Page 24 of The Isles of the Gods
I assume the girl who went to investigate the galley—by the sound of the order given, she is not the ship’s habitual cook—will arrive with food in due course. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to distract myself.
I pull up the lid of my trunk, studying the titles nestled amid my few spare clothes. Reading always helps me push away worries, or worse. It helps me breathe. I pause as I spot Tajan’sMythos and Temples.I couldn’t have brought better reading, it turns out, given our destination. Tajan is boring, often predictable, but he’s nothing if not thorough.
A loud thump on the door startles me, and I narrowly escape slamming the trunk’s lid shut on my fingers.
Barrica, please let that be the girl with my meal, and not Leander.
Holding the treatise carefully against my chest, I open the door and find myself face to face not with the girl who wentto the galley, but the other one. She’s distinctive—she marches everywhere, like she’s bracing herself for battle.
We met this morning and exchanged a few words. She looked me up and down like she was measuring me, then nodded, which seemed to indicate I’d passed a test.
“I’m here to fix your porthole,” she says abruptly, brandishing a bucket at me.
“Now?”
“We might hit rough seas overnight,” she says, nodding at the Tajan I’m still holding against my chest, in a position I will admit is not unlike a shield. “Lots of paper in here. Hate to see it get soggy.”
I’m in no position to argue with her, and I’m too rattled by recent events to resist, so I step back obediently and retreat to sit on the edge of the bed. She sets her bucket on my little table, and leans in to look at the seal on the window.
She’s about my age, her blond hair pulled back into a messy braid, her suntanned skin heavily freckled. Her green eyes are narrowed, and she scowls at the porthole as if it’s personally offended her.Selly,my mind supplies. That’s what the captain called her.
“So, heading to the Isles,” she says, retrieving a screwdriver from her bucket and beginning to remove the screws from around the brass edge of the porthole.
“Unexpectedly,” I agree, and I’m sure I don’t hide my grimace. I see now why she’s here—she wants information, and she correctly suspects I’ll have it.
She holds out the first screw, and I stare at it a beat too long before I understand what she wants. I push up from the bed to join her, holding out my hand so she can drop the screw into it.We’re both silent as she removes its fellows, dropping each of them into my palm, one after another.
She yanks the brass frame off the porthole with a grunt, sets it down on the table, and reaches into her bucket for a large jar, which she unscrews. Then she peels off the fingerless leather gloves she wears, revealing vivid green skin on the back of each of her hands.
I’ve never seen magician’s marks like these on anyone but a child—rather than the intricate design that should indicate her affinity, they’re simply a thick stripe, as if they’ve been painted on by a wide brush. I’m instantly curious, but as I draw a breath to ask, she follows my gaze and her face closes over. Cheeks flushing, she turns her hands over so the backs are hidden. And I keep my mouth shut.
Using her fingers, she scoops a generous dollop of black goo out of the jar, and I mentally implore Barrica to ensure she doesn’t touch any of my books afterward.
“Does this make any more sense to you than it does to me?” she finally asks, dabbing the goo into the space she’s made by removing the frame. “Because from where I’m watching, we’re about to go to war—our ship is sinking—and instead of doing something useful, we’re trying to bail it out with an invisible bucket, with a bedtime story.”
“It’s more than a story,” I reply—not that I’m in any mood to defend Leander. “There’s every reason to believe the prince can prevent a war if he makes a sacrifice at the Isles. It worked for King Anselm, and it should work now.” It would have already worked if he wasn’t running late, as usual.
She spins around to face me, eyes narrowing as she tries to decide whether I’m pulling her leg. “Are you serious?King Anselm is a bedtime story too. That’s what we’re relyingon?”
“King Anselm is much more than a bedtime story,” I assure her. “He may have lived five centuries ago, but he was real.”
“You’re saying he truly ran around fighting a war with a goddess on his team?”
“Well, I think he was onherteam, but yes.”
“How can you possibly know what happened hundreds of years ago?”
“Books, mostly.”
“You know they make up the stories in books, right? Especially the ones about magical kings?”
She sounds moderately concerned for my sanity, but finally I’m on solid ground. “Not all stories are made up, and in this case, there are multiple contemporaneous sources on the tale of King Anselm.”
She eyes me sidelong, and I thinkcontemporaneousmight be the snag.
“There are plenty of written accounts of the original sacrifice,” I say. “Many are by people who were alive at the time, rather than repeating something they’d heard. Also, they line up in the important details. That means it almost certainly happened the way they say it did.”
She stops her work to properly study me, measuring my explanation. I find myself fighting the urge to shift my weight like a schoolboy found wanting, as if something depends on her accepting my words.
