Page 96 of The Isles of the Gods
Keegan’s white as a ghost, eyes unseeing as he stares at the crates of rubbish hiding us. Trying, I’m sure, to find a way out of this, to find any answer other than the one I’ve given. And coming up with nothing.
Selly’s clinging to my hand like it’s a lifeline, and I’m trying to fight the drum beating inside my head, drowning out everything else.This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.
We’ve failed. My friends from school are dead. Her crew is dead. The ambassador is dead. Soon enough the whole world will thinkI’mdead, and if we’re found here, I will be.
I want to crawl in behind the stacks of crates, lie down on the cobblestones, and hide until someone comes to take care of this for us. Until someone shows up to sayI’ll take it from hereand tell us exactly what to do.
Except that was the ambassador, and now she’s gone.
I don’t remember the last time I cried—I must have been very young—but when I think now of Lady Lanham’s face, of her smile, of Penrie Lanham on the progress fleet…
I squeeze my eyes shut against the hot ache behind them. Guilt is roiling inside me, twisting my gut with the sick knowledge that if I’d made the sacrifice when I was supposed to—if I had strengthened Barrica as my family has always done—Mellacea would never have been willing to challenge us.
I can’t even think what I was doing instead that was so important. Parties with friends who are dead now, because they boarded my decoy fleet thinking it was just another stop on our endless train of good times.
Putting off the journey my father made on time, because I wanted to keep a piece of him—keep his journal entries—to myself for a little longer. If I wanted to be close to him so badly, I should have done my duty like he did.
But I didn’t.
And now I don’t know what to do.
Selly squeezes my hand again, and when I open my eyes, her steady green gaze is waiting for me.
“We could sell Keegan’s necklace,” she murmurs. “Disguise you, get you onto a boat home as a passenger on the lower decks.”
I shake my head. “What good am I on a slow boat home when a war’s beginning?”
“What else can we do but get you out of the city?” Keegan asks quietly.
And suddenly Idoknow, but I have to make myself speak the words. “I do need a boat,” I say slowly. “But not to head to Alinor.”
Selly lifts her brows, and I can see she’s grasped my meaning. “The map in your father’s journal isn’t exact, Leander. It’s a sketch—it’s not like the charts you gave to Rensa, and a trip at sea isn’t like traveling on land. If our course is off by even a fraction, we’ll miss the Isles altogether. And if that happens, we’ll die out there.”
“We won’t miss them,” I say, soft but certain. “The map will be enough. And everything we need is in the journal—descriptions of the harbor, the temple. I know what we’re looking for, and Keegan’s read it too.”
Selly studies me, biting her lower lip. “So we sail there ourselves and make the sacrifice.” Everything she’s done so far has been to keep me alive—it’s what her captain sacrificed her ship and her crew for. And rolling the dice like this is just the opposite.
Finally, Keegan speaks again, slow and deliberate as ever. “I doubt anything we do can prevent a war now,” he muses. “But perhaps we can make it short and sharp. Reduce the number of people who are killed. The Mellaceans are far more likely to back down again if they realize Barrica has been strengthened.”
Selly sucks in a breath. “The type of boat we can crew with three people, two of whom don’t know what they’re doing…” She shakes her head. “It’s a long way to go. I’m not sure either of you is understanding what this would be like.”
“I’m sure we’re not,” I agree. “But I do understand the alternative.”
“The odds are we won’t make it,” she says. “We have a drawing, not a chart. Winter’s starting, so the weather will be unpredictable, and even if we did pull it off, getting fromthe Isles to Alinor afterward…we’d be against the wind all theway.”
We’re silent, Keegan and I watching Selly as she closes her eyes, biting her lower lip again. I squeeze her hand, but I can’t bring myself to ask her again, not out loud.
Everything depends on her willingness to risk her life for this. Her father’s fleet might fly Alinor’s flag, but she didn’t grow up in Kirkpool—she didn’t grow up with the politics, or the people.
She could walk away from us right now, and with what she knows, take a place on the crew of any ship out there in the harbor. She could find a way back to her father’s fleet.
Her lashes lift, and she tips her head back, looking up at the only sliver of sky we can see. “We can’t just go out there to the docks and buy a boat. It might not be safe, with Alinorish accents, by now. Word spreadsfastamong sailors. We’d leave a trail a mile wide for whoever comes asking questions after us.”
I nod slowly, my gut dropping as I reach helplessly for another idea, another way to get a boat, and come up short.
She lowers her gaze, studying each of us in turn. “So we’ll have to go south,” she says. “We can head down the coast, find a boat at a smaller town.”
“You mean you’ll…?”
