Page 113 of The Isles of the Gods
She allows herself a small smile, and I study the way her lips curve. “Who doesn’t hold on to something in a storm like that?” she whispers. “I thought you’d killed yourself.”
“What happened?”
“You went flying, hit your head. The spirits…panicked.”
My eyes widen as memory floods back and my heart tries to clamber up my throat. “Theywhat? How are we still alive?”
“Well, I…had a conversation with them.”
“You did?” I try to sit up, and she holds me down by the shoulders.
“Don’t panic, Mister Magician. We figured it out between us. Had to, since you’d fallen down on the job.”
“Sorry,” I murmur, still gazing up at her as my heart begins to slow again. Her eyes are a mossy green, the closest I’ve ever seen to the shade of my magician’s marks. I curl my fingers slowly, trailing my fingertips along her skin. I can feel where the salt’s dried on it.
“Better not start apologizing now, my prince,” she says. “You’ll run out of time to cover it all.”
I pause, halfway to a smile. “Wait. If you’re here, who’s steering the boat?”
“Keegan. Now sit up nice and slow, because you’re going to want to see this.”
She wraps an arm around me to help me to my feet and holds me steady as I check whether I can support myself.
“You all right?”
“Maybe hold on a little longer,” I reply, sliding an arm around her waist and looking down at her. “Just to be extrasure.”
Still smiling, she lets me get away with it, and together we make our way across to the port side of our little boat, to gaze out across the sea.
The wind is still whipping around us, the tops breaking off the waves into whitecaps, but up ahead of us it’s like an invisible barrier slides through the air and the water—everything on the other side is different.
The change isn’t gradual, the clouds lessening, the seas becoming softer. Instead, on one side of the boundary are our threatening skies and dangerous seas. On the other, the water is a calm and friendly sparkling blue.
As we pass through the divide, theEmma’s sails stop straining, and she settles from a canter to a stroll. The breeze is light and the air is warm, stroking my skin with velvety fingers, the air spirits almost playful. It’s like we’ve sailed through an invisible dome, and inside lies a perfect summer day.
The sudden sunny atmosphere reminds me of Kethos. When I was young, we used to cruise down there on one of the family yachts in the summer. We’d anchor offshore and dive into the sea for hours, drying ourselves in the sun like a row of warm seals laid out on the deck.
But here I see not the Kethosi coast on the horizon, but all at once—though they must have been there before—eight islands rising before us. It’s as if something stopped me from noticing them until this moment.
The largest is the Isle of the Mother, and her seven children are gathered before her in a circle. On the map, a lightly traced line joins the eight of them in a circle, and now I can see reefs beneath the water connecting them, dark shadows just close enough to the surface to cause little breaking waves. Acrown of white, starred with the vivid green jewels of the islands.
The islands themselves are lush, crowded with impenetrable jungle, a hundred shades of green tangled together.
Selly shifts within the circle of my arm, peeling off her wet jacket and gloves without pulling away. She lets them fall to the deck, turning her face up to the sun and breathing out slowly. My gaze traces a path along her profile as the breeze teases her hair, strands of it drying in the sun and starting to curl.
Then, as she reaches out to rest her hands on the railing, I see something else, and a shock goes through my whole body. “Selly…your marks.”
She glances down, then yanks up her shirtsleeves, gasping as she reveals her forearms. The thick, childlike magician’s marks that were painted there before are gone.
In their place are finely wrought emerald lines, in geometric patterns I’ve never seen before. Like a kaleidoscope, squares and triangles and diamonds fit together in endless complexity.
“What are they?” she whispers.
“Nothing I’ve ever seen,” I say slowly. The sight is electric, sending a shimmer through me I can’t explain. An air magician’s marks are all loops and swirls and curves, not…notthis.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur. “These aren’t even close to…Selly, I don’t know.”
