Previously at the Inn: Pumpkina and Sway vanished from the bake-off and woke up bailing on a pirate ship no one remembers boarding. Back home, their bottle came up the kitchen sink, and Grumm wrote a poem about the word fine. The whole story starts on Start the Story Here.
To get a bucket on this ship, you need a form.
To get the form, you need a bucket.
Pumpkina worked this out on the second morning. She was standing in a line that began at the Form Window, ran the length of the main deck, and disappeared down a hatch.
Her hands still ached from the nightly bail. Her apron had dried stiff with salt and crackled when she moved. Somewhere near the bow, a gull was judging everyone.
“It’s simple,” said the first mate.
He had been saying so for some time. He was a large, cheerful man in an enormous hat, with a brass stamp on a chain around his neck. He wore it over his heart.
“Step one.” He held up a damp yellow form. “Fill out the Request for Bucket. Step two, take it to the Bucket Office for a countersignature. Step three, the Bucket Office will want to see your old bucket.”
“We handed our buckets in,” said Pumpkina. “Last night. To the clerk.”
“Lovely! Then step four, the clerk gives you a receipt for your old bucket. Bring the receipt back here with the form, between third bell and slightly after third bell.” He beamed. “And then you may get a bucket.”
“May,” said Sway.
“May!” said the first mate, thrilled that someone had noticed. He stamped the form. Then, for good measure, he stamped the back of Sway’s hand.
Sway studied it. Approved, it said, backwards.
“Approved for what?”
The first mate beamed at them, tipped his enormous hat, and moved off down the line. A moment later they heard him again, three people back, just as warm as before.
“It’s simple!”
The line moved one person every few minutes. No one talked. A small red crab sidled out from a coil of rope, plucked a yellow form from someone’s hand, and scuttled off with it. The someone did not seem to notice.
Three places ahead stood a halfling, broad as a barrel and not much taller than one, with a wrestler’s shoulders and a pair of goggles pushed up into his spiky hair. The sailors on either side of him kept talking to him, or about him. It was hard to tell which.
“Seven loves the morning line,” said one. “Don’t you, Seven?”
“Seven’s been here forever,” said the other. “Natural bailer, Seven. Born to it.”
“Born to it,” the halfling repeated, quietly. As if he were checking the words for leaks.
Sway leaned forward. “Forgive me, friend. Is Seven your name?”
The halfling turned. He had a scrapper’s beard, round spectacles, and very steady eyes behind them. He opened his mouth to answer, and got interrupted.
“It’s his bucket number,” said the first sailor helpfully. “He’s always been Bucket Seven.”
“Where we come from,” said Pumpkina, “nobody’s a number. There’s an inn...”
His eyes narrowed, the easy squint of someone who had been sold things before.
“There’s always an inn,” he said. “Somebody always knows a better place. Then you find out what it costs.”
“There are hammocks,” Sway offered.
“That’s how they get you.”
Sway put a hand over their heart, wounded on the hammocks’ behalf.
Third bell rang. The line lurched forward all at once, everyone shuffling faster, the way people do when they can smell the end of a long wait. The halfling reached the Form Window with his form held up over his head.
The shutter came down in his face.
“Slightly after third bell,” said the clerk, from behind it.
“Seven doesn’t mind,” said the sailor at his elbow. “Seven never minds.”
The halfling stood looking at the closed shutter for a long moment.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
Then he did a strange thing. He brushed off one shoulder, then the other, slow and easy, the way a fighter does after a win. He looked down at his own hands, confused, as though they had done it without asking him.
Something pulled tight under Pumpkina’s ribs. She didn’t know him. She knew that look. She had worn it folding a card that said Too emotional.
She stepped up and knocked on the shutter. It opened one inch.
“The Window is closed.”
“It’s still slightly after third bell.”
“It is now considerably after.”
The shutter slammed shut.
Pumpkina stood there with her form crushed in her fist. Overhead, in a perfectly clear sky, one small grey cloud slid in over the Form Window and stopped. A single drop of rain struck the shutter. Then the cloud thinned, and was gone. No one looked up.
At the rail, past the end of the line, someone had left a bucket. One bucket. No form tied to its handle, no name on it. Pumpkina looked around for whoever it belonged to. There was no one.
She picked it up. No one stopped her.
She carried it back up the deck and held it out to the halfling they called Seven.
He looked at the bucket. Then at her. “What’s it cost?”
“Nothing.”
He took it. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t let go of it, either.
The afternoon went the way afternoons went on that ship. Half the deck went below to sleep, because the nights belonged to the buckets and everyone had to close their eyes sometime. The other half polished pipes that already gleamed and coiled ropes that were already coiled.
Mister Captain Regulus Proctor, sir, strolled among them, perfectly dry under his little floating umbrella, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“One more polish on that pipe,” he told a sailor, tapping it with one finger, “and we may be very close to perfection today.” He checked his pocket watch. “A crew that coils together stays dry together.” To a deckhand nodding off over a rope, he said, “Chin up. You never know. Perhaps tonight the storm won’t come.”
No one believed him. Not one of them. They polished anyway. It was the only way to dodge the captain’s... enthusiasm.
The shadow of the mainmast crept across the deck. Everyone watched it go. They all knew what they were waiting for.
At sundown, right on schedule, the sky went the color of a plum.
The first drop. Then the rest.
Cold. Dark. The roar. Scoop, swing, throw. Pumpkina bailed with her two cupped hands. Sway bailed with a boot.
Seven was there, at her shoulder. She hadn’t seen him come. He bailed with the bucket she’d given him, steady as a pump.
The ship climbed a wave and fell off the back of it. The whole deck tipped. Everyone slid. Buckets, boots, crew, all of it went sliding toward the rail in one long tumbling heap.
He didn’t.
He stood with his feet planted wide, the smallest body on that deck, and the sea threw itself at him. He did not move an inch.
Sway caught Pumpkina by the wrist. Pumpkina caught the rail. When the ship came level again, the halfling looked down at his own feet in surprise.
The bailing continued. Somewhere in the long middle of the night, without looking at her, he said, “Where’s this inn?”
“I don’t know,” Pumpkina said. It was the truth.
He grunted. “First honest pitch I ever heard.”
A while later, between waves, he said one more thing.
“Jory.”
“What?”
“My name.” He scooped, swung, threw. “I think it’s Jory.”
Pumpkina said it over once under her breath, so she would have it.
The storm ran out slowly, the way it had before. Rain to needles. Needles to mist. Pails handed in at the hatch, one by one, to the clerk with the soggy ledger. The sky went pewter, then pearl, then gold, and everyone lay down on the warm deck and steamed.
Pumpkina turned her head toward him. She was smiling. She could hardly feel her face, but she was smiling.
“Morning, Jory.”
He looked at her politely. Pleasantly. The way you look at someone who has sat down at the wrong table.
“Do I know you?”
Behind him, the sailor sat up and pointed. “Look, Seven. New ones.”
“When did you two come aboard?” asked the deckhand, the same one she had asked on their very first morning how long he had been on this ship. His eyes slid right over her, the way Jory’s had.
Her smile stayed exactly where it was. She closed her fingers around the warm stone in her pocket and held on.
Sway’s hand found hers on the deck between them. Neither of them said anything.
Then came the chime. Then the sigh. Then, warm as fresh bread, the voice over the loudspeaker.
“Gooood morning, crew! Today’s heading is a promising one. Please remember that bucket requests submitted yesterday are void, as yesterday has ended. Morale is mandatory. Chins up, emotions down!”
At the Form Window, the clerk didn’t look up.
“Name?”
“We did this yesterday,” said Pumpkina.
“There’s no box for yesterday.”
She filled out the form. She got in line. Three places ahead of her stood Seven, holding a bucket with no form tied to its handle.
He turned around. He looked at her for a long moment, like someone trying to remember a song.
Then, for no reason anyone on that ship could have named, he winked.
Last week, you voted on what Grumm would rhyme with “hammock.” The vote was unanimous: he refuses, on artistic grounds. Grumm says it’s the most accurate poll in the history of the Inn and has asked for it to be framed. We’re working on that.
Who left that bucket at the rail? Why can’t anyone on this ship hold on to a single yesterday? Will Jory remember his own name tomorrow night?
And most importantly: what will the first mate stamp next?
Votes close Friday at midnight. The winner arrives with Chapter 4.
Filling forms out in triplicate,
RJ