I stood, the rope clutched in my hand as I looked to the bow. Koy’s eyes dropped to the deck and he turned, fitting his belt back around him. The last thing I’d seen before I blacked out was his face, peering up over the reef. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that he’d cut me loose.
I snatched a knife from the belt of a dredger standing next to me and sawed at the rope around my waist. One of the strykers came up the steps from belowdecks with a tin box of needle and thread in one hand, a bottle of rye in the other.
He reached out to steady me, but I tore my arm away. “Don’t touch me,” I snarled, snatching them from his hands and pushing past him to the archway.
I could feel the stares of the crew pinned to my back as I limped down the stairs, leaning into the wall to stay on my feet. I took a lantern from the hook and moved down the passage until I made it to the cargo hold, the tears lighting in my eyes as soon as I was cloaked in the darkness. I sniffed, willing the pain in my chest to stay put. I wasn’t going to let them hear me cry.
My leg stung, but it was nothing a few stitches couldn’t fix, and more importantly, it wouldn’t keep me from diving. I’d seen worse.
I closed the door and sat on an empty crate, moving the lantern close to me before I uncorked the rye. I pulled a deep breath in and let it go before I poured it over the wound. A growl erupted in my throat as I clenched my teeth. The burn shot up my leg, finding my belly, and the urge to vomit returned, making me feel dizzy.
I brought the bottle to my lips and drank, welcoming the warmth in my chest. Another second or two under water, and I wouldn’t have taken another breath. I wouldn’t have woken.
The passageway outside the door was silent and dark. I stared at the ground, trying to remember what I’d seen. The only two people on that reef were Koy and Ryland. And the look in Ryland’s eyes when he wrapped his hand around my throat had been clear. He’d wanted me dead.
That meant that Koy had cut the rope. That he’d saved my life. But that couldn’t be true.
I threaded the needle with trembling hands and pinched the deepest part of the cut together. The needle went through my skin without so much as a prick, and I was grateful that I was still so cold I could barely feel it.
“Through and over. Through again.” I found my lips moving around the words silently, the tears falling from the tip of my nose as I worked.
Clove had taught me to stitch a wound when I was a girl. He’d cut himself on a grappling hook and when he caught me spying on him on the quarterdeck, he demanded that I sit and learn.
“Through again.” I whispered.
The wide cargo hold seemed to close in, making me feel small in the darkness as one crystal clear memory surfaced after the other. My father at his desk. My mother lining up the gemstones on the table before me.
Which are the fakes?
The first time I got it right, she took me to the top of the mainmast and we screamed into the wind.
I stared into the dark, watching the image of her twist in the shadows. The shape of her moved with a bend of light coming from the deck, flickering like a lantern’s flame. She was a ghost. And for a moment, I thought that maybe I was too. That I was existing in some in-between space where Isolde had been waiting for me. That maybe I hadn’t made it out of the water. That I’d died with the cold sea in my lungs.
In that moment, I wanted my mother. I wanted her the way I had as a little girl, waking from a nightmare. In all the years on Jeval and in the time since, I’d hardened the way Saint wanted me to. I’d become something not easily broken. But as I sat there stitching up my leg, a quiet cry escaping my lips, I felt young. Fragile. More than that, I felt alone.
I wiped at my slick cheek with the back of my bloodied hand