The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(54)

“Jovis?” she said.

Just the posters were bad enough when I’d been running from the Empire and the Ioph Carn. Now I was trying to hide from people who thought I was some sort of hero.

“They paid me to do it. Steal the children, that is,” I explained to her. I could have opened my mouth and vomited frogs, and she would have treated me with the same cursed reverence. “I’ve only saved three.”

“Take the rice,” she said, reaching beneath the counter and putting a sack on it. She pushed my coins back to me. Other people were starting to notice.

I seized my coins and whirled, looking for the door.

The music had stopped.

“Jovis,” an old woman said from my right. The lamp above her turned, casting moving shadows across her stricken face. “I have a grandson turning eight.”

“My niece,” another woman said. “Her father died of shard sickness two years ago.”

And then they were standing from their seats in the drinking hall, moving around the wooden pillars so they could make eye contact with me. Clamoring, begging. So many voices. So many wants and fears. So many children.

A tremor started in my bones, a humming that shook me from the tips of my ears to the end of my toes. It asked to be released somehow. “Stop!” I stamped my foot on the ground, expecting just to sway the floorboards a little.

The foundation shook. Dishes rattled on their shelves. The beams creaked, a little dust coming loose. This was more than just the result of strength. This was something else.

Everyone, with Deerhead Island so recent, stilled. All the bells on the musician’s bandolier chimed with the fading vibration, the only sound left in the hall. I glanced from face to face and saw fear writ there. So much for my quick, quiet stop at a harbor to restock supplies. I went for the door and everyone moved out of my way.

The breeze was warm and wet, ruffling Mephi’s fur. I could still feel my pulse pounding at my neck.

The time I’d picked up Philine. The man in the alleyway I’d almost toppled. The ease with which I’d done my work on the ship. Myfast-healing wounds. They weren’t just coincidences, some trick of my mind. Now, with the shaking of the drinking hall, I had to admit it. Something had changed, was changing with me. I’d always been different; the people around me couldn’t stop reminding me of it. But my differences had always meant I had less power. I could shout into a room and be ignored in favor of other voices. Now, I could make the same room tremble. I should have felt excited; who could ignore me now? But I couldn’t seem to stop my hands from trembling.

“Is it you?” I said to Mephi.

“Perhaps,” he said in his squeaky little voice. As though he knew what thoughts turned in my head.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Perhaps? After bombarding me with ‘not good’ and ‘very good’ for days, now you give me ‘perhaps’?”

“Still learning. Don’t know. Many things don’t know,” Mephi said, nuzzling my ear with his cold nose. I shivered, and only half from the chill. I’d thought him like a parrot, and here he was, speaking fully formed thoughts like a child. I couldn’t gain my bearings. It felt like I stood at the edge of a dark sinkhole and I was catching glimpses of movement far, far below.

Looking about, I found a large branch fallen from the recent storms. I picked it up and tried to break it. The bark merely roughed up my palms.

Mephi crawled halfway down my arm, patting my elbow with his little paws. “Try harder.”

When I’d made the foundation of the drinking hall tremble, I’d been panicking a little, just wanting everyone to stop, to leave me alone. This branch – I needed to want it to break. A part of me wanted it to, and a part of me didn’t want it to. Because this sort of change, I knew, was the sort a person didn’t come back from. I would be plunging into that sinkhole, unsure of what lay at the bottom and with no one to guide my next steps. “I’m afraid.”

Mephi merely scrambled back up to my shoulders, paws combing through my hair. “Is fine. Me too.”

I could run from this, the way I’d been running from the Empire and from the Ioph Carn. But I’d rather be running to something, and not inadvertently causing havoc as I went. I pushed away the fear and concentrated. The humming began in my bones again. I could almost hear it if I held my breath and listened.

When I bent the branch again, it broke beneath my hands as easily as if it were a twig. “How is this possible?”

“Don’t know,” Mephi said. “Neat though.”

I laughed and let the two pieces of the branch fall to the ground. “I suppose, in a manner of speaking. But what are you, Mephi? Are you a sea serpent like Mephisolou?” In the stories, the ancient sea serpents had magical powers and could speak like people did.

I said it jokingly, but Mephi only wrapped his tail around my neck and shivered. “Don’t know.”

That made the both of us.

The noise within the drinking hall had begun to reassert itself, the musician playing another song with his bells and his drums. No one, it seemed, had the courage to chase me down. “Should we still get our rice and water?”

“Rice!” Mephi said with satisfaction. I wasn’t sure if I was feeding a creature sometimes, or some sort of bottomless pit in the shape of an animal. How was I going to keep him if he kept growing?