The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat

Author:Christina Soontornvat [Soontornvat, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536224665
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2022-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

Two weeks later, Bo and I had settled into a routine. During the day, I helped Paiyoon on deck or in his cabin. Working in his room meant that I could get a good look at his bookcase and determine what I wanted. It was a little like window-shopping. I would pick out which books or documents I needed, and later that night they would get delivered right to my doorstep by my own personal pickpocket.

Each night, Bo slipped above deck after the midnight bells, once the crew on watch had settled into their stations or their nightly card game with Rian. Then he’d creep to Paiyoon’s cabin and use a sail mender’s awl to pick the lock. Working from my shopping list, he’d take the documents we needed and bring them back to me in the hold. He could take only a few items at a time—a ship’s log or two, maybe a journal. If Paiyoon woke in the middle of the night, we didn’t want him to notice that something was missing.

“Paiyoon doesn’t snore like everyone else on this ship,” said Bo, bright-eyed from the excitement and chill of going above deck. He dropped down the ladder and landed silently in front of me. “The old man sleeps like a stone. It’s creepy, like sneaking into a tomb and stealing from a corpse.”

I frowned as I took the packet of papers from him. “Not stealing, borrowing,” I said. “And I don’t know about anyone else on this ship, but I don’t snore. Not that I even get the chance these days.”

My hours were completely filled with work, with only four or five left over for sleeping. But maybe that was a good thing. If I had extra time on my hands, I knew that I would just fall into daydreaming about my new lineal, how I would wear it, and what the look on Tippy’s face would be when I walked into the Three Onions and jangled it in front of her. The whole thing was still too much of a long shot to daydream about. I needed to stay focused.

Bo plunked down beside me on the sailcloth pallet. We had added padding to make it somewhat more comfortable, and I’d brought lemon peels from the galley to try to mask the smell. Our lamp cast lanky shadows on the timbers that wrapped around the hull like massive wooden ribs.

I split a hard ginger cookie in half, checked it for mealworms, then gave one piece to Bo. I began thumbing through the pages of the ship’s log he had swiped for me. “Perfect, this is another one!”

“Another what?”

“Another entry from the captain of a Mangkon merchant ship. This one is newer, too, only fifty years old.” I ran my finger across the dense script. “They foundered in a storm past Fahlin. The winds blew them due south and west, where they sighted land—or at least they thought they had.”

After digging into the documents for the past couple weeks, I was getting used to reading records like this, but the first time, it had come as quite a shock.

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