the rope, looking out at the water before his eyes drifted to me. “I don’t want you to sign it,” he said, his voice deep.
I stepped toward him, taking the rope from his hands and dropping it on the deck. He softened when I snaked my arms under his and wrapped them around his middle. “Saint will come through. I know it.”
He set his chin on top of my head. “And the Roths?”
“If Saint delivers, they will too.”
He fell quiet for a moment. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t tried to get back at Zola for Willa.”
“West, this was always about Holland. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t asked you to take me across the Narrows.”
He knew it was true. But West’s nature was to take the blame. He’d had people depending on him for too long.
I tipped my head back to look up at him. “Promise me you’ll do what you have to do.”
He took a strand of my hair and let it slip through his fingers, making me shiver. Silence from West was a bad omen. He wasn’t a man of many words, but he knew what he wanted and he wasn’t afraid to take it.
“Promise me,” I said again.
He nodded reluctantly. “I will.”
THIRTY-FOUR
When I woke that morning in West’s quarters, he was gone.
The shutters of the window had come open, tapping softly against the wall in the wind, and the memory of that morning in Dern flashed before my eyes. The gray sky and the cool breeze. The cast of light through the hazy cabin. But it was the Unnamed Sea out the window this time.
I sat up, sliding my hand beneath the quilt where West had been. It was cold. His boots, too, were missing from where they usually sat beside the door.
Out on the deck, Auster and Paj were eating their breakfasts in the breezeway.
“Where is he?” I asked, my voice still hoarse with sleep.
“He and Hamish went to see the shipwright.” Paj motioned toward the harbor.
Auster stood from the crate he was sitting on. “Hungry?”
“No.” I shook my head. My stomach had been turning since I’d come up from the water at Fable’s Skerry.
I walked to the railing, watching the deck of the Sea- dragon. Holland’s crew was already up and working, and the melodic brush of holystoning echoed over the water. I used to sit cradled in the jib on my father’s ship, watching the deckhands scrape the white bricks over the deck, grinding the wood pale and smooth. Back and forth, back and forth. My father liked his decks sparkling clean, like any good helmsman, and it was the job dreaded by everyone onboard.
White as bone. Not until it’s white as bone.
My father’s voice snaked through my mind, like the hum that rattled the hull of a ship in a storm.
Not until it’s white as bone.
The grind of sand on the wood was as warm under my skin as every memory I had of those days. When Saint would lean into the railing with his elbows, watching the crystal blue water for my mother to surface from a dive.
I hoped that was how my memories of the Marigold would stay, there within reach when I needed them for the next two years.
Willa came up the steps from below, her boots in her hands. Her twisted locks were tied away from her face, falling down her back like cords of bronze. The scar on her cheek was flushed pink in the cold.
“Where are you going?” I asked, watching her button her jacket.
“Into the village to see the smith. Can’t get back to Ceros without an anchor.”
I looked over the rooftops in the distance. Something inside of me was holding its breath, and I realized it was not being able to lay eyes on West that was bothering me. I’d been thinking about that cool look in his eye since the night before. The quiet that had come over him when I said I was going to sign Holland’s contract.
“I’ll come with you.” I went back to West’s cabin and fetched my boots and jacket, raking my hair up into a knot on top of my head.
A few minutes later we were climbing the steps out of the harbor, the sun on our faces.
Willa walked the streets in a grid, looking for the smith’s shop, and every time someone caught sight of her scar, their steps faltered a little. She was a fearsome thing to behold, her small