single piece of midnight in the years since Isolde brought it up from the depths.
But the ship logs were clear, without so much as a day left unaccounted for. The crew had been diving in Yuri’s Constellation for nearly thirty-two days before they went back to Bastian for supplies. A day later they’d returned, with no deviations off course.
I sat up, staring into the shadows, my mind working. The thin threads of an answer glimmered to life, taking shape in the dark.
If I was right, and Isolde hadn’t found the midnight in Yuri’s Constellation, then someone had lied. But how?
If the navigator had forged the logs, there’d be at least thirty people on Holland’s ship, including the helmsman, who would have been able to report the discrepancy in the days and weeks after the dive.
But maybe it was my mother who’d lied. If Isolde had any suspicion about the value of her discovery, maybe she’d kept the stone’s origin to herself. Maybe she’d found it when she was alone.
I stood abruptly, sending the chair tipping back. It clattered on the floor behind me as my hands slid over the maps, looking for the one I’d seen days ago. The one I hadn’t even looked twice at.
When I found it, I pulled it from under the others. The Bastian Coast. I took the lantern from the wall and set it at the corner, moving my fingers over the thick, soft parchment until I found it.
Fable’s Skerry.
“West!” I studied the depths and charts noted along the shore, the map of currents that slid around the little islet. “West!”
He appeared in the dark breezeway with a dry shirt pulled over one arm. “What is it?”
“What if she didn’t find it here?” I panted. “What if she lied?”
“What?”
“Why would Isolde steal the midnight? Why would she leave Bastian?” My voice sounded far away. “She didn’t trust Holland. Maybe she didn’t want her to know where she found it.”
He was listening now, sliding the other arm into the shirt as he walked toward me. “But where? She would have had to have a ship and a crew. The log says they were here.”
“They were,” I breathed, flipping through the parchments in the drawer until I found the log. I dropped it between us. “Except for one day.” I set my finger on Bastian.
“There’s no way she found it in Bastian. There are no reefs in those waters. There isn’t even so much as a sandbar for miles.”
I pointed to the islet.
“Fable’s Skerry?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s just a rock with a lighthouse on it,” he said.
“What if it’s not just a rock?”
He picked up the chair, setting it upright before he looked at the map again, thinking. “It’s just offshore of Bastian. Don’t you think if there was something there, someone would have found it?”
I let out an exhausted breath. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re looking in the wrong place. I don’t think it’s here, West.”
I didn’t know if I was making any sense. The lack of sleep and hours in the cold water had cast my mind in a fog. But still, that feeling was there. That doubt.
“Are you sure?” West said, studying me.
I clutched the quilt tighter around me. “No.”
It was a feeling, not a fact. I paced the floor in front of him, the warmth finally beginning to return beneath my skin as my cheeks flushed hot.
“I don’t think it’s here,” I said again, my voice a whisper.
His eyes jumped back and forth on mine and I watched as he weighed out my words. After a moment, he was walking toward the open door. And as soon as he disappeared into the breezeway, his voice rang out on the deck.
“Make ready!”
THIRTY
It had only taken Willa an hour to figure out our anchor problem. She sent Koy and West back into the water to fill one of the empty iron-framed crates from the cargo hold with rocks from the seafloor. Once it was rigged, we hauled it up and secured it to the ship.
It was a temporary fix, one that wouldn’t hold against another storm. When we got to Sagsay Holm we’d have to use the last of our coin to replace the anchor, giving everyone yet another reason to be angry about West’s orders.
I sat curled up in the netting of the jib with the quilt from West’s cabin pulled tight around me. I hadn’t been able to sleep as we sailed through the night, headed for Fable’s