Font Size:

A minute later, soft snores met my ears.

Arms around my knees, I studied him. There was little else to do, with the world so black around me. He lay on his side, knees lazily bent, his head resting in the nook of his own elbow, the arrow hanging from his back. The sea had washed away any blood, but his face remained bruised, a cut under his eye likely to scar. Torn skin covered the knuckles of his right hand, rough and raw.

We’d escaped. We’d made it to land. To Rivea, the kingdom promising Calder a war. But wewerealive. Hardly able to believe it, I let the thought harden into a lump in my throat. After two weeks of believing I’d be sold to some unknown bidder, hope trickled through me, foreign and startling. Soothing—but almosttoosoothing. Wispy.

It didn’t embed into my skin the way worry had gnawed at me the past fortnight. Instead, hope was light and fleeting. Like trying to catch a breeze with only my fingertips. Flighty and thin,barely there. And like wind, fickle enough to blow away, leaving me surrounded by only hollow air.

Hope wasn’t strong enough to count on. I’d always leaned on other assurances for that. Things like resentment. Spite.

Anger.

Pulling my legs closer, I glanced back at the water. Waves met the rock below, climbing the cliffs and falling away. It would’ve been too easy to dive in and search, though I’m not sure how long it would take, or if I’d even find the sunken ship at all. The question of finding sunken tools didn’t matter anyway. Not while Kye was asleep.

He hadn’t left me, even to care for himself. I wouldn’t leave him.

The narrow corners of the ship’s cabin where we'd been chained suddenly blazed into my imagination, sweeping a rash of unexpected heat over my skin, a tightness in my lungs. I froze. And hushed the sudden fervor of my heart. Jagged rock cut into the pads of my fingers. A gust of sea spray unfurled on my tongue. I struggled to catch my breath, leaning into the rock.

Wooden walls rose around me, locking me in. My eyes found the door, but my arms remained fixed to the wall. Shackles held my arms in place. Feet dragged over the floor above me, so slow I was sure I’d begun to suffocate. I tracked the sound as it descended the stairs. Thump. Thump. Thump.

They stopped outside the wooden door, and the little window slid open, but only darkness peered through the hole at me.

Then the floor began to lift, the ceiling began to lower. The walls leaned in. My breath left my body as the room shrank with me still inside it, just as the door cracked open. Its hinges squealed as it swung its arc inch by inch, and I twisted myself to the side, trying to escape.

Chains rattled. Metal groaned. Walls closed in. The door hovered open, pitch black on the other side, shadows stretchingacross the floor, reaching for my feet. I tried to scream. Opened my mouth and—

“Leihani?”

Flecks of sea mist coated the clammy skin of my forehead, wind licking it cool. Metal and wood clattered together in my head, sending a shudder through my bones. Across from me, Kye watched in quiet thought, and I wondered if I’d made a noise that woke him.

I shook the echo of rattling chains and snapping boards from my mind. “I’m fine. Sleep.”

3

Maren

“Did it rain?”

I nodded, eyes trained onto the dying fire. Under the climbing sun, its smoke announced our location as clearly as chicken blood to a Juile shark. Pausing as I kicked sand over burnt logs, I shuddered at the thought.

Kye raised a brow at me, angling a squinted eye into the sparse clouds. “Must have been a deep sleep.”

Hehadslept deeply. But it hadn’t rained. Not unless the moisture in the air counted. I’d called it to wash the dirt from a basin in the rock, then forced the molecules together until it boiled itself sterile.

“I already drank plenty,” I said. "Don't worry about saving any for me."

Of all the challenges we might face in the days ahead as we roamed the Rivean coast back to Calder, clean water needn't be one. I just needed to ensure he didn’t catch me supplying it.

Soft slurping came from my back as I held up the assortment of knives Kye found in the dinghy. The fire had painted a thin blanket of ash over the steel, and I wiped them clean with aswatch of cloth, the fabric sanitized with liquor. Then made my selection—a dagger with the thinnest blade—and plastered a look of fortitude across my face as I turned toward him. My chest throbbed with each palpitation, palms damp with sweat.

Kye wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, studying the blade. The corked bottle in my opposite hand. The fishhook and line wafting around the bottom. “You know what you’re doing?”

I pursed my mouth. “No.”

He didn’t flinch at the admission. Instead, he turned, offering me a side view of the shaft. “If an arrowhead separates, it’s almost impossible to find under fat and muscle. You’ll have to extract it from the very tip using the knife.”

“Easy,” I lied, my voice a fraction weaker.

He closed his eyes, wiggling his arm carefully out from the sleeve of his stolen pirate shirt, jaw hard against the pain of movement. I peeled the rest of it off him, holding my breath at the bare canvas of his powerful back, then carefully tugged the arrow through the rip in his shirt.