Page 54 of Add To Hoard

“I’ve been waiting,” she says simply, “for you to get there.”

I take the chart.

I leave at dawn.

The island watches me go as it always watches, that geological attention, the deep awareness of an island that has been here longer than any of us and keeps its own accounting. I feel it at my back as I descend toward the western cliff, the same pull that has oriented me toward this island for six centuries, the same bone-deep gravity of home.

It is still home. That has not changed and will not change. I am not leaving the island. I am leaving the island to go somewhere and coming back, which is a thing guardians do when the thing that requires their attention is not on the island. I am applying the same logic I apply to everything. This is completely rational.

Soryth is at the cliff edge.

He looks at me. I look at him. The weight between us is still there and still load-bearing and I am not going to set it down this morning, maybe not ever. But he is here, at the cliff edge, which is itself a thing.

He says nothing. I say nothing. I step off the cliff and I open my wings and the morning air takes me west, and the island falls away behind me, and the Blaecwater spreads out ahead cold and wide and silver in the early light, and somewhere beyond it is a settlement called Blackwake with a building on Harbour Lane, eastern end, third one in, blue shutter broken since the winter before last.

I already know the way.

33

NERINA

Bren has color in his face by the third week.

It is the first thing I notice every morning when I come to Sevraine’s back room, the color, incrementally returning, the gray pallor of a boy that has been fighting a losing battle, gradually replaced by color and more sustainable health. The healer from the inland kingdoms is a small precise woman who speaks little and observes everything and carries the self-possession of a healer very good at her work and under no obligation to discuss it. She comes every third day. She makes notes. The notes, she tells me at the end of the second week, are going in the right direction.

I ask Bren about the book.

He tells me for two hours. Natural histories of the western coastal settlements, apparently, with a section on the deep-sea fauna of the Blaecwater that he finds particularly compelling. I listen to all of it. I ask every question I did not ask before because I was somewhere else in my head, and I am not somewhere else in my head now, or rather I am. I am always somewhere on a black sand beach with a cold fire pit and worn stones and the smell of volcanic rock and thermal water, but I am also here, with Bren, in the back room of Sevraine’s apothecary, and both things are true simultaneously and I am learning to hold them.

I fix the shutter in the fourth week. It takes an afternoon and the right hardware from the ironmonger two streets over and the particular satisfaction of a repair done properly, the shutter moving smooth and true on its new hinge, the blue paint catching the thin autumn light. I stand on the street and look at it for a moment.

“Fixed it,” I say, to no one in particular.

To someone in particular.

It is Sevraine who tells me. Five weeks after I come home, a Tuesday morning, the light flat and gray with the first real cold of autumn coming in off the Blaecwater. Bren is in the next room. He is fine. This is about me.

She has suspected for two weeks, she says. She was waiting for me to be ready to hear it. She says it in the same even voice she uses for all difficult news, which I have always valued and which today lands differently than it ever has before, not like a verdict, like a window thrown open in a room that has been closed too long.

I sit with it for a long time. On the chair in the corner of the apothecary where I have sat for years waiting for news I did not want, which is not what this is, except that it is also complicated and large and nothing I had a plan for. The story of every significant thing that has ever happened to me.

I think about a warm spring and a man’s hand covering mine on his chest and a carving in a rock wall and a question I already know the answer to. ‘Fix the shutter so I can find it.’ A direction, and two people already moving in it, and the space between them being just water.

I have crossed worse.

I go to the dock. It is raining, which is the default condition of Blackwake in autumn, the gray drizzle that comes in sideways off the Blaecwater and gets down the back of your collar. The harbor is doing what it always does, the cargo ships unloading, the longshoremen with their heads down, the merchants at the warehouse gates with their ledgers and their soft hands. The water in the harbor mouth is dark and working, and beyond the harbor mouth the Blaecwater opens into a gray too large to see the far edge of.

I stand on the dock in the rain and I look at it.

I am still standing there when I see him.

34

MAELOR

The Blaecwater is cold and gray and the crossing takes three days in human form on a vessel I hired without explanation from a coastal trader who asked no questions because I paid well and carried the manner of a man who does not invite questions.

I stand at the bow for most of it. The open water is different from the island’s air in ways I had not fully anticipated, the scale of it, the absence of the island’s gravity at my back, the cold that has no volcanic warmth underneath it. I am two hundred years removed from the last time I crossed open water in any form and the crossing has changed, the shipping lanes different, the vessel types unfamiliar, the mainland coast resolving out of the gray haze of the third morning in a configuration I have to reconstruct from memory and Ysara’s chart.