Page 58 of The Isles of the Gods
“The tiller,” I correct him automatically.
“The tiller,” he agrees. “I won’t be as good as you, but I can ask the water spirits to keep us on a straight course, ask the air spirits for a gentle enough wind that the sail’s easier to manage.”
I want to disagree, but the truth is I do need to sleep. So I let him rest his hand on the oar beside mine and show him how the boat turns when he pushes it away or pulls it toward him. He’s distractingly close, and I’m paying far more attention than I wish I was to the places we touch at hand and knee, turned slightly toward each other. It’s as if having noticed, I now can’t tear my attention away from him.
“Every movement should be small,” I warn him, making myself sound businesslike. “Subtle. Anything big, you risk tipping us. So just go against your instincts at every stage, and we should be fine.”
He snickers, and I carefully ease my hand free to let him try it on his own. The air’s chill against my skin when I pull away. He laughs at me when I twitch, ready to grab the tiller from him at the first sign of trouble, and it’s mostly to keep my hands occupied, and because my skin is itching with dried salt, that I start peeling off my gloves.
The moment he sees the backs of my hands, I realize I’ve made a mistake.
“Selly! What’s—” He tries to grab for my wrist, and I lunge for the tiller, and suddenly he’s dizzyingly close and I’m shoving him back onto his side of the boat with far too much force.
“You want to tip us?”
“But those are magician’s marks!” He’s not interested in helming the boat anymore, leaning in to get a better look at my hand, and I can’t pull it away since I’m the one holding the tiller now. He bends his head over my hand like he’s reading a map. “I’ve never seen them like that. Not on an adult. How does your magic work?”
“It doesn’t,” I reply heavily, that new, different connection between us gone in an instant. “I’m not a magician. I just have the marks.”
“That’s impossible.”
“And yet here I am. This is my least favorite topic, Leander. Pick another one.”
“Did you ever apprentice?” he presses. “With Kyri, or someone else?”
“No point,” I grit out. “She tried to explain it, but I don’t have an affinity. She always says—”
My voice dies in my throat.
She alwayssaid.Notsays.
For a moment, impatient, I forgot that…I forgot.
The smallest details keep hitting me, keep washing over me like waves that want to drag me under.
Kyri will never light another candle with her sure hands. Her spirit flags are burned to ashes. Last week she was mending her best dress for a night out when she got shore leave. Now she’ll never wear it. It’s underwater somewhere, or ashes. Even her possessions are gone. Nobody alive but me knows that dress existed.
I keep hitting these small, new realizations and repeating them to myself, trying to find a way to understand. But it just doesn’t seem possible she’s gone forever.
I realize I’m gripping the tiller so hard my knuckles are turning white, and when I lift my gaze, Leander’s dark eyes are waiting for me again. Solemn now. Kinder than I’d have expected. Sad.
He has to clear his throat before he can speak again—he keeps his voice low, out of deference to Keegan, who’s somehow managing to sleep through all this in his spot behind the mast.
“I’ve never heard of someone who couldn’t use their magic before.” He pushes up his own sleeve to study the intricate designs there—by far the most complicated I’ve ever seen. Nothing could highlight more clearly the thick, lifeless strips of emerald green visible on the backs of my hands.
“Do you want to steer the boat or not?” I ask, trying to divert him.
“Not,” he replies promptly. “Can you think of a reason you would have suppressed your magic? Something that might have made you afraid to use it, even if you don’t feel that way on the surface?”
I shake my head. I’ve thought about this myself, more than once. “I didn’t have an early traumatic experience with a gust of wind or anything.”
“Air,” he murmurs. “That’s what’s in the family line? Who did you inherit it from?”
“My mother,” I say. “She has air magic. Or had it, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since my father and I heard from her.”
Deep down, a part of me has wondered for years if I somehow rejected my own magic, in response to the magician motherwho rejected me. But the world is full of people with fault lines in their hearts, and they all manage to keep going—plenty of them are magicians, even.
“You never talked to her about her magic?”
