11. Nerina
NERINA
Up before the light.
Not because I slept well, the ground has not improved as a sleeping surface and the fire needed feeding twice in the night and something in the upper canopy of the treeline made a sound at the third hour that I have decided not to categorize, but because the list I made yesterday is long and three days is not, and I have never in my life solved a problem by waiting for it to become more convenient.
I start with the overhang.
The crack in the basalt face is worse in full daylight than it looked yesterday.
Standard result of looking at structural problems in proper light.
They are always worse. The fault line runs deeper than I thought, the separation at the top wider by a finger’s width on the eastern edge, and when I put my hand flat against the rock and push I feel a vibration in the stone that has no business being there.
The overhang is not weeks from coming down.
It is storms. Two, maybe three, depending on the angle.
I need wedging material. A piece of hardwood or compressed bark, something to drive into the base of the crack to arrest the separation and transfer the overhang’s weight back into the main face.
Stone would work best — cut stone, fitted, but I have no tools for cutting and the beach offers nothing but rounded volcanic rubble smoothed by tide. I need to go into the treeline.
I pick up the knife and the length of rope from the supply chest and go.
The forest is different from inside it.
From the beach it reads as a wall — dense canopy, dark interior, the abrupt boundary between open shore and closed tree cover.
Inside it the scale shifts. The trees are enormous, black-barked and ancient, their root systems rising from the ground in buttressed arcs that in some places form natural chambers large enough to stand in.
The canopy overhead is so thick that the light arrives diffused and green-tinged, the kind of light that makes everything look like it exists slightly underwater.
The ground is soft volcanic soil covered in growth I have no names for — broad-leafed and dark, nothing like the coastal scrub I know from Blackwake’s headlands.
The island smells different in here. Mineral and wet and a third thing underneath that I keep trying to identify and keep failing to, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar, the particular smell of a forest that has been doing its own thing for a very long time without reference to anything outside itself.
I move carefully. Not timidly. I have not got the energy for timid, but with attention, watching my footing on the uneven root-crossed ground, keeping my bearing by the sound of the sea behind me.
Thirty yards in I find what I came for: a rock formation where a chunk of basalt has sheared off cleanly along a natural fault, leaving a flat-faced piece roughly the right size and shape to be driven into the crack in the overhang if I can get it back to the beach.
I work it free from the surrounding root growth with the knife and my hands, which takes twenty minutes and leaves me with dirt to the elbows and a fresh complaint from the hand I cut on the fish knife three days ago.
I get the rope around it, test the weight, decide I can drag it, and start back toward the beach.
Thirty feet from the treeline when I smell the water.
Hot water. Not salt, not tide — fresh water with a mineral edge, the same volcanic smell I noticed in the forest but concentrated, sourceful. I stop with the rope over my shoulder and turn my head and follow it.
Twenty yards north, off the path I made coming in, the ground dips into a shallow depression ringed by the same black basalt as the beach formations but older here, more weathered, the edges of the rock smoothed into curves that the weather alone does not fully account for.
Inside the depression the water sits dark and still and steaming faintly in the cool morning air, a natural pool, fed from somewhere below by the island’s thermal activity, draining over a low lip of stone on the far side into the forest floor.
I crouch at the edge and put my hand in.
It is warm. Not hot enough to scald, warm enough to matter, the warmth of water that has been holding heat since before I was born and will hold it long after, patient and constant and entirely indifferent to whether anyone takes advantage of it.
I look at the stones around the rim. They are smooth in the way of stones that have been handled, not just weathered, handled, the edges worn not by water but by contact, the kind of polish that comes from something returning to the same place again and again over a very long time.
Someone used to come here. I cannot tell when they stopped or why, only that they did, and the pool has been here since, warm and waiting, belonging to no one.
I look back toward the beach. The basalt chunk sits on the rope behind me. The overhang is not going anywhere in the next hour.
I begin unlacing my boots.
The water receives me the way warm things receive cold ones — completely, immediately, with the specific generosity of water that has more than enough to give. I go in to my shoulders and stay there and do not move for a long time.
Two days of storm salt and grit and volcanic dust lift away in the heat.
The stiffness in my shoulders, which has graduated from complaint to established fact, loosens by degrees.
The cut on my hand, which has been tight and angry since yesterday, softens in the warm water and stops insisting on itself quite so forcefully.
I float on my back and look up through the gap in the canopy at a sky that is gray and low and entirely indifferent to me, and I breathe.
I cannot remember the last time I did nothing.
Not slept — sleep is not nothing, sleep is a maintenance requirement the body enforces regardless, but voluntarily stopped.
I have been moving since I was sixteen years old with the focused momentum of a dockworker who knows that stopping means looking at the distance still ahead, and the distance has always been too far to look at directly.
I look at it now, in the warm water, because I am too tired to keep not looking.
Bren has months. I have three days to prove myself on this island, and then whatever comes after three days, and then a journey back through the Varak Fog in a brig that has already demonstrated its opinion of the crossing.
I have no map of the interior, no knowledge of where the hoard is kept or what a dragon considers a fair exchange for a stone from it.
I have a rope, a knife, a nearly-healed hand, and the arrangement I negotiated yesterday with a man who is not a man and who came back to the beach when he didn’t have to and who I am deliberately not thinking about.
Except that I am thinking about him, which is the problem.
It had started with the hair. I had noticed it in the first seconds on the beach yesterday, the black of it threaded through with silver at the temples, and had filed it under ‘information about the person I am negotiating with’ and moved on, which had worked for approximately the length of the conversation and had been failing steadily ever since.
The silver is not the grey of age. It has the look of something that belongs there, earned rather than accumulated, the way certain marks on certain things improve rather than diminish them.
My eyes had kept dropping to his throat.
I know it. I am not pleased about it, but I know it, and I am a person who prefers accurate information about myself even when the information is inconvenient.
The burn scars at his jaw and throat are old and severe and they have settled into the bronze of his skin with the same quality as the silver in his hair, not damage exactly, not anymore, simply part of what he is.
I know scars. I have a working taxonomy of them built from years of my own and I know the difference between a scar that is still defining the person and one the person has finished being defined by.
His have finished. Long ago, judging by the colour and the texture.
I wonder how far down they go.
The thought arrives with the easy confidence of a thought that doesn’t know it’s unwelcome, and I catch it two full seconds after it has already been thought.
Two seconds too late. I straighten in the water.
My hand has moved to the scar on my own forearm, the hook-catch from three winters ago, without my telling it to, thumb tracing the familiar ridge of it in the warm water, and I look at my hand doing this and feel something shift in the region of my chest that I do not immediately have a name for and do not want one.
I have not thought about a man like this in.
I try to find the end of that sentence and cannot locate it.
Information, that. I have been too busy.
I have been too tired. I have been too consumed by the arithmetic of keeping Bren alive to have anything left over for whatever this is, and the whatever this is has apparently been waiting with considerable patience for a moment when my defenses were dissolved in a warm pool on a volcanic island at the edge of the known world.
“Inconvenient,” I tell the pool. “Absolutely inconvenient timing.”
The pool does not have opinions about this. The steam rises. The forest is quiet around me.
I hear the footstep at the edge of the depression and my hand is on the knife on the rock before the sound has finished arriving.
He stops at the rim.
He is looking at a point somewhere above my head with the deliberate care of a creature with excellent vision who has decided not to use it, which tells me everything I need to know about how long he has been standing there and what he may or may not have seen before he made that choice.
The heat in the pool has nothing to do with what arrives in my face.
“There is wedging material closer to the beach,” he says, to the canopy above my head.
His voice has its usual resonance but something underneath it is running differently, a frequency I cannot identify, controlled in the actively controlled way rather than simply calm.
“The northern formation. There is a shear face twenty yards from the overhang that would give you better stone for the purpose. Flatter grain.”
I stare at him.
He is telling me where to find better materials for the repair I am doing on his island, standing at the edge of a hot spring I found in his forest, looking at the canopy with those predator eyes very carefully aimed at nothing that is me.
“Flatter grain,” I repeat.
“For wedging,” he says. “The piece you have will split under pressure. The shear face stone won’t.”
He still has not looked at me directly. I become aware, in a way that is entirely separate from the situation and entirely unhelpful to it, that my coat is on the rock beside the knife and the pool is warm and dark and I am in it and he is at the rim of it and this is a specific configuration of events that I did not plan for when I made the arrangement yesterday.
I also become aware that he came back. Again. And this time he found me, and he is still here, and he is telling me about stone grain.
“Thank you,” I say, because those are the words that fit and I do not have better ones right now.
He nods, once, at the canopy. Then he turns and walks back into the trees, and his footsteps fade until the forest takes them, and then I sit in the warm water of the spring with my heart doing something loud and uninvited and my hand still on the knife I no longer need and the morning light coming down through the gap in the canopy in thin columns that land nowhere near me.
“Absolutely inconvenient,” I say again, quieter this time.
The island, for once, does not disagree.