The Deepest Blue(29)



For an instant, Mayara thought she was talking about her beloved. But no, she meant Lord Maarte. “He doesn’t know whether or not my husband lives.”

“That’s good news!” Roe said encouragingly. “Possibly alive is better than definitely dead, right? Um, right? You don’t look happy.”

“I have to live,” Mayara said.

“Again, good news, right?”

“I don’t know how to fight spirits.”

“That’s why we’re going to be trained! You’ll see. The queen wants us to survive. The more heirs Belene has, the safer the islands will be.”

Mayara thought of the cove where she’d left Kelo. If she’d been trained, if she’d known more about how to control the spirits . . . If she’d been able to wrest them away from the Silent Ones . . .

She shook herself. What am I thinking? Overpower the Silent Ones? There were three of them! All trained to control the island’s spirits! And all focused on one task: subduing her.

“Once we’re at the training site, we’ll have a real heir to teach us,” Roe was saying. “Don’t worry. It’s not like everyone else will be an expert. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Mayara said. In fact, she was sure of the opposite. Elorna had this special training, and she still died. How am I going to do what she couldn’t?

I chose this, knowing it meant my death. How can I now expect to live?

“You’ll catch up,” Roe said. “If you’re willing to try. So are you? You, me, and Palia—we could be a team. Help each other out on the island. Keep each other from dying. What do you think?”

This was her actual choice, she realized: Accept that she was doomed . . . Or fight fate.

And maybe win back the future she’d wanted.

Mayara looked out across the sparkling waves. A flock of pelicans soared low over the water, toward the island that looked like a fist raised to the sky. She filled her lungs, then emptied them, the way she did when she was preparing for a difficult dive, and she imagined Kelo, alive and waiting for her.

“Let’s chase death,” Mayara said.





Chapter Eight

Kelo drifted in and out of consciousness in a haze of pain. Sometimes he woke certain the spirits were still gnawing on his leg and he thrashed, fighting them, until he felt his father’s hand on his forehead.

Other times he woke with the taste of soup on his tongue, salty and sweet, and to the sound of his father singing, an off-key crooning sea song, like he used to sing when Kelo was a small child and had trouble sleeping.

He wasn’t sure which was the dream: the spirits or his father.

Or maybe both were, and he was somewhere else entirely, wherever souls went after their life ended. At last, though, he clawed his way back to awareness.

He was in his parents’ home, in a cot, tucked in with quilts that he remembered from his childhood. His pillow was mostly flat and smelled of seaweed. Turning his head, he saw the walls had been patched with sail fabric that fluttered in the wind. I should help them fix that, he thought vaguely. His thoughts felt like they were fluttering too.

And then he tried to sit up.

Pain shot through him, and he clutched his chest, easing himself back down. His torso was wrapped in bandages. Craning his neck, he managed a glance at the rest of him—bandages swaddled his leg as well. And his left wrist was bound. He’d broken it, he remembered.

I’m alive, he thought. How? The last thing he remembered were the spirits in the cove. . . . He’d been certain they were going to kill him. He didn’t know why he’d been spared or how he’d gotten home.

“Mayara?” he croaked.

“She’s alive.” His father was in a rocking chair by the window. The window looked oddly empty—no charms, no mobiles, no shutters. All of it had blown away in the storm. Kelo noticed other things missing as well: dishes and bowls, everything made of glass. There was a stack of coconut shells, cut in half and dried out, that were stacked beside the sink.

As he cataloged each difference, he tried to wrap his mind around those simple words: She’s alive. She’d chosen life. And he wouldn’t see her again. Or if he did, he wouldn’t know it was her. She’d be behind a mask, swathed in robes. She’d have renounced her family, her name, herself. . . . And it’s my fault. I told her to choose that life.

That non-life.

I shouldn’t have done it.

It had seemed like such a beautiful solution at the time: He’d leave her coded messages in his art, and he’d know that somewhere she still existed. Their love would survive so long as they both did. But now that plan felt empty. And foolish.

“So she is to be a Silent One.” He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded, when what he wanted to do was scream and rage against the universe for taking her from him. He’d never felt this rush of anger before. Usually, he went through life as calm as the sea on a windless day. He took pride in being even-keeled.

“Kelo, my boy . . .”

He heard the note in his father’s voice and knew he wasn’t going to like what came next. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears like a child and not hear whatever it was his father was about to say.

His father’s voice was as soft as a lullaby. But the words burrowed into Kelo’s heart: “She chose the island.”

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