46. Maren
Maren
“Those are your bones?”
Enough sunlight had crept inside the ceiling of the cave that I could see Ano’s flush, a sheepish pink glow across his cheeks.
“Not my bones. Bones of the men I’ve killed.
” I stared at him, words beyond my capability.
My father pulled his long dark hair over a shoulder, avoiding my eyes.
“You must have been, oh, twelve. Sailors hadn’t yet gone missing, but they were beginning to watch you.
One day a captain approached me. Said he’d heard you were a troubled child and offered to take you for a gold bouillon. ”
I’m not sure why I smiled. Maybe because I’d never heard the story before, and the idea of someone paying that much for me—enough my father wouldn’t have to work another day in his life—was so far-fetched it felt like a joke.
“I knew my answer was no.” Ano scratched the side of his jaw.
“But I was curious. What might a sailor want with a troubled girl? Had he lost a daughter once, or was it that he took pity on you, thought he could be a better father? But he laughed and said he planned to sell you at the markets up north. I was so shocked, I stammered my answer—no—but he must have thought I hadn’t meant it.
He said he’d be back to the island in time, that he’d ask again.
So I uh, waited for his ship to leave port, then sneaked onboard and sank it. ”
My smile had slighted away halfway through his story, but at that I choked a small scoff of disbelief. “You sank his ship? How?”
“Told him I changed my mind, but I’d only make the trade here after dark. That I’d build a fire along the cliffs outside showing where it was safe to sail. Then led him directly into the rocks at high tide, when he couldn’t see them.”
The pole had stilled in my hands. “And they all drowned?”
“Two fought the undertow and made it to shore, but…” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “They didn’t make it very far.”
Mouth half-open, I gawked at him, unable to do anything else.
My father had always been the happiest person I knew.
The most patient; the most gentle. Easy to befriend, difficult to anger.
Had there not been ships just outside the tunnel, wrecked and battered across the sea floor, I wouldn’t have believed him.
“Wait—there were more than one,” I remembered.
“More than one what?”
“Ship.”
“Oh.” He didn’t ask how I knew. “I think I sank six more over the years. Sailors that asked about you.”
“Six?”
“Maybe seven.” My father waved a hand in front of his face. “It’s fuzzy now.”
“And the bones? They’re all from dead sailors who survived?”
His gaze finally slanted toward the dark tunnel I’d emerged from. “The tide is high now,” he said, almost to himself. “How did you get in here?”
I swallowed. Tapped my fingers over my knee. “I swam in.”
“Swam—”
“Makua.” I sighed, steeling myself. Nerves crept in, a small swarm across my skin, stinging, pricking, biting.
I sat straighter, letting the pole drop to the cavern floor, trying to disregard the question I wanted to ask.
But it was as impossible to ignore as setting my hand into the flames of a fire and trying to distract myself from the burn.
It pulsed within me, anxious one moment, almost angry the next.
“Seven years ago, a pirate cabin boy disappeared from Akamai’s house. ”
I didn’t need to ask.
My heart began to pang against my chest as my father’s body became very still.
His eyes had danced around the walls and shadows since the moment I’d entered, but they softly locked into mine now.
The longer he went without speaking, the louder everything else became.
Dripping water, crackling fire, the rhythmic pull of my own breaths, each one more rapid than the last, until a hole might have opened up beneath me and swallowed me whole.
The shy pirate boy who had spent a week pointing at stars while his father hid from Calderian authorities in Leihani’s harbor.
Had blushed and tripped over his words, had fumbled so much with his hands that he’d eventually shoved them into his pockets, and had coughed so much that last night, the night he’d vanished, that I’d had to help him to the village healer.
“You killed him?” I asked, little more than a whisper, but it tore through the quiet.
“You had wanted to check on him,” my father murmured back.
“But I’d seen the way the other islanders watched you as you brought him into the village.
The witch’s daughter and a young boy who was clearly sick—” He paused to scratch the inner corner of his mouth.
“I told you I would check on him instead. Took my canoe and rowed to Akamai’s house on the edge of the market.
She was just leaving when I arrived. I heard her tell the boy she’d be right back, then she marched away, on a mission to find something or someone.
Herbs for a tonic, maybe, or the boy’s father.
She was so focused she didn’t even see me, even when I tried to ask her how he was.
So I slipped inside, and he perked up. Asked if he could talk to you.
But one look at him, and I—I knew. I knew he wasn’t going to last the night, no matter what Akamai tried to do. ”
I’d latched onto the sound of his voice, unable to look away. Pressure built in my chest, each pang of my heart a tight stitch between my ribs.
My father’s brows tightened. “I said you were already asleep, but that you’d see him in the morning, and he tried to say thank you, but he started coughing instead.
And didn’t stop. He coughed until he couldn’t breathe.
He just sat against Akamai’s wall, mouth open, face the color of nightfall, blue and cold.
I’d expected Death to take him that night; I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.
Less than five minutes. I laid him down, tried to close his eyes.
Offered him the Calderian prayer to Theia, the one sailors use. And then I left.”
I exhaled, the air a blade against my throat. “So, you don’t know what happened to him?”
“No. I do.” My father swallowed. His mouth opened and twitched, the sour scent of worry bitter in my nose.
“I slipped out of her house and was on my way home to tell you when I heard voices. Akamai and the boy’s father, arguing.
He said the islanders had informed him that you were a witch, that your mother used to attack sailors.
Said that if his son died, he’d take you to Calder, make you stand trial.
And Akamai challenged him. Why should Calder’s authorities believe him, when he’d spent the last week hiding his pirate ship in our port, she asked.
And that’s when I realized they wouldn’t take you for trial.
They’d take you, but at best they’d sell you up north, and at worst… ”
The torch was suddenly too bright, the sun glaring through the ceiling.
I’d spent years agonizing over Irah’s death.
Revisiting that night in my mind, wondering what had happened to him.
Imagining him leaving Akamai’s house to find his ship and falling off the dock or wandering in the wrong direction toward the mountains or caves.
Dropping under thick ferns somewhere, struggling for breath until his air ran out under a canopy of leaves.
I’d conceived Irah’s fate a hundred different ways inside my head, always believing Akamai had been the last person to see him alive. Never had I imagined it had been my father instead.
“You took him.”
He blew out a heavy gust, as if it had been locked inside him, chipping away at his bones for years.
“I didn’t know what else to do. It’s not as if the island would have rallied, fought pirates to protect you.
They had weapons, swords, catapults. What did I have, a fishing knife?
I turned around, stole back into Akamai’s house and gathered him up, and had enough time to hide just outside her wall as they stepped inside.
I could hear him shouting at her as I ran back to my canoe. ”
“And then brought him here,” I finished for him, the words heavy in my chest.
My father cringed slightly. “Well, actually. I was so worried they might come looking for you, I left him in my va’a and came back to you.
You were asleep. I sat outside the door all night with my knife, heart in my throat as I kept watch on the canoe and the torches as they moved around the market as they searched for him.
It was only after you’d left to visit your cursed island that I brought him here.
Returned home only to find his little tinderbox at the bottom of the stairs, like he’d left himself a reason to come back and see you. So I brought that here, too.”
He rocked the back of his skull against the hull, aiming his gaze up.
“I thought, that by hiding him, the islanders would spare you any blame. But it didn’t matter whether they found him or not.
They were convinced it was you. Everything I did, every word I said, only made them meaner, more convinced you were something to fear.
But they never crossed that line, never attacked you, and we couldn’t leave with Mihauna watching.
So I asked you to try to make friends, to smile and not make trouble, and I told myself I was protecting you.
But I knew I was only burying the problem, not fixing it.
I could feel you growing angrier, and then concealing that anger, like you had worn a second skin just to shield yourself.
The island didn’t force that shield on you, little leaf. I did.”
He blinked up at the sunlight streaming through the crack.
Moisture rose from the cave, humid air dancing with the light, shimmering in steady waves.
Tears flashed silently down his cheeks. “I knew little by little you’d start to hate me, as you hated them.
I told myself, I’d rather she hates me alive than loves me dead.
Then they took you, and for all I knew, you were dead.
And I looked back at the last few years of your life, years where I’d broken your heart day after day, and wondered what kind of life that was.
What had I truly offered you, as a father?
Not love. I might have loved you, but that’s not what I’d filled your life with. ”
We each sank into the quiet of the cave, my father staring up at the thin veils of sun, my gaze roaming to the dark hallway where Irah rested, neither of us ready to face the other.
We let the cool wind mist over us instead, soft and easy and hardly even there.
I thumbed through emotions, trying to understand how I felt, but it was like skimming across the books and scrolls of Selena’s shelves, trying to decide what to read.
No feeling seemed just right, no words or action or response.
There was a time, long ago, when I would have wept with relief at hearing him speak that way.
I sifted through those memories, when a sailor had vanished or my garden had been trampled, when witch and demon trailed behind my own name in hushed voices across the crops and between verandas, and my own father had just sighed and looked at me with desperate exasperation and said, try to be good, as if I hadn’t spent my entire life trying to be just that, good and quiet and invisible.
I’d always believed my challenges lost on him.
Something he couldn’t see or maybe avoided seeing.
It had been my own private war; me against the world.
I hadn’t realized he’d been fighting his own battle in the shadows alongside me.
I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, feeling for the taste of different words to try.
It’s okay seemed too trivial. I forgive you too sharp, a rock lodged in my throat.
Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to forgive.
Maybe I’d strayed that far, let myself become that lost that I couldn’t.
But I’m not sure I blamed him either. The hardest part of knowing your parents after you’ve grown is facing their humanity with bracing clarity, deciding what flaws and errors you must hold onto and what you must let go.
“I wouldn’t have left,” I said softly. Kye had offered me the same thing, once.
Worried over what the islanders would do after Naheso died, he’d asked me to come to Calder with him.
I’d said no. I’d known then, with soul-deep intuition, that I belonged to these waters.
My Prizivac blood had been branded by the Juile Sea before I’d even been born.
A daughter of the tide, a future queen of the ocean.
“I would have begged you to stay. To take me back.”
“That’s what she said.” My father shook his head, leaning his elbow over his thigh and twisting to look at me.
“Let her learn to fight monsters. I wonder, sometimes, what she would have done had I been the one to die, and she’d had to raise you alone.
Sometimes I hate that I’m still in love with her.
Sometimes I wish I could tell her I hate her.
It would make everything so much easier. ”
“Oh.” I clapped my hands awkwardly on the sides of my thighs. “About that. I, uh. I have someone I’d like you to meet.”
He glanced down at my ring. “Is it—”
I chuckled nervously, twisting it over my finger. “No, no. You’ve met him. This is Kye’s ring.”
His mouth twisted to the side, his brows an unamused slope I could have rolled a coin down—I hadn’t missed the fact that he’s referred to Kye as the Calderian.
I dusted myself as I stood, reaching to help him to his feet.
He groaned as he rose, a deep rumble familiar and nostalgic, a sound belonging to my childhood I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.
“Don’t faint or anything,” I said, thinking of Palunu.
My father crossed his corded arms. “I’ll try my best,” he deadpanned.
“All right, well,” I leaned down, plucking his torch from its earthen home. “This way.”
We didn’t have to walk far.
She’d crept from the place I’d left her, sneaking along the shadows to eavesdrop, I’m sure, hovering at the rim of darkness.
The torch lighted on ankles and knees and layers of white as she scrambled to her feet.
Hands wringing over each other, she stepped away from the wall, the firelight breathing her into existence like some goddess born from the dark, lustrous midnight hair and starlit eyes and skin that glowed like the shell of a pearl.
“Makua,” I said, sucking my breath in tight, “this is Cebrinne.”