Fable (Fable #1)(49)

“Stop!” I slurred, my arms dangling. But she didn’t listen. We climbed dark stairs, and the jingle of keys made my eyes pop open. In the next breath, I was lying in a bed.

“Stupid,” Willa muttered.

“What?” I croaked.

“I told you I was trying to figure out if I liked you or if you were stupid.”

The words jumbled into one blaring sound in my head. A metal pail landed next to the bed, and Willa rolled me onto my side, opening my mouth.

“What are you—”

Her finger went down my throat, and I kicked, trying to pull free. But I was already vomiting. Willa lifted the bucket to my face and hit me on the back with the flat of her palm.

“What are you doing?” I coughed, shoving her away.

“You’ll thank me tomorrow when only half of that poison is still in your veins.” She laughed, standing.

“How’d you find me?”

“I’ve been following you for hours. Figured I should make you call it a night before you passed out on the counter.”

“You’re following me?” I pushed her away again.

“Believe me, it’s not what I wanted to spend my night doing.” She glared at me.

“Then why are you here?”

“Orders.” She looked down at me, waiting for the words to settle into something that made sense. When they finally did, I realized she was talking about West. He was still doing his job—keeping me alive. “What happened with Saint?”

I rolled onto my back and fixed my eyes on the rafters, trying to make the spinning stop. “Exactly what you said would happen,” I muttered.

“Oh, I see.” She crossed her arms, leaning into the wall. “So, you think you’re the only girl in the Narrows whose dreams didn’t come true?”

“Go away,” I groaned.

“You want something in this life?” She came to stand over me. “You take it, Fable.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want to crew on a trading ship.”

It wasn’t just that I wanted to crew. I wanted to crew for my father. But I couldn’t tell her that without breaking my promise to Saint.

“You know the Marigold doesn’t have a dredger,” she said evenly.

“So?”

She sighed. “So?”

I blinked, thinking. But everything was too fuzzy. Too clouded.

“You want something in this life, you take it,” she said again, louder. “For a girl who lived on Jeval, I’m not sure why I need to tell you that.”

“West will never take me on.”

“I told you. He has a habit of making other people his problem.”

She was right. I didn’t have a chance with a single helmsman down on the docks. No one was going to take on a Jevali dredger they didn’t know unless I showed them what I could do with the gems. That was a risk I couldn’t take. Gem sages found themselves the prey of rival traders and the pawns of gem guilds often enough that it had become just one more thing that could get you killed.

But if I was going to get to the Lark, I did need a ship. “He told you to follow me?”

The hardness that always constructed Willa’s face wasn’t there as she sat back down on the bed beside me, and I wondered if she’d had a few glasses of rye herself. “Make him take you on.”

I still wasn’t sure what exactly the Marigold was up to, but it couldn’t be any worse than the crooked work Saint did. Or maybe it was. In only a few days, I’d found that West’s crew was trying to outrun more than one enemy. If I was going to take that on, I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with.

“What happened with the merchant in Sowan?” I took a chance in asking it.

Willa stared out the window, her voice hollow as she answered. “West did a bad thing to a good man because he had to. And now, he gets to live with it.”





TWENTY-FIVE



Everything hurt.

The light beaming into the room pierced like a knife through my skull. I peeked one eye open, swallowing the urge to throw up again. Beside the bed, the pail I’d emptied my stomach into throughout the night was gone. The window had been cracked open, letting the sea air drift inside, and I sat up slowly. The room wasn’t spinning anymore.

A basin of water sat on a stand in the corner, and I washed my face, rinsing my mouth as best I could before I rebraided my hair. The strands caught the morning light, making the hue of red look almost violet. My belt sat on the floor beside the bed, and I picked up the coin purse, throwing it into the air and then catching it. If Willa was telling the truth and West had ordered her to follow me, there might be a chance I could get him to take me on.

The tavern was already awake below. The clang of teacups and the vibration of voices carried up the stairs and under the door, and I took each step carefully, my head pounding. As soon as I appeared, Willa lifted a hand from a bench in the corner and a wide smile erupted on her face. She bit her lip to keep from laughing.

Paj, Auster, and Hamish were hunched over plates of bread and dishes of butter, greeting me with full mouths.

“Look what the rye washed up.” Auster tore a piece of bread from the loaf and held it out to me. I shook my head, finding a place to sit beside Paj. But Auster pushed it toward me. “Trust me, you need to get something in your stomach.”