Chapter Four #2
Besides which, they’d have to catch me.
She lit a candle and carefully melted the edges of the wax seal just enough to affix it to the letter, not enough to disturb the imprint of the stamp. When she finished, it looked as if it had never been opened. “Your secret is my secret,” she told the statue.
She wondered what the gardener would do when he read the letter.
Yarrow Verdane. She hadn’t known his name before, and she reminded herself to continue to act as if she didn’t know it, since she only knew it from reading the letter.
She’d only met the man once—he had a reclusive hermit vibe, but that didn’t tell her whether or not he’d break the law and cast a spell.
She was fully aware she had lousy people sense.
“I assume you’re worth the risk,” Marin said to the statue.
The statue didn’t reply.
Happily, it looked like the risks to her and Perri were minimal, which was all she cared about and the reason why she’d pried into the contents of the letter in the first place. It also meant she didn’t have to disappoint Rijes or return the payment—all excellent news.
Opening the pouch that the head librarian had given her, Marin poured the coins into her hand and her eyes widened.
Rijes had said she was paying for her discretion as well as the delivery, but this …
it was double her normal delivery fee. Double!
Well, that clinched it. Of course she’d complete the job.
She ogled the coins in her hand for a moment more, feeling their weight and inhaling their lovely metallic scent. This amount … it meant her family could make the next payment to the sorcerer while enabling her to steer clear of any Alyssium jobs.
And now she knew their destination after they delivered the statue:
She was going home.
Pleased, Marin tucked the payment and the letter into one of the many hidden compartments she and her mother had installed within the cabin, and then she headed back up to the deck.
She thanked Perri and took her position by the wheel again.
It was the perfect evening for a nice sail.
The sea was flat and the breeze was brisk, as if the ocean didn’t care that an emperor had been defenestrated.
Frankly, she didn’t care either. The emperor hadn’t ever felt like a person to her—more like a force of nature, unpredictable and potentially dangerous. A lightning bolt. Unlikely to hit you but disastrous if it did.
That was another reason why she wanted to visit home: to make sure her parents were okay and that they knew to avoid any trips to the capital city. Her home island, Flicker, was far enough southeast that it should be fine, but she didn’t want them to take any unnecessary risks.
She didn’t visit home often. For the first year after Iovar tried to destroy her family, she’d kept her distance entirely, worried that her presence would endanger them by drawing his ire. Now … I just have to be careful, that’s all.
So long as she was careful, so long as she kept sailing, so long as she avoided messes that weren’t her business and didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t her parents or Perri, then everything would be fine.
Ahead, the sunset stained the horizon as the sun liquefied into gold, and Marin felt the tension in her muscles melt with the golden sun into the edge of the sea. She breathed in deep. She loved the smell of the sea: briny and bright. It made her feel like she was breathing in hope.
Marin slept and sailed beneath the stars on the journey to Belde.
She passed plenty of islands with fishing villages that boasted inns and rooms to let, not to mention cafés and bakeries and markets, as well as job boards with various supply-runner postings.
She’d normally have stopped at each one to check for jobs, but not this time, with the statue in the cabin and thoughts of her parents and her home island filling her head. She just kept sailing.
The farther she ventured from Alyssium, the fewer other boats and ships she saw, which was exactly how she liked it.
Not many visited the southern islands—the vast majority of them were tiny dots, barely able to support a village, with few resources to tempt traders.
One island was home to exclusively sheep and a few shepherds.
Another was just rocks and lizards. A third had been claimed by an ornery gryphon and her brood, sharing the shore with a solitary lighthouse.
Several others had once been inhabited but were now all but abandoned. Belde was one of those.
She’d heard that it had once been a jewel of the southern islands, home to a magnificent greenhouse created by a brilliant sorcerer, but after the sorcerer’s death, it had fallen into disrepair.
No one visited it anymore. There was no reason to.
It was an island of dying magic with only a single resident.
Also, it was cold there.
As Perri trumpeted their arrival, she sailed across the harbor toward the dock.
There were no boats of any kind or any hint of movement anywhere along the shore, except from birds.
Snow covered the island, coating the pine trees.
In the distance, she saw the sparkle of the glass cupolas of the greenhouse, barely visible through the forest.
Winter always came early to Belde. She’d asked once and been told by the people of a neighboring island that it was a result of the late sorcerer’s spells—part of the cost of creating a vast complex of greenhouses.
Indoor summer in exchange for outdoor winter.
But she didn’t know if that was true or not.
What she did know was that it was still summer in the northern islands, mid-fall on her home island, and stupidly cold here.
She tied off and then gazed up the path into the pine tree forest. “Want to give it another bellow?” Marin asked Perri.
He looked offended.
“I mean, want to make a beautifully melodious trumpet sound that will bring our hermit running to see what could be making such incredibly gorgeous noises?”
Perri sang out like a trumpet, and it was as crystal clear and beautiful as any bit of music she’d ever heard flow out of the windows of the conservatory.
She wondered what Dax would have thought and reminded herself again that she didn’t need to think about him.
He was fine, completely safe within his conservatory.
She waited a few minutes, shivering, but the gardener didn’t appear.