15. Nerina
NERINA
Iknow what day it is before I open my eyes.
Not because I have been counting. I have been counting, but that is not the reason.
It is the weight of the morning, the particular shape of it, the way certain days arrive already carrying what they are.
I have felt it before: the morning Sevraine told me about Bren.
The morning I untied the ‘Tenacious’ from the Blackwake dock.
Days that have a shape you can feel before they fully arrive, and knowing the shape does not change it.
I get up. I build the fire. I eat.
Then I go to work.
There is nothing left on the list. I made the list on Day 3 and I have worked through it the way I work through everything, and this morning when I check it the check marks go all the way down.
The overhang is wedged and seated. The basin runs clear.
The hull repair has been through a storm and held.
The mooring lines are sound. The freshwater casks are full.
The provisions chest is packed and stowed.
There is nothing left to do.
I do it all again anyway.
I re-tension the bow line, which does not need re-tensioning.
I walk the hull section with my palms on the planking, feeling for any change in the patch, and there is no change in the patch.
I walk the beach perimeter from the northern formation to the southern spur and back, reading the tideline the way I read it on the first morning, and the tideline says what it has been saying for days: old wreckage, dark grit, the patient industry of water that has all the time in the world.
I know what I am doing. I am saying goodbye to the work, because the work is the thing I know how to say goodbye to.
The rest of it I have not found the language for yet.
The brig sits in its lines with the particular solidity of a vessel that is ready.
The tide is right. The wind off the water is from the northwest, the heading I need for the fog corridor approach.
The conditions are as good as they are going to get and I know this and I stand at the waterline with the water coming over my boots and I look at the ‘Tenacious’ and I think about Bren and I think about the number Sevraine gave me and I think about what I came here for.
I am still standing there when I hear his footsteps.
He comes around the northern formation at midday, which is when he said he would come, because he is the kind of creature that arrives when he says he will arrive.
He is wearing the dark coat. His hair is down.
He crosses the cove toward me at the pace I have memorised without meaning to and stops at the waterline a few feet to my left, and we both look at the brig for a moment, and the brig looks back at us with the stoic indifference of a hull that has been waiting and is prepared to wait longer.
He reaches inside his coat.
The stone is smaller than I imagined. That is the first thing.
I had built it up in my mind into something significant in size, something proportional to what it cost to get here, and it is small enough to sit in his palm with room around it, dark and smooth, almost black except for something moving inside it that is not quite light but behaves the way light behaves when it wants to be looked at.
He holds it out without ceremony, without speech, and I look at it in his hand for a moment before I take it.
Our fingers do not touch.
I am careful about that. I notice that I am careful about it, information I file in the same place I have been putting information about him since the second day on this beach, the place I am not examining directly, the place that has been filling up regardless.
I close my hand around the stone. It is warm.
Warmer than it should be from sitting against his skin, warmer than the air accounts for, the warmth of stone held for a very long time by a creature that runs hotter than most. I feel the weight of it settle into my palm and I think: this is enough.
This is what Bren needs. This is what I crossed the Varak Fog for, what I survived the storm for, what I repaired the hull and wedged the overhang and cleared the basin for.
It is enough.
I pocket it.
The tide moves against the hull of the ‘Tenacious’.
The wind is still from the northwest. The conditions are still good.
I look at the brig and I do the arithmetic I have been turning over since I woke up this morning and the arithmetic produces the same answer it always produces: go.
Now. While the wind is right and the tide is with you and the thing you came for is in your pocket.
I look at the brig. Then I turn away from it.
“The basin,” I say. My voice comes out even, which I am grateful for. “Before winter, if there’s another silt accumulation, it’ll block. The overflow lip on the eastern side is lower than the western — that’s where it’ll go first. You’d want to clear it before the wet season sets in.”
He is very still beside me.
He does not point out that the basin is clear.
He does not say that the wet season is weeks away and I will not be here for it.
He does not name what I am doing, which is the kindest thing he has done since he walked out of the treeline on the second morning and fixed his eyes on me and told me to leave.
“I’ll note it,” he says.
“And the overhang. After a bad storm, check the eastern wedge first. The grain runs —”
“I know the grain,” he says. Quiet. Not a correction. Gentler than that.
I stop talking. The wind comes off the water and the brig moves in its lines and the stone is warm in my coat pocket and I am standing on volcanic sand on an island I came to steal from and I am not leaving.
Not today.
I am not ready to examine why and I am not going to, but I am not going to pretend it is the basin either, not to myself, not standing here with him close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him even in the cold afternoon air.
“One more day,” I say.
It is not a question. He receives it as the statement it is.
“One more day,” he says.
Neither of us looks at the other when we say it. We are both looking at the water, easier, the coward’s option, and I am taking it without apology because I have used up most of my bravery on other things today and I am running on what’s left.
I look at the shelter.
The rock face of the northern formation, the dark interior, the cold fire pit and the worn stones of the floor and the wall that I have been looking at and looking away from for three days.
Part of me has been circling it, the way of a thing you intend to do and haven’t done yet, and standing here now with the stone in my pocket and one more day agreed to, the circling gets closer.
Not yet.
But closer.
He follows my eyes to the shelter and back.
He does not ask. He has never asked. One of the things about him.
He watches and files and waits, and the waiting is not passive, it is a different kind of attention, the attention of a creature that has learned over a very long time that most things reveal themselves if you give them room to.
I wonder sometimes what he has filed about me. I wonder if the file is accurate. I think it probably is. The part I find most inconvenient.
I go back to the fire before the light fails.
He goes back to the treeline, slower than he used to.
The island is quiet around us both and the ‘Tenacious’ sits in its lines and the stone in my coat pocket is still warm, and I sit beside the fire.
Tomorrow stays outside the ring of it, and the day after, and the crossing, and all the arithmetic I have been doing for eight years.
I think about one more day.
One more day is a thing I can hold.