Fable (Fable #1)(69)

“What’s wrong?” I came to stand beside him, looking over the parchments.

“Nothing,” he said in a breath, dropping his compass.

I eyed him, waiting.

He thought for a moment before he came to the other side of the desk, setting a finger on the map. “This.”

The turn that sat at the center of Tempest Snare was a hard right angle, a difficult maneuver for any vessel bigger than a fishing boat. It would take expert precision to pull it off.

“Is there a way around it?” He studied the shapes of the reefs.

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “Not without scraping bottom.”

“It will have to be perfect,” he murmured.

“Then it will be.”

He leaned into both hands, the muscles in his arms surfacing beneath his gold-painted skin. “We need to be back in Dern in the next few days if we’re going to make this trade without notice.”

He was right. We’d have to work fast, but if Paj’s calculations were good, we could get the haul up onto the Marigold before the next day was out.

“That’s how he did it, isn’t it?” West sat in the chair, looking up at me.

“What?”

“Tempest Snare. That’s how Saint built his fortune and started his trade.”

“Yes,” I answered. “He spent years mapping the Snare before he started his first route. He used the coin from dredging shipwrecks to buy his first vessel.”

West was quiet, as if he was picturing it. As if he was imagining himself in Saint’s shoes.

The string of white adder stones chimed together as they swayed in the open window behind him. “Do you think they really bring luck?” I asked.

He looked amused by the question. “They’ve worked so far.”

The set of his mouth changed, pulling up on one side, and I could hear an unspoken answer in the words, but I didn’t know what it was.

I picked up the white stone at the corner of his desk. “What is this?”

“It’s from Waterside.”

“Oh.” I set it back down, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

His eyes flickered up to me. “Saint gave it to me when I got the Marigold. To remind me where I came from.”

I sat on the edge of the desk, smirking incredulously. Saint had wanted West to remember his place. And for some reason, West had kept it.

“I know that you know Willa’s my sister,” he said, his voice hardening again. “And I know you went to see our mother.”

I tried to read him, looking for any trace of the anger that was usually lit on his face. But he still looked up at me with eyes that were full of words he wasn’t saying.

“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know where we were—”

“It doesn’t matter.” He set his elbows on the desk, scratching at his jaw, and I wondered why he said it. It did matter. It was likely one of the only things that really mattered to him.

“How have you kept it from the others all this time?”

“Maybe they do know, but they aren’t going to say it. They don’t ask questions. But Willa and I agreed a long time ago to never tell anyone we knew each other.”

I nodded. To tell someone that Willa was his sister was to give them power over him. And her. It was the same reason why no one outside of this ship knew about Auster and Paj.

“Willa had a better chance crewing on a ship than staying in Waterside, so I made it happen.” He said it as if he had to justify it. As if he knew it had come at a cost to her.

“What about your father?” I asked, my voice small.

But that pushed too far. And I wasn’t sure why I’d even asked except that I really wanted to know. “We’ll lose the light in a few hours.” He stood, going to the trunk against the wall and opening it.

“What else needs doing? I’ll help you.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, and for a moment, I thought he smiled. “I’ve got it.” He pulled a wide, flat scraper from the trunk, sliding its handle into his belt.

If he was using that tool, then he was going to clean the hull. Barnacles, mussels, seaweed, and a number of other creatures made their homes on the bottom of ships, creating their own kind of traveling reef. But in the Snare, we couldn’t afford to catch on anything. We needed the hull to slide over the seafloor.

It was a disgusting, tedious job. One that West either thought I couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

“Are you worried about the draught?” I asked. The depth at which the ship sat in the water was the first thing that could take us down on the reefs. But the Marigold’s hull was empty and with the new sails, she was moving smooth over the sea.

“Right now, I’m worried about everything.” The lid to the trunk fell closed, and he pulled his shirt over his head, wincing against the pain that erupted in his body as he lifted his arms. It dropped to his cot before he pushed past me, going out onto the deck.

I stared at the open doorway, thinking, before I followed after him. Just as I came around the corner, he stood on the rail and stepped off, disappearing over the side. A splash sounded below, and I peered back through the open door of his quarters, eyeing the white stone that sat at the corner of his desk.

I went back into the breezeway, turning the lock of the cabinet on the wall and riffling through the shelves until I found another scraper and a mallet.