The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(26)

“There are parrots,” I said to Mephi, “that live on a few of the islands. Some people keep them as pets and they can speak like people do.”

I’d stopped petting him. He pawed at the knee where I’d placed my hand, and I obliged, scratching his cheeks.

“Is that what you do? Just repeat what you’ve heard?”

Mephi crouched, and before I could register what he was doing, leapt into my lap and sprawled across my legs as though he belonged there. I sat still, not daring to breathe, a little afraid this wild creature might bite me. When he didn’t, I rested a hesitant hand on the warmth of his shoulder. He let out a grumbling sigh and laid his head between his paws.

I’d once swum to the bottom of a cove at home just to see how long I could stay there. When my lungs were fit to burst and even my brother had splashed at the surface in his worry, I had uncurled my legs and pushed myself toward the surface. It felt like that now, like my heart was uncurling, surging up to some brighter place.

A boat appeared ahead on the horizon – a dark shape against the water. The wind picked up, and my ship cut through the water, bouncing a little on the waves. Mephi didn’t stir. Would that I could fall asleep so quickly and without any cares. The boat on the horizon wasn’t an Ioph Carn boat, and it wasn’t an Imperial ship. Oddly enough, it had no sails at all. The Empire still kept galley boats, but even their galley boats had sails.

But as we drew nearer I realized that the ship did have sails. Only they were the same blue as the sky.

I was on my feet in a flash, spilling Mephi onto the deck. Alon’s father had seen the boat heading east, but it must have anchored out of sight, or come back to the isle for some unfinished business – because it was here, now, right in front of me.

I checked the sails. I was only carrying the two boxes of melons; I didn’t have a full cargo hold. This was as fast as I could push my ship. The other boat perhaps hadn’t seen me or just didn’t care, because it looked like I was gaining on it. I went to the prow and squinted before remembering I kept a spyglass. My head was full of wasps, buzzing, disorganized.

I lifted the bench at the prow, pulled it out and snapped it to its full length. With the rocking of the waves and my unsteady hands, it took me more than one try to set it properly against my eye. The horizon came into focus, as did the dark-hulled boat. The blue sails billowed, and near the stern stood a figure. Only one that I could see, and cloaked in dark gray. The first time I’d seen the boat had been on the morning Emahla had disappeared. In the initial panic, one of my aunties had suggested that perhaps she had drowned herself, and even though I knew she hadn’t, I went to the ocean. Mist hung heavy over the beach, waves crashing on shores I couldn’t see. I’d gone to the very edge, the water seeping into my shoes, sucking cold at my toes.

Something had moved in the fog. At first I’d thought it the water, or even the fog itself. But then I’d seen a patch of blue. A blue sail. I’d blinked, and it was gone. Even the sand beneath my feet hadn’t felt quite solid; how could I be sure in that moment that any of it wasn’t just a terrible dream? I’d already begun to miss her, my heart knowing what my head couldn’t.

And then I saw it again five years later. Five wasted years. I’d been paying off my own boat – something larger than my father’s fishing boat, something that could move from island to island without being capsized in the first storm. The Ioph Carn were the only ones who would let me pay it off by working for them. I hadn’t had a choice. But on the anniversary of my brother’s death, I’d stopped at an isle east of Imperial and burned a sprig of juniper on a bluff in Onyu’s remembrance. Clear skies, sunny. It was there I’d seen it again – the boat with the blue sails, a lone figure at the rails. This time, I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I’d cut contact with the Ioph Carn and spent the next two years chasing whispers of blue sails.

Now, as I stood on my boat with the strange ship in my sights, I imagined leaping aboard, seizing the cloaked figure, shaking them. Asking them what they’d done with Emahla, where they’d taken her, where she’d been all these years. I still knew the weight of her head on my shoulder, the creases in her cheeks when she smiled, the warm, callused feel of her palm against mine. The way she always seemed to understand me even when I couldn’t find the words.

But these things were fading, no matter how desperately I held them, dissolving like salt into the waves. And that was the worst thing about this grief – not just knowing that she was gone, but knowing that eventually new memories and experiences would layer on top of them, making the distance between us ever wider. The days we’d spent swimming and fishing at the beach, the first time I’d kissed her, the dreams we’d shared – I was now the only keeper of these memories, and that was the truest sort of loneliness. There were so many things I still wanted to tell her, to share with her.

The figure turned toward me. For a moment, I thought they met my gaze through the distance. And then they went to the sails. A moment later, I caught a glimpse of white, wispy smoke. Burning witstone.

I snapped the spyglass shut. I had no witstone, but my boat had been designed to be quick. There might still be a chance, depending on how much witstone the other ship had. I cast my gaze about my boat, suddenly aware that despite my imagination, my certainty that I’d leap onto the other ship and take it by force, I had no weapons. Even the fishing spear was gone, dropped into the harbor with Philine. And, as my body kept reminding me, it wasn’t in the best condition at the moment.