Chapter Ten #3
“I wanted to point out that if you’d like us to fall in love, there is precedent.” He looked down at the strings as he strummed, and his damp purple hair fell across the frets.
Marin wasn’t certain how he wanted her to react to that statement, so she decided she wouldn’t. “Okeydokey,” she said. She continued to sail while he played.
Over on the starboard side, the winged cat was napping in a swathe of sunlight, and Ree was amusing himself by tickling his wing with a leaf.
Every so often, Stowy would flinch, then resettle his feathers.
Eventually, he had enough, swatted at Ree, and then devoted himself to licking his feathers flat.
Ree hopped over to Marin at the helm.
“You’re lucky he didn’t swat you overboard,” she told him.
“I just want him to be my friend.”
“Then maybe don’t be annoying.”
Ree rustled his leaves. “Me? Annoying? But…” He sputtered, then his leaves drooped. “So how do I get him to be my friend?”
“Ask Dax,” Marin said. “He’s the one who befriended Stowy in the first place.”
Ree trotted over to Dax, who proceeded to give him lots of advice that all, in Marin’s opinion, boiled down to maybe don’t be annoying. Also, offer him fish.
Sailing onward, Marin watched Dax. He liked to talk.
He liked to explain things, expound on theories, share knowledge …
but the most surprising thing was he never once tried to tell her how to do what she knew how to do.
He waxed on about ballads and how to befriend a cat and whatever, but he hadn’t tried to issue a single word of advice about how to sail or where to go.
He’d been easy to teach to swim—no resistance to her telling him what to do.
She’d never met anyone who both liked to talk and knew when to shut up. He was a rare bird.
Glancing over at her, Dax smiled. He’d noticed she was watching him.
She adamantly refused to blush. There was nothing wrong with her looking at him while he was talking with Ree.
Okay, maybe looking was more like staring, but she had nothing to be embarrassed about. “That’s good advice,” she told him.
He shrugged. “I just said what you said but in more words. You’re the one who said it first. Credit belongs to you.”
By the sea, he’s so different from Iovar.
She didn’t know why her brain decided to compare Dax to that snake, but it was nice to be able to think that name and not feel like either screaming or being sick. Maybe this was growth. Or distance. Or whatever.
Standing up, Dax stretched, lute in one hand, and squinted at the horizon. “So, where are we going next? More turtles? Upgrading from turtles to dolphins?”
Marin grinned. “That’s the hierarchy? Turtles, then dolphins?”
“Yep, then whales, kraken, and sea serpents at the top.”
Off the side of the ship, Perri blew bubbles in approval.
She laughed. “Perri agrees.” Then she answered his question: “We’re going to a town, okay more of a village, called Dew, on the island Aver.
It’s a hub for supply runners—there’s a job board in the village center where people from the surrounding island chain post what they need transported and what they’re offering to pay, and runners can pick their jobs. ”
“Is there an inn on the island?” Dax asked.
“Yeah, the Kraken’s Nest. It’s for tourists. Very expensive. Most supply runners stay in the hostel—okay, that name is overselling it. It’s a barn with cots that runners can stay in, if they’re sick of sleeping on their boats.”
He perked up at that. “A cot that doesn’t sway?”
“I always sleep on the boat.”
“But it’s a cot on solid ground,” Dax said.
“I don’t want to waste the money, even on the hostel,” Marin said.
She hesitated. She didn’t want to explain why she saved every coin she could.
It wasn’t his business. On the other hand, it wasn’t like it was a secret.
“My parents paid for this boat, and they owe a debt to the sorcerer who enchanted the hold to do its whole bigger-on-the-inside trick. I’m paying it off.
” Slowly, but she was doing it, and the quicker it was done, the less likely it was that the sorcerer would get tired of waiting and decide to claim her parents’ home as compensation.
There wasn’t a formal contract for the repayment plan, which meant he could change the terms, if he wanted to—he could demand it all be repaid tomorrow.
She was counting on him not caring enough to bother.
As one of the wealthiest people on Flicker, he didn’t need the money, and he never liked any inconvenience.
If the emperor hadn’t outlawed non-university-approved magic users, then her family never would have gone to Yvex at all. “I can’t let them stay in debt for me.”
“Ahh.”
She wondered if he had any idea what debt was, coddled within the conservatory … No, of course he knows. The conservatory hadn’t demanded coin from him in exchange for housing and training him; for him, it was worse. They’d demanded his obedience. He was paying his debt with his freedom.
“What are your parents like?” he asked. “Will I meet them at the End-of-Harvest Festival?”
“They’re great,” Marin said, “and yes.”
He waited.
She sailed.
“That’s not very detailed,” he complained.
“When I was a kid, my parents used to take me on their sailboat,” Marin said.
“I was like Ree, absolutely in love with the sea.” She grinned at the myrtle, who waved his leaves at her.
“I wanted to be out on the waves all the time. Didn’t care what the weather was.
I loved it all—calm, rough, sunny, rainy, whatever.
This one time, they told me no. I must have been about six years old?
Seven? There was a storm coming in, they said. All purple clouds and lightning.”
“A magic storm.”
“Back then, we hadn’t seen very many of those,” Marin said. “They hadn’t gotten as bad as they are now.”
“What do you mean?”
Had he seriously not heard about the worsening magic storms? “In the outer islands.” Even as sheltered as he was, he must have heard rumors. Unless all he’d heard were lies. “They’ve gotten really bad, thanks to the emperor hoarding magic and monopolizing the sorcerers.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize. I’d heard a few reports, but … I’ve never seen one.”
“Yeah, well, at the time, we didn’t know how bad it could get, but my parents knew they didn’t want me out in it.”
“Wild guess: you stowed away on board.”
He knew her well enough to guess that. “Instantaneously,” she said.
“I hid myself in a cupboard belowdecks and waited until the boat was too far from shore to turn around before I popped out. I tried to be all subtle about it, sneaking up on deck and just helping out with the lines, as if I was meant to be there, as if they wouldn’t notice. ”
“What did they do?” he asked.
“First they told me no dessert for a week for disobeying them, but then they hugged me and told me they loved me, before they tied me to the mast.”
Dax blinked. “They what?”