The Bone Shard Daughter: The Drowning Empire Book One Page 8

  The lantern swung from my hand as I whirled about. There was more room to explore, and I might find something other than bone shards and catalogs. I went to another column and tested a few more drawers. Just shards.

  At the very back of the room, the wall was free of drawers. I pressed a palm against the smooth plaster, wondering what lay on the other side. A dark shape caught my gaze. Another door, wedged nearly into the corner. I hurried to it, my excitement mounting with each step.

  This brass knob was cool to the touch, and I tried to turn it before I saw the keyhole beneath. The doorknob rattled in my grip.

  Locked. Of course.

  I pushed away from the door, frustrated, and then seized the key in my sash pocket. It slid easily enough into the lock, but the tumblers wouldn’t turn. I tried pushing on the door, I tried pulling it. I tried jiggling the key in the lock as I turned, hoping that this was the right key, even as I knew it wasn’t. It wouldn’t be like Father.

  He just couldn’t make things easy for me, not even once in my life. I jerked the key from the lock. My breathing seemed to echo off the cabinets, off the walls.

  The door. I’d been so focused on the lock, I hadn’t looked at the door. Something seemed to seize my heart, squeezing hard enough to make me gasp. Two bronze panels were fastened to the door. Engravings of cloud junipers rooting themselves at the bottom, curling upward, their branches filling the top.

  The beauty of the engravings weren’t what had startled me, though the door was beautiful. I’d not seen this door, not in the five years since I’d been sick. But I knew it, the way I knew the feel of my teeth beneath my tongue. I grasped at a feeling, a smell, an image of this door lit by multiple lanterns. It wisped away from me, never substantial enough to grasp.

  I’d been here before.

  9

  Jovis

  A small isle east of Deerhead

  If anything can be said about the Ioph Carn, it is this: they are persistent. I was in my ship with the sails hoisted and my lines checked when Philine and her men ran skidding down the road toward the docks. I think Philine called out, “Stop!”

  Waste of breath, that. Does anyone actually stop when they’re being chased? She’d just beaten me; what did she expect – for me to turn around and thank her for the kind request? No. I did what everyone else who’s ever been given that command does – I fled faster.

  Mephi chirruped as I ran from one end of my ship to the other trying to get the sails filled with wind and my stern pointed in the right direction. The harbor here was small, the opening barely large enough to fit an Imperial caravel. I wouldn’t be scraping my sides against the breakers, but I certainly didn’t have the space I had back on Deerhead.

  Mephi sat at my feet as I went to the tiller and pointed to the Ioph Carn, running down the docks toward us. “Those people are not good people.” He tilted his head to the side, his eyes fixed on mine. I was doing it again. I was talking to an animal. I could blame nerves. I’d always talked too much, too often – except when I was home in the kitchen, or out on the Endless Sea. Other places I was restless, always restless. Emahla had never taken me seriously until she’d seen me silent.

  Philine didn’t go for any ship they’d sailed in on. She hurried her lackeys into a dinghy, untied it and urged them to row.

  They had arms thick as posts and sinewy as salt-soaked ropes. I glanced at my own slender limbs, and then to the sails, billowing but not skipping me across the water. I’d not reach better winds until we left the harbor. There was still the handful of witstone. I could still outrun them. “Don’t get underfoot,” I said to Mephi, and then shook my head. I’d done it again. Oh, what did it matter if the talking made me feel better? And it did. Made me feel in control.

  I lifted the storage hatch, lifted the loose board and felt around for the witstone.

  Only smooth wooden boards. A dizzying sensation rushed over me, bringing bile to the back of my throat. The witstone was gone. I swiped my hand across the space. Perhaps a wave had hit my boat in the night and the stone had shifted, rolled into a corner. I tried a third time, my head stuffed with cotton.

  It couldn’t just be gone.

  Something cold patted my other arm. I pushed myself up and saw Mephi, watching me, clutching his paws like a worried auntie. When I looked over his head, I saw the Ioph Carn looming.

  Would that I could control the wind or the sea. All I had aboard was a spear I used sometimes for fishing. I grabbed it anyways, set my boat toward the harbor entrance and stood on the port side with my spear. My bruised ribs ached as I breathed, waiting.

  Philine’s expression was grim, her baton at the ready. She’d not let me get away a second time.

  My heartbeat thudded against my ribs, steadier than I thought the situation merited. Sweat slicked my palms as the dinghy grew closer. I could see the veins on the Ioph Carn’s arms as they rowed, the tendons straining on Philine’s hand as her grip tightened around her baton.

  The dinghy knocked against the side of my boat, and in that same moment, Philine grabbed at the side of my ship with one hand and seized the end of my spear with the other hand – just as I tried to jab her off my boat.

  She used my spear to help haul herself up, nearly sending me tumbling overboard. I righted myself, barely, just in time for her to put the butt of her baton into my already-bruised ribs.

  The pain took my breath away and I hissed it back in through my teeth, trying to focus on something, anything, else. The spear. I still had it. The end of it was still in her grip. I shoved with the spear, trying to put her off balance, trying to send her overboard.

  She merely looked annoyed.

  I needed her to get off my boat; I needed her to. I needed it with the panic of a drowning man. I couldn’t go to Kaphra, not now. I would have made any demon’s bargain, would have shaken hands with the greatest of the Alanga himself. Just to send Philine over the edge.

  She smiled as though the desperation I exuded with every breath were a perfume. With her free hand, she pulled a blade free of her belt, cocking her arm to throw. By her gaze, she was aiming for my eye.

  A ball of brown fur hurtled past my feet, launching itself at the woman. Philine’s expression shifted all at once, her jaw clenching. “Shit!” She dropped the knife and it tumbled into the ocean behind her.

  Mephi locked his jaws around her ankle, a growl rumbling in his throat. She tried to shake him off. I remembered the sharp little teeth he’d used to eviscerate the fish I’d given him. They’d hurt, but they wouldn’t put her off for long. Damned woman still had her fingers tight around the end of the spear, and she was more than a match for me in strength.

  And then something shifted inside me. It felt like an unlocking, a moving of tumblers, and then a soft and subtle click. I could feel myself quaking, a quiet roar sounding in my ears.

  Philine kicked Mephi to the side. I took in another breath and the pain left my ribs. The air seemed to flow into my lungs and then dissipate into my limbs, bringing new strength. I felt it first in my bones, a subtle tremor of power. And then in my legs – now solid and as strong as the corner posts of a house. It flowed upward, into my back and arms, and in the next instance I was no longer grappling with Philine. It was still her in front of me, but it felt like wrestling with a child. I lifted the spear experimentally, and her feet nearly came free of the deck.

  I watched the sick realization travel across her face. Was that what I’d looked like when I couldn’t find my witstone? And then, before I could think any of this through, I tossed both her and the spear into the water – just before the breakers. It was as easy as tossing a fish back into the ocean.

  Just as quickly, the strength left me. I collapsed onto the deck, my breath ragged in my throat, my gaze on the sails as we left the harbor and headed out into the Endless Sea.

  Mephi crept over to me. He placed both paws on my knee, his whiskered face solemn, blood marring the fur beneath his mouth. “Not good,” he said in a squeaky, guttural
voice. He patted my leg. “Not.”

  A beating at the hands of the Ioph Carn I could handle. Being chased out of the harbor and losing the last of my witstone – that too it appeared was not beyond my abilities. But this?

  My brain promptly gave up.

  I woke to the sound of the ocean lapping at the hull. Colors and detail filled in like paint soaking into paper. First the sun, high and bright in the sky. And then the wind whipping at the sails. I squinted.

  Mephi stood at the prow of the ship, his whiskered face into the wind, fur ruffling. As soon as he heard me stir, he scampered over and chittered, his paws combing through my hair as though he were searching for a meal.

  I waved him off and sat up. My whole body felt stiff and sore, like I’d been tumbled and buffeted by waves before being rudely tossed ashore. That was the thing about beatings – they got worse before they got better.

  The Ioph Carn.

  I jolted up, pain lancing through my body sharp as a knife. The isle was still in view, though getting rapidly smaller. I didn’t see any boats following me – not yet. It would have taken them time to fish a sodden Philine from the ocean, and time to ready their boat. Their ship wouldn’t be as quick as mine, and I wasn’t sure how much precious witstone they’d want to expend in capturing me.

  The wind ruffled my hair, sending it into my eyes. I tucked it back behind my ears and made a quick round, checking the lines and the sails. I looked through my charts again, just to be sure. We were headed in the right direction and the wind was good, so there wasn’t much to do except sit and wait. The Navigators’ Academy always liked to say that patience was the first thing they taught their students, though that hadn’t been my first lesson there. My parents had known what I’d be confronted with. They’d tried to tell me as I’d packed my bags for Imperial.

  “They won’t accept you,” my father said, his voice soft. “They won’t see you as one of them.”

  “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes as I pulled books from my shelves. “They’ll ask me if I’ve spoken with the ancients, or if my name means ‘snowy mountain’ in Poyer.”

  My mother wedged herself between me and my bags, her brows low. “We’re trying to tell you something important! Anau is small; everyone knows us here. They don’t know you in Imperial. They’ll think they know you, and that’s very different.”

  I’d sighed, a youth who thought he knew more of life than his parents did. “I’m half-Poyer and half-Empirean – is that what you wanted to remind me of?”

  They’d exchanged a glance, my mother’s face exhausted and exasperated, entreating my father to explain. If I’d not been fool enough to deny it, I’d have seen I’d missed their point entirely. “Jovis,” my father said, “we wanted to remind you that you are both Poyer and Empirean. And no matter what they say, that doesn’t make you any less than them.”

  I’d nodded and thanked them, though I still hadn’t quite understood. I’d passed the entry test, hadn’t I? But when I’d arrived at the Academy, the instructors had put me in my place as a half-breed spectacle, and the first thing I’d learned was that a life as an Imperial navigator would be a lonely one.

  I sat at the tiller and regarded my new companion. He seemed determined to ensure I was in no danger of loneliness. Maybe I could have ducked Philine’s knife-throw. Maybe not. It seemed I’d plucked him from the water and he’d plucked me from a messy death.

  “So what are you?”

  Mephi only sat on his haunches and scratched at one small ear with a foreleg. His lips drew back into a grimace as he searched for the right spot. He did look something like an otter. The digits on his paws were longer, his ears pointed instead of curved. His face was more angular than round, which is why I must have mistaken him for a cat at first. Despite his kitten size, his body was longer so he could stretch easily up to my knee.

  After watching him struggle for a moment, I sighed and reached out to help him scratch. He leaned into my touch. Though his fur was coarse, his undercoat was soft as downy feathers. It felt the way clouds looked – decadently fluffy.

  I rubbed a thumb over his head and paused. There were two bony knobs next to his ears. The beginnings of horns? I couldn’t think of any sea-dwelling creatures with both horns and fur. Feeling very foolish, I said, “I don’t suppose you could tell me who and what you are?”

  Mephi only opened his mouth and let out a satisfied chirrup.

  Had I imagined him speaking before? I’d been overwrought, having been beaten, narrowly escaped and then narrowly escaped again. But despite the lies I told others, and the lies I sometimes told myself, I didn’t think this was something my mind had made up.

  “There are parrots,” I said to Mephi, “that live on a few of the islands. Some people keep them as pets and they can speak like people do.”

  I’d stopped petting him. He pawed at the knee where I’d placed my hand, and I obliged, scratching his cheeks.

  “Is that what you do? Just repeat what you’ve heard?”

  Mephi crouched, and before I could register what he was doing, leapt into my lap and sprawled across my legs as though he belonged there. I sat still, not daring to breathe, a little afraid this wild creature might bite me. When he didn’t, I rested a hesitant hand on the warmth of his shoulder. He let out a grumbling sigh and laid his head between his paws.

  I’d once swum to the bottom of a cove at home just to see how long I could stay there. When my lungs were fit to burst and even my brother had splashed at the surface in his worry, I had uncurled my legs and pushed myself toward the surface. It felt like that now, like my heart was uncurling, surging up to some brighter place.

  A boat appeared ahead on the horizon – a dark shape against the water. The wind picked up, and my ship cut through the water, bouncing a little on the waves. Mephi didn’t stir. Would that I could fall asleep so quickly and without any cares. The boat on the horizon wasn’t an Ioph Carn boat, and it wasn’t an Imperial ship. Oddly enough, it had no sails at all. The Empire still kept galley boats, but even their galley boats had sails.

  But as we drew nearer I realized that the ship did have sails. Only they were the same blue as the sky.

  I was on my feet in a flash, spilling Mephi onto the deck. Alon’s father had seen the boat heading east, but it must have anchored out of sight, or come back to the isle for some unfinished business – because it was here, now, right in front of me.

  I checked the sails. I was only carrying the two boxes of melons; I didn’t have a full cargo hold. This was as fast as I could push my ship. The other boat perhaps hadn’t seen me or just didn’t care, because it looked like I was gaining on it. I went to the prow and squinted before remembering I kept a spyglass. My head was full of wasps, buzzing, disorganized.

  I lifted the bench at the prow, pulled it out and snapped it to its full length. With the rocking of the waves and my unsteady hands, it took me more than one try to set it properly against my eye. The horizon came into focus, as did the dark-hulled boat. The blue sails billowed, and near the stern stood a figure. Only one that I could see, and cloaked in dark gray. The first time I’d seen the boat had been on the morning Emahla had disappeared. In the initial panic, one of my aunties had suggested that perhaps she had drowned herself, and even though I knew she hadn’t, I went to the ocean. Mist hung heavy over the beach, waves crashing on shores I couldn’t see. I’d gone to the very edge, the water seeping into my shoes, sucking cold at my toes.

  Something had moved in the fog. At first I’d thought it the water, or even the fog itself. But then I’d seen a patch of blue. A blue sail. I’d blinked, and it was gone. Even the sand beneath my feet hadn’t felt quite solid; how could I be sure in that moment that any of it wasn’t just a terrible dream? I’d already begun to miss her, my heart knowing what my head couldn’t.

  And then I saw it again five years later. Five wasted years. I’d been paying off my own boat – something larger than my father’s fishing boat, something that could move from islan
d to island without being capsized in the first storm. The Ioph Carn were the only ones who would let me pay it off by working for them. I hadn’t had a choice. But on the anniversary of my brother’s death, I’d stopped at an isle east of Imperial and burned a sprig of juniper on a bluff in Onyu’s remembrance. Clear skies, sunny. It was there I’d seen it again – the boat with the blue sails, a lone figure at the rails. This time, I knew I wasn’t imagining it. I’d cut contact with the Ioph Carn and spent the next two years chasing whispers of blue sails.

  Now, as I stood on my boat with the strange ship in my sights, I imagined leaping aboard, seizing the cloaked figure, shaking them. Asking them what they’d done with Emahla, where they’d taken her, where she’d been all these years. I still knew the weight of her head on my shoulder, the creases in her cheeks when she smiled, the warm, callused feel of her palm against mine. The way she always seemed to understand me even when I couldn’t find the words.

  But these things were fading, no matter how desperately I held them, dissolving like salt into the waves. And that was the worst thing about this grief – not just knowing that she was gone, but knowing that eventually new memories and experiences would layer on top of them, making the distance between us ever wider. The days we’d spent swimming and fishing at the beach, the first time I’d kissed her, the dreams we’d shared – I was now the only keeper of these memories, and that was the truest sort of loneliness. There were so many things I still wanted to tell her, to share with her.

  The figure turned toward me. For a moment, I thought they met my gaze through the distance. And then they went to the sails. A moment later, I caught a glimpse of white, wispy smoke. Burning witstone.

  I snapped the spyglass shut. I had no witstone, but my boat had been designed to be quick. There might still be a chance, depending on how much witstone the other ship had. I cast my gaze about my boat, suddenly aware that despite my imagination, my certainty that I’d leap onto the other ship and take it by force, I had no weapons. Even the fishing spear was gone, dropped into the harbor with Philine. And, as my body kept reminding me, it wasn’t in the best condition at the moment.