The Deepest Blue(25)

Squaring her shoulders, Mayara walked up the plank onto the ship. The Silent One joined her sisters. All three were motionless, except for the fluttering of their robes in the wind. She wondered if they sweat under their masks. Or laughed. Or cried. Or felt guilt over those whose lives they had taken and lives they had destroyed. Maybe they had abandoned all emotion when they’d relinquished their names and identities.

Murderers, she thought.

Trying to put space between her and them, Mayara crossed the deck to Roe and Palia.

Roe beamed at her, as if this were an exciting adventure, while Palia humphed, squinted at the sun, and then started to shuffle away.

“Hate ships,” Palia said. “Get me when it’s over.”

The older woman disappeared belowdecks, leaving Mayara and Roe above with the sailors and the Silent Ones. Shouting to one another, the sailors stowed the plank, untied the ropes, and unfurled the sails. Lord Maarte barked orders from the helm. The Silent Ones merely watched. One stood on the prow. One on the stern. And the third not far from her and Roe.

Roe leaned against the railing and looked out at the sea eagerly, as if she couldn’t wait to be underway, which they soon were. Mayara faced the opposite direction: looking back at the fortress and her island as they receded.

Wind filled the triple sails.

“This is exciting!” Roe said.

“You’re excited to die?”

Roe rolled her eyes. “I don’t plan to die.”

How can she be so naive? Nearly everyone who went to the island died there! The test was designed to weed out those who were unsuited and leave only the best of the best. And I’m not that. Mayara had no experience, no training, no strategy for how to survive. I’m just an oyster diver. “I’m not planning to either, but it’s going to happen. It’s the most likely outcome.”

“Likely but not certain,” Roe said. “Death can’t catch me if I chase it.”

Mayara stiffened. “What did you say?”

“It’s a saying. Haven’t you heard it before? It comes from the tale of the first islander.” Leaning against the rail of the ship, Roe launched into the story, chattering cheerfully. “He was a fisherman, and in the wake of the first great battle between the queens of Renthia and the wild sea spirits, he couldn’t find any fish. All the leviathans had scared them off. So he got into his boat to row out to deeper waters. Everyone told him he was crazy—the deeper waters were where the wild spirits ruled. He’d never survive. And he told them that death was searching for him and everyone else up and down the shore of Renthia, so if he went out to where death lived, he’d be fine. His family let him go, because they thought anyone who was spouting such nonsense was probably going to die soon of some terrible mind disease anyway. Or something like that. Anyway, he went out into the sea, and found that the queens had killed so many of the gigantic spirits that their skeletons had formed the islands. He made his home there and caught thousands of fish. When at last the battle was over, others rowed out to the new islands and found him there, as fat and as happy as could be.”

Mayara had never heard that version of the story. She’d been taught the first queen of Belene had founded the island nation, not some stubborn fisherman. But she liked it.

“Sorry—I didn’t mean to bore you with the whole tale. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to my grandparents tell me stories. It’s pretty much all I did for most of my childhood.”

“It’s all right,” Mayara said. “It was a good distraction.” For a few moments, she wasn’t thinking about what she’d left behind or what lay ahead. Of course, now that Roe had finished, it all came back.

As they sailed farther and farther away from the only home she’d ever known, Mayara looked out across the water. Spray spattered her face as the ship sliced through the sea. A pod of dolphins swam parallel with the ship. She watched their smooth bodies leap, glistening, out of the water, one after another. They looked so full of life as they journeyed through the sea.

And here I am, traveling to my death.

Death should be sudden. Not this slow march toward inevitability. She wished she felt more like the elderly grandmothers of the village when their time came—she’d seen them leave the world with dignity.

Except Great-Aunt Hollena, she remembered.

On her ninety-ninth birthday, Great-Aunt Hollena had smashed every window in the village and then run off the end of the dock. She might have made it to her hundredth birthday, people said, if she hadn’t misjudged the leap, hit her head, and drowned before anyone realized where she’d gone.

If you can’t die with dignity, die dramatically became a new village saying. As funerals went, it had been a fun one. Great-Aunt Hollena wouldn’t have wanted any tears.

Oh, Kelo, why did this have to happen?

Mayara didn’t want to die, either with or without dignity. She wanted to be home with her new husband, her parents, and her cousins. She wanted to be diving for abalone in the mornings and sipping fish soup with Kelo in the evenings while they watched the fishing boats come into the harbor. She wanted it so badly that it physically hurt in her gut.

They stood by the railing, side by side in silence, each lost in her own thoughts, until Roe pointed at the horizon. “That’s where we’ll train.”

In the distance was a small island, one of the many that dotted the sea around the five major islands of Belene. It looked like a fist rising out of the ocean, covered in green. There, they’d receive their final training before they were deposited on the Island of Testing.