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Fortune clicked her beak and returned to the ragged tail feather. Tempest watched her biting and tugging and noticed what she’d been too afraid to say out loud for the last two weeks. Fortune was quite literally fading. Her affliction was accelerating. The gray had spread from her wing’s tips inwards, like a storm rolling in. Half her feathers were now the color of dirty snow, streaked with brownish and yellowish striations in some areas.

There was nothing overtly wrong with the gray feathers, other than the fact their color and texture seemed wrong. Tempest had tried to find an article or entry in one of her books that mentioned something like this. But none of the books in her bus described an illness that made a parrot’s plumage go gray. Since Fortune didn’t otherwise appear to be sick, it had been easy to ignore it. But there was no denying the change now. Tempest knew she needed to get Fortune to a veterinarian who specialized in avian familiars.

She would start her search in the morning.

She searched the bookshelf for one of her other standard comfort reads. Before she’d settled into the habit of nodding off with Dan Wilder’s trivia book on her pillow she favored novels or fairy tales—that was what she needed tonight, she decided.

No sooner had she made this decision than a pale blue hardcover book with gilded pages and beautiful hollyhocks stamped on the spine, presented itself. She recognized it immediately. It was her childhood copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. She hadn’t seen it in ages. Not since she was eleven or twelve.

And even more surprising was the smooth, pale bit of applewood poking out from between the pages, as if a book was an appropriate place to store a wand.

I used my wand as a bookmark? That must be how I lost it!

It had been so long since Tempest had seen the wand that she almost didn’t recognize it. It was nothing special really, just the sort of basic starter wand that babies were given to cut their teeth on. She could see her own baby teeth marks in the wood. Her mother would have made it for her and would have given it to her when she was still an infant.

And by the time she was in grade school, she would have realized it was never going to work, which would explain why she’d been so careless with it.

She slid the wand out from the book and held it in her hand. It was slim and smooth, warm to the touch. The tip was crooked, probably because she’d chewed on it so much. The base was carved with tiny blossoms, both as decoration and to create traction, so the wand didn’t slip in a child’s hand. She set the wand down on the shelf and settled into the beanbag with her book. But something was still missing. The reading nook lacked a certain ambience.

On a whim she fetched a candle down from the shelf above the reading nook. Orange colored wax, hand-poured into a lopsided black ceramic cup. She’d bought the candle at a craft fair underneath the Burnside Bridge because it smelled like home. Not her home, exactly, but what she imagined a cozy home would smell like. Apple and persimmons, fall leaves and cloves. It had never been lit. She wasn’t sure what she had been saving it for but now seemed a fine time to light it.

She picked up the tiny wand and pointed it at the candle.

The flame burst to life at once. Small and feisty, and spitting sparks.

Tempest gaped at it. Fortune, who had been nearly asleep, opened her eyes and craned her neck around to look at it too. They both stared. The flame did not waver.

“You saw that, right?” Tempest asked the bird.

“Like a moth to a flame!” Fortune twittered.

“It was probably just a fluke,” Tempest rationalized. “The wizard who sold it to me must have done something to the wick. Spelled it to light itself under the right conditions or—” She couldn’t think of any way to finish her own sentence. So, she pointed her wand at the tea light in the glass jar mounted on the dash.

It blinked on like she’d flipped a light switch.

She directed the wand towards the small ledge next to her bunk, where she kept some writing supplies and a candle warmer to melt her sealing wax. This candle lit too. There was no denying she had done it this time.

Three candles. Three flames. Each one behaved the same, responding to her wand, without hesitation. The entire cabin of the bus glowed with warm flickering light. Her light. Her magic.

I did that.

“Third time’s a charm!” Fortune whistled. Tempest could have sworn the bird was smiling.

“It was me, Fortune. I did it,” Tempest whispered to the parrot. “You saw it too. I know you did.”

She set the wand back down on the shelf beside her. She did not know what to do with the rush of feelings moving through her. She had no one to share this amazing development with, other than Priya possibly. But she had no way to reach her friend tonight.

The atlas was still blank when Tempest came back to it in the morning. She’d had a feeling that would be the case. There was a compass, shaped like a ball and encased in glass, mounted to the dash beneath the three skeletons. She tapped it with her wand. The compass began to spin. She tapped it again. It spun faster. The skeletons spun too, twisting and dancing around each other in the morning breeze.

“Round and round and round they go!” Fortune croaked. Her voice was hoarser this morning than the night before.

Tempest sat down in the driver’s seat and spread the atlas across her lap. She laid her wand in the seam and placed her hands flat on the paper, fingers spread wide. Fortune climbed up onto the steering wheel, where she could peer down at the book as well. She seemed just as interested in the atlas as Tempest. They both stared down at the open book, waiting. Willing something to happen.

The images began to appear, and they were blurry around the edges. Like frost on glass, with markings underneath. Tempest wasn’t looking at a map, like she had on the previous pages. This was something different. Records. Notes. Things scrawled in the margins and written on top of old drawings. She thought she was reading some sort of ship’s manifest from the 1600s, the numerals written so formally and precisely with tented ones and looping zeros. There were names of passengers and ports, recorded in neat columns. She spied the name Glass written on one line, just before it faded away.

Next, she saw what she thought must be a recipe, written in a language she couldn’t immediately name, with measurements that didn’t make sense with any system she knew. Rosewater was written beside one of the illegible ingredients. Another item was scratched out and overwritten with the phrase I’d use dried figs instead. A note in the margin too: much too sweet. Reduce sugar by half. Add cardamom.

An IOU note was hastily scribbled on the right, the signatures of the parties blurred out by drops of rain. Then a sketch appeared. Fine lines, carefully drawn, rose from the page to show an ancient-looking ship. She traced a finger over the belly of the boat and it revealed the cargo inside. Stacks and stacks of books that were little more than bound together piles of parchment. Scrolls stored in urns.