“Dead,” Marie said. “I had her pinned. She knew she was beaten. She said, ‘It would actually be simpler for everyone if you started a fire and burned the ship out of the sky. It’s not as if you dare return home after losing your precious cargo.’ She withdrew from the bloodhollow and killed it on her way out.”

Cargo? Isabelle’s heart near seized as the full import of what the bloodhollow had said struck home. This whole scenario, the Skaladin slavers and all of it, had been nothing but a ploy to expose and steal the key to the Vault of Ages, and Isabelle had fallen for it.

“Where’s Jean-Claude?”

“He took la reine’s cradle,” Marie said. “Him and Dok.”

“We’ve got to get him back,” Isabelle said. She’d sent him into danger without warning. Saints, but she was ever so much worse than a fool. She was a dupe. The hollowjacker not only meant to steal the key but also the navigator and navigation tool and to conceal their crime with the destruction of the Thunderclap. If the ship went down, no one would even know to look for them.

“We’re in the middle of a battle,” Marie said as another thunderous blast shook the ship, the smell of gun smoke finally penetrating Isabelle’s murky awareness. “After you healed the keel, we regained buoyancy, but we’ve got no margin. When we came back up we surprised the Skaladin brig. Vrain’s been trying to run it down.”

Isabelle said, “It’s a decoy. The Skaladin are after the key. I need to get topside.”

She stood and felt woozy. A ghost stain spread across her vision. She stood in the vestibule in the Temple on Hadon Hill outside of Om. She knew that the vestal standing before her was Marie and the sound of men chanting was actually the shouts of battle, but that knowledge eroded like a sand castle in the rain under the onslaught of hallucination.

Isabelle closed her eyes, but the visions inside her head were no better, because her head was no longer entirely Isabelle. The fire in her skull grew hotter, spreading like a fire that had leapt its hearth and caught on the rug. She turned her attention inward to the breach and found it crumbling and fraying like ancient cloth.

Escape is called—seize the advantage while—traitors in your ranks … Her ancestral chorus shouted over one another as they whirled by in the current of the everdream.

“Make sense, curse you.” It was as if all of her past lives had something to tell her but could not agree on how to say it.

Vestal Marie put a hand on Isabelle’s shoulder. “You need to stay here.”

“I have to tell Vrain,” Isabelle said.

“I’ll tell him,” Marie said. “You’re in no shape to lead.”