Fable (Fable #1)(4)

I dropped the trap beside the fire pit, unbuckling my heavy belt. The wind picked up as I wrapped my hands around the thick tree trunk that hung over the cliff and shimmied myself up slowly. The ground dropped out from under me, and I looked down to the shore that lay at least a hundred feet below. The night waves were foaming white on the sand. Most dredgers were too heavy to climb out onto the spindly tree without the branches cracking and sending them to their death. I’d almost fallen myself once or twice.

When I was close enough, I reached up into the hollow at the joint of two swollen branches. My fingers found the purse and I swung my arm back, tossing it to the ground behind me before I climbed back down.

I started my fire and skewered the fish on the spit, settling into a comfortable groove in the rocks that overlooked the path. If anyone came snooping, I’d see them before they saw me. I just needed to make it to morning.

The coins clinked together as I shook the purse, spilling them onto the soft sand. Their faces shined in the moonlight as I counted, setting them in neat stacks before me.

Forty-two coppers. After what I would have to spend on skiffs, I needed another eighteen and I’d have enough to barter with West for passage. I had even set aside a little coin to keep me fed and sheltered until I tracked down Saint. I lay back on the ground and let my legs hang over the edge of the cliff, staring up at the moon as the fish crackled over the fire. It was a perfect, milk-white crescent hanging above me, and I breathed in the salty, cypress-tinged air that was unique to Jeval.

My first night on the island, I’d slept out on the beach, too afraid to go up into the trees where the tents were pitched around burning fires. I woke to a man tearing open my jacket, searching my pockets for coin. When he didn’t find anything, he dropped me on the cold sand and walked away. It took days for me to figure out that every time I fished in the shallows, someone would be waiting on the beach to take whatever I’d caught from me. I ate kelp for almost a month before I found safe places to forage. After almost a year, I finally had enough coin saved from cleaning other peoples’ catches and selling palm rope to buy the dredging tools off Fret, who was too old to dive anymore.

The waves crashed angrily below as the storm winds blew in, and for just a moment, I wondered if I’d miss it. If there was something on Jeval that had become a part of me. I sat up, looking out over the night-cloaked island, where the tops of the trees moved in the dark like churning water. If it hadn’t been my prison, I might even think it was beautiful. But I had never belonged here.

I could have. I could have made myself one of them, working to build my own small gem trade on the barrier islands like so many others. But if I was a Jevali dredger, then I wasn’t Saint’s daughter. And maybe even that wasn’t true anymore.

I still remembered the hum in the belly of the hull and the creak of the hammock. The smell of my father’s pipe and the sound of boots on the deck. I didn’t belong on the land or on the docks or the cities that lay across the Narrows. The place I belonged was gone.

Miles away, where the moonlight touched the black seam of the horizon, the Lark lay beneath the waters of Tempest Snare. And no matter where I went, I’d never get home. Because home was a ship that was at the bottom of the sea, where my mother’s bones lay sleeping.





THREE



I stood on the cliff as the sun came up, watching the Marigold down on the water. They’d arrived in the dark hours, despite the raging storm that had barreled in from the Unnamed Sea. I’d stayed awake all night, staring into the fire until the rain put out the flames, and my entire body ached with the need to sleep after three straight days of diving.

But West didn’t like to be kept waiting.

There were already hordes of dredgers waiting at the water’s edge when I made it to the beach. I’d been smart enough to pay Speck a month in advance for a spot on his skiff. He was lying on the sand with his hands folded behind his head, his hat set over his face. If you had a boat on Jeval, you didn’t need to dive or trade because every dredger on the island needed you. Having a skiff was like having a pot of copper that never ran empty, and no one was more undeserving of luck like that than Speck.

When he saw me coming, he jumped up, smiling with a wide, rotten-toothed grin. “Mornin’, Fay!”

I tipped my chin up at him, throwing my satchel into the skiff before lifting myself over the side. No one bothered to make room for me to sit, so I stood at the prow with one arm hooked around the mast and my hand closed over the purse of pyre inside my shirt. Koy’s boat was already disappearing around the barrier islands ahead, packed full of so many bodies that legs and feet were dragging in the water on both sides.

“Fable.” Speck gave me a pleading smile, and I glared at him when I realized what he was waiting for.

I worked the sail free, letting it unroll as he pushed us off. The dredgers asked things of me they’d never ask of one another. I was expected to just be grateful they hadn’t drowned me as a scrawny child in the shallows, but the truth was, they’d never done me any favors. Never fed me when I begged for scraps or offered me a place to take cover during a storm. Every bite of food or piece of pyre, I’d worked for or nearly died getting. Still, I was supposed to be beholden to them that I was still breathing.

The wind picked up and we cut through the smooth morning water like a hot knife through tallow. I didn’t like how calm it looked, the way the surface gleamed like newly fired glass. It was unnerving to see the sea asleep when I’d seen how bloodthirsty she could be.