Page 78 of Saint
“I meant what I said. I’ll come back and help you dredge the Snare.”
It wasn’t just because I wanted to see my mother fall anymore. It was about the helmsman standing in front of me. It was about that dark gleam in his eyes. The way he said exactly what he meant. If there was a future for the Narrows, he was it. And that was a future for me too.
“I know you will,” he said.
I took a step toward him, and this time, I didn’t wait for him to kiss me. I lifted up onto my toes and took his face in my hands before I pressed my mouth to his and breathed him in. His arms came around me, fingers finding the skin beneath the hem of my shirt, their warmth flooding into me as they drifted up my back. He kissed me deeper, leaning into me until we were moving backward, across the floor.
He laid me down on the bare cot and I pulled him closer, tugging the shirt over his head so that I could press my handsflat against his ribs, his chest. I said a kind of goodbye that didn’t need words or promises or plans.
I couldn’t change that night in my mother’s study or the path I’d walked to Simon’s. I couldn’t go back and erase my signature from that contract with Zola. But I could cast my lot alongside Saint’s and know that there was something true in it. Because there was. The hum in the air that hovered around us. The calm that settled in my blood when he touched me. The feeling that we were only the beginning of a story that would be told long after we were gone. They were things I could take with me.
A year was nothing if it let me come back tothis.
29SAINT
The cold that lived in my bones was gone for the first time since I left Cragsmouth.
Isolde slept soundly beside me, despite the fact that she’d face the Trade Council when she woke. She hadn’t so much as blinked when she realized there was no way out of it, and I’d half expected her to disappear, slipping out into the night and back to wherever she’d come from. But I was learning that even though she’d left Bastian and her life behind, she wasn’t the running kind.
Her hair fell across her cheek, hiding the trail of freckles that crested her cheekbone, and her breath was so soft that I could hardly hear it over the sound of the rain and Nash’s snoring upstairs. Even Clove had managed to close his eyes for a rare few hours of uninterrupted sleep. But I hadn’t beenable to let go of the image of Isolde sleeping beside me, one hand curled against her chest. If she was leaving, I was going to remember it.
The bare cot was draped with a few unraveling quilts and we’d lain there watching the raindrops streak down the window without talking until her breaths pulled long and deep. This girl who’d dropped onto theRivendragging a sea of demons behind her felt like the only unmoving thing. A point on the tilting horizon.
I’d never been given anything, not even from my father. He’d believed in earning. Making myself worthy of something. But I was painfully aware that there was nothing I could do to merit that feeling of warmth at my side. And I wouldn’t pretend to.
Carefully, I reached over Isolde’s sleeping frame and into the pocket of her jacket for the purse that she kept hidden there. The leather had been worn smooth by her fingers, and the stone’s weight was heavy in my hand. I opened it, letting the stone roll into my palm, and I held it to the moonlight. Violet ribbons danced, suspended in the almost- opaque black gem, like a flicker of fire frozen in time.
This one small stone had tipped the balance of Isolde’s life until she was tumbling into mine. It was a thing that could build cities or burn them. Make kings or slay them. And I could feel the weight of it the moment she had shown it to me.
There was that thing in me, too. That voice that said that this gem in my hand could mend every unraveling thing—my ship, my debt to Henrik, my trading operation. Bastian, theTrade Council, the Narrows. If there were ever a broken oil lamp just waiting to catch flame, this was it. And I’d never had that kind of power within reach before.
I sat up slowly, letting my arm slip from beneath Isolde’s still body. Her face turned to the moonlight as I stood, and my hand closed over the gem tightly until I could feel its points against the tender healing skin of my palm. She’d trusted me with it, but she shouldn’t have. Isolde saw the almost-man trying to build a ladder he could climb. She didn’t know I’d made that ladder with the bones of the dead.
The door barely creaked as I closed it behind me and stepped out into the alley. The rain was finally beginning to let up and the city was quiet with a calm that only existed in Ceros in the middle of the night. Tomorrow would come with its own worries and problems, but for now, the stars were stretched out across the black skies as brightly as they were on Emilia’s croft.
I could feel that warmth I’d left with Isolde pull away from me as I started up the alley, and when a pair of eyes found me in the dark, I pulled a copper from my belt.
As soon as the moonlight hit it, a small boy stepped out from the shadows, his trousers rolled up at the ankles to reveal muddy bare feet. His black hair was wet and curling into ringlets over his eyebrows, as if it had been trimmed just enough for him to see. He blinked once before he looked up at me.
“I want you to sit up in that window.” I pointed overhead. “Anyone besides me comes to that door, and I want every bastard in the Pinch to draw their knife.”
The boy nodded.
“If you’re still there when I get back, I’ll have another copper for you.”
He snatched the coin from my fingers and scurried away into the black. The sound of his bare feet slapping in the mud disappeared around the corner and I watched the window that looked out over the street until I saw his face appear behind the fogged glass.
I took the bridges toward the merchants’ district for the first time. Now that I had a trade license, it wouldn’t be the last. There would be deals to strike, contracts to negotiate, and investments to be made if we were going to take the Narrows back, like Clove said. I had a feeling I’d come to know these streets well. Better than I wanted to.
It only took three coppers to find out where the man I was looking for lived. That was the problem with these coin-rich fools. They’d forgotten they had something to fear.
The door of the gray stone house was painted red and set with a brass knocker that was cast in the shape of a ship’s helm. On either side, green velvet curtains were pulled closed behind the window glass, but the glow of candlelight seeped between the panels. In another few minutes, the sun would rise over the water, and the house would begin to stir.
I reached up, taking hold of the knocker and rapping three times, more loudly than was necessary in case the bastard wasn’t awake yet. The flit of light behind the curtains moved and footsteps shuffled behind the door before it was yanked open. On the other side, a young woman in an apron looked up at me with wide eyes.
“May I”—her gaze raked over me—“help you?”
“I’d like to see the merchant.”
