The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(111)

Mephi tried to help, picking up clothes in his teeth and handing them to me – a little moist and worse for the time spent in his mouth. But I couldn’t complain. I was shaking now. There was a tremor building within me, and it wasn’t Mephi’s magic. I could hear Ranami’s voice, over and over: “She’s dead.”

No. I would know it if she were.

At last I had all my things in a bag. My hair curled in the moist air. I was a half-blooded smuggler, and I finally had the information I needed to rescue the woman I loved.

Mephi leaned against my leg, steadying me. “We could help here,” he said.

I thought of Gio, who wanted to take the islands for his own, whose plans I did not know. I thought of Ranami and Phalue, who didn’t know they’d already been betrayed, of the children being marched to trepanning rituals, of the gutter orphans who’d wanted to rob me. It was true: we could help here.

It didn’t mean we had to. “No. Emahla. She is my priority.”

Mephi made a small, confused noise. He didn’t know her.

“You’d like her,” I told him. “But she’s in danger. She’s been gone for seven years and now I know where she might have been taken.”

“We go there?” He wound around me.

I didn’t know. Maila was treacherous, and I wasn’t sure I could slip past its reefs without crashing. “Yes.” I put my hand on the floor, ready to push myself to my feet. Even this seemed an effort.

Mephi put his paw on my knee. “She is one. These people are many.”

Everything terrible I’d been feeling over the past three days welled within me, overflowing. “I don’t care about these people! They don’t care for me except for what I can do. They don’t know me. Emahla knows me. She loves me, and I’ve let her down for too long.”

The creature didn’t even look away or flinch. “I know you.”

“Do you?” I jerked away from his touch and rose to my feet. But, Endless Sea help me, I stopped to check if he was following. He was, his head so low that my heart shattered a little to see it. But I couldn’t stop now; if I did, I might not ever start up again.

The few rebels who remained in the caves watched me go, and said nothing.

My boat was where I’d left it, hidden behind some rocks on the shoreline. Mephi slipped into the water, graceful as a sea lion. I waded into the water as he scrambled aboard. The ocean had cooled with the migration of the islands north-west, and the chill of it seeped into my shoes. I stripped off my wet clothes once I was aboard, put on dry ones and hauled up the anchor.

Mephi lay on deck near the bow of the ship, his head between his paws. He watched as I readied the boat to leave, as I tested the wind. Most times, when I’d rebuked him, he’d either ignored me or taken it with the irrepressible good humor of a puppy. This time, he lay apart from me, as though his heavy heart had anchored him to the bow.

I couldn’t keep thinking about everyone else.

The wind was good. It would take a long time to reach Maila, but the sooner we left, the sooner we’d arrive. I’d have to figure out the reef on the way. “No more stopping,” I muttered into the night. The moon was full, and enough to see by. “No more sad stories about children who need to be saved, or regimes that need toppling. We go straight for Maila.”

Mephi only huffed out a sigh and looked toward the horizon.

I remembered the dreams we’d told each other. I would be an Imperial navigator, and she would sell pearls. Emahla had stopped collecting clams at the beach and had started diving for pearls when she’d turned fifteen. She could hold her breath for far longer than I could, and never seemed afraid of the depths beyond the shoreline. “Sometimes,” she’d told me as we’d lain on the beach together, “I think I’ve reached the part of the island where it stops sloping out and starts falling straight into the darkness. At some point, even after that, they must slope inward. The islands float in the Endless Sea. I wonder if any diver has seen the bottom of an island?”

“You’d be the first,” I’d said, pulling her into my arms and kissing her brow.

She’d laughed and pushed me away. I still remembered the jasmine scent of her, the touch of her thick black hair against my neck. “I’d drown.”

“There is no one as clever as you, as smart, as strong.” I’d buried my fingers into her hair.

“You are such a liar.” But she’d smiled as she’d kissed me.

Darkness had begun to cloak the sky. I couldn’t see the stars. I hadn’t been lying to her. She was smart, and clever, and strong. She’d never needed me. She’d chosen me.

If there’d been a way to escape her fate, she would have found it. She hadn’t. It had been seven years. No one else who had disappeared had ever returned.

I told a great many lies to others, and I told a great many to myself. This perhaps was the greatest lie of all. Emahla is alive. She is waiting for you. She needs you to rescue her. It was the only thing that kept me getting up in the morning, that kept me from giving up and giving myself over to the Endless Sea or the Ioph Carn.

My legs folded beneath me, my knees sinking to the deck. “Mephi,” I whispered.

He was there, beside me before the tears even began. I clutched at his fur so tightly I was sure I must have hurt him. But he didn’t move, steady as a cloud juniper.