Still, I had no idea what to say. My mind blanked, filled instead with a strange fuzziness that grew and crackled with warmth as the stranger stared at me with gold-flecked eyes, liquid and smoldering. I forced myself to meet them, though it was almost like trying to watch molten lava swirl in a barrel, so bright and fiery it hurt to stare too long.
“I’d have thought you would’ve left the island by now,” I choked out instead.
What in the name of the sun and moon and all the strands of time between here and Perpetuum was this? I’d never gone speechless at a pair of stupid eyes.Withheldmy own speech, sure. I’d swallowed more noxious outbursts than I could remember. And I’d seen my fair share of attractive sailors before. Been approached by plenty of sailors, though I’d always lashed out with knives for words, then scurried away to safety before any islander could see me speaking to one, while the poor fools stood stunned, trying to work out why I’d verbally accosted them in the first place.
Damp curls caught in his lashes, he shook his hair away from his face. “It’s summer in Calder. High trading season. There’s no room on the ships for me. I’ve asked every captain, but they’ve all told me to wait until the cooler months when the merchant ships are less full of goods.”
“You could send a message home,” I prompted, realizing my mouth had gone dry as I held his gaze. “Would your family hire a ship to collect you?”
“Yes, I’m sure they would…”
He paused to gnaw on his lip, and I realized I should leave. I shouldn’t be sitting here like a mindless dolt in the water, intrigued by the rest of his sentence. I didn’t care about whether his family would send a ship for him. My beach was right there. I should just paddle to the sand and forget the man gazing at me with open curiosity and molten irises. Before anyone peered through the trees, I should go.
Instead, I rested my arms on my oars, eager for the other half of his stupid thought.
“The ships have offered to deliver a letter for me, but they know I’m stranded and at their mercy.” He smiled sardonically. I leaned forward in my canoe, almost eye-level with him, but his gaze settled over my mouth. “So, they’ve requested a high fee. I lost my coin purse in the ocean on my way here, so…”
My mind stirred for something cruel to say. If I couldn’t tear myself from his grasp, maybe I could cut into his ego instead. But my thoughts mercilessly scattered out of reach. Cursing myself, I threw my gaze away from him.
Mihauna, if you had to send a man to my beach, you could have at least made him ugly.
I offered a stiff nod. At least he wastryingto leave the island. “That’s why you’ve been fishing on the boats. To pay your way home.”
He watched me under dark lashes, the plane of his forehead a tight valley over the thicket of his brows. Behind him, a red haze floated under the surface, the waves murky and dark. I tilted my head, staring at it.
“Why do they call you a witch?”
Well, that did it.
The fuzziness in my head sharpened into pointed barbs. It was a simple question—warranted even, in his position. But that didn’t help the sneer that pulled my upper lip from my teeth, or the flare of my nostrils as I gazed down at him.
He waited, eyes shifting darkly over my face, as if he, too, were agitated by the question.
“Because I lure unsuspecting men to the water so I can kill them and drink their blood.” I stretched each word, my tone dripping with venom and sarcasm alike, and he worked his jaw as he sorted whatever thoughts I'd left hatching inside his head.
“Hey, boy.”
Our eyes snapped up at the voice that cut through the ferns along the beach. I bent in myva’abefore I remembered I was hidden by the reeds, but Kye craned his neck, leaning in the water to see who was there.
“My wife said she saw sharks an hour ago on this side of the island. You should get out of the water for now.” My uncle’s familiar voice floated through the trees, and the sudden tension loosened from my shoulders. It was only Naheso.
Kye nodded at Naheso, and I waited until the rustling leaves announced my uncle’s departure, watching Kye covertly. He hadn't moved an inch. The poor fool. The moon had spent too much time on his face and not enough on his brain. He swerved his gaze back to me, something like disappointment twitching between his brows.
“You know what sharks are, don’t you?” I asked, hands finding my oars.
“Do you find everyone beneath you, or am I just lucky?”
Something between a sputter and a scoff left my throat. For all the stares and whispers that followed me around the island, the islanders were rarely so direct. Except for my aunt. Dipping an oar into the reeds, I aimed the nose of my canoe toward the distant beach. “You’re just lucky,” I said sweetly. “You’rewelcome, by the way.”
“For what?”
A muscle flexed in my jaw. “That I risked my life to save yours.”
The furrow in his brows lifted. I waited for him to mock me, or perhaps deny I'd done anything to help him at all. But his lips parted on an inhale, and he stretched his shoulders absently, as if trying to work a memory back into cognition.
He didn't remember.
Mother moon damn me, he didn’t remember. Of course, he wouldn’t remember. My stupid luck. Kye hadn't seen me when he'd landed on the beach of Neris Island, and by the time I’d reached him, he'd been unconscious. He’d only woken after the danger of drowning was gone, and he'd been delirious, trying to tell me something about his mother in the water. He hadn’t even been alert enough to realize he couldn’t row.
