The Lost Prince (24 page)

Dean sensed that Ronan could see the wheels turning in his head. Ronan patted his shoulder. “You’re in a bad spot, Seaborne. I know it. I do. If it means anything to you, you’ve got my respect for seeing this thing through.”

“A lotta good that’ll do ’im when he ends up dead in a ditch,” Rook said. “When you’re layin’ there, just remember you did it to yerself. Yer the one that wanted to be a prince and make time with the regent’s daughter.”

“I told you to leave her out of it,” Dean warned.

“Livin’ in a dream world, you are. That’s what ya get. A target on yer back, front, port side, and starboard.” Rook laughed. “They’re comin’ at ya from all angles, mate.”

“I’m not your mate, Rook.”

“Not my prince, neither,” Rook said through gritted teeth. He gave Dean’s head a shove.

Dean lunged for Rook.

The two boys grappled with each other in the brush until Ronan broke them up. “Belay that!” he rasped in a hoarse, angry whisper. “Both of you, stop it! We’re here to do a job, not meddle
with each other. Your words, Seaborne, remember? Now, look down there.”

He pointed over the bushes. Lights were going out in the watchtower windows. Dean and Rook hushed up. A few moments later, the last two Watchers left the building and locked up for the night. Dean remained silent even after they disappeared down the mountain trail. He was upset with himself for letting Rook get to him. That shouldn’t have happened. He had to do a better job of staying cool.

“You all right?” asked Ronan.

Dean shook his head. “This isn’t how I work. I’m used to keeping a low profile. This job … everything about it has been wrong from the start.”

“It’s a new experience for me too,” Ronan said. “What do you say we just keep our eyes on the prize?”

“Eyes on the prize,” Dean repeated. He got up and started off toward the watchtower. “No bones about it.”

CHAPTER
23

T
he watchtower stood alone on a promontory overlooking the ocean. It was a squat, blocky structure that, due to its position on the peak, had seemed taller from afar. A wooden staircase wrapped around the mountain all the way up to the main entrance, which had been left unguarded. It was an easy enough thing for Dean to pick the lock on the front door and slip inside. Ronan and Rook hurried after him. They waited until they were safely inside the tower before they lit their lanterns, just in case anyone was watching.

The tower’s lower levels were a chaotic mess. Cluttered desks
were covered with journals, calendars, and bits of scrap paper that had been scrawled with illegible handwriting. Everywhere Dean looked he saw books—sturdy new ones and brittle ancient tomes written in a dozen different languages. They were jammed into shelves, piled high on tables, and stacked up in corners on the floor. There were pieces of wind gauges and weather vanes at workstations. Star charts were spread out on drafting tables and marked with quizzical notations. Dean spied a roll of parchment that took up an entire wall and couldn’t help but feel intimidated by it. The paper was littered with symbols he didn’t recognize, and equations he couldn’t understand. Everything about the place reeked of wisdom beyond his ken.

“I’m starting to see why they don’t post guards at the door,” Dean said. “How could anyone but the Watchers make sense of this?”

Ronan lit a lantern by the stairs and motioned for Dean and Rook to follow him up. “Not to worry. This is just the science behind their machine. We don’t need to understand how it works. It’s enough for us to know that it does. Up we go now. Step lively.”

When Dean got upstairs, he found it sparse, clean, and empty. At first glance, it was the exact opposite of the floor below. There was nothing but a white stone pedestal in the center of the room, with an iron brace around it. Upon closer examination, Dean saw that both the pedestal and the brace ran up through a
wooden platform overhead, where a complex network of gears and hydraulic pistons split off to line the bottom of the decking above. Dean whistled.

“Impressed?” Ronan was already climbing a ladder up to the next level. “That’s nothing. Wait until you get a load of this up here.”

Dean followed Ronan up to the observatory level, where he came face-to-face with the largest spyglass he’d ever seen. It was five times the size of a cannon, perched high atop a wide steel shaft. A spiral staircase twisted up toward a seat that had been planted at the base of the telescope, and the shaft holding up the entire apparatus was connected to the web of gears beneath the floorboards. There were handles, levers, and cranks aplenty to adjust its position. Rook shifted a few. “Don’t play with those,” Dean said, swatting his hand away. “Ronan, you really understand how to use this thing?”

Rook shook his head no.

Ronan heaved on a line that ran through a series of pulleys on the wall. “I understand enough.”

Each hard tug of rope opened a hatch in the tower’s dome roof a little wider. After Ronan finished sliding the roof open, he pushed a big red button. Pumps in glass tubes pressed down, water bubbled, and pistons fired. Dean heard the sound of compressed air being released as the steel shaft extended, stopping only after the end of the spyglass had been raised up out of the tower.

“Amazing,” Dean marveled.

“That it is,” Ronan said. “The Watchers spend all year maintaining and calibrating this contraption. Apparently, it can only predict the storm’s next break now, before the winds pick back up. They get one shot at this and that’s it, so they have to make sure their tools are precise.”

“How do they know?” Dean asked. “How’d they figure all this out?”

“You’re asking me?” Ronan replied. “I don’t know how they cracked this nut, but they’ve been doing it since before we were born.” He pointed up at the night sky. “You line up Orion’s belt in the sights of that spyglass, and it’ll tell you when next year’s storm will die down.”

“Orion’s belt?” Rook said. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

Ronan sighed. “Weren’t you paying attention in here today? Orion’s belt! How long have you been a sailor, and you don’t know your stars?”

Rook scowled. “How long you been a pirate, and you don’t know how to …” He trailed off, trying to come up with something clever.

“Don’t think too hard, Rook,” Dean said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He put a hand on Ronan’s back and lowered his voice. “Ronan, this contraption is beyond the likes of us.”

Ronan shook his head. “The Watchers told me how they do it. It’s not as hard as it looks.”

“They just volunteered all this today?” Dean asked. It sounded too good to be true.

“It was just like you said. Once I buttered them up, I couldn’t shut them up. Half the time, I didn’t understand what they were talking about, but what I did catch was simple enough. The answers we want are written in the stars.”

Dean shook his head in wonder. “This I have to see.” He started up the spiral staircase that led to the spyglass. “Rook, you keep an eye out that window. Let us know if you see any trouble coming our way.

Ronan, can you work these levers by yourself?” Ronan spit into his palms and rubbed his hands together. “Aye.”

“All right,” Dean said, climbing into the red velvet chair beneath the spyglass. “Let’s get a look at the weather.”

Dean settled into his seat and got his bearings. The end of the spyglass was there for him to look into, and below that, a console filled with confusing controls. There were sliding switches, knobs, and a calendar readout made up of three wheels. There was one wheel for months, one for days, and one for years. Dean looked through the spyglass and saw three circular targets he could adjust. He twisted a few knobs on the console, and the date wheels scrolled as the targets moved. The readout would reveal the storm date to him once the targets clicked into place along Orion’s belt.

“Do you see it?” Ronan called out. “The constellation?”

Dean looked again. “I think so. Rotate me clockwise, toward
you.” Ronan cranked a gear, and the spyglass swiveled. The years clicked forward on the readout as he moved. “All right, stop!” Orion the Hunter came into view. Dean fiddled with the controls, but the scope’s markers couldn’t reach the stars in his belt. “No good! Angle me up a point, Ronan.”

Ronan tried a few more levers until he found one that tilted Dean’s chair back and the spyglass skyward. Months scrolled by on the console as he moved Dean into position. Dean focused the lens, but his sights were still off. Ronan had moved him too far. It took some doing, but with a little back and forth, Dean and Ronan got the spyglass in place before either one of them lost patience with the other. From there, Dean could make the final adjustments himself. He leaned forward to line up the targets with the stars. A few more minutes and he would have it.

“How we doing up there, Seaborne?” asked Ronan.

“Quiet!” Rook called out from his perch at the window. “Someone’s comin’.”

Dean’s head shot up. “How much time do I have?”

“Not much. They’re on the stairs outside the tower.”

“They’re on the stairs and you’re just telling me now? What are you doing over there?”

“The best I can!” Rook called back. “I’m lookin’. I didn’t see ’em before now!”

“How many are there?” Ronan asked.

“Just one. Can’t tell who it is.”

“I knew this was going too smoothly,” Dean muttered. “Why should anything we do here come easy?” He swallowed hard and turned back to his work. There would be time to yell at Rook later. Right now, he had to focus. The console before him was an endless array of knobs and dials. Sweat beaded up on his brow as he tried them all, fine-tuning the spyglass’s sights, but the mutinous little targets refused to go where he wanted. Dates on the calendar wheel ticked up and down as Dean worked. Downstairs, he heard the tower doors open.

“Hurry up, Seaborne,” Rook said.

“Before they get here, you mean? Brilliant, Rook. Thank you.” Dean bit his lip and kept twisting knobs, turning dials, and sliding switches. Eventually, he found the right ones, and the targets did as he asked. The three gold rings in the spyglass fell over the stars in Orion’s belt. The numbers in the date box clicked into place. He had it.

Dean sat back and stared at the date of next year’s harvest, committing it to memory. It was ten months away. Not quite a year, but still a long time to wait. One-Eyed Jack had never been known for that kind of patience, but if there was ever a treasure worth waiting for, this was it. Dean sprang from his seat and sped down the spiral staircase.

“Do you have it?” Ronan asked, his voice just above a whisper.

Dean nodded and jumped down to the platform. Ronan and Rook doused their lights and followed him below, taking cover
behind the spyglass’s massive stone pedestal. They could hear someone in the offices downstairs. “Who is it?” Dean asked Rook. “A Watcher? A guard?”

Rook shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Dean frowned. The three of them stared at the door in silence. When it opened, the face behind it belonged to the last person Dean expected to see.

“Hello?” Waverly Kray called out, holding a candle. “Is somebody there?”

CHAPTER
24

D
ean, Ronan, and Rook huddled together behind the stone column. It was so quiet in the tower that a small shuffle of feet, a sniffle, or a breath was all it would take to give them away. They kept still and quiet as Waverly climbed the ladder to the platform above without noticing them. After she passed, Ronan and Rook crept toward the door, but Dean held back. Ronan stopped and looked at Dean. He motioned with his hands, silently asking what he was waiting for. “You go on ahead,” Dean whispered. “I want to see what she’s up to.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “I’ll bet you do. Forget her, Seaborne. Come on.”

“I’m serious, Ronan. Aren’t you curious what she’s doing here?”

“Not enough to get caught sneaking around this place.”

“I won’t. Trust me.”

Ronan shook his head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He followed Rook downstairs and vanished in the shadows of the stairwell. Dean waited until he heard Waverly’s footsteps leave the platform, then followed her up.