Skidwrack River

The Skidwrack River on a map of Nagspeake.

The ****S******kidwrack River** is a river in Nagspeake that feeds into the Magothy Bay. It is known for being nearly impossible to map, with Violet Cross being the only one known to have done it.

## History

### *Bluecrowne*

Lucy noted that her house looked out over a muddy river. Liao suggested that she get a boat and float it in the river, which wasn't far, and Lucy agreed, though she wished she could float it in the sea instead of the Skidwrack River. Lucy later thought of the *Left-Handed Fate* in the river on the Quayside Harbors, and decided that she would have her own boat. She and Liao went to the Quayside Harbors, Nagspeake's river district, and chose a cutter. Lucy, Liao, and Kendrick took the cutter for a test cruise on the Skidwrack, and bought it for Lucy. Lucy, having named it the *Driven Star,* took it out on the Skidwrack with Liao, who sent up a firework that reflected on the river. Lucy noted that Flotilla was further along the river.

After Liao was kidnapped, Lucy could see Blister in a boat on the river, bringing him to a house out of the way. Lucy brought herself and Xiaoming to the house via the Driven Star, mentioning the red reflection of the tree leaves on the river. When she returned with only Liao and not Xiaoming, the night was still and there was no wind in the sails, and Lucy had to row. The *Left-Handed Fate* arrived farther down, but couldn't do anything. Trigemine swam into the Skidwrack and tried to board the boat, but Lucy and Liao jumped into the river and sank it. The *Left-Handed Fate* pulled them out of the river.

### *The Raconteur's Commonplace Book*

The Skidwrack River had flooded in the river-adjascent inn, the Blue Vein Tavern's inhabitants. The water had continued rising for a week, and still had not stopped, though the inkeeper, Mr. Haypotten, claimed that it would not rise past the blue-painted stair. Every thirty minutes, the old ship captain Frost would go out and check the weather, and always reported that it was still raining. When telling her story, Madame Grisaille said that the old iron was older even than the river. Sullivan talked about the area under Flotilla, the Coldway, that appeared when the Skidwrack froze in the winter. Brave explorers would map the Coldway each winter, and often they encountered the so-called dreams of the caldnicker.

After his tale, Frost compared the story to one of seiche, and he, Sullivan, and Sorcha taught the guests who did not know, what the seiche were. The seiche, they said, were beautiful creatures that lived in the river. When seiche wanted to come out of the water, if they wanted to stay, they had to find a human to sacrifice themselves. Until they did, the river would rise, looking for the seiche that had left it. Frost accused Sullivan of being a seiche, which he did not deny, but knew that the water wasn't rising because of him, as his sacrifice had already been made.

Al Tesserian told a story of a Ferryman on the Skidwrack. The Skidwrack, he was told, changed quite often. Rivers were somewhat miraculous, as was crossing them. He told a story about a roamer Ferryman called Isaac Knickpointe who took passengers across the Skidwrack at the miraculous area the Tailrace. Mr. Haypotten told a story about a boy called Hugo, who had a bottle of fog, and sometimes let it out over the river.

Petra told a story about a girl called Nell. The Skidwrack had flooded and the floods had killed her family, so Nell had set out to stop the floods, using a cat bone with orphan magic. Nell floated upriver with the bone's magic, but was stopped from reaching the end by a man who convinced her to give up the cat bone, but he never stopped the floods with it. Petra revealed that she was Nell and the man Masseter had been the one to stop her. He eventually agreed to go to the river's source with Petra. Sullivan came too, and the three left, floating upriver to stop the second flood. Jessamy told a story of what would happen next, how Petra would challenge the Devil to a dancing contest and win, and the Devil would be forced to stop the floods. Outside, the river's flooding began to recede.

### *Greenglass House*

Greenglass House overlooked the Quayside Harbors, a district half on land and half on piers in the Skidwrack. Milo noted that guests very rarely arrived at the inn in winter, because the Skidwrack and its inlets were very often frozen. When Milo found the nautical chart, he and Meddy both agreed that it was not a map of the Skidwrack or one of its tributaries or the Magothy Bay. Milo liked the view out his bedroom window, because the slope down to the Skidwrack River was steep, and sometimes he could see all the way down to the water.

Mr. Vinge was reading a book about the history of the Skidwrack River and its environs. Milo asked to see it, and compared the pictures in the book to the nautical chart, but found no match.

### *Ghosts of Greenglass House*

Clem noted that she and Georgie had been looking for Violet Cross's haul somewhere underground on the Skidwrack. Clem and Georgie explained that they'd been searching for a derrotero, a book of secret charts. Georgie said that the Skidwrack was very hard to map, because it shifted too much for any map to be accurate for very long, and Mr. Pine added that all previous maps that claimed to be accurate had been frauds. Clem and Georgie explained that this had not been anyone's derrotero; they knew it had been real because it had belonged to Violet Cross.

Milo wondered about the derrotero, which Clem and Georgie said had not been in the haul, to their confusion. He wondered if it was impossible to chart the Skidwrack and there was no derrotero at all. He wondered if it was a map that could be changed, or if Violet Cross or her mapmaker had found some underlying permanent thing that made the movements of everything on top of it predictable. Milo noted that Whilforber Hill's slope led down to the Skidwrack. Milo told Doc Holystone's ghost (later revealed to have been Toby Gilawfer in disguise) about the derrotero, and he suggested that perhaps the derrotero did not look like a book or a map, because to do something thought to be impossible Violet Cross would have had to have thought outside of the box. Meddy later provided Milo with *The Skidwrack: A Visual History* to read, in the hopes that it would help him with the derrotero problem. The book had illustrations of the river, each with a disclaimer that the map was not for navigation.

Milo told a story about how Violet Cross had distributed maps through kites (the Windrose and the Portolan). At the end of the tale, Mr. Larven contributed that rumors were that Violet Cross had somehow mapped the Skidwrack, mentioning the derrotero. After Mrs. Kirkegrim (revealed to have been Violet Cross) left, Milo realized that the thing she'd left with, a set of keys, had been the derrotero. He proved this by looking in the book and showing how there were eleven inlets of the Skidwrack, five on the south and six on the north, and the keys had been numbered 1-5S and 1-6N. Each key had had a deeper section, a channel, near the middle with shifting shoals and banks. The keys too had had a channel down the middle and edges that could be changed, allowing the derrotero to be shifted to match the Skidwrack's shoals and banks.

## Physical characteristics

The Skidwrack is known to change regularly, making it nearly unmappable. It moves quickly and has brown water.

## Locations

* Quayside Harbors
* Flotilla
	+ The Coldway
* Tailrace

## Gallery

**Take a look at our **gallery for Skidwrack River****.