Read Fair Wind to Widdershins for Free Online

sailed across the azure sky, their fortune and their fate to try! This is going to be great. I need to write it down.”
    Trundle sighed as he handed over a pencil and some paper. Look on the bright side, he told himself. In years to come, people might sit around the fire and sing “The Ballad of the Grisly Death of Trundle Boldoak at the Hands of Evil Pirates and a Wicked Roamany Aunty.”
    It would be nice to be famous.
    He sighed again. It would be even nicer to be alive and safe at home!
    “Impressive, eh?” said Jack.
    Trundle nodded. Jack was right. This was very impressive indeed.
    It was a bright new morning, and the Thief in the Night was hanging with tethered sails above the island of Widdershins. Except, as Trundle could clearly see, Widdershins was not just one island—it was a collection of dozens and dozens of islands, some as big as towns, others only large enough to hold one or two buildings. The floating islands were held together by arched wooden bridges and by iron walkways and chain-link catwalks and ropewalks and overpasses. Spires and belfries and towers and steeples thrust up into the sky. Narrow tip-tilted streets and stairways wound up and down and in and out of the tightly packed buildings. People in hooded habits scuttled about as though intent on important business.
    But as Trundle gazed down in awe, his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the huge island that formed the heart of the age-old city. It rose up above all the other islands like a mountain, steep sided, craggy, and rugged. Here and there, windswept trees and bushes pushed out from between the buildings that clung to its sheer sides like limpets to a rock. Up and up it soared to a great palace of rearing walls and time-worn battlements and keeps and halls and towers and turrets, topped off by an ornamented citadel from the apex of which rose a lofty steeple of gold that flashed in the sunlight.
    “And that, my friend,” said Esmeralda, “is where the Guild of Observators hangs out.”
    “It’s amazing,” breathed Trundle. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Face it, Trundle,” said Esmeralda. “Before you met me you’d never seen anything, period!”
    “Except cabbages,” added Jack with a wide smile.
    “Yes,” Trundle agreed, turning away from the awesome sight. “Many a cabbage. So what’s the plan? What do we do now?”
    “We make landfall and go chat with the big boss,” said Esmeralda. “We’ll show him the crown and the key. He’s bound to know what the key is for. I’m betting it fits a big golden chest that will have the Iron Crown sitting inside it on a purple velvet cushion.”
    Jack shook his head. “My guess is it’ll be the key to a long-forgotten room at the top of a deserted tower.” His voice lowered. “We’ll open the door and we’ll find a throne all covered in spiders’ webs … and sitting on the throne will be a skeleton dressed in rotting rags—the skeleton of the last king of Widdershins. And the Iron Crown will still be on his fleshless, hollow-eyed skull. And when we try to take it, the dead king will speak, putting a terrible curse on us.” Jack laughed. “That’ll be exciting, won’t it?”
    “That’s all we need,” said Trundle. “To be cursed!”
    “No one’s getting cursed,” said Esmeralda. “Come on, you two. Let’s get busy. And remember, keep your eyes peeled for any ravens. Aunt Millie’s messenger could be here already, and we don’t want to be taken by surprise.”
    Mooring the Thief in the Night on an outer island, they made their way through the maze of old streets, across rickety bridges, up narrow twisting stairways, along deep-set alleys and passages, heading always inward and upward.
    Trundle found Widdershins even more imposing and grand from close up, but he began to notice something else as well. The whole place was falling to pieces. Here and there, entire buildings had collapsed into rubble, and many another old edifice was being propped