And now she knew their destination after they delivered the statue:
She was going home.
Pleased, Marin tucked the payment and the letter into one of the many hidden compartments she and her mother had installed within the cabin, and then she headed back up to the deck. She thanked Perri and took her position by the wheel again. It was the perfect evening for a nice sail. The sea was flat and the breeze was brisk, as if the ocean didn’t care that an emperor had been defenestrated.
Frankly, she didn’t care either. The emperor hadn’t ever felt like a person to her—more like a force of nature, unpredictable and potentially dangerous. A lightning bolt. Unlikely to hit you but disastrous if it did.
That was another reason why she wanted to visit home: to make sure her parents were okay and that they knew to avoid any trips to the capital city. Her home island, Flicker, was far enough southeast that it should be fine, but she didn’t want them to take any unnecessary risks.
She didn’t visit home often. For the first year after Iovar tried to destroy her family, she’d kept her distance entirely, worried that her presence would endanger them by drawing his ire. Now…I just have to be careful, that’s all.
So long as she was careful, so long as she kept sailing, so long as she avoided messes that weren’t her business and didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t her parents or Perri, then everything would be fine.
Ahead, the sunset stained the horizon as the sun liquefied into gold, and Marin felt the tension in her muscles melt with the golden sun into the edge of the sea. She breathed in deep. She loved the smell of the sea: briny and bright. It made her feel like she was breathing in hope.
Marin slept and sailed beneath the stars on the journey to Belde. She passed plenty of islands with fishing villages that boasted inns and rooms to let, not to mention cafés and bakeries and markets, as well as job boards with various supply-runner postings. She’d normally have stopped at each one to check for jobs, but not this time, with the statue in the cabin and thoughts of her parents and her home island filling her head. She just kept sailing.
The farther she ventured from Alyssium, the fewer other boats and ships she saw, which was exactly how she liked it. Not many visited the southern islands—the vast majority of them were tiny dots, barely able to support a village, with few resources to tempt traders.One island was home to exclusively sheep and a few shepherds. Another was just rocks and lizards. A third had been claimed by an ornery gryphon and her brood, sharing the shore with a solitary lighthouse. Several others had once been inhabited but were now all but abandoned. Belde was one of those.
She’d heard that it had once been a jewel of the southern islands, home to a magnificent greenhouse created by a brilliant sorcerer, but after the sorcerer’s death, it had fallen into disrepair. No one visited it anymore. There was no reason to. It was an island of dying magic with only a single resident.
Also, it was cold there.
As Perri trumpeted their arrival, she sailed across the harbor toward the dock. There were no boats of any kind or any hint of movement anywhere along the shore, except from birds. Snow covered the island, coating the pine trees. In the distance, she saw the sparkle of the glass cupolas of the greenhouse, barely visible through the forest.
Winter always came early to Belde. She’d asked once and been told by the people of a neighboring island that it was a result of the late sorcerer’s spells—part of the cost of creating a vast complex of greenhouses. Indoor summer in exchange for outdoor winter. But she didn’t know if that was true or not. What she did know was that it was still summer in the northern islands, mid-fall on her home island, and stupidly cold here.
She tied off and then gazed up the path into the pine tree forest. “Want to give it another bellow?” Marin asked Perri.
He looked offended.
“I mean, want to make a beautifully melodious trumpet sound that will bring our hermit running to see what could be making such incredibly gorgeous noises?”
Perri sang out like a trumpet, and it was as crystal clear and beautiful as any bit of music she’d ever heard flow out of the windows of the conservatory. She wondered what Dax would have thought andreminded herself again that she didn’t need to think about him. He was fine, completely safe within his conservatory.
She waited a few minutes, shivering, but the gardener didn’t appear.
“This isn’t going to work,” Marin said. “Our gardener’s not the greet-visitors type, and I don’t want to freeze solid. Then he’ll have two statues to contend with.” She ducked into the cabin, located a coat, and pulled it on. She slid the letter from the head librarian into one of her many pockets, and then she hauled the wood statue up the steps onto the dock. It was awkward and required a lot of huffing and grunting, but she managed. “I’ll be back,” she told Perri.
She hefted the statue off the boat and waddled it up the dock, then she bent her knees and lifted it up, leaning the statue against her shoulder. She gritted her teeth and plowed forward, up the snow-covered steps.
Birds sang as they flew between the pine branches, cheerful because they weren’t carrying a human-size statue. Marin huffed as she walked up the path. She lowered the statue near the first structure, a two-story tower that looked like a lighthouse without a light. Leaving the statue, she climbed up to the door and knocked.
No answer.
She wasn’t particularly surprised. She doubted the gardener lived so close to the dock. Just to be sure, she peered in through the grimy window and saw what looked like an abandoned workroom of some sort: dust, cobwebs, stacks of books, lots of glass jars and empty pots. It absolutely looked like it belonged to some kind of ancient and unsanitary sorcerer, and it absolutely wasn’t her business.
She returned to the statue, lifted it up, and continued on.
The snow-covered road wound through the pine trees, past other cottages that looked even more abandoned: broken windows, damaged roofs, one open and snow-clogged door. She checked a blue cottage that looked mostly intact. No sign that it had been lived in for years. It occurred to her to wonder whether the solo gardenerwas still here. Perhaps he’d left too, and there was no gardener of Belde.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought. What was she supposed to do with the statue if he were gone?No, he has to be here.It wasn’t that long ago that she’d done a supply run to deliver flour and a few other items. He’d given no indication in the order he’d left at the flagpole that it would be her last delivery.
At a cottage that looked like a toadstool—it had a bulbous roof and round windows and door, red paint and white trim, very mushroomlike—she again lowered the statue to the ground and tried the door.
From inside, she heard a low growl.
Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw a gryphon stalk toward her out of the shadows. Its wings were flattened on its leonine back, and its eagle eyes were fixed on her. Quickly, she slammed the door shut and hurried to the statue.
