Page 90 of Saint

“You’re cold, love.” He said it almost to himself.

“Tea.”

Clove said the word almost automatically, rising to his feet and dropping the log on one of the steps as Saint draped the quilt over my shoulders. His arms wrapped tightly around me, hands moving over my skin to bring the warmth back into my limbs.

“Emerald?” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking with cold. I could hear the gemstone before I’d even opened the crate.

“A lot of it,” Saint answered.

The new map he was working on was fixed to the table behind him. He’d specially commissioned the desk from a woodworker in Ceros so that it could be set up beside the railing. That way he could see the surface of the water when I was diving. I didn’t mind. It meant that his face was the first thing I saw every time I came up from below.

I resisted the urge to touch the parchment with my wet hands, but I loved the smell of the ink when he was working. It was almost finished, a detailed rendering of the ruggedshoreline west of Sowan. There was no end to the parts of the Narrows that needed mapping and I suspected Saint would spend the better part of his life attempting to complete the job. It was only one of the enterprises he’d begun since we set sail on our first trade route.

Clove reemerged from the passageway with a steaming cup of tea and Saint let me go so that Clove could set it in my hands.

I took a small sip, mostly interested in what the tea’s warmth would do for my fingers. “We should head back, leave the rest for next month. There are only so many places we can keep stashing gemstones.”

“Emilia’s expecting us, anyway,” Clove said, picking up the log he’d abandoned. The ink was still staining his fingertips.

We had a system now. Dredge and sell, but not all of it. The rest we found other uses for. Nothing that would draw attention, just enough movement to give the gem merchants in the Narrows an advantage. I imagined the Gem Guild in the Unnamed Sea, baffled by the influx of stones, especially when so many had originally come from their own waters.

That was the irony of it. The tales of the Narrows were different than the ones I’d heard as a child. They weren’t just the stories of the traders who sailed these waters or the people who lived on its shores. They were the story of the sea itself. Her love and her anger. Her favor and her cruelty.

Once, a man who ran the gambit shop in Dern told me that the sea gives and she takes. That for every gem dredged from the reefs, she required restitution. And she was patient. She waited to call in her debts.

We’d had no way of knowing just how many ships had sunk on those reefs or how many of them bore crests from the Unnamed Sea. There was a trove of wealth that had been snatched back from Bastian, and no one had thought to come looking for it. Not in the teeth of Tempest Snare.

The wreckage seemed to go on for miles, the poor souls who’d sailed those ships long dead. But the bellies of those vessels still held the jewels and coin that had set up our post in the Pinch and would soon have three new ships under construction in Dern. Nash himself was heading the builds.

It would be slow, and it would be steady, but it was the very fortune Bastian had taken from the sea that was now chipping away at its crumbling, gilded edges.

The stories the gambit told me are true,I thought.The seagives.

Saint believed that she would never betray him. He’d given his heart to her, after all. Like he’d given it to me. But something told me the deep wouldn’t share a love like that forever.

One day, she wouldtake.