Chapter 50
I moved up to the boat’s bow and rested my belly against its wooden curve. I watched Marshen in his glorious form as he dragged us out of the foggy mist and into the clear. I looked up.
Once the sea was at its calmest, he steered us left towards Ramel’s cliffs—towards the reddish-brown fortification built all those years ago. Towards home.
The first few hours felt like days. We moved, yet the faraway land ahead of us didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
It all felt distant, unreachable almost. But as more hours passed—Mercy smoothly gliding along the shimmering bed of dark blue—the jagged mirage of sandstone surfaced on the horizon.
The towering cliffs began to morph, the ancient stones finally taking shape. They glimmered in the golden light.
Behind us, the sun was soon setting. My breathtaking surroundings left me in awe, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t often peer at the sky, feeling threatened by every passing bird.
Marshen anchored the boat close to the cliffs.
“So…how did I do? Got us so close to shore in one day,” Marshen asked, pulling back his dripping hair.
“I wouldn’t call this a shore,” I told him.
“I wonder how many Sand Wielders it took to build all of this. How many days…years, perhaps. Though as magnificent as all of this is, I can never understand how they could give up the ability to touch the infinite sea…or to fish even. I wonder if my ancestors were fishermen.”
Marshen took off his shirt and wrung it out.
“You wonder too much. My best guess is that they must’ve been fearing something, or rather someone.
” His thumbs went to his waistband. I tossed him a towel, which he caught, only to set it aside and continue undressing.
I snapped my face away, letting my gaze linger on the setting sun—fiery orange.
“Oh, come on, it’s not like you’ve never seen a naked man before,” Marshen teased. He took my silence as an answer. “Then there’s no need to flatter yourself too much.”
“I’m not.” Then I muttered beneath my breath, “He was much bigger.”
“Size is not all that matters,” Marshen sneered. “It’s all about knowing how to make use of it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Sure.” My eyes rolled at his snort. “I saw that eye roll through the back of your head.”
“Are you all dressed now?” I huffed.
“Yes.”
“Do you think—You prick!” I whipped my head away. “Put on something or I’ll throw you overboard.”
Once Marshen was done amusing himself, he helped me set up the tent and spread out the blankets. We dined on the variety of food Alma had prepared for us, and even treated ourselves to a pint of ale.
We later lay down in the quiet night, the lantern’s flame the only light. It imitated the starry sky above us, glittering with millions of jewels, so far away.
“Do you think we’ll make it to the caves by this time tomorrow?” I murmured, my gaze still on the stars.
“Of course. We did make it halfway in one day, didn’t we?”
I nodded, taking comfort in his words, even as I knew he meant only to ease my worry.
We didn’t find the caves by dusk.
Peering into the night sky, I’d never felt smaller. We seemed insignificant compared to the endless twinkling sky, the infinite calm sea, and the great monumental stones. They made the possibility of finding the Unnar Caves seem so out of reach.
That night, as I lay curled beneath the blanket, it wasn’t green eyes that haunted my thoughts.
It was yellow ones with black slits. I had nearly bartered my soul for the Seer’s vague answers, and I kept wondering if I’d missed that second where blue sea met green terrain.
And now, I feared I would miss the caves, too.
And this time, I wasn’t just carrying the dragging weight of my own burden.
Now, many lives were at stake, including Marshen’s.
The following morning, I didn’t remove my eyes from the cliffs. I fought and suppressed my every instinct to look at the sky, to confirm that we were absent from the Phoenix.
The same opposing thoughts persisted, though—every second was a series of hope and fear. Hope that they existed, and fear that they didn’t…or that they wouldn’t want to show themselves to me.
But then I may have seen a crevice, a fissure. It wasn’t very wide, but I was almost certain it was there.
I hurried towards the bow and shouted at the top of my lungs. “Marshen!” Again. “Marshen!”
He did not stop.
I grabbed the wooden paddle and bent over the railing, slapping the water’s surface. “Marshen!”
He kept moving. Gods damn him.
For a second I thought about jumping, but to do so from a moving boat seemed too risky. My other option was not the safest either, but what better way to attract a shark?
I reached for Marshen’s dagger. I hissed as I cut across my left palm, allowing blood to trickle drops of red into the deep blue sea.
Marshen stopped. He shifted.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“I think I saw a crevice farther back. Over there,” I shouted. Drops of blood splattered on the wooden floor as I pointed towards the cliff.
“I’ll move us there. Prepare the paddles, I’ll join you on board soon.”
I didn’t complain when Marshen dripped water all over the deck, soaking my feet.
“Boreas, you smell exactly like him.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s as if you didn’t have your own scent to begin with.”
I covered my palm with a piece of cloth and pressed down firmly, not bothering with the salve. I avoided Marshen’s gaze like he was Daekon himself.
Cutting my own palm and then opting to paddle was a terrible sequence. Marshen ended up doing most of the paddling.
“Next time, cut somewhere else,” he said over his shoulder.
“Next time, I’ll cut your tongue. Go farther left. Around there, I think I saw it.”
“I think you’re right.”
It was ingenious, the way the vertical sandstone panels stood in alternating rows of towering rocks. Sailing Mercy in a zigzag motion around their reddened edges felt as if we were moving through the interlocked teeth of two colossal hair combs that united into a dead end.
The cave’s aperture was out in the open, yet cleverly concealed, hidden behind many layers of sandstone. It reminded me of Semuel’s stable—of Cinnamon, always concealed in the open.
“Well, Delia Wildheart,” Marshen bellowed as he bowed in my direction. “It seems that you are right. The Unnar Caves are no myth.”
“Thank you, Mercy,” I mumbled, tapping its hull.
And as we abandoned the boat, hope and fear returned like an unexpected bolt of lightning, tearing through a clear blue sky.
It deprived me of the I told you so that I more than once imagined myself boasting to Marshen during this exact glorious moment.