dating back around two hundred years and grabbed the oldest ones first. Dust plumed in the air when I plopped one box on the ground. Considering those skeletons we saw were old as dirt, I figured they wrecked a long, long time ago.

We worked in near silence for a while. Odessa muttered dates and ship names under her breath as she stacked ledgers on the table; I combed through old charts, looking for any mention of a shipwreck or Twin Tides. The handwriting was faded with time, some of it nearly impossible to read. What I could make out was mostly the same. Ship names and dates, origin port, what cargo they were carrying, where they docked, what goods they left with. The occasional damage report or storm sighting.

After an hour, I began to give up hope on this particular trail of breadcrumbs. But then Odessa perked up. “This is interesting,” she said, taking her spectacles off and biting the tip.

“What is?”

“I didn’t think it was worth mentioning at first, but this is the fourth incident I’ve seen.” She rummaged around her pile until she fisted a piece of paper, put her glasses back on, and began reading. “Reported sighting of anomalous whirlpool southeast of Shipwreck Cove. Weather clear. We adjusted course farther south to avoid. All hands survived.” She lifted another one from her lap. “Aftermath of whirlpool encounter. Noon-time storm came quickly from the north. Lost one mast and three deckhands. Strong pull from beneath the ship.”

“A whirlpool? Are you sure?”

She nodded. “There are two more with similar stories, but their ships actually did wreck. At Shipwreck Cove. The whirlpool sucked them in and spat them back out. Only a few survived, and the damage report…” Odessa grimaced. “And that’s not even the strangest part. Listen to this. The dates for every single one are in early spring, around the exact same time as your incident: the beginning of the third month. But they’re all spread apart in history. The first one I found was one hundred and ninety years ago, all the way to this one”—she squinted at one of the other papers—“which was twenty-seven years ago.”

She handed them all to me, and I flipped through the logs. It did sound strangely similar. The whirlpool, the positioning, the storms coming out of nowhere. Notes written in a cramped scrawl from a century ago caught my attention.

Current pushed us west to Twin Tides. Sky was clear, but the sea was wrong. Smelled of sulfur and metal. Captain reported something vast and animal-like beneath the surface.

My heart tripped. I remembered the long, scaled figure I saw silhouetted near the whirlpool. Had this crewmate seen the same thing? Some sort of animal?

I dragged my fingers through my hair as I thought, letting the locks fall around my face. “Can I see the file from the oldest one you found?” I asked, and she handed it to me. I searched through the worn, weathered pages of diagrams and lists. I was about to close the file when something fell to my lap.

A very, very old piece of papyrus, unlike any parchment I’d seen. It was so thick, it almost felt like animal skin. The edges were torn and cracked, and the entire thing was only a little bigger than my hand.

I flipped it over to find dark markings in a circular shape, like a star chart. I brought a candle closer to get a better look. I could barely make out the familiar sprinkle of stars, the arc of the Northern Crown, the tail of the Scorpion—all constellations I learned when I moved to the northern hemisphere. So, it was definitely from around here.

I squinted at the ink markings off to the side. They looked like letters, but they weren’t from an alphabet I recognized. “Odessa?”

“Hmm?”