this reef was a monster, regenerating at a pace that made each break in the rock glow white with new growth. Fish swarmed around pointed crests, where delicate sea fans, bubble coral, and purple death anemone were scattered in brilliant shapes and colors.
Somewhere in the tangle of shoals, Isolde had found midnight.
The tips of West’s fingers grazed my arm as I sank below him to the tip of the ridge. The color of the sea bottom told me that the bedrock was limestone. Caches of calcite, fluorite, and onyx would litter the reef in pockets, and I could hear their distinct calls all around me, humming from where they lay beneath the rock.
I set my hands on the shelf before me and closed my eyes, letting a string of bubbles trail up from my lips. The place between my eyebrows pinched as I listened, sorting through the sounds one at a time until I found the deep, resonant ring of something that didn’t belong. Some sort of agate? Maybe tiger’s eye. I couldn’t tell.
My eyes opened and I swam over the ridge, trying to find it. The sound grew, more a feeling in my chest than something I could hear, and when it was so close that I felt as if it was writhing within me, I stopped, touching the bulbous piece of broken basalt that eyed me from beneath a growth of branching coral.
I pulled at a strip of pink silk from my belt and tied it loosely around the frond so that its ends rippled in the pull of the current. Koy came down beside me, getting to work. He inspected the spot before he chose a pick and a chisel. When he slid his mallet free, I kicked off, making my way farther down the reef.
West’s shadow followed mine, and when I found another suspicious cache, I stopped, fitting myself into a corner of the ridge so I could tie another marker. West watched me, taking a pick from his belt, and when I turned to start again, he caught my hand, pulling me back through the current toward him.
The edges of the silk kissed my feet as he looked up at me and his fingers tightened around my arm. It was the first time he’d touched me since I’d made my deal with Holland and I could see that he was waiting. For what, I didn’t know. West was adrift, lost without the anchor of the crew and the ship. The guilt of knowing I’d been a part of that made it feel as if the air in my chest was on fire.
I threaded my fingers into his and squeezed. The corners of his mouth softened and he let me go, letting the tow of water take me over the shelf, away from him. In another moment, he was gone.
I looked down as the tide carried me over the coral, watching the reef run past me until another gemstone song caught my ear. Then another. And another. And when I looked back to the end of the reef where Koy and West had been, it vanished in the murky blue. It was the color of a sleeping sea, my mother would say, because the water only ever looked like that before dawn.
The labyrinth of reefs held everything from black diamonds to the rarest of sapphires, and most of the stories my mother had told me about dredging in the Unnamed Sea were born in these waters.
This place had known my mother.
The thought made a sinking feeling drop between my ribs as I tied another strip of silk and kicked off, letting the current take me again. She’d never told a soul where she’d found the midnight. What other secrets had she left here?
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Fable.”
I was still floating in the deep, infinite blue illuminated around me. The reef stretched out below, the ripple of sunlight dancing on the surface above.
“Fable.” My name was soft on West’s gravelly voice.
The length of him pressed against me, and I felt his fingers slide through mine. The blisters on my hands stung as he pressed my knuckles to his mouth.
“Time to wake up.”
I opened my eyes just enough to see a faint light spilling through the slats of the closed window shutters of the helmsman’s quarters. I rolled beneath the quilts to face West and set my head on the crook of his shoulder, fitting my hands beneath him. They were still a bit numb, even after a few hours of sleep