In the end, only Isabelle was allowed to accompany Marie to Flotsam. It took less than half a day to get there on the Finale. The war balloon dove into a cloud bank so thick that it turned day to night. Isabelle imagined the choir of Windcallers who provided the vessel’s motive power must be reading the currents in the air to keep them from colliding with anything.

They emerged suddenly into a great sphere of clear, calm air, a pocket of peace in the center of the storm. It was still dark, but before them floated several wide concentric rings of flickering lights. As Isabelle’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out dozens of ships’ hulks stripped of their masts and lashed together like the spiral of an immense spiderweb. The decks were covered in bright canvas tents and lit with colorful lanterns that made the whole thing look like a fairy market. Gyrine in wildly colorful garb walked the decks, and several clan balloons were tethered about the edges of the outer ring.

“It’s amazing,” Isabelle said.

“Which is why yer folk tries to destroy it all regular-like,” Feng said.

His kind betrayed the Enlightened and left the goodlands open to rape and pillage by the Skaladin, Primus growled.

Isabelle had no desire whatsoever to take either set of bait, so she kept her mouth shut and her inside voice quiet.

They were shoveled onto a skiff and then shuttled across to a hulk that had once been a galleon, one of the earliest types that still resembled a waterborne vessel, complete with rounded bottom and overbuilt sterncastle.

Feng marched Isabelle and Marie along a series of rope-and-plank bridges to the center of the spiderweb. At the hub, three hulks were joined, stem to stern, in a tight triangle. A deck had been erected between them, and on it was built a wooden theater, ascending circles of bench seats around a central stage.

Under the wide tent roof were strung scores of cables in a complex crisscrossing pattern. Each line was hung with the flags of other nations and navies; most of them tattered and burnt. They were the banners of captured ships. Trophies of the clans displayed for all to see.

Clearly word had been sent ahead of their arrival, for Gyrine flowed into the theater from all directions.

Feng took Isabelle and Marie to a room beneath the seats with an entrance leading out onto the arena floor. Isabelle’s trepidation grew the closer they got, like frost on the spars growing into crippling sheaths of ice. Marie showed no sign of stress, but she couldn’t even if she needed to.

“Conductor Feng,” came a woman’s indignant voice. “What trickery is this, calling a challenge in my clan’s name?”