29. Maelor
MAELOR
Iwake before dawn and I do not lie still.
I get up and I build the fire and I eat and then I go to the brig.
Hull check, the patch is perfect, has been perfect, I know it is perfect and I check it anyway because this is the last time and I am going to do it completely.
Lines — all four, tested, taut, everything as it should be.
Provisions — stowed and secured, the water casks full, the weight distributed correctly for a solo crossing.
The spare sail that someone stored and forgot about, still in the hold, still serviceable.
The ‘Tenacious’ is ready.
I stand on the deck for a moment and put my hand on the wheel and look at the cove and the rock formations and the treeline and the shelter.
Twelve days. I put my hand on the wheel and I look at what I am leaving — the wedge still seated exactly where I drove it, the basin running clear, the fire pit I built and rebuilt every evening.
The overhang that kept the rain off us. The cove that stopped trying to kill me and started simply being a place I lived.
“Thank you,” I say to the brig, quietly, because I have always talked to things that cannot hear me and I am not going to stop now.
I go over the side and walk up the beach to the shelter.
The rock face is cold under my hand. I crouch at the base of it where the stone is flattest and I take the knife out and I hold it for a moment and look at the wall.
I have been thinking about this since the night I sat at the fire with my hands shaking.
The thinking goes back to the warm day when the island played my own voice back to me.
Since Vaelka sat on my beach and told me what it cost him to argue for me, and since Ysara said ‘I’m glad you came here’ at the treeline, and since he covered my hand with his in the warm water of the spring.
I know what I want to say.
I press the blade to the rock and I start.
The stone is volcanic basalt, which is harder than it looks but yields to a good knife applied with patience, and I have patience and a good knife and I am not in a hurry.
The letters come slowly and I make them clearly because they need to be readable and they need to last. When I finish I sit back on my heels and I read it:
May Lord the capable, the brig did not sink. The fog did not yield. I made it here. Will you find me there?
I stand. I leave it.
I walk to the treeline.
He is there. He has been there, I think, for a while — long enough that the forest has settled around him as it settles around things it has accepted as part of itself.
He is wearing the dark coat and his hair is down and the morning light is the thin gray of early day on this island, diffused and even, making everything it touches look like it exists in the moment before it becomes itself.
We stand at the treeline and we look at each other.
I reach up and put my hand against the burn scars at his throat.
The ones I already know. The ones I have chosen twice.
He goes still the way he always goes still when I touch them, not braced, received.
His hand comes up and covers mine and holds it there and I feel the beat of him under my palm, slow and steady and very old and nothing I am going to become accustomed to.
I pull my hand away before I can’t.
“Fix the shutter,” he says.
I blink. Then I laugh, a real one, short and surprised, the kind that comes out before you can decide whether to let it. “I’ve been meaning to.”
“Fix it,” he says. “So I can find it.”
No performance of certainty. He simply is certain about the things he has decided, and he has decided this in the way I have come to understand he decides things, without announcement, without drama, with the full weight of six centuries of knowing the difference between what is temporary and what is not.
I turn and walk down the beach and I do not look back.
I know myself well enough to know that looking back is the thing that would undo me on this beach, and I have the brig and the crossing and Bren and a healer to pay and I am not going to be undone.
I get the lines and I haul in the bow mooring and I push off from the shore and I take the wheel and the tide takes me and the cove opens behind me.
The fog comes in from both sides as I clear the rock formations. Not hostile, the barrier currents do not push. The island is letting me out. Not nothing. I watch the cove disappear into the fog and I keep my eyes forward and my hands on the wheel and I breathe.
I do not look back.
The cove is there. The shelter is there. The wall with its carving is there. I do not need to see it to carry it.