The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(16)

And then her hand slipped from the branch.

The world slowed as her arms windmilled. Her hand struck the trunk behind her, but she couldn’t find anything to grab, and then her foot flung free of its spot between two branches. She was falling. Branches whipped at her, her vision a blur as her head flew back and then ricocheted forward. Each of her injuries registered only as things that might hurt later – building up one on another. The ground. The ground would hurt.

It gave beneath her only a little. The air whooshed out of her lungs and she opened her mouth to suck in more. But the air she breathed made her feel sick. Sand coughed and then retched to the side, her head spinning. She lay there, just gasping for breath.

Her arms were bleeding. The numbness where the branches had struck her gave way to a sharp, stinging pain. Sand rolled onto her side and then pushed herself up slowly, discovering fresh aches with each movement. She was still alive, though the thought didn’t comfort her. There was a deep gash on her left forearm. She probed at it, hissing in pain, examining the way it slashed through skin and fat and into the muscle beneath – the layers of her laid bare. That would need stitches.

That thought . . . wasn’t hers either.

The world still rocked around her, moving as she moved her eyes. Nothing for it. She had to get up, get back to the village. Thatch could sew up her arm. Her tunic had ripped on the way down. She helped it along, tearing off a strip to wrap the wound with. When she finally got to her feet, the earth didn’t feel solid; it was as if she were on a boat, like the one that had brought her here. The one that had brought them all here.

No. She hadn’t been on a boat, had she? She wasn’t sure what she was thinking, who she was.

The bag of mangoes lay near the tree, half upended. Several mangoes had rolled out, and she collected them, slinging the bag over her shoulder once more and wincing. It felt like a blacksmith had taken up residence behind her eyes, using her skull as an anvil. With every beat of her heart, an answering throb started in her head.

Her bag was still not full.

Sand eyed the tree and then went straight back to the base of it to climb once more. But something stopped her just as she reached for the first branch.

Why did she need to return with her bag full? What sort of nonsense was that? Her cold, gray heart flushed with color. She could just . . . go back to the village. There were plenty of mangoes for them all, and the others were cultivating or harvesting food as well.

Something had changed between the memory and the fall, and she wasn’t sure what. It was as though she’d pulled back the curtain and was finally seeing the palace. The world was not just inside the palanquin.

Halfway back to the village, on the turn in the path that jutted over the ocean, Sand stopped. The spray from the sea kissed her face as she looked out over the horizon. The jagged edges of the reef surrounding Maila broke the water in places, like the ridged backs of some strange animal. Beyond the reef, the Endless Sea waited. A thought struck her, and it knocked out her breath as surely as the fall had.

Why was she on Maila at all? Why didn’t any of them leave?





7





Jovis


Somewhere in the Endless Sea

It was not a kitten.

I watched Alon playing with the creature near the bow. It leapt onto his wriggling fingers, mouthing at them with a gentle jaw. For one, its ears were small and rounded. It didn’t have claws on its front paws – which looked closer to digits than to paws, with a fleshy web between. The brown fur on its body was lighter on its belly, and as dense as an otter’s fur. I should have noticed when I’d plucked it from the water, but an entire floating island had just sunk right in front of me. One could be forgiven for missing smaller matters.

A vise tightened around my heart. The boy had been busy taking care of creature, but I’d watched the horizon until the island had disappeared beneath it. I might have hoped that the island had stopped sinking, but the smoke that had billowed upward finally disappeared at sunset, and I just knew. All those people. I wanted to scream at the horror of it.

The water would have come up to their ankles, and then their shoulders, and then the land would have ceded completely to the ocean. People who had holed up in their homes would have been trapped in them, cold ocean filling their lungs instead of air as they beat their fists uselessly against their ceilings. Pressure against their ears as the depths claimed them.

I raked a hand through my hair. Both were covered in dust. My lungs still felt scratchy with it.

At the bow, Alon was scratching the beast behind the ears. I didn’t know what manner of creature it was. There were so many animals that lived in the Endless Sea, no one could quite keep track. Did it even matter? Something that lived in the water by the look of its webbed feet. It made me feel quite a bit less generous, that I’d likely not saved the beast at all. But it still seemed to be an infant that had somehow been separated from its mother, and it had eaten half my store of fish, ravenous as a shipwrecked sailor.

Chittering, it dashed from the bow to where I sat at the stern. When it saw it had gotten my attention, it sat neatly at my feet, tail curled around its haunches. And then, cautiously, it rose to its hind legs and laid one of its odd paw-hands on my knee. Wide, black eyes stared up at me with a strange solemnity.

“Mephisolou likes you,” Alon called. “He knows you saved him.”

“Mephisolou?” I scoffed. “You named it?”