The sea was sharp and ungrateful, and the rocks were much worse. But Rilla had her hands on the tiller and her eyes on the stars and the wind between her teeth, and that was all she needed.
Then the stars went out.
“What?” she asked, helpfully. She looked at the stars again: still gone. Also gone was her ability to see the tiller beneath her hand, her hand in front of her face, and the rock that slammed right through her hull.
“Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled, and then the mast fell on her.
***
Some time later, Rilla awoke in a bright new morning with three of her five lungs full of water and a nostril full of a seagull’s beak.
“Fnarf,” she expelled.
“Oh good!” said the seagull as it picked itself up and shook unspeakable droplets from its head. “You’re not dead! If you were, I’d have to eat you and my GOD you are made ENTIRELY of scars. Very obnoxious to peck.”
“What happened,” Rilla said, deciding to stick to the basics, “to the stars?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” said the seagull.
“They blinked out. Couldn’t see anything at all.”
“Oh,” said the seagull. “That’s the light house!”
“It’s one word. Lighthouse.”
“Not this one! There’s a wizard up the coast, he made a house that keeps light inside it. A good few leagues across or so is its reach, and its grasp is absolute. No light? No seeing anything.”
Rilla closed her eyes again, in the hopes this would make everything more sensible. Instead, she just saw last night. “I liked that boat.”
“Really sorry to hear that,” said the seagull helpfully.
“Tell me: exactly how… wizard… is this wizard?”
“A few years back he made me talk so he could ask me what day of the week it was.”
“Great.” She ground her palms into her forehead and breathed in so hard her gills creaked. The most wizard she’d ever had to deal with was a fresh apprentice out on the town, still new enough to be reasonable. He’d turned the bar’s water into wine and wine into water and the bartender into a crayfish before she broke his legs. “Great. Great great great. Well. Guess I’d better go deal with this then.”
“If you could, that’d be swell. Don’t get me wrong, the light house DOES keep me pretty well fed what with shipwrecks and such, but my best nest was there and I can’t find it.”
“I don’t suppose you can help me, can you.”
“What kind of help would you like?”
“A magic sword.”
“I’ve got a very nearly not broken plank!”
“Invincible armour.”
“There’s some tattered and filthy rags trapped under your left hand. I think they were your shirt!”
“A goddamned drink.”
“I found a cracked bottle behind that rock. Empty though. Sorry!”
“Thanks for helping,” said Rilla. She dredged up the last of her resolve, then when that didn’t work, remembered how much she’d liked her boat. That got her upright.
“Seagull. One last thing.”
“Shoot.”
“What day of the week is it, anyways?”
“Tuesday the fourteenth,” said the seagull promptly.
“Thanks,” said Rilla.
And she started putting her feet down and hoping they ended up in front of each other eventually.
***
The light house boundary was invisible, but its effects weren’t subtle. One moment you were cracking along without a care in the world, the next you were elbow deep in an absence of illumination so profound that the inside of a geode would blink. For the second time, Rilla couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she took heart from her inability to wreck a ship she didn’t own, and pressed onwards guided by the smell of salt and bird shit; the rise and fall of the surf’s roar; the crunch and crackle of sand and stone under her scaly feet; the wind’s steady, unrelenting sharpness.
An invisible amount of time later — while keeping a careful distance from the increasingly-distant crash and roar of the surf against what her ears told her was a pretty tall cliff on her right – she found the wizard’s tower, which her nose determined to be crafted of finely-cut granite, obviously quarried at a great distance and brought here at some significant expense of magical power or money, where it had crushed her cartilage against her bone quite cleanly.
“FUCK!” she shouted.
“You shouldn’t say that,” admonished a voice from the tower that sounded something between quiet and querulous. “It’s quiet time.”
Rilla wiped the blood off her face. “You the wizard?”
“Yes,” said the wizard. “And I was enjoying quiet time. Monday morning is quiet time, and since you’ve interrupted me I will have to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. AGAIN. This keeps happening! It happens all the time!”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Rilla.
“Oh. Which one?”
“The fourteenth.”
“Well then, you might as well come in.”
A few awkward minutes later, he added “door’s to the left.”
“Thanks.”
The doorknob was simple and rough beneath her hand, but it did shiver in an unwholesome manner, and seemed to contract when she turned it. Then it opened and Rilla was inside the wizard’s tower, insulated from the distant sound of waves by thick stone walls and what smelled like an open sewer crossed with a library supply office. There was an undertone of rotting fish, and memories of better days and better meals swallowed her whole for a single and utterly self-pitying second.
“Welcome to my unhumble abode!” said the wizard. The voice seemed to be moving around her, but the pace was unsteady – every syllable came from a new corner. “Are you here to slay me?”
“No,” Rilla lied carefully. This was, as far as she knew, the smartest thing you could do with a wizard under any and all circumstances. They wouldn’t take anything you said reasonably, so you might as well say whatever seems most helpful at any given moment, unrestricted by reality. Fight fire with fire.
“Oh good, that would just be the stone whistle again.” A faint noise came that sounded like rats rustling through fallen leaves; it made Rilla’s hackles rise. “What’s the other reason, the other reason everyone comes here…are you here to complain about something?”
“No,” said Rilla, with utmost delicacy.
“Wonderful. No stone whistle. Then there is but one remaining option: are you here to be my apprentice?”
“I guess? Sure. Absolutely.”
“Stone whistle! Wait, you are? Oh.”
“Definitely.”
“Then you must act as an apprentice must,” said the wizard regally, and Rilla heard the rustling again and realized it was fingers thoughtfully combing through wizardly beard. “An apprentice must do as the master bids to prove themselves willing to learn before they are given anything to learn, that’s just common sense. Make me a sandwich. Cheddar mustard salt pork EXTRA mustard please, on rye. And do it in ten seconds or I’ll turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. Onetwothreefourfive.”
“Here,” said Rilla without thinking enough to panic, and she held out the board.
“Oh, perfect!” said the wizard, and a fell, frail wind gently ghosted across her knuckles as the board was yanked from them. “Delicious. Wonderful. Ah! Ow. Mmm. Bit prickly. I think I have splinters in my lips.”
“The rye looked a little stale.”
“Blasphemous lies! Ow ow ow. Yes, those are splinters. I’d best not whistle for a little bit. Ooooooohouch. I was going to clean up today. You’d better do that for me. Clean every room on every floor of the tower, and don’t knock anything over or move anything or touch anything or breathe too hard or too moistly. Should take about five minutes. If it doesn’t take five minutes, you’ll have to wait a few days for me to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea.”
The wind blew by again – cold, like old meat. Rilla stood there, probably alone, trying to decide if the sweat running down the back of her neck was from fear or from fury, then shook her head and mopped her brow down with her filthy rags.
She looked around, eyes useless and straining. Her ears caught the clink and groan and clatter of a horde of fragile glass instruments; the mutter and rustle of a draft running through the pages of innumerable overcrammed bookshelves, and the furtive zoom of a mouse scavenging a discarded meal from a lost plate. Something hissed; either boiling liquid, escaping gas, or seething animal.
That was one room. Who knew how tall the tower was.
“Finished,” she said, and held her hands out, rags-upwards.
“Oh, really? That wasn’t five minutes. I wanted it done in five minutes, but mostly I just wanted you to fail horribly so I could do the stone whistle. I miss that whistle so. I learned it from my grandfather. He was-”
“I’ve used up these cleaning rags doing it,” said Rilla. “See?”
The cold little breeze swept her palms clean again. “Oh. So you did, so you have. Well, that’s awkward. But maybe this is good! Maybe this is good. You see, I need you to find something for me! Someone put splinters in my lips and now I can’t whistle to turn them into a stone and throw them into the sea.”
Rilla bit her tongue, removing what felt like a good few millimetres of it.
“But I just need a little pinch of bottled sunlight and they’ll heal right up again. Good for your lips, sunlight is. I left it somewhere in the glass-maze. Could you find me that bottle right now?”
“Here,” said Rilla, holding up her cracked bottle.
“Aha! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you wait. This is EMPTY! There’s no light left! I’ll have to get more from the light house.”
“Could I hear more about that?” asked Rilla.
“Oh of course not. It’s far too dangerous and fragile and clever for a clumsy ol’ apprentice. Why, it’s secured with sixteen different knots, all of them not real! You need to pull them all out widdershins while whispering to yourself. Like this. See?”
“Not really,” said Rilla.
“Of course you don’t, you’re an apprentice. Then you need to infasten the unzippper and roil the gate. See?”
“I can’t quite manage to,” said Rilla.
“Hsst! Pay closer attention! Then I hook this to that and that to this and disarm this little spring—spear with my finger – my LITTLEST finger, you understand! – and it’s all safe and ready. See?”
“Completely incapable of that.”
The wizard gave a little shriek of frustration, and Rilla heard the tip-tap dog-on-a-hardwood-floor scrabble of him dancing in angst. Something fragile fell over and shattered into shards of…glass? Wood? Bone? “Oh, you brainless, soulless apprentice! Listen! If you can’t keep anything else in your head, remember this: NEVER. EVER. OPEN. THE LIGHT HOUSE.”
“How do I do that?”
“You don’t do that!”
“How do I don’t do that?”
“Like this,” said the wizard promptly, and he turned the light house inside-out and dumped nine-hundred-and-three days-worth of sunshine directly into his own face.
***
This time the gull was on Rilla’s chest.
“Hello again,” it said. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” she said. “But I don’t think I fixed anything.”
“Your eyes are shut.”
“Oh,” she said. And she opened them and yes, that was a lot better. There was a lot of shattered stone and wood and glass, and sky, and a sunset, and the moon faintly hanging in the last of the blue. And a twinkle on the horizon that could be the very first of the stars coming out.
“Tell me something, gull,” she said. “Do you know where any of the less-rotted shipwrecks are around here?”
“Probably! What’s in it for me?”
She pointed. “There’s probably cheddar, mustard, salt pork and rye inside that shattered cupboard over there.”
“Sold!
There was a lot to do, and Rilla couldn’t imagine having the strength to sit up, let alone start. She had the first and most brutal sunburn she’d ever experienced. Her limbs and felt like they weighed a ton apiece; her eyelids, sixteen tons.
But she didn’t want to close them in the slightest.