Page 32 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“What kind of sauce?”

“Marinara. Or ranch. Or anything that goes with calamari.”

“You eat calamari with ranch?”

He looked genuinely appalled.

“I eat everything with ranch. And don’t get all Italian on me,” I said because he was going to. I’d had this lecture before.

He stopped, but it was clearly a struggle. “I don’t think the fey know about marinara,” he said as I searched the half-acre of coat.

“Well, that’s it then. That’s how we win. Let the others battle it out; we’ll bring the marinara and get crowned.”

“It’s a concept.” He eyed me. “So, I come up with a sauce, and we drop the angsting?”

I thought about it. I was tired tonight anyway. “What sort of sauce?”

“Well, you got your choice,” he said, going to the other side of the coat and pulling out some even smaller spills, these with their tops cleverly made to fit together to seal them up.

He started describing the contents, none of which sounded very appetizing, with frequent uses of the words fermented and krill. I took the opportunity to examine my cards and decided that I should have left them at home. They’d gotten wet before and come through mostly okay, but this time. . .

They weren’t even yelling at me, which was a bad sign. They’d been spelled to describe the meaning of each tarot card, often at length, and while it was an old enchantment, it had never failed me before. But I didn’t get so much as some confused muttering this time, not even when I shook them, and one looked to be—

“Oh, no,” I said, peeling off the two halves of the World card from the end of the pack, where it was clinging to the next card in line after having been torn in two.

I didn’t understand that, as the deck had been inside my armor in one of the pockets that moved around as it morphed. This one had ended up on my belt and must have gotten the brunt of some blow or other, probably when that damned tentacle was trying to squeeze me to death. And now—

“What’s wrong?” Alphonse said, seeing my face.

“Eugenie’s cards,” I told him, feeling teary-eyed. Which was stupid, but the deck was the only thing I had from my old governess. She’d had them enchanted for me when I was a kid, and I’d kept them ever since.

Now, they were ruined.

“Hey,” Alphonse said because he’d known her, too. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” I said, not looking at him because big, bad Pythias didn’t cry. Especially not over a ratty old pack of tarot cards!

“Cards can be fixed. See, there’s your problem,” he said, pointing at the ruined World card. “It’s messing up the enchantment. It got torn somehow.”

“I know that!”

“So you also know that, if you mend it, the enchantment will work again.”

I looked up at him. “Really?”

He nodded. “Not all of us have a ton of decent mages around. That Pritkin guy, he don’t have to fix anything. He just casts a new spell. But when you’re one of us untalented slobs and shell out for a thing, well, you gotta have that thing. So, you get it fixed, right?”

“I guess.” I didn’t know if something as delicate as a ruined card could be fixed.

But Alphonse seemed to feel differently. “Yeah, this won’t be too hard. Your Dad repaired something similar for me once.”

“My Dad did?” I blinked. I hadn’t known that he and Alphonse had interacted much, mainly because Tony hadn’t allowed anybody to talk to me about my parents. But nobody cared what Tony thought now.

“Yeah.” Alphonse looked uncomfortable suddenly, as if he was sorry he’d brought it up. “It was nothing.”

“What kind of nothing?”

He scowled. “The poem kind, okay?”

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