44. Maren
Maren
We didn’t wait for the tide to shrink away. We found the cavern under the waves beyond a graveyard of ruined ships. The cave tucked into the northern edge of the island, the very opposite of my father’s house.
Air battled water at the mouth of it, enough trapped inside to gargle and burp angrily, a rampage with every swell and fall.
Finding it and swimming in had been no problem, but we fought the rough waters, hands and elbows braced against the narrow throat of the cavern as it roared and spit at our faces in the near dark.
Cebrinne lost her footing, crashing into me and then scrambling as she was swept away, panic curling her fingers into claws.
“Perpetuum drown the night,” I growled, catching her arm and hoisting her in next to me.
I was unwilling to survive a giant ribcage and the sea of stars just to die in some moon-forsaken cave an hour from my door flap.
Palm flat, I thrust out a hand, forcing the water to calm as I pushed it away.
Dripping, Cebrinne gave a small, ragged smile, a small cut over the curve of her cheek.
We waded through, the tunnel rising out from the water. By the time our feet hit dry rock, the light had evaporated, though the gritty scent of smoke tickled my olfactories.
“Come on,” I murmured. “And watch your head. Bats sleep in these caves.”
“Perfect,” she mumbled under her breath.
There was nothing to guide us except the tunnel itself, which didn’t turn or twist or separate, though it did seem to slant up and down.
My fingertips slid over the rocky walls, more wet than I’d have liked.
I shuddered, remembering the crying walls in the tunnels below Paria. Cebrinne’s heart began to thump again.
A dry, brittle crunch froze us in our tracks.
Cebrinne sucked in a sharp breath of air. “I just stepped on a bone.”
“Doubtful,” I said, kneeling to pat the dark floor. “Bats can’t carry anything larger than a beetle, and—” I stopped as my hand spread over something cold and hard. A smooth, round curve lay on one end, something sharp and dented, like sockets, on the other.
The moisture in my mouth evaporated.
I wasn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, I’d dealt with him firsthand. But the thought of touching a corpse sent a withering chill through my limbs like a silent gust through a graveyard. I shook the feeling away, wiping my palm on my hip and standing straight.
“What was it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said in a rush.
The quiet loomed ahead, expanding through the dark.
I followed it, flinching as something smooth and frail collapsed under my own foot.
Soon every step was broken and fractured.
My teeth fixed together in a stony wince.
Fire crackled ahead, light whisking through the tunnel, but I couldn’t bring myself to look down until my feet tripped over a hard, stiff bolt of fabric.
I caught myself against the rock, hoping to find canvas.
The remnants of a sail, maybe, or something used to cover cargo in a hold.
But I’d stumbled over neither of those things.
My foot was half-lodged under the lip of a sailor’s coat, an unmistakable jumble of rounded rib bones the new neighbor of my toes.
Dry amusement mingled with Cebrinne’s voice. “Where exactly are we, Maren?”
“I don’t know,” I hissed. “I’ve never been in here before.”
“Then why—”
I stopped her with a hand around her wrist.
The world narrowed to a small, suffocating point just beyond where I stood. Distant firelight flicked and danced just enough to glint off the lid of a small, iron box.
The air around me grew scarce, and a pulsing throb replaced the silence of the tunnel. I bent forward, grasping the edge of the box and tilting the lid back. Tinder and flint sat inside, coated with dust like a peaceful layer of snow.
“Do you recognize it?” Cebrinne asked.
“Yes,” I said numbly. Yes, I recognized it.
The last time I’d seen it, it had been in the hands of a cabin boy.
A young pirate who coughed into the crook of his sleeve with salt sickness, who had trailed behind me around the island like a shy shadow, who had blushed when he looked at me too long as we sat under the stars, sharing constellation stories.
“I think you should probably stay here.”
If Cebrinne minded the company of dead men and the dark, she didn’t say so. She offered a small, if not perplexed nod, teal eyes watching as I tracked the light ahead, the tunnel widening to a chamber so deep I couldn’t see around its corners.
An opening carved through the roof of the tunnel, steering smoke toward the sky where the sun’s rays were just curling around the grooves of the rock.
The fire hissed and sizzled against the moisture in the air.
A double-hulled boat, or the fragments of one, sat scattered across the floor, the pieces larger than I was.
And there, his knee resting on a hollowed log as he sealed a jagged scar across a smooth keel of hardened wood, sat my father.
Ano slid his smoothing stone in a long, careful swipe down the side of the boat’s disconnected hull, so focused he didn’t stir at the soft shuffle of my feet behind him.
He’d thinned in the near year since I’d left.
My father had always felt big and powerful, but his muscles had rounded as I’d grown older, had taken on a bloated quality, his edges softening with natural age.
That had gone. The striations in his back seemed cut just under the surface of his skin, blunt and sharp and toned to finite detail under the dark patterns of his tattoos.
I watched them stretch and contract for a long moment, the long thhhhhhhhh of his stone a soothing sound against the crack of his fire.
“It must be sixty feet long,” I finally said. “How do you plan to get it out?”
He jumped at the sound of my voice, his knee slipping sideways under him, head careening forward to thwack against the hull. My father scrambled to his feet, whipping around—and then freezing in place. Then stared, his mouth cracked open.
“Hello, Makua,” I said.
I expected him to return the greeting. My little leaf, he’d say, when I was small and curious and eager to please.
That name had dwindled throughout the years, as the islanders began keeping my name in the company of hardships that had fallen over Leihani.
Shriveled crops or scarce fish or sailors that washed to the shore with dead lungs full of salt.
He didn’t say it. His brows slanted instead, pitch-black eyes varnished with a slick shine, and his mouth moved in silence, words I couldn’t hear.
The stone in his hand fell. He became a smear of brown and gold and green before my equilibrium rocked backwards, my feet losing the sturdy sense of ground, arms wrapping around me in a thunderous hold.
“They let you go,” he said, face buried into the side of my neck. “Or did you escape?”
“Well,” I began, but I was certain he was only half listening. He’d pulled away enough to set me down, his stare darting over my face and shoulders and arms as if he expected to find a smattering of open wounds and bruises.
“What are these?” he asked, holding my wrist and running a finger down my arm, trailing a long line of molten tattoos. “What—what is…” He stopped, hand cupping the tips of my fingers, his attention fixed solely on the glittering ring on my left hand.
My father’s throat narrowed, tight over his Adam’s apple. He sniffed, once, hard and short. “Are you hurt? Has anyone hurt you?”
“I’m fine.” My words were as hoarse and clipped as his, the hard lump gathering again at the back of my soft palate.
“You’re fine,” he echoed softly. “You’re fine. You’re safe.” He sniffed again, blinking up at the crack of sky spilling through the rock like an open chimney. Water welled in the rim of his eyes. “Does anyone know you’re here?”
I shifted awkwardly, a tumble of emotions vying for my attention. He combated something similar, caught between checking me for bumps and bruises in an almost business-like way as he battled back tears.
“A few people,” I admitted, ignoring the feeling of Cebrinne watching from the shadows.
“We’re leaving.”
I didn’t mean to laugh. The sound was hollow and thin and frayed with disbelief like the snap of a dry, rotten rope as it broke into two, broken threads disintegrating in my hands.
A year ago, my father would have ignored that laugh. He’d always let his ears glide over my sarcasm, as if it were too slippery to acknowledge, something he’d never gain enough purchase to walk through. But he stared at me now, a piercing set of deep, dark eyes, unwilling to let me go.
“I should have left years ago. When your mother first told me she was different—you would be different. I should have taken her and you and traveled to the far east. To Perpetuum with her prophecies and foretelling and messages from Mihauna.”
“Her prophecies—” I threw a glance over my shoulder toward the dark tunnel I’d just left.
My mother had explained Theia’s prophecy?
She’d spoken to him? He’d never mentioned that before.
My father had always avoided the topic of my mother, as if the memories were more like wounds, my questions like salt poured into him.
“I did everything wrong,” Ano was saying.
“Every moon-damn thing. I always only half-believed her, even when she carved that hole in the water and walked me through the ocean. The moon couldn’t want my daughter.
Me, a nobody fisherman on a tiny island, no true land or titles or importance.
But when your mother got sick.” His voice broke roughly, almost angrily on the word.
He waved the heel of his hand in front of his face, closing his eyes and swallowing hard.
“And the little things started to come true. It wasn’t that she could fold water in half like a fishing net that made me start to believe. It was the details.”
“Makua,” I tried to cut in.