Holland’s eyes fell down my wrinkled dress. “I come down here when I can’t sleep. No use in lying in bed when I can get some work done.”

But it didn’t look as if she was working. It looked as if Holland had come down to see Isolde.

She pulled a long match from a box on the desk and I watched as her hand floated over the tapers. When the last wick was lit, she blew out the match and I studied the illuminated maps pieced together on the far wall. They showed a detailed system of reefs, but this wasn’t just any chain of islands. I’d seen it before.

Yuri’s Constellation.

I took a step closer, reading notes written in blue ink along the margins of the diagrams. Different areas were crossed out, as if someone had methodically marked them. It was an active dive chart, like the ones my father would hang up in his helmsman’s quarters on the Lark. And that could mean only one thing.

Holland was still looking for the midnight.

Behind her, another large portrait of a man was hung in a gilded frame. He was handsome, with dark hair, gray eyes, and a proud set to his chin. But there was a kindness in his face. Something warm.

“Is that my grandfather?” I asked.

Holland smiled. “It is. Oskar.”

Oskar. The name seemed to fit the man in the portrait, but I was certain I’d never heard my mother speak it.

“He apprenticed as a gem sage with his father, but he’d given his heart to the stars. Against your great-grandfather’s wishes, Oskar took an apprenticeship as a celestial navigator.”

I guessed that’s where Azimuth House had gotten its name, as well as its design.

“He was the best of his time. There wasn’t a trader in the Unnamed Sea who didn’t revere his work, and nearly every navigator out on those waters was an apprentice of his at one time or another.” She smiled proudly. “But he taught Isolde the trade of a gem sage when he realized what she could do.”

The tradition of a gem sage was something that was passed down, and only to people who had the gift. My mother had seen early on that I had it. I wondered how long it had taken Oskar to see it in my mother.

I reached up, touching the edge of another portrait. It looked like the same man, but he was older. His white hair was cut short, curling around his ears.

“Odd that your mother never told you about him. They were quite close from the time she was a little girl.”

“She didn’t tell me a lot of things.”

“We have that in common.” Holland smiled sadly. “She was always a mystery to me. But Oskar … he understood her in a way I never could.”