“Yes, my lady.”

“You do know how important this voyage is?”

“I know. Of course. And forgive me for having delayed you in your great work. I meant no disrespect. Please—”

“Ssh, ssh, ssh,” Mater Motley said with an almost loving indulgence in her voice. “You did well.”

“I didn’t think—”

“I said you did well, Maratien. And so you did. There will be another tide. I will return to the tower with you.”

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Then you will have made an error and you’ll learn from it, won’t you?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Now let’s see who has come to visit me.”

Chapter 22

Turning Away

ONCE THE SMALL ROWING boat had delivered Candy and Malingo out of the maze of caves beneath Jibarish, and into the open waters of the Izabella, it had lost all power of self-will.

“Do you have any idea of what direction the Nonce is in?” Malingo said, gazing about confusedly in all directions.

Candy considered this for a long moment. A chill wind came across the waters. She shuddered.

“I can’t focus. I’m all alone in here,” she said.

Her hand went to her face. Behind it, tears came. And once they came, could not be quelled. Malingo just sat, an oar in each hand, watching her. Though his head was dropped, he kept his eyes on her.

“I would have thought you’d be happy to be rid of her,” he said.

“I am,” Candy replied. “At least I was on the island. And she’s a vile piece of work. But still, in here . . .” She tapped the middle of her forehead with her finger. “In here there’s just me and a lot of space. Too much space.”

“Everybody’s in the same situation.”

“Yes?”

“Of course.”

“Lonely?”

“Sometimes very.”

“I didn’t realize how strange it would feel, with her gone. You’re right. I’m just feeling what everybody else feels.”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, but she’d only just done so when her sorrow overwhelmed her again and more tears came. It was as though she, Candy, was weeping for the first time, without another presence in her thoughts to help her shrug off her grief. She didn’t try to stem the flow now. She just let the tears come, talking through them.

“I thought there was enough of the real me just spread out to fill my head. That’s how it felt at first.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s like I’m sitting by a little fire in the middle of . . . in the middle . . .” The tears almost silenced her, but she pushed on through them. “. . . the middle of a huge gray nothing.”

“Is it solid? The gray, I mean.”

“Does it matter?” she said, looking out over the dark waters.

A single squid, its body no longer than her foot from the tips of its tentacles to the top of its head, propelled itself past the boat, its body decorated with waves of color.

“Maybe it’s just a gray mist,” Malingo said. “Maybe it’s not empty. Maybe it’s full of things that you just haven’t seen yet.”

Candy glanced up at Malingo, who was studying her so intensely, his face so full of love she could feel its presence, a living thing, coming in to drive off her solitude. Whether he intended it or not, that’s how she felt.

“I hate girls who cry at every little thing,” she said to him, wiping her tears away for a second time, “so no more blubbering from me.”

“It’s not as if you didn’t have a reason,” Malingo replied.

“There’s always reasons, aren’t there? I’m sure all kinds of things will go wrong before I get home.”

“Back home to the Hereafter? Why go back there? You said you hated it.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Candy replied without much conviction. Then, looking back at the sea, she said, “I love being here, Malingo. Nothing would make me happier than to stay forever.”

“Then stay.”

“I can’t. The price is too high.”

“What price?”

“People’s lives. Not just Covenantis. But Mrs. Munn . . . she was almost killed too. And there’ve been plenty of others. Some of them perhaps you’d say deserved it. Kaspar Wolfswinkel. The Criss-Cross Man. A lot of stitchlings on the Wormwood, and Mater Motley’s seamstresses. All of them would still be alive if I’d stayed in Chickentown. What just happened with Laguna and her boys is the last straw.”

“And what about the other ones whose lives you’ve changed? The people who love you? What about me? What will I do when you’re gone, Candy? I thought we were going to be friends forever.”

Candy sighed.

“You’ll come visit,” she said.

“I’m sure I’d be very welcome in Chickentown,” Malingo said. “They’d probably put me in a zoo.”

“But suppose something were to happen to you right here, because of me? You know it could. I couldn’t live with that.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me, I swear. I’m going to live forever. We both are.”

“Oh, and how long have you had this planned?” Candy said.

“Since we got out of Wolfswinkel’s house. I thought then: this girl has miracles at her fingertips. Nothing’s beyond her. That’s what I believed then and I believe it even more strongly now.”

“Miracles? No. That wasn’t my doing. That was Boa, staying in practice for the day when she finally got out.”

“So if you’d have come knocking on Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s door without Boa—”

“We’d both be slaves right now.”

Malingo shook his head.

“You’re wrong. I remember very clearly looking in your eyes that first time Wolfswinkel summoned me.”

“You were hanging upside down from a roof beam.”

“That’s right. And I looked in your eyes—I remember this so, so clearly—and you know what I saw?”

“What?”

“Exactly the same person I’m looking at right now. Candy Quackenbush, of Chickentown, Minnesota. Come to save my life—”

“But—”

Malingo raised a finger.

“I’m not done yet,” he said. “You’d come to save my life from the hell Wolfswinkel had turned it into. Maybe you didn’t realize that was what you’d come to do, but it was. Now you can make lists of people who got hurt because you crossed over from the Hereafter, but I can make just as many lists of people who are still alive, or whose lives are better, because of you. Think of all the people who lived in fear of Christopher Carrion. You took that fear away.”

“Did I? Or did I just leave room for something even worse to take his place?”

“You talking about Mater Motley?”

“For now. But there’s probably somebody out there even worse, whose name we don’t even know yet.”

“You’re right. The Abarat’s got its share of bad. Just like the Hereafter, right?”

“Right.”

“But you didn’t put them here. Can you really blame yourself for every twisted, poisoned soul in the Abarat?”

“No. That’d be stupid.”

“And you’re not stupid,” Malingo said. “You’re anything but. Even if you were to leave right now the Abarat would never be the same. There’d always be this brief, golden time we’d remember. The Age of Candy.”

That broke Candy’s dark mood, at least for a moment.

“The Age of Candy!” she laughed. “That’s the silliest thing you’ve ever said.”

“I thought it had quite a poetical ring to it,” Malingo replied. “But if you think it’s silly then there’s only one way to stop us all from making idiots of ourselves.”

“Which is—”

“You can’t leave. Simple as that.”

Candy’s laughter died away and she thought about things for a long while. Finally she said, “I tell you what. I’ll stay until this whole business with Boa is cleared up. How’s that?”

“It’s better than you leaving us right now. And of course there’s a possibility that the mystery of Princess Boa will never be completely solved. In which case you’ll just have to stay with us forever.” He grinned. “What a terrible thing that would be.”

There was a moment of silence between them, and then Candy’s eyes drifted back over the edge of the boat. The lone squid she’d seen before had found a companion.