Page 9 of Saint
Zola wasn’t good at hiding his irritation, clearly bothered that I cared so little for his attentions. But I wasn’t going to stroke his ego, even if it got me what I needed. That was a door that was hard to close once it was opened.
Burke didn’t look at me, but I could feel his thoughtsdrifting in my direction. The crew wouldn’t be the only ones to suffer if they broke the helmsman’s decree. As second in command, Burke would bear a punishment for failing to control them, and the last thing I needed was for him to have a reason to resent me.
Zola dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “Make sure they’re ready to make port.”
Burke seemed to still be debating whether to protest Zola’s order, but he thought better of it, shuffling out and leaving the two of us alone.
“Make port?” I asked, trying to read the open log at the corner of his desk. “I thought we wouldn’t be in Ceros for a few more days.”
He found his way back around the desk, eyes off me now. “We won’t.”
“Then where are we stopping?”
“We run routes in the Narrows, just like they do in the Unnamed Sea. We make stops.” The sarcasm changed the rhythm of his speech. The poisoned honey that had been there moments ago was gone now and the man the crew feared had returned. The rumors belowdecks were that he’d buried his knife in the chest of his last stryker only weeks before I arrived on theLuna.
I bit my tongue, swallowing down the argument that was climbing up my throat. Every day I was on the water was another day someone was looking for Holland’s daughter and the fabled gemstone she’d stolen. I needed to get to Ceros before someone found me.
Zola returned his eyes to the parchment in front of him. The wooden rim that skirted his desk was the only thing keeping the contents from sliding when the ship tilted under a gale. I leaned to the left, instinctively countering my own weight.
“If that’s all, I have work to do,” he said.
He was a creature that needed to feel like he was calling the shots. In more than one way, he reminded me of my mother—wheels always turning. Always plotting and scheming.
I pulled the door shut behind me and came back out onto the deck as the sound of voices lifted over the wind. The horizon was a thick line of blue that encircled us in every direction, a color that deepened before it blended seamlessly into the sea.
Burke stepped past me, walking straight for the bow, and he lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. I squinted, trying to see what he was looking at, but it wasn’t until the low-hanging clouds cleared that I could make out the dark sliver of coastline far in the distance.
My heart jumped up into my throat when I saw it. Land. Not the red sand or craggy rocks that lined the shores of the Unnamed Sea. We’d officially crossed into the Narrows, the hovel of crofters and fishermen far north of Bastian. Its blue-green waters were haunted by storms that were the stuff of legends. It was also the last place, I hoped, that my mother would think to look for me.
“What city is this?”
Burke laughed through a grunt, leaning into the railing to spit into the water below. “City? There’s only one of those in the Narrows, if you want to call it that—Ceros. This is just Dern, a rotting crofter’s village. But there’s a tavern and more than fish and fowl to eat.” He turned back toward the helm, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Bear north six degrees! Get ready to reef the sheets!”
The crew was already moving, finding their places to start the sequence of actions that would take the ship to port. I reached up, feeling the small leather purse beneath my shirt that hung from the long gold chain around my neck.
There was no way to bring my father back or travel through the threads of time to save him. There was no way to tell the younger version of me to take his hand and run, the way I knew he wanted me to.
Leaving my mother would undercut her trade and undermine the power she was quickly amassing in the Unnamed Sea.
There was only one thing she hated more than losing, and that was the idea of losing to the Narrows. When we anchored in Ceros I would go to the Trade Council Chamber. I would ask to see the Gem Guild master who’d never be good enough for Holland. And then I’d hand him the thing that could sink her—the midnight.
The wind picked up, pushing theLunatoward shore, and I looked down to the splash of white water cutting around the bilge. I’d never sailed the waters of the Narrows or setfoot on its shores. But there was a solid feeling in my gut as I watched the sea race beneath the ship.
I hadn’t just left my mother in the Unnamed Sea. I’d left my home. The place I’d taken my first breaths. But I could feel in my bones that these unknown waters were the place I’d take my last.
4SAINT
Clove sat on an overturned crate, running the sharp edge of his knife around the mouth of the jewel-blue bottle with the same calm, certain look he always had.
This wasn’t a job we could do on the ship. The less our ever-changing crew knew, the better. The barkeeper at the tavern, however, owed us a hundred times over and it was in his best interest to let us have the room at the end of the hallway to work in when we came to Dern. Our payment was the unmarked Sowan rye we left behind.
Clove turned the bottle in a circle until the wax seal was broken and then he pried the cork free before handing it to me. Using the rye to trade the gem fakes had been his idea from the start, and the scheme had made us most of the coin we’d used for theAster.But we hadn’t counted on the fact that the rye would turn out to be so popular in the taverns, andwe’d had to be careful to not let it get out of hand. If we were caught, it could cost us the license we’d been waiting for.
I set the bottle on the table beside the others. This particular crate wouldn’t find its way to a tavern or the cabinet of a guild member in Ceros.
I opened the velvet pouch Henrik had given me and poured the red gemstones onto a wooden tray, counting them out in sets of twelve with the tip of my knife. There would be four bottles that would hold a dozen stones each, some of them fake and some of them genuine. The gem merchants in Ceros wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless they had a gem sage in their charge, and even then, they couldn’t report it to the Trade Council. Not when they’d purchased them illegitimately in the first place. It was the kind of trade that everyone involved stood to lose from. They also stood to gain a lot of coin.
Looking at the red beryl now, the weight of the risk we were taking settled heavily in the center of my chest. We’d traded small sums many times before, but Felix Roth would sooner gut us than lose a haul this valuable. I wondered what Henrik had done to convince him it was a good idea.
