Page 3

We don’t talk much on the walk. I want to pepper him with countless questions about my mother—what he’ll give her for lunch, whether he’ll make sure she gets her walks, whether he’ll leave a note by the door in case she wakes alone—but his pace is quick despite his age and I feel the need to catch up. I’m pretty sure at this point, if he wasn’t here walking me to the ferry, I’d be hightailing it back to the cottage.

By the time we’ve crossed the boardwalk through the ashwater, the wood boards rotting in places, the sleepy port of Bracken Cove comes into view.

I suppose sleepy is a generous word, especially when the ferry is in. Then Bracken Cove becomes the busiest place in the world…at least the only world I’ve known.

The whole bay is awake with gulls calling over the fish stalls, a dog barking at its owner to throw a stick into the water, shoppers haggling with the fishmongers, and nets out along the sea wall in long green swags. The air smells of tar and brine and woodsmoke and the sugary sweetness of Mrs. Ferris’s honey buns.

I know every face here, for better or for worse.

Old Thom lifts his pipe at me from the mooring post he’s occupied since before I was born. The Salarno sisters stop dead in the road to stare at my trunk with unabashed interest before whispering to each other. Duger, the cobbler, leans out of his doorway to ask if I’ve packed my good boots and to let me know that my current ones could use some oil.

That’s the other thing about the Bracken Islands. No business is truly your own. Everyone has known for weeks that I’m attending Mortis. And underneath all the waving and whispering there’s something else in the way they look at me, something I’ve felt all summer since I got the news of my acceptance. Pride, perhaps? Or the wariness people get around a thing that’s changing. People here don’t like change, that much I know.

Or maybe it’s even envy.

Saturna Greythorn, off to the mainland. Off to be something.

And I’m sure to some, my absence will be a welcome thing. One less witch to worry about.

The deep-blue-colored ferry is tied at the long pier, her ropes creaking noisily, three sheep already aboard and looking vaguely alarmed. Gibson hauls my trunk up the gangway on one shoulder like it weighs nothing, though I can see from the clench of his jaw that it’s something.

He sets it down by the rail. “I know you’ll be back, but even so, write to her,” he says, looking out at the water instead of at me. “She won’t read them of course, but she likes the way an envelope looks on the table, and I’ll read them to her at night if she’ll allow it.”

I swallow hard at the thought.

And then, because I can’t think what else to do with the enormous unwieldy thing rising in my chest, I hug him. We don’t do that. He goes stiff as a tree and then, eventually, one hand comes down on my back.

“You’ve given her five years, girl,” he whispers gruffly. “Go and make something of your own.”

Then the captain calls for everyone onboard, thankfully interrupting any forthcoming tears. I stand beside my trunk and look back to Gibson on the pier. He doesn’t wave. He’s not the hugging type nor the waving type. He simply stands there, getting smaller, along with the whole of Bracken Cove.

I hold on to the rail with both hands until my knuckles ache and stare out at the Bracken Isle as it slowly disappears from view. My whole life, shrinking to a line on the water.

Whatever tears were threatening to overtake me on the pier return, teasing me. But I manage to hold them back.

The early autumn wind is cold, and by the time the Brackens are nothing but a faint smudge on the horizon, my face is wet anyway, and I tell myself it’s just the spray from the sea.

Chapter

Two

SATURNA

It’s hard not to think of the sea monsters whenever you’re on a boat. The Deepwyrms are only said to exist in The Maw, the body of roiling water between The Bracken Isles and The Old Bones. You can tell they’re coming when the fog seems to rise up from the sea itself, or so the legends say.

While there haven’t been any sightings of the Deepwyrms elsewhere, the fog drifting toward our ferry is making a fist of anxiety in my chest. The water out here is a deep emerald green that gives way to black in the fathoms where there’s said to be no bottom that man can conceive. On the chart, the official name is the Strait of Veils, but to everyone else it’s just “The Crossing,” the stretch of brackish water where the shallow lagoon meets the deep sea and divides the floating city of Sogliano and the Sanctum Isles from the Bracken Isles.

I sit on my trunk at the stern with my satchel wedged between my boots. Nobody on the ferry says anything, not even a bleat from the sheep. The depth, the fog, the exposure to the open sea, it all strikes us into a humbled silence.

Eventually the Sanctum Islands come into view: Watcher’s Rock, a spine of black stone peppered with the ruins of a lighthouse. Beyond it, Gallow’s Spit, a finger of shingle and salt grass with three dead trees standing like soldiers who abandoned their post. And further west, Thorn Temple, swallowed by wild blood ferns and tumbled columns, a ruin for so long that no one remembers what it was a temple to.

I’ve made this crossing before with my father a handful of times back when he had dealings with the boatwrights and I’d grip his hand on the deck and stare at everything with my mouth hanging open.

The fog lifts, and there’s Sogliano, one of the finest (and most storied) cities in the realm of Verenia.

It rises above the waves as if ancient, giant gods reached down with spindly fingers and pulled the city up from the bottom of the sea. The waterline is a green-black sash and above that the city goes to extreme lengths in all directions: it’s too narrow, too tall, too steep, with too many bridges slung between buildings like sutures, and too many spires crowded together like hands at prayer. When I was a child, I remember how beautiful it was, how in awe I was of the grandeur. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a feast for the eyes, but back then I certainly didn’t notice how many windows were shuttered, or that all the shuttered ones are on the lower floors, or that rats scampered about in the shadows.

To my surprise, I count seven of the long-beaked plague masks before we’re past the customs quay, worn by people going about their daily business, like haggling over fish or the two children chasing each other along a walkway with theirs pushed up on their heads like caps. The thing is, the plague ended five years ago. No one seems to have told Sogliano.