I was crying, I was. Right there at the Parsnit table, in front of Pop and Tally and everyone else. But I wasn’t crying for Boss Authority, I was crying for me.

And that’s when I understood what true Orating was. It isn’t just about telling your own story. It’s about telling your story in a way that makes it someone else’s story too, maybe even more theirs than yours when the telling’s all over. It’s inviting someone else into the tale and letting them live there awhile, letting them put their own hearts and feelings and lives into it, and then saying, Here, you can keep it, it’s yours now. That’s what Boss Authority did every time he opened his mouth. His words might as well have been mine. They would have been mine too, if I was half the Orator he was.

Truth be told, Boss Authority was whooping my tail right now. I didn’t stand one ghost of a chance of winning this one, unless I got lucky, and fast. Good thing I had half Pop’s blood running through me, the luckiest blood in the whole Swamplands.

Now came the time for us to lay down Journey cards against each other. I drew the first card and held it tight in my hands. It was a good card, but one that wasn’t quite so powerful for me this time around, how I was feeling right now. I drew the Rambling Duke.

I laid the Rambling Duke faceup, the tall gangly traveler with a knapsack full of cards, a swagger to his steps, a gold tooth glimmering in his mouth. I played the card of my pop, charged with all the love and power I could muster, and I thrust it at Boss Authority, trying to figure how on earth he could overpower a card so full of love as that one.

But Boss Authority just grinned at me, this weird trickster’s grin, like he’d set this trap for me ages and ages ago and I’d just blundered myself right into it. Scared me, it did, shivered me right through my bones. I didn’t know what all was about to happen to me.

“Let me tell you the story of how the Fish Boy met his hero,” said Boss Authority. “When the Fish Boy was a little older, say seventeen or so, he ran away from home, he did, left his wretched lying mom and his evil-tempered daddy and took off to the swamp. Why the swamp? Because nobody knew him there. Because it was a place his mom never went and his daddy was scared of. Because it was the only place left in this whole wide world where he would be safe from the both of them, where nobody had ever heard of him or his family, where he could make himself new. Besides, a swamp wasn’t so bad, was it? It was beautiful in the mornings, when the sun cut through the trees and burned all the water gold. The cattails swaying in the wind, the dew on a spiderweb, the dragonflies and hummingbirds, the turtles that rose and vanished at their whims, snakes long and glistening on the water. It was all beautiful, astonishing, and new every day. Even now he remembers rowing out on his first clear night in the swamp, a big bright moon thick and gold and juicy as a peach up there, and seeing all the stars reflected in the water beneath him, like he was drifting through them, a tiny canoe that had left the old world and cut a path through space. He knew this would be the place for him, this would be where he could become someone new, the person he secretly was, the person he’d always wanted to be.”