He flashes me a grin. “Did you expect that to change just because I had a wedding band on my finger?”
Against my better judgment, my annoyance melts. “No,” I say, curling up against his shoulder. “Against all reason, I happen to like you the way you are. However, I’m not content tojust let you waste away. Besides, you need your rest. It’s not like you’re going to know whether I’m combing through the library looking for cures while you’re asleep. You’ll be none the wiser.”
“How devious you are,” he says, flatly, but then amusement tinges his voice. “What library do you speak of?”
“The one on the ship,” I say. “Charlie mentioned it to me once.”
“Ah,” says Nolan. “That library.”
The reasonfor the mocking in Nolan’s voice becomes evident as soon as Charlie shows me what she previously referred to as the ship’s library.
One of the newer crew members who used to be a healer agreed to stay with Nolan for an hour while Charlie, Maddox, and I made our excursion to the library, butlibraryis a generous term.
There is one bookshelf on the opposite end of a room that seems to be otherwise dedicated to maps and atlases. It’s not even a properly sized bookshelf. In fact, it reaches to about my collarbone, and I’m not a particularly tall individual. And the bookshelf itself isn’t even full.
“This is it?” I ask.
“What were you expecting?” asks Maddox. “I mean, I know you grew up with an entire library wing at your disposal, but really, Wendy. This is a ship.”
“I thought sailors read all the time to pass the boredom,” I say.
Maddox laughs. “Yes, we each have our favorite book, and that stays by our bedside table, and we read it over and over. Those of us who are literate, I mean.”
I cross my arms and look at Charlie, who shrugs. “Sorry, but this is all we have.”
I spend the next half hour searching through the dozen books on the shelf, but they’re all related to sailing, either charting stars for navigation, or how to clean the barrel of a cannon, or how to make ship repairs.
There’s absolutely nothing of use.
Giving up, I turn to Charlie and Maddox, who are both at a table pretending to search through books they know good and well are irrelevant to our search. They haven’t spoken to each other the entire time we’ve been down here, which I note as odd for them.
“Fine,” I say, slumping down in the seat next to Charlie. “But there has to be something we can do.”
“You got any ideas?” asks Maddox.
There’s one that’s been chewing at my mind ever since Nolan’s heart attack last night. “We could go to the Eldest Sister. She’s the one who Marked him in the first place. She could maybe Mark him again, or at least restore his health.”
“Nolan already met with her, remember?” says Charlie. “He’s not exactly on her good side. She wasn’t willing to heal him then. I don’t know why she would have changed her mind.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d known Nolan met with the Eldest Sister, but he’d only ever told me that it was to try to track me down, and that she’d shown him the tapestries of our alternate life. It makes sense that while he was there, he would have also asked for a cure for his illness. I suppose he didn’t feel the need to bring it up, given the answer was no. Besides, when he’d originally told me the story, he’d left out the part about his illness altogether.
“It was a good thought,” says Maddox, but I feel like he’s placating me, well-intentioned as he is.
“I did have another thought,” says Charlie.
Something twists in my gut. I can tell by the hesitation in her voice exactly where she’s going with this.
“I know,” I say, burying my hands in my face. “I thought of it too.”
“Am I missing something?” asks Maddox.
I take my hand from my palms after rubbing my eyes, probably causing the redness to worsen. Strangely enough, Charlie doesn’t answer him.
“Captain would never make you do that,” she says.
“Make me? I’m more concerned with whether he’d let me. He’s not exactly eager to be searching for a cure at all,” I say. “I very much doubt that going to Peter would stoke his motivation.”
Maddox looks back and forth between the two of us. “You think there’s a way to transfer Peter’s Mark back to Nolan?”
