Scarlet Morning

Elvey leads Viola through the town. She’s friendly with everyone in the poor, working-class area. They reach a giant black rift, within which they can see the wreckage of buildings and mangled lampposts. The Second City is more accurately the first city built on Wilder’s Green, but it flooded easily, so the people covered it and rebuilt the new city on top with the same layout, every detail replicated. People do not go down to the Second City, believing it is haunted.

They walk along the edge of the rift to an abandoned villa upon which someone has written: “THESE STREETS BELONG TO THE REQUIEM SHARKS” (292). They enter a decaying ballroom in the villa where a group of children greets them. Elvey introduces them as “the last pirate guild in all of Dickerson’s Sea” (293). There is one old man, Gubb, who explains that “Charley Noble” is an old pirate code. Everyone in the group came from a pirate family, who they lost during the Massacre, and they take care of each other now.

The group makes Viola feel welcome. Everyone eats together and sings a pirate song in the evening. The younger children ask Gubb for a story because he knows all the famous pirates. Viola asks if he knew Scarlet Morning, but he says that Scarlet Morning was just a myth. Instead, he tells a story about the Requiem Sharks, whose pirate court ruled Wilder’s Green from the Second City. They did not harass the regular people, only the Queensmen. A few years before the Great Blow, they started dying mysteriously. Most were already dead before the Massacre started. People fear that whatever killed them off is still down in the Second City.

Aboard the Excelsis, Herman asks to speak with Wilmur about the Calamary Rose. Wilmur can tell he is fishing for information about pirates, but insists that the ship was only a porp-hunting vessel. Herman asks where Wilmur came from and says that Wilmur is not a “real name” (309). Wilmur insists it is real because it is his.

Viola dreams again. She sees the man with the typewriter, older and more haggard, a graveyard with a grave dug up, and a girl crying in a cellar. The girl looks at Viola and says she is not supposed to be there. The dream shifts again. She is in the city square in the Second City. At the end of the square, she sees a pub, its front formed out of the hull of a ship, with a sign calling it Neptune’s Cup. Inside, a group of pirates sing. She recognizes them from Gubb’s description of the Requiem Sharks. They turn to look at her, and there is something wrong with their eyes. They scream. Then gulls burst through the windows, killing everyone in minutes. Just before Viola’s vision goes black, she sees a figure standing amid the gulls: a man with silver hair and a giant bird on his shoulder. An illustration evokes the ominous and threatening nature of the image (314). Gubb shakes her arm to wake her.

Viola ventures out into the city. She scavenges charcoal and travels around the city, writing Wilmur’s name everywhere she goes. A six-year-old girl named Rhosymedre offers to help when she understands that Viola is trying to find a friend. Rhosymedre offers to take Viola to an oracle woman called Tal dei Tali, who can find anything.

They find the oracle hiding in a large drainpipe, concealed in darkness. Tal dei Tali is a haggard old woman. She asks how Rhosymedre’s father’s broken leg is healing, and Rhosymedre says that her father has not broken his leg. Viola gives Tal dei Tali one of her boots, which first belonged to Wilmur, to help find him. Tal dei Tali says his name is William, not Wilmur. She does not say where he is. She sees Chase’s knife in Viola’s belt and asks where it came from.

Tal dei Tali takes the knife and says that it once belonged to a man who fell and gashed his neck on the spike of an iron fence and died. Suddenly, she panics, calling Viola a dream. Viola grabs the woman’s arm and falls into a vision of Hail Meridian hiding in a cellar. In the vision, Hail Meridian can see her and speak to her. The vision shifts to a man with silver hair and green eyes, a monstrous bird with gray wings on his shoulder.

When Viola escapes the vision, Tal dei Tali is screaming. Viola sees her face clearly for the first time. She is not as old as she seemed. Her hair is pale, and her eyes are violet. It is Hail Meridian.

Viola asks Rhosymedre to fetch water for Tal dei Tali. Alone, she asks Hail Meridian how she is alive. Hail Meridian insists that she is dead because that is what people want. Others have seen but not recognized her because they did not want to. They prefer the story about the innocent, beautiful queen murdered in her prime. If she is not dead, then the massacre and everything that came after were wrong, and people cannot face their guilt. Instead, she hides with the dead, knowing it is her fault.

Hail Meridian says that she has seen Viola in her dreams. Viola thinks that it is because of the gulls’ poison. She sees a pale ring in Hail Meridian’s eyes. Then Hail Meridian screams again, saying that Viola will bring the Silver Circle back. Rhosymedre returns, and she and Viola leave together. Viola asks if Rhosymedre can see anything in her eyes. The little girl says it is like a shiny ring.

Wilmur and Jacquelin stand on the deck. She asks what Herman wanted when Wilmur spoke to him. He tells her about the conversation, still trying to hide the truth about the Calamary Rose. When Jacquelin confides that her twin brother was a pirate, Wilmur admits that the crew of the Calamary Rose used to be pirates. He tells her what Herman said about his name, remarking that it is funny that Herman is the second person to say his name is not real. Chase said the same thing. Jacquelin suggests that both Herman and Chase suspect it is not his original name. Wilmur does not understand what that means, and Jacquelin does not explain further.

In the villa, Viola sits alone, staring at a tiny mirror. Now that she knows to look for it, she can see silver circles in her eyes, just like those in Hail Meridian’s. She wants answers and knows that she can find them in her dreams, but when she tries to sleep, she fails. Elvey asks what is wrong, and Viola explains that she grew up on a dead island where the people had given up. She says she met someone important who made her feel important too, like she “was part of the story” (336). Now she’s alone, confused, and fears that “everyone here has already given up, too” (337). She decides that if no one else will fix things, then she will.

Elvey calls Viola lucky, explaining that the truly lucky people are those who know that even the bad things have “led somewhere worth going” (338), and therefore have no regrets. Elvey lost her parents during the Massacre, and they were not even pirates. They were bakers. Viola finally falls asleep.

In her vision, she is with Hail Meridian, in a cellar beneath a pub in the Second City. The door smashes in, and Chase enters, saying that she is there to fix Hail Meridian’s mess. Hail Meridian struggles. Chase angrily explains that the Queensmen are coming, and they are hungry for blood. Hail Meridian used the mask of Scarlet Morning to stage her own abduction and fake her death. Now the Queensmen have the excuse they wanted and will not care that the queen is alive. They might even kill her themselves to make sure the story sticks. Chase adds that Vesper Argent slowly poisoned Hail Meridian because “he needed a mad queen” (343) to control, which is why she hears voices. Chase takes the Scarlet Morning mask, explaining that she will cause a distraction so that Hail Meridian can run. She says that Hail Meridian cannot die. If she is alive, they have a chance to fix things.

Hail Meridian laments that Chase never came back, and everything is over. Viola retorts that it is not over if they are both alive to do something about it. They think Ves must be behind everything. Viola tells Hail Meridian to stop hiding and be the queen again, but Hail Meridian says that she has no authority without her crown, which went missing the night she staged her abduction. She thinks that if she could hold her old pistol again, which she left in the cellar, she might be able to use it to find the crown. Viola realizes that the cellar must be beneath Neptune’s Cup and promises to find it.

The next day, Viola uses recognizable landmarks to count her steps toward where she believes the original Neptune’s Cup should be. She makes a map as she goes, climbing down to the Second City and using the map to locate the pub. The Second City is dark and creepy. She hears footsteps around her but ignores them. Finally, she finds Neptune’s Cup. The bodies of the pirates killed by gulls still lie inside. She walks past them to a trapdoor and finds the cellar beneath. Just as Hail Meridian told her, the pistol is still there.

Viola turns to leave, only to find something blocking the entrance. It is shaped like a woman and speaks in Hestur’s voice. The creature tells Viola to remember “section four, page three hundred and seventeen” (358). Viola realizes the creature is a mogrim, which should be lost in the Lacuna Laridae. The mogrim explains that the Lacuna is overflowing, and many of them are free now. They are the voices Viola hears in her dreams. She needs to listen. It says: “We died in pain […] and that will be the fate of everyone in Dickerson’s Sea unless it can be stopped. The Silver Circle will take and take and take, until there is nothing left” (358-9). It asks what Viola will do about it.

She pushes past it and runs. Behind her, it chants the same words Quagga said just before she died: “Evening gray and morning red brings down rain upon his head” (359). The screaming starts as Viola runs out of the pub.