34. Maelor
MAELOR
The Blaecwater is cold and gray and the crossing takes three days in human form on a vessel I hired without explanation from a coastal trader who asked no questions because I paid well and carried the manner of a man who does not invite questions.
I stand at the bow for most of it. The open water is different from the island’s air in ways I had not fully anticipated, the scale of it, the absence of the island’s gravity at my back, the cold that has no volcanic warmth underneath it.
I am two hundred years removed from the last time I crossed open water in any form and the crossing has changed, the shipping lanes different, the vessel types unfamiliar, the mainland coast resolving out of the gray haze of the third morning in a configuration I have to reconstruct from memory and Ysara’s chart.
Blackwake announces itself by smell before it announces itself by sight.
Salt and fish and coal smoke and the working smell of a settlement that runs on labor, the smell, I realize, that I have been carrying on my skin in the archive of my memory since the morning I walked into the council chamber and Drazik withdrew a word.
The harbor mouth opens. The town climbs the hill above it in the way of settlements that started at the water and grew upward as the water filled up.
I can see the dock from the approach, the cargo lines and the longshoremen and the warehouse gates, and I am looking for a building on Harbour Lane, eastern end, third one in, blue shutter, when I see her.
She is on the dock.
She is not alone.
Beside her stands a young man — twenty or so, broad in the shoulders, the kind of solid that comes from returning health rather than ordinary health, the kind that has been rebuilt from the ground up.
He is grinning at something on the water, his face turned into the rain, the light catching the warmth in his skin.
He looks like someone who has recently been given back his future and has not yet stopped marveling at it.
I allow myself the recognition quietly, the way I allow myself most things. Bren. Her brother. Alive. Standing on a dock in the autumn rain looking like a man who has enough air in his lungs to last him.
I ran the calculation three times.
She is standing at the edge of it in the rain with her coat dark with water and her hair salt-tangled the way it was when I first saw her from the air above the Varak Fog, and she is looking at the harbor mouth, and I understand with the completeness of a certainty arriving rather than reasoned toward that she has been looking at this harbor mouth for five weeks and that the looking is the same thing as the carving, and the carving is the same thing as the address on Harbour Lane, and all of it is the same thing, which is: I am here. Will you find me?
I already found her. I found her the first night, flying west above the Varak Fog toward a stubborn vessel that refused to sink, and I have been finding her every day since.
She sees me.
The distance between us on the dock is twenty feet and then it is ten and then it is none, and the rain comes down on Blackwake the way it always comes down — sideways, mean, entirely indifferent to the things people are doing in it, and I put my hand against her face and she puts her hand against the burn scars at my throat that she already knows, that she has chosen twice, and the harbor moves around us with its ordinary industry and does not care about us at all.
The island is behind me.
This is where I am.