I stood abruptly, sending the chair tipping back. It clattered on the floor behind me as my hands slid over the maps, looking for the one I’d seen days ago. The one I hadn’t even looked twice at.

When I found it, I pulled it from under the others. The Bastian Coast. I took the lantern from the wall and set it at the corner, moving my fingers over the thick, soft parchment until I found it.

Fable’s Skerry.

“West!” I studied the depths and charts noted along the shore, the map of currents that slid around the little islet. “West!”

He appeared in the dark breezeway with a dry shirt pulled over one arm. “What is it?”

“What if she didn’t find it here?” I panted. “What if she lied?”

“What?”

“Why would Isolde steal the midnight? Why would she leave Bastian?” My voice sounded far away. “She didn’t trust Holland. Maybe she didn’t want her to know where she found it.”

He was listening now, sliding the other arm into the shirt as he walked toward me. “But where? She would have had to have a ship and a crew. The log says they were here.”

“They were,” I breathed, flipping through the parchments in the drawer until I found the log. I dropped it between us. “Except for one day.” I set my finger on Bastian.

“There’s no way she found it in Bastian. There are no reefs in those waters. There isn’t even so much as a sandbar for miles.”

I pointed to the islet.

“Fable’s Skerry?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s just a rock with a lighthouse on it,” he said.

“What if it’s not just a rock?”

He picked up the chair, setting it upright before he looked at the map again, thinking. “It’s just offshore of Bastian. Don’t you think if there was something there, someone would have found it?”

I let out an exhausted breath. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re looking in the wrong place. I don’t think it’s here, West.”

I didn’t know if I was making any sense. The lack of sleep and hours in the cold water had cast my mind in a fog. But still, that feeling was there. That doubt.

“Are you sure?” West said, studying me.

I clutched the quilt tighter around me. “No.”

It was a feeling, not a fact. I paced the floor in front of him, the warmth finally beginning to return beneath my skin as my cheeks flushed hot.

“I don’t think it’s here,” I said again, my voice a whisper.

His eyes jumped back and forth on mine and I watched as he weighed out my words. After a moment, he was walking toward the open door. And as soon as he disappeared into the breezeway, his voice rang out on the deck.

“Make ready!”

THIRTY