Caspian Tidemark held the scroll open with two webbed fingers and watched the corner curl before his eyes. The ink smelled of kelp and old salt. The parchment did not. The parchment smelled like the swamp, which meant the swamp was inside it. He had carried this scroll up from a trench three miles deep. It described a rite for boiling the sea. Now it was warping into a green tube on the floor of a borrowed library, because Caspian, merman and hoarder of forbidden pages, had chosen to live above water for the first time in his life. The library sat on a small island ringed by brown water. Ivy climbed its walls. The windows leaked. Caspian had dragged eleven waterproof sacks of texts up onto the porch three nights ago and had been losing pages ever since. A treatise on drowning gods had gone soft at the spine. A banned atlas of whirlpools bled its ink onto his palm. He grinned the whole time, the way he always did, and muttered, "Oh, that's very bad, that's really quite bad," as if narrating a pleasant walk. He needed something dry, sealed, and big enough for a merman's obsession. He hopped off the porch and searched the island. A vibrant green frog watched him from a stone, unbothered. Behind a fallen log, half-sunk in mud, Caspian found a heavy oak chest. Iron corners. A working latch. He wiped the lid and knocked. It sounded solid. He hauled the chest toward the porch and only then noticed the snapping turtle asleep on top of the lid he had just been holding a second ago, which he had somehow lifted without waking it. The turtle opened one eye. Caspian said, cheerfully, "Please don't bite my face." He set the chest down slowly. The turtle slid off and thumped into the reeds. Caspian dragged the chest inside, tipped it upright, and checked the seal. The wood was dry. The hinges held. He lined the bottom with wax cloth from his pack, then laid the drowning-gods treatise inside, then the atlas, then the boil-the-sea scroll, page by careful page. He closed the lid. He listened. No drip. No swell. For the first time since climbing out of the ocean, his collection was not dying by the minute. Caspian sat back on the library floor and laughed once, short and delighted. Then he counted. The chest held maybe forty texts. He had brought over three hundred. The eleven sacks on the porch bulged against their ties, and one had already begun to weep brown water onto the boards. He wiped his hands on his vest and smiled wider. He needed more chests. He needed them before morning. And he had no idea, yet, whose island this actually was.