Then, as the darkness advanced, I watched the tide retreat again. Lamps were lit in the Alpha villages on the slopes below us.
It wasn’t the underwater city that I was thinking of, as I watched the tide go out, the sea slinking away like a fox from a henhouse. I was thinking of Leonard’s passing comment that the Confessor had come from the Sunken Shore. Somewhere, only a few miles down the sloping coastline, was the place where she and Kip had grown up. She would have been sent away when they were split, but Kip had probably stayed on. This strange landscape would have been his home. As a child, he would have roamed these same hills. Perhaps he’d climbed up to this very viewpoint, and seen the tide go out, as I saw it now, more and more of the land being exposed to the moon’s gaze.
When it was fully dark I woke Zoe and Piper.
“Get up,” I said.
Zoe gave a low groan as she stretched. Piper hadn’t even moved. I bent and yanked the blanket off him, throwing it down at his feet as I headed back to the lookout point.
We couldn’t risk a fire, within sight of the villages below, so we ate cold stew in the darkness. While Piper and Zoe packed up their things, I stood with my arms crossed, kicking at a tree root. Finally we moved off down the hill, toward the rich green slopes that edged the deepest inlets. We walked in silence. When, after a few hours, Piper offered me the water flask, I grabbed it without speaking.
“What’s got you in such a foul mood?” said Zoe, shooting me a sideways look.
“I’m not,” I said.
“At least you’re making Zoe seem like a ray of sunshine in comparison,” Piper said. “It’s a nice change.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d been gritting my teeth ever since we’d come within sight of the sea.
I remembered the day that Kip and I had first seen the ocean. We’d sat together, on the long grass overlooking the cliffs, and stared as the sea lapped at the edges of the world. And if he’d seen it before, he didn’t remember—it had been new to both of us.
Now I knew that the sea would have been a daily sight for him. He would have been used to it—probably didn’t even glance at it as he went about his daily business. The sea, which we’d sat and marveled at together, would have been as familiar to him as the thatched roofs of his village.
It wasn’t only Kip that I had lost. Even the memories of what we had shared were being snatched from me, rendered false by what I’d learned about him.
Safest not to remember, I told myself, walking faster. Safest not to disturb the drowned city of my memories.
Ω
We had to navigate carefully through the unforgiving landscape. We weren’t only avoiding the Alpha villages, but also the inlets and fissures that penetrated even into the high slopes. Several times the route in front of us opened up into dark water, the gash of a crevasse. We walked all night, with only a brief rest at dawn. It was past noon when we left Alpha country and reached the edge of the straggling flatlands and the sea-mired spits. I stopped and looked back, one last time, at the Alpha villages behind us.
“I heard it, too,” Zoe said, “when Leonard mentioned that the Confessor came from here.”
Piper was walking ahead of us, out of earshot. Zoe, one foot up on a rock, was waiting for me.
“I figured you’d be curious, when we got here,” she said.
“It’s not just that,” I said. I remembered her face at the campsite, when I’d caught her swaying with the music. I kept my eyes on the ground as we walked together. And for the first time, I ventured to say out loud what the Confessor had told me about Kip’s past. I needed to speak it. And I offered my secret to her like an apology, because I had intruded on her secret dreams.
I told her everything the Confessor had told me: how Kip had been cruel and had delighted in having her branded and driven away. How, later, when he could afford it, he’d tracked her down and tried to arrange to have her locked in the Keeping Rooms for his own protection.
I told Zoe how Kip’s past had tangled everything that I felt. When I looked at the Sunken Shore and tried