Obsidian and Stars (Ivory and Bone #2)(24)

I find myself beside Lees, both of us on our hands and knees, as the island shakes beneath us.





TEN


My mind goes back, reeling to the moment in the canyon, as the mammoth herd thundered by. My cheek braces against the cold sand, and I bite the inside of my lip. My mouth fills with the taste of bile and blood.

Then everything stills. Just as I begin to believe the foot of the Divine will appear on the sand in front of my eyes, the shaking stops.

The stillness stretches. Could the feet of the Divine have passed over these islands like stepping-stones? Could this be our punishment for having traveled beyond the horizon?

If so, she has moved on, at least for now.

I find the strength to lift my head, and my eyes meet Lees’s.

Her gaping gaze darts from my face to the ground to the sea and back again. Her hands, clutched to her chest, shake as if the ground were still moving. “Do you think that’s my fault?” she asks. “Because Roon and I angered the Divine?”

Her sweet self-reproach overcomes my anxiety, and I sit up. “No,” I say. “I don’t think anything you’ve ever done could anger the Divine that much.”

“But you said—”

“I said if you and Roon ran away and he didn’t attend his father’s burial—”

“Then what? What could have brought that on?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s stopped for now. Whatever brought it on, let’s hope it’s over.”

We pull the boat far enough up away from the water that we are sure high tide won’t reach it, but I tell Lees to leave it right there—right in the wide-open space, away from trees and cliffs. The sky is finally black, the stars finally shining. I don’t dare trek back under cover. Not after that quake. Instead I ask Lees to dig out something for us to eat while I spread the mammoth hide across the cold ground.

“We’ll sleep right here,” I say. Even though I know it’s the only choice, the chilled air that swept in with the dark sky sends a shiver through me. “It won’t be cozy, but at least nothing will fall on us.”

Lees spreads out a piece of caribou hide and places on it a full skin of water and two piles of dried mammoth meat and berries. It’s nothing grand, but it fills our stomachs. Fear had soaked into every bone of my body during the quake, but it finally drains away, replaced by a deep ache. Dragging ourselves despite our fatigue, Lees and I stash the packs of food and other supplies beneath the overturned kayak. When we’re done, we wrap ourselves between the folded halves of the mammoth hide. Before I can say a single word to Lees, she drops her head against my shoulder. “In the morning, we’ll scout around to find a better site,” I say, but her body has already gone heavy and still with sleep.

I lie awake a long time, listening as the waves lap the shore to my right and the wind stirs the dune grass to my left. I feel like I will never relax enough to drop off, but I must. I wake with a start as something thuds against the ground.

Lees is curled away from me. Her long hair, all loose from her braid, covers her face. She is definitely asleep. I sit up and run my hands through the sand—cold and damp with morning mist.

I swivel in place, sweeping my eyes across the tops of the dunes. Nothing stirs. My gaze scans the horizon, but nothing breaks the line of the sea except for an occasional gull diving for its morning meal. But then I notice faint footprints that mark the surface of the sand. Human footprints. Two lines overlapping—one leading to the overturned kayak, one leading back toward the dunes. My eyes trace the tracks back toward the tall grass and this time I notice movement. A figure—a person hunched over and moving fast—disappears up the trail toward the cliffs.

I jostle Lees’s shoulder until she opens her eyes. “Someone’s here. Someone was near the boat.”

Lees sheds her sleepiness as soon as she understands the threat. “Did they get anything?” she asks.

If we lose our food, we won’t have a thing to eat until we’ve successfully hunted. And if we lose our food and our weapons, what will we do then? Without a means of bringing in game, we’d almost certainly have to go home. Even the best toolmaker—even Kol’s father—would struggle to make proper hunting tools from the limited resources on this island. Though I hope it will be only days until Chev relents and sends for us, I can’t be certain we won’t be here long enough for the food we’ve brought to run out.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see if she carried anything—”

“She?”

“It might’ve been a girl. The person was moving fast and I only saw her back, but something made me think of a girl.”

While Lees checks on the supplies, I run through the possibilities of who might be on this island. Could a clan have landed here after having become lost? We’re so far from shore, I can’t imagine anyone landing here without being lost.

“They got just one thing,” Lees says. I turn to her, hopeful, ready to calm down and understand that this is not a tragedy. We are not in danger. But then I see her teeth pressing into her bottom lip. “They got the pack of food.”

We have no choice but to go after it. We can hunt, but we don’t know what game we’ll find. Even fishing—usually the shortest path to food—is harder when you don’t know the waters.