Quentin supposed he would consult on weather magic if any was required, but Julia was better at that stuff than he was, and anyway he couldn’t imagine how even Julia could improve on what they had, which was a clear sky and a cold stiff wind out of the northwest. He decided to climb up the mast.

He walked over to the last and least of the Muntjac’s three masts, swinging his arms forward and back, loosening up his shoulders. It was probably a stupid idea. But who hadn’t at some point in his life wanted to climb to the top of a sailing ship in full flight? It always looked easy in movies. The mast wasn’t exactly built for climbing—there weren’t any rungs or steps or spikes. He put his foot on a brass cleat. The man at the helm looked at him. Your king is climbing a mast, citizen. And no, he doesn’t know how. Deal with it.

It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. Where there weren’t cleats or spars there were at least ropes, though you had to be careful not to pull anything that wasn’t supposed to be pulled. He skinned a knuckle, then another one, and a fat splinter stabbed straight into the soft ball of his thumb and broke off there. The mast hummed with tension—he could sense it rooted deep in the hold, taking the force of the wind and balancing it with the force of water on the keel. The thing he hadn’t counted on was how cold it got, right away, like he’d climbed into another climatic zone, or maybe the lower limits of outer space.

The other thing he hadn’t counted on was the angle of the ship. He barely noticed it most of the time, but the farther he got from the safety of the deck the more perilously the ship seemed to be heeling over. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t actually in imminent danger of rolling right over and drowning them all. Probably.

By the time he got to the top he was no longer over the deck at all. He could have dropped a plumb line straight down into the water, which rushed along below him, a torrent of rough green glass. A blunt-nosed, milky-gray shape was keeping pace with them below the surface about fifty feet off their starboard side. It was huge. Not a whale—its tail was vertical, not horizontal. A gigantic fish, then, or a shark. Even as he watched it, it swam deeper, growing fainter and more diffuse, until he could no longer see it at all. The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.

Going down was easier. Once he was safely on deck Quentin decided to keep going the other way, down to the hold. The noise of the bright, busy outside world vanished as soon as he stepped through the dark hatch in the deck. There wasn’t far to go: three short flights took him to the bottom of the Muntjac’s hollow little world.