The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(46)

I think they had a little more confidence in me after what I’d done with the construct. They lowered themselves into the cargo hold with no complaints – not even when I swung the hatch shut over them. Mephi ran from the bow to the stern and back again, trying to bite at the rain. I laughed at his antics. Of course, the creature hadn’t seen rain before. It had been a dry season, and this was the first rain of the wet season. I wondered if, when the dry season came back seven years later, Mephi would even remember what that was like.

“Yes,” I said to him as he dashed past me. “Water from the sky can be an amazing thing.”

He stopped biting at the rain to look at me, and then lifted his head to the sky again. “Water,” he said in his rusty hinge voice. “Water!”

“Rain, actually – it’s just made of—” I stopped and shook my head. I don’t know why I thought it made a difference. “Yes,” I said instead. “Water.”

Mephi let out a little warbling cry, and then ran to me, slamming his tiny body into my shins. “Water. Good!”

“I suppose it is.” I sat at the tiller and let the rain soak my clothes.

It had been a long time since it had rained like this. I was thirteen when the last wet season had begun, at the beach with Emahla. We’d made a little game of seeing what sort of bounty we could pluck from the ocean and from the sand. I’d just captured an enormous rainbow crab, and crowing with delight had nearly shoved it in her face. “What have you got? A few clams and a sea urchin? I’ve got –” I seized the claws of the crab, waving them about. “the biggest and most delicious of crabs. He’s Korlo the Crab and he’s happy to meet you. He sinks boats in his spare time. So, you see, I’m not just bringing back food to fill the pot. By capturing this crab, I’ve made myself a hero. They’ll sing songs about me. Jovis, conqueror of crabs! Savior of the seas!”

Emahla only rolled her eyes. “Telling stories again? You’re such a liar.”

The crab twisted in my grip and pinched the meaty flesh between my thumb and forefinger with a claw. “Ow! Dammit!” I shook it loose, and Emahla had laughed.

The rain had started then, all at once. Clouds had been threatening it for days, but had chosen that moment to follow through.

We’d both been born in a wet season, though it had been a long time since. It still rained in a dry season, but not like this. This was as though heaven held an ocean, and the dam keeping it there had finally burst. Water rained from the sky like a waterfall. Emahla had laughed again, throwing her arms and her head back, letting her bucket of clams fall to the sand. Just like that – with the rain sticking her hair to her skull, gathering like glass beads on her eyelashes, running like tears down flushed cheeks – I knew.

“You’re beautiful,” I’d blurted out, and had changed our friendship for ever.

All the joy had rushed out of her. “You’re such a liar,” she said again, but this time, she didn’t sound sure. And then she’d turned and run from the beach, leaving her bucket behind.

She hadn’t spoken to me again for fourteen days, which to me had seemed like a lifetime. I’d knocked on her door several times, only to be turned away kindly by her mother or father. The one time her younger sister had opened the door, she’d bluntly said, “She doesn’t want to see you,” and had shut the door before I’d had a chance to ask for anything.

I’d forgotten what life was like before we’d been friends. I tried to find other boys and girls to play with, and while they accepted me into their groups with little protest, they asked first if I spoke any Poyer, if it was true the Poyer had bears for pets and what did my name mean? Surely it had to mean something. They didn’t laugh at the same jokes Emahla did. They had their own language, and I floundered when I tried to adapt, because I did not want to. I wanted the comfort of Emahla’s presence, the way we understood one another.

When finally she’d knocked on my door again, I’d been breathless with relief. She didn’t try to pretend it had never happened, or even try to slip into our old conversations first. She stood in my doorway, her black hair streaming in satin ribbons about a solemn face. Eyes so dark I thought they could swallow me. “We can be friends,” she said simply. “Nothing more.”

I was little more than a boy, and had all the clumsy eagerness of a pup. “I was only joking. Come on, don’t scare me like that. I didn’t mean it.”

She stared at me, and my lies were like wet sheets of paper, disintegrating at the slightest touch. I wilted beneath her gaze. She sighed, probably out of pity more than anything. “Do you want to go pick coconuts?”

I’d nodded and slipped on my shoes.

It was never the same again after that, though we both tried. I’d noticed that I liked women, and Emahla was fast growing into one, and I liked her more than any of all the others combined.

Later, on nights where we’d sit on the beach and gaze at the stars, she told me that she fell in love with me on a rainy day in my mother’s kitchen. “You were helping your mother make dumplings,” she’d said, her head pillowed on my shoulder. “You were quiet. For once in your life, you were quiet. And when I sat next to you to help, shoulder to shoulder, I could feel a future in that silence. You always say so many things. Always, always talking. So many stories! But it wasn’t until you were silent that I could feel the truth of you beneath all the words, all the stories. I always knew we could laugh together, that we could do fun things. But I never thought I could tell you what was in my heart, to share pain and disappointment and to have you cup that in your hands. To breathe back your own sorrows. I always thought you’d just make a joke or tell me a funny story about a fisherman who accidentally hooked the moon.”