Page 98 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

Cebrinne lost her footing, crashing into me and then scrambling as she was swept away, panic curling her fingers into claws.

“Perpetuum drown the night,” I growled, catching her arm and hoisting her in next to me. I was unwilling to survive a giant ribcage and the sea of stars just to die in some moon-forsaken cave an hour from my door flap. Palm flat, I thrust out a hand, forcing the water to calm as I pushed it away. Dripping, Cebrinne gave a small, ragged smile, a small cut over the curve of her cheek.

We waded through, the tunnel rising out from the water. By the time our feet hit dry rock, the light had evaporated, though the gritty scent of smoke tickled my olfactories.

“Come on,” I murmured. “And watch your head. Bats sleep in these caves.”

“Perfect,” she mumbled under her breath.

There was nothing to guide us except the tunnel itself, which didn’t turn or twist or separate, though it did seem to slant up and down. My fingertips slid over the rocky walls, more wet than I’d have liked. I shuddered, remembering the crying walls in the tunnels below Paria. Cebrinne’s heart began to thump again.

A dry, brittle crunch froze us in our tracks.

Cebrinne sucked in a sharp breath of air. “I just stepped on a bone.”

“Doubtful,” I said, kneeling to pat the dark floor. “Bats can’t carry anything larger than a beetle, and—” I stopped as my hand spread over something cold and hard. A smooth, round curve lay on one end, something sharp and dented, like sockets, on the other.

The moisture in my mouth evaporated.

I wasn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, I’d dealt with him firsthand. But the thought of touching a corpse sent a withering chill through my limbs like a silent gust through a graveyard. I shook the feeling away, wiping my palm on my hip and standing straight.

“What was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said in a rush.

The quiet loomed ahead, expanding through the dark.

I followed it, flinching as something smooth and frail collapsed under my own foot. Soon every step was broken and fractured. My teeth fixed together in a stony wince. Fire crackled ahead, light whisking through the tunnel, but I couldn’t bring myself to look down until my feet tripped over a hard, stiff bolt of fabric.

I caught myself against the rock, hoping to find canvas. The remnants of a sail, maybe, or something used to cover cargo in a hold. But I’d stumbled over neither of those things. My foot was half-lodged under the lip of a sailor’s coat, an unmistakable jumble of rounded rib bones the new neighbor of my toes.

Dry amusement mingled with Cebrinne’s voice. “Where exactly are we, Maren?”

“I don’t know,” I hissed. “I’ve never been in here before.”

“Then why—”

I stopped her with a hand around her wrist.

The world narrowed to a small, suffocating point just beyond where I stood. Distant firelight flicked and danced just enough to glint off the lid of a small, iron box.

The air around me grew scarce, and a pulsing throb replaced the silence of the tunnel. I bent forward, grasping the edge of the box and tilting the lid back. Tinder and flint sat inside, coated with dust like a peaceful layer of snow.

“Do you recognize it?” Cebrinne asked.

“Yes,” I said numbly. Yes, I recognized it. The last time I’d seen it, it had been in the hands of a cabin boy. A young pirate who coughed into the crook of his sleeve with salt sickness, who had trailed behind me around the island like a shy shadow, who had blushed when he looked at me too long as we sat under the stars, sharing constellation stories. “I think you should probably stay here.”

If Cebrinne minded the company of dead men and the dark, she didn’t say so. She offered a small, if not perplexed nod, teal eyes watching as I tracked the light ahead, the tunnel widening to a chamber so deep I couldn’t see around its corners.

An opening carved through the roof of the tunnel, steering smoke toward the sky where the sun’s rays were just curling around the grooves of the rock. The fire hissed and sizzled against the moisture in the air. A double-hulled boat, or the fragments of one, sat scattered across the floor, the pieces larger than I was.

And there, his knee resting on a hollowed log as he sealed a jagged scar across a smooth keel of hardened wood, sat my father.

Ano slid his smoothing stone in a long, careful swipe down the side of the boat’s disconnected hull, so focused he didn’t stir at the soft shuffle of my feet behind him. He’d thinned in the near year since I’d left. My father had always felt big and powerful, but his muscles had rounded as I’d grown older, had taken on a bloated quality, his edges softening with natural age.

That had gone. The striations in his back seemed cut just under the surface of his skin, blunt and sharp and toned to finite detail under the dark patterns of his tattoos. I watched them stretch and contract for a long moment, the long thhhhhhhhh of his stone a soothing sound against the crack of his fire.

“It must be sixty feet long,” I finally said. “How do you plan to get it out?”