Chantel looked at the ships, and at the open sea beyond. The smells of the harbor were familiar to her—fish and seaweed and salt. They blew into the city when the wind was from the south.
But she’d never seen the ocean up close, rolling in glass-green waves toward the shore, crests of white water breaking slowly, crashing against the stone pier.
And the ships! They could go anywhere. They could sail forever. Across a world without walls. The thought was at once thrilling and frightening.
“There are so many ships,” said Anna.
“Not really,” said Franklin. “About three-fourths of the berths are empty. Berths means places for the ships to dock,” he added.
“We knew that,” said Chantel.
“I didn’t,” said Bowser.
The snake in Chantel’s head twitched. “Do you have to take his side?”
Bowser looked hurt.
“Ships only come to you if they can’t sell their goods anywhere else,” said Franklin. “The merchants don’t like the way they’re treated, so they bring their worst goods and charge high prices. To all of us.”
“Well, anyway,” said Bowser, “we need to get through the gate.”
Franklin looked around at all of them. “If you tell the guards at the gates that I’m not one of you, that I’m a—Marauder, is it?—then I’ll say that you’re the same.”
“We weren’t going to do that!” said Anna, but Bowser ruined everything by looking embarrassed.
“They’ll know as soon as you open your mouth,” said Chantel.
“So I won’t open it,” said Franklin. “You’ll do the talking.”
There was a whole neighborhood between the harbor and the gates. It had warehouses and markets, inns for the sailors and houses. People lived out here, whole families. They must be Marauders, Chantel thought. She couldn’t imagine anyone from Lightning Pass wanting to live among the noise and the smells and the loud, rough sailors.
Or being allowed to, she thought with a pang.
“Anyway,” said Chantel, “they’re not going to let you in with that cross . . .”
She trailed off. Franklin was unarmed.
“With what?” said Franklin.
“Where’s your crossbow?” said Bowser.
Franklin shrugged. “They wouldn’t have let me in the first gate with it, you know. Let’s go.”
Chantel frowned. She was sure he’d had the crossbow recently.
The city gates were, in fact, two iron-clad doors in Seven Buttons. They were shut fast. Towers rose on either side of them, bristling with guards. Two ranks of guards stood before them, heavily armed.
Their purple uniforms meant Home. The place where Chantel belonged, and Marauders didn’t. Inside the wall, safe from the Roughlands.
She started toward the doors. A guard stepped in front of her, blocking her path.
“No entry,” he said.
“I live in there,” said Chantel. “And so do my friends.”
“Nonsense,” said the guard. “Now run along, before you get hurt.”
Chantel felt the snake twitch inside her head. “Owl’s bowels!” she cursed. “I do live there, blast you. Lightning Pass is my home. It’s all of our homes! Now let us in!”
“I don’t think so,” said the guard, looking amused. “Lightning Pass girls don’t talk like you. Lightning Pass girls are shamefast and biddable.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Anna. “We do live in Lightning Pass. We go to Miss Ellicott’s School for Magical Maidens.”
“Nice try,” said the guard. “But a Lightning Pass girl would never be outside the walls. Certainly not a nice little schoolgirl. She’d be all shut up inside her school where she belonged, doing as she was told. Now run along.”
“Well, I live in Lightning Pass too,” said Bowser. “And I want to go home.”
The guard eyed him a little more suspiciously than he had the girls. “That’s what they all say. No one in Lightning Pass is as ragged and dirty as the lot of you.”
“We—” said Bowser.
“Look.” The man bent down, while the other guards stared straight ahead and pretended they couldn’t hear. “I’ve got kids at home, myself. I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to you. Run along before something does, eh? I don’t want to see you dragged off to the dungeons.”
Chantel, Bowser, and Anna didn’t want to see that either. They backed away from the gate, and turned down a cobblestone lane, out of the guards’ line of view. Franklin followed, regarding them all with an amused expression.
“Nice work,” he said. “You guys guard that place so carefully.”
“But we live there!” said Anna, outraged.
“Looks like you don’t anymore,” said Franklin. “So what are we going to do now?”
“We have to get in,” said Chantel. “We have to get back to the school. Mrs. Warthall said she was going to sell the younger girls.”
“Sounds like a funny kind of school,” said Franklin, raising an eyebrow.
“I heard a story once,” said Anna doubtfully, “where some soldiers got through the gate hidden in a wagonload of hay.”
“It was the story of the treason of Wendy the Wayward,” Chantel snapped. “Ever since then all wagonloads of hay have been pierced with swords and pitchforks at the gate.”
“Oh,” said Anna, looking hurt.
“Sometimes w— in stories people crawl through a sewer grating in the walls,” said Franklin.
“Well, that sounds lovely,” said Chantel. “But the sewers in Lightning Pass are underground all the way to the sea. I read that in a book.”
“So there’s no way to get in,” said Franklin. “Oh well. I guess we’ll go somewhere else. What about High Roundpot? Or the Stormy Isles?”
Chantel looked longingly at the ships. To sail off on a wind that blew toward places with magical names . . . She sighed. “No, we . . . we can’t. You go ahead.”
“Too bad you threw the crossbow away,” said Bowser glumly.
“No it’s not.” Franklin looked at Chantel. “You’ve thought of something. You think there’s another way in.”
“Oh, Chantel, are you thinking of the but—” Anna stopped, and clapped her hands over her mouth.
“Thinking of the butt?” said Franklin, smiling.
Chantel glared at Anna, and Anna glared back.
“Whatever you’re thinking of, you’d better tell me.” Franklin sat on a barrel and folded his arms and very plainly wasn’t about to go off in search of High Roundpot.
Chantel decided it was better to get her version in before Anna or Bowser told too much. “Fine. There might be a magical way to get through the wall. There are these things called buttons. But we’ve never seen them, they’re probably invisible, and we’re not sure where they are.”
“Well, that’s helpful, then,” drawled Franklin.
It was quite possible he was the world’s most annoying person.
“We know at least one of them is on the western side of the city,” said Bowser.
“An invisible portal and you don’t know where it is. Maybe it would be easier to go back and find that place where you all came out,” said Franklin.
“Fiends,” said Chantel shortly.
“Besides, it’s a maze down there,” said Anna. “It’s only luck we got through it once.”
“What about the vampires and zombies? And what are fiends, anyway?” said Franklin.
“Spirits of the restless dead who take you with them to wander the wastes between this world and the next,” said Chantel.