Matthias walked up to them. “What happened back there?” he asked. Sera explained about the memory sharing, no longer afraid to declare her magic to humans. Matthias’s pale eyes grew wide as she spoke. When she finished, he said, “It is a good thing we left when we did. My mother would never have let you go.”

“How long until we reach Braxos?” Eneas asked, coming up to them, Agnes and Vada trailing behind.

Sera shrugged. “Errol does not understand distance like we do.” She peered into the water again and gasped. “Leo, look!”

The waters around the ship were dotted with mertags. Errol was not their only escort, it seemed. Errol saw her and popped up out of the water again.

“Some of my family has come along,” he said. “They wish to help the Cerulean who saved me. There is fighting back on Culinnon and they want no part of it. There will be death today, human and mertag both.” He sniffed at the air and then looked back the way they had come. “By snails and seaweed, let us hope it does not follow us.”

“Yes,” Sera murmured, her fingertips flashing. “Let us hope.”

One day out from Culinnon, the mist appeared.

It was delicate at first, clinging to the water’s surface like a cloud to a nebula leaf. The wind grew colder but Sera did not mind. It felt good to be sailing again.

She was standing at the rail with Agnes when Errol emerged from the water.

“Ships are coming,” he said. “Ships with golden suns along with ships of Culinnon.”

When Sera translated for Agnes, she pursed her lips, her face stony. “The Renalt and my grandmother,” she said. “I suppose it was too much to think they would keep each other distracted. Ambrosine must have noticed that we left. She’s coming after us. And the Renalt is coming after her.”

“This ship is very fast,” Sera said, gazing up at the billowing sails.

“Let’s hope it’s faster than those clandestines,” Agnes said.

The mist grew heavier and heavier, slowing their pace, and then the fog took them and everything disappeared.

Errol led them carefully, even slower now. The fog left dewdrops in Sera’s hair and sent little shivers down her spine. It grew denser by the minute, surrounding the sloop in thick clouds of pearly gray. When Sera looked down she could barely make out the water lapping at the hull—if not for Errol’s light, they would have been lost in minutes.

The benefit of this was that there was surely no way Ambrosine or the Renalt could follow them in it.

The first destroyed ship took them completely by surprise. One second there was nothing but fog; the next, the prow of a half-sunken galleon was rearing up on their left.