Fable (Fable #1)(2)
I came up, checking my belt again as I dragged the air in slowly, filling my chest, and then letting it out at the same pace the way my mother taught me. My lungs stretched and then squeezed as they emptied in a familiar push between my ribs, and I quickened my draw, sucking it in and pushing it out in spurts until I took one last full breath in and dove.
My ears popped as I carved through the water with my arms, headed for the brilliant colors glowing on the seafloor. The pressure hugged in around my body, and I let myself sink deeper when I could feel the surface trying to pull me back. A school of red-striped tangs pushed past, folding around me in a swarm as I came down. The infinite blue reached out in every direction as my feet landed lightly on a ridge of green coral reaching up like twisted fingers. I gripped the rock ledge above it, scaling down to the breach.
I’d first found the pyre when I was scouring the reef for crab to pay the old man at the docks to repair my eyeglass. The soft hum of the gemstone had found my bones in the silence, and after three straight days of trying to uncover it, I caught a lucky break. I’d kicked off an outcropping to surface when a shelf broke off, revealing a crooked line of basalt pocked with the telltale white clusters I knew so well. They could only mean one thing—pyre.
I’d made more coin off the traders on the Marigold in the last three months with this stash than I had in the last two years altogether. Another few weeks and I’d never have to dive these reefs again.
My feet settled on the ledge, and I pressed a hand to the rock, feeling down the curve of the ridges. The soft vibration of the gemstone hissed beneath my fingertips, like the stretched resonance of metal striking metal. My mother had taught me that too—how to listen to the gems. Deep in the hull of the Lark, she’d set them into my hands one at a time, whispering as the crew slept in the hammocks strung from the bulkhead.
Do you hear that? Do you feel it?
I pulled the tools from my belt and fit the chisel into the deepest groove before I hit it with the mallet, crumbling the surface slowly. Judging from the shape of the corner, there was a sizable piece of pyre beneath it. Maybe four coppers’ worth.
The shine of sunlight on silver scales glittered above me as more fish came down to feed, and I looked up, squinting against the glare. Floating in the murky distance down the reef, a body drifted beneath the surface. The remains of a dredger who’d crossed someone or didn’t repay a debt. His feet had been chained to an enormous, barnacle-covered rock, left for the sea’s creatures to pick the flesh from his bones. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the sentence carried out, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d meet the same end.
The last of my air burned in my chest, my arms and legs growing colder, and I hit the chisel one more time. The rough white crust cracked, and I smiled, letting a few bubbles escape my lips as a jagged piece of the rock broke free. I reached up to touch the glassy, red pyre, peeking out at me like a bloodshot eye.
When the edges of black began to push in around my vision, I kicked off the rock, swimming for the surface as my lungs screamed for air. The fish scattered like a rainbow breaking into pieces around me, and I came up out of the water, gasping. The clouds were pulling into thin strands overhead, but the darkening blue on the horizon caught my eye. I’d noticed the tinge of a storm on the wind that morning. If it kept the Marigold from reaching the barrier islands by sunup, I’d have to hold on to the pyre longer than was safe. I only had so many hiding places, and with every day that passed, more eyes were watching me.
I floated on my back, letting the sun touch as much of my skin as possible to warm me. It was already sinking toward the slanted ridge that reached over Jeval, and it would take at least six or seven more dives to get the pyre free. I needed to be at the other end of the reef by the time Koy came back for me.
If he came back.
Three or four more weeks and I’d have enough coin to barter for passage across the Narrows to find Saint and make him keep his promise. I’d only been fourteen years old when he dumped me on the infamous island of thieves, and I’d spent every day since scraping together the coin I needed to go and find him. After four years, I wondered if he’d even recognize me when I finally showed up knocking on his door. If he’d remember what he said to me as he carved into my arm with the tip of his whalebone knife.
But my father wasn’t the forgetting kind.
Neither was I.
TWO
There were five rules. Only five.
And I’d been reciting them to my father from the time I was big enough to first climb the masts with my mother. In the dim candlelight of his quarters on the Lark, he’d watch me, one hand on his quill and the other on the green rye glass that sat on his desk.
Keep your knife where you can reach it.
Never, ever owe anyone anything.
Nothing is free.
Always construct a lie from a truth.
Never, under any circumstances, reveal what or who matters to you.
I’d lived by Saint’s rules every day since he abandoned me on Jeval, and they’d kept me alive. At least he’d left me with that much when he sailed away, not once looking back.
Thunder grumbled overhead as we neared the beach, the sky darkening and the air waking with the whisper of a storm. I studied the horizon, watching the shape of the waves. The Marigold would be on its way, but if the storm was bad, she wouldn’t be at the barrier islands in the morning. And if she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to trade.