Chapter 4
Two years later.
The only thing the storm washed in was the carcass of a rowboat.
I gather the easiest parts first, broken ribs and what might have been a bench, keeping to the tideline. The sea belches and slaps against the cracked black stones, shining damp in the gray light. Each piece of wood is disgustingly soaked. I throw them onto the rockfield behind me.
Malkin walks away along the shore, kicking at the rocks as she scans the ground for any other flotsam. If we don’t come back with more than this, the Governor will assume we’re lying, and didn’t do the work. Nevermind that the storms are unpredictable and the ocean is a bastard.
There’s a plank and a piece of netting stuck just past the tide, lodged between two of the black rocks. It's the only part of my find I haven't gathered yet. But even standing out on the low rocks, I can’t quite reach it. Not without touching the water.
I stare down at the swirling foam and the charcoal gray sea. Every roll of the waves is trying to call me in, begging that I could leave this world behind, but I know the sea is not my friend.
Malkin is going to have to walk back here and help.
My fellow exile is paused, some fifty feet away, crouched down and looking at something. In her bright green dress, she’s the only spot of color on the beach.
The sky is heavy gray. The rocks are extremely dark gray. The sea is medium-gray, with soft-gray foam. A cluster of birds flying overhead?
They're speckled gray.
But Malkin always has colorful clothes. When she was exiled to the Bluff six months ago for refusing some asshole High Duke's flirtations, she brought three whole trunks of outfits with her. Even lace-strips for her shiny brown hair, since proper young noblewomen don’t wear valor-ribbons.
Right now the lace—a green that matches her dress—flutters behind her like flags in the wind. Or like leaves.
The last time I saw a tree was two years ago, in Barivum for my trial, when they decided to exile me. If I were anyone else’s daughter, it would have been an execution. Malkin and I have that in common.
I put my fingers in my mouth, metal and flesh, and whistle a piercing note. Malkin’s head jerks up and I wave for her to come back. She holds an arm up in the sailor’s motion that I taught her for “wait.”
She’s found something, too. I stare at her, and then my eyes flick back to the piece of wood thunking between the two rocks, slipping forward as the waves rush in and dragging tight between the stones again when they go out.
For comfort my fingers wrap around my necklace pendant, a small leather tube I fashioned to hold the War-Father’s letter, like it can grant me the same protection my enchanted necklace used to.
This, my life on the Bluff, isn’t forever. The War-Father is going to bring me home, so I can't afford to get soft out here. If I ever want the chance to hunt down the King of Witches and make him pay, I can’t get in the habit of letting fear control me.
My knife barely cut him. But did it cut him deep enough to scar, to draw a line across his chest like I'd marked him my target?
I firm my jaw. If I’m careful, there has to be a way to get the last piece of wood without stepping into the water. I grab one of the planks I’ve gathered. Using it as a crutch, I lean across the distance between the rocks, towards the jammed wood.
I inch down. Just as my right foot starts to slip I manage to graze the edge of the net wound about the plank. I fix my right foot, angling the sole of my boot against the slick stone it's braced on, and lean further over.
My left foot betrays me out of nowhere and shoots out from under me. Off balance, I topple forward.
My knees crash between the stones, into the cold rush of the hateful sea. Salt flecks my lips as my whole body spasms in disgust.
Little knight? Is this where you've gone?
I scramble back out of the water, the bottom of my gray canvas dress sopping wet. The voice in the water was just my imagination.
My heart won’t calm down, even though I know I’m safe. I grab the piece of wood I’d used as a crutch and retreat to the safety of the tide line.
With a shush-shush-shush, a large wave washes over the plank and net I left behind. For a moment it's hidden from view. Then the foamy water crawls back to reveal it again.
“Caiteven!” Malkin yells. She grins as she jogs towards me, cradling a canvas sack in both arms. “I found apples!”
“What?” For a moment I forget the sour feeling in my mind, the sickness the ocean always brings.
Malkin closes the distance between us and crouches to undo the bag’s drawstrings.
Inside there are five apples with gold and red freckled skins.
A small, shriveled leaf clings to one of their stems. The bag must have been on the boat that washed up.
My mouth waters. I don’t even remember what apples taste like.
“They’re only a little bruised,” Malkin whispers.
“We haven’t found much else,” I remind her, gesturing at the small pile next to me. “He won’t punish us if we bring fruit.”
Malkin chews her lower lip. Her hands are tight on the bag.
There’s a distant look in her eye as the excitement of her find turns to an ache of disappointment.
If we don’t bring back enough, we might find ourselves taking a full inventory of everything in the castle, down to each individual fishing hook, and then taking it twice more to see if the numbers changed.
Or using our hands to separate every strand of three pounds of blister kelp, until the fingers of my left hand pulse with pain and Malkin’s delicate skin is bloody.
Still. I’m used to long campaigns on the Wild Seas, but Malkin never had to go without produce until she came here. Maybe for her, the punishment is worth it. I sigh.
“Three’s not so different from five,” I admit. Her face immediately softens.
“It isn’t, is it?” she says, and draws one from the bag to offer me.
I ought to refuse, because I was told to follow the Governor’s demands. But if we both participate, neither of us can tell on the other.
I take a bite for Malkin’s sake, so she can enjoy hers without worrying if I'll tattle. The sea has left its mark, and the apple’s shiny skin is unpleasantly salty.
I nearly gag. But beneath that layer is soft flesh, tart and honey-sweet all at once.
With a moan, I sink down to the stones and sit, cradling the apple with both hands.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever tasted.
Who cares that my dress is wet or that the sea is pounding right next to me, begging me to come in like a cliff begs for you to fall?
I could die happy with this taste on my tongue.
Malkin bites into hers and then wades out into the water without hesitation. Apple in one hand, plank and netting in the other, she drags the wreckage back to shore, then adds it to the pile.
“Three apples, some wood, and some netting,” she announces as she sits beside me. “He can’t be too mad.”
“Of course he can. He’s a small man with grand delusions,” I mutter, then take another bite. The apple’s half-gone already.
“I’ve known worse men,” Malkin says quietly. She frowns down at her apple. She’s getting lost in her memories again, as she often does.
“Look,” I say, and point out over the sea to distract her.
A sea-titan wheels overhead, the bird’s wingspan thirty feet at least, then skims out past the sunken edge of the rockfield and dives.
We stare in silence as it comes up with a reaper, one of the large-jawed fish that will shred your flesh from your bones faster than you can say a prayer to any Exalted.
“Do you think the reapers ate whoever was on the boat?” Malkin asks.
“Maybe.” I finish my apple, gnawing all the way down the core, then chuck it as hard as I can towards the ocean.
A terror of reapers can devour you in under a minute. And it’s still far from the most horrifying thing that haunts the deep.
“My nursemaid told me the witches worship reapers, and sacrifice malformed children to them,” Malkin says. I snort.
“Reapers? No. Worse.”
“Worse?” she wrinkles her nose at me.
“The War-Father says dragons crave killing. To get them to bond, they have huge, ritual—”
“I don’t want to know,” Malkin interrupts with a shudder.
I lick the juice from my fingers as Malkin finishes hers.
“Is one apple really that different from three?” she whispers.
“You want to bring back a bag with just one apple in it?” I raise my eyebrows, though probably only the left moves; the right side of my face is too stiff from the dragonfire scars.
“I want to bring back an empty sack and gag him with it,” Malkin informs me sweetly.
I stifle a snort and stand.
“Let’s split the third and bring back two.”
While Malkin scrutinizes the apples to pick the best one, I wring what water I can out of my dress and begin to arrange the wood and rope we scavenged.
She takes a bite and moans as I tie the smaller pieces in a bundle on top of the largest slab.
I waste a moment searching the planks for any Hellion marks, even knowing the odds of one of Rampage's rowboats washing up here two years after the attack are slim to none.
In any case, there are no marks on this boat's bones.
Someday, I’ll have revenge for everyone he killed.
I fashion the longest piece of rope into a harness to sling over my chest. Malkin hands me the apple, half-eaten.
She doesn’t deserve to be here any more than I do. And unlike most of the Bluff’s other inhabitants, she believed me immediately when I told her I was not a witch and that the council had it wrong. It takes very little for Malkin to believe a man is an idiot.
I take a small bite and hand the apple back to her. Malkin smiles.
“That half’s yours,” she says.
“I don’t really like apples,” I lie, and keep my arm out until she takes it.
I wrap the rope around myself, and we begin to trudge home.
It’s slow going, the wood constantly snagging on the uneven surfaces of the rockfield.
Malkin walks behind me and kicks it loose when it gets caught.
The Bluff isn’t big, and even from here we can see the top of the castle where we all live.
Dull blue light glows from the roof, from the power crystals growing there, cutting through the stormy gray sky like a beacon.
White lines of paint are stark against the black stone of the castle.
The building may have been constructed by the witches when they still ruled these lands, but the paint and crystals are our addition: lines of enchantment extending our protections, drawing the barrier over from the larger islands to the east of the Bluff.
To the far north, behind the wall we form, our people live in safety.
And to the south, slowly pushing our borders further, is the navy I used to be part of.
The logs I’m pulling catch on another stone. I pause to let Malkin work them loose.
Gods, if I knew nothing else about the witches, the Bluff’s barren landscape would be enough to make me hate them.
Decades ago this whole place went dead, and layer by layer the winds and storms have stripped the lifeless soil away to leave only rock.
Well, rock and mud, which hides between the stones like bits of soft tissue clinging to a skeleton’s bones.
There’s a shadow emerging on the horizon of the ocean, past the castle.
“Got it,” Malkin says.
I stay frozen, staring at the shape on the horizon. So far away from shore it looks stationary.
I know the outline, even as smudged by fog and mist and obscured by sea spines as it is.
The shadow is a ship, and from how big it looks even at a distance, it’s not a little boat like the one we scavenged.
It’s not even one of the long, low transports that skim between the towns, carrying our wounded and bringing food and letters to the last line of the barrier, before safety ends and the Wild Seas begin.
No, this is a Hellion of the imperial navy. And if it’s close enough for me to see it, that means it’s far, far north of the southern front where it belongs.
Did the War-Father finally come to bring his daughter home?
The wooden sledge clatters behind me as I break into a run.