Chapter Seven Kit #4
Nevertheless, when I reach into my bag for supplies night after night, I find myself pausing to touch the cravat. A sort of daydreamy feeling rises when I do, but I pull away and cut off my thoughts. I have more pressing concerns.
So I think of other things, until I think of Idris again, and the frustrating loop continues.
When we finally reach the port of Stramp at the end of the mainland, it is little more than a fishing village.
Under the cloud cover, the place is as colorless as the sea and the sky.
People move about briskly in the cold wind, everyone focused on some errand or task.
We receive curious looks but nothing more.
Catharine and I pause at the edge of the harbor. Small fishing boats are preparing to go out with the tide, the men and boys calling greetings to one another. There are a few larger boats as well—some schooners with cargo being loaded.
I feel suddenly overwhelmed, like all the strength that kept me moving has drained out of me at the sight of people. I look at Catharine and see the same frozen uncertainty in her face.
“Can I help you, lasses?” asks a kind voice.
I start and realize an older man has come up behind us. He’s carrying a net over his shoulder, and his face is creased from years at sea. When he smiles, his teeth are surprisingly white.
Catharine rallies herself. “We are hoping to get to the islands. To Skyare, specifically.”
The man nods thoughtfully and glances round at the various boats.
He points toward one of the schooners. “The Marksman will be going there this afternoon, but they will take a whole purse for fare.” He gives us an assessing look—our clothes ragged and torn, our two small bags.
“But Tom Westness will take you for less, if you don’t mind helping him reel in some herring on the way. ”
“We can do that,” Catharine says with unearned confidence.
I nod more reluctantly. Neither of us has so much as been out on the open sea before, and I know Catharine’s wrist still aches. She will have a hard time with any labor. But it can’t be too difficult to pull nets in with this well body. Or, at least, I hope not.
The man waves another fellow over. Mr. Westness is even older, with a bright gleam to his brown eyes and a beard streaked with black and white.
He takes us on for only a few coins, almost all we have left.
Within the hour, Catharine and I are on his small fishing vessel heading out to sea. On the horizon, the clouds blacken.
The swell is unsettling—lifting the small boat and dropping it again suddenly. I grab my seat with white knuckles, sure at each drop that we’re going to plunge beneath the next wave. I swallow hard, and Catharine casts me a concerned look.
Unfazed, Mr. Westness says, “Just lean over the gunwale if you need to be sick.”
“Gunwale?” I repeat, my neck heating.
“The side, lass.”
After more than a week in this body, I’ve grown comfortable being the strong one.
But even this body has flaws. Soon I’m hanging over the edge of the boat and losing what little food I ate that morning.
I feel Catharine put her hand on my shoulder, holding me steady as another swell rises and drops. I retch again.
Mr. Westness had said that we wouldn’t get to Skyare until that night.
But as the nausea rolls through me, time loses all meaning.
I have no sense of how long we have been on this horrible boat, and no way to judge how much farther remains.
Catharine helps haul nets. Fish slide and wriggle round my feet.
Rain and wind splash my face in turns, and I heave.
Catharine points to something on the horizon, and still I heave.
There’s an island in the fog. A column of rock stands apart from the cliff’s edge, impossible and grand. My heart gives a single hopeful beat, and I whisper, “Is that it? Are we there?”
Catharine speaks to the fisherman. Their words are lost in the whirl of my head. To me she says, “No—but we’re close.”
I bend and heave again.
It may be hours, it may be years, but some time later Catharine is taking my arm and helping me rise. The fisherman is on my other side. My feet land on something blessedly solid. Land. Though it still seems to rock beneath me.
“There, now, careful lass,” Mr. Westness murmurs. “We’ll just go lie you down.”
We enter a house, I think. I only know that the wind stops abruptly, and the air warms. A woman’s voice asks questions.
Her accent is lilting and musical and the words mean nothing to me.
Catharine answers. The fisherman says something about the boat, and a moment later a door closes.
Catharine and the woman clean me with heated, wet cloths and help me into a dry dress made of scratchy wool.
“You must change,” I say, searching for Catharine, dazed but remembering my old hands. Hands that will punish her for this journey. “You must get dry.”
“I am dry.” Catharine comes into focus. I’m so nauseated and dizzy, I have to concentrate to hold her still in front of my eyes. “I’m fine.”
I’m taken to a small bed tucked into one of the walls. When I lie down, the mattress feels like it is made of thick, woven ropes.
“Rest,” says Catharine, squeezing my hand. She winces and looks at her fingers, confused. She then turns her attention back to me. “We’re safe now.”
I want to open my mouth. We won’t be safe until we have reversed this magic. I need to know where we are and where to go next. We hadn’t planned what to do once we got to Skyare—the task of arriving seemed so enormous on its own.
But my eyes close. I sleep.