I tugged the shirt over my head and unbuttoned my trousers before I went to the basin. My blistered knuckles stung as I slid my hands slowly into the hot water. The bubbles smelled like herbs, and I raked the water up my arms, scrubbing before I moved to my face and neck. When I was finished I went to the mirror, wiping at the places I’d missed with the corner of a cloth.
My mouth twisted as I looked at my reflection in the glass. Once, my mother might have stood before this mirror. Isolde couldn’t have been much older than me when Zola first took her on, and I wondered how long it had taken her to find out what kind of man he was. Her days on the Luna were ones she’d never told me about, and part of me didn’t want to know anything about them. In my mind, her spirit lived on the Lark. I didn’t like the idea of any piece of her being left here.
I pulled my fingers through my hair to untangle as much as I could, and wound the length of it up until I could tuck the end underneath to make a tight knot. I didn’t bother trying to tame the loose waving pieces that fell around my face. Zola may have needed someone to play the role of a Saltblood, but he’d have to settle for me.
Calla tossed the shirt onto the bed and I picked it up, examining the cloth. It wasn’t one that traders usually wore. The linen was newly spun and thin, falling down the arms softly to the wrists. The trousers, too, were new, made of a thick black wool fit with whalebone buttons. Zola had obviously been prepared when he stepped into that alley in Dern. He’d had a very detailed plan. The thought made a tingle run up my spine.
Two days, I told myself. Two days and I would be on my way back to the Marigold.
There was a knock at the door before I’d even finished tucking in the shirt, and Calla opened it to one of the Waterside strays. He held my boots in his small hands. They were cleaned and shined, the laces replaced with new ones made of a tightly knit cord. I stared down at them, and emotion curled thick in my throat, remembering the night that West had given them to me.
I’d stood in the rain at the village gambit, watching him and Willa in the alley. The light from the streetlamps carved the angles of West’s face, and his voice had changed when he said my name. That was the first time I’d seen the underneath of him, if only for a moment. And I missed him so badly I could hardly breathe.
I couldn’t help but wonder at what my father and Zola had said. That there was a darkness to West that went deeper than I’d known. A part of me didn’t want to know. To believe that it didn’t matter. Anyone who’d survived the Narrows had that same darkness. It was the only way to stay alive.
But that night in Dern, when we said we wouldn’t lie to each other, he hadn’t told me the whole truth. And I was afraid of what I might find if he did. That when I saw him again, he would look different to me. That he would look like Saint.
TWELVE
The faint flicker of sprawling lights glowed like stars on the shoreline ahead.
Bastian.
I stood at the bow of the Luna, watching the city come closer. It was a place I knew only in stories. Streets and lights and colors that formed memories that weren’t my own.
My mother had loved Bastian. The way the wet streets shone in the moonlight. The roll of buildings up the hill and the smell of the markets. But in the end, she left and she’d never gone back.
The hands of the dockworkers below slowed on their tasks as the Luna made port, and the crew pulled up her sails, stowing them neatly on the masts. She looked beautiful in the cloak of night, the dark wood gleaming and polished. But there was no amount of scrubbing or ruffled shirts that could hide where we’d come from. We were Narrows-born traders through and through and from the look of everyone in the harbor, they knew it.