Fable (Fable, #1)

by Adrienne Young

He was a bastard, but so was I.

The fish scattered like a rainbow breaking into pieces around me,

Three or four more weeks and I’d have enough coin to barter for passage across the Narrows to find Saint and make him keep his promise. I’d only been fourteen years old when he dumped me on the infamous island of thieves, and I’d spent every day since scraping together the coin I needed to go and find him. After four years, I wondered if he’d even recognize me when I finally showed up knocking on his door. If he’d remember what he said to me as he carved into my arm with the tip of his whalebone knife. But my father wasn’t the forgetting kind. Neither was I.

And I’d been reciting them to my father from the time I was big enough to first climb the masts with my mother.

Keep your knife where you can reach it. Never, ever owe anyone anything. Nothing is free. Always construct a lie from a truth. Never, under any circumstances, reveal what or who matters to you.

I’d lived by Saint’s rules every day since he abandoned me on Jeval, and they’d kept me alive. At least he’d left me with that much when he sailed away, not once looking back.

I traced the scar at my wrist with the tip of my finger, following the vein of it like tree roots up my inner forearm to my elbow. For a long time, it was the only thing that kept me alive on the island. Jevalis were nothing if not superstitious, and no one wanted anything to do with the girl who had a mark like this one. Only a few days after Saint left me, an old man named Fret started a rumor on the docks that I’d been cursed by sea demons.

The waves crashed angrily below as the storm winds blew in, and for just a moment, I wondered if I’d miss it. If there was something on Jeval that had become a part of me. I sat up, looking out over the night-cloaked island, where the tops of the trees moved in the dark like churning water. If it hadn’t been my prison, I might even think it was beautiful. But I had never belonged here. I could have. I could have made myself one of them, working to build my own small gem trade on the barrier islands like so many others. But if I was a Jevali dredger, then I wasn’t Saint’s daughter. And maybe even that wasn’t true anymore. I still remembered the hum in the belly of the hull and the creak of the hammock. The smell of my father’s pipe and the sound of boots on the deck. I didn’t belong on the land or on the docks or the cities that lay across the Narrows. The place I belonged was gone. Miles away, where the moonlight touched the black seam of the horizon, the Lark lay beneath the waters of Tempest Snare. And no matter where I went, I’d never get home. Because home was a ship that was at the bottom of the sea, where my mother’s bones lay sleeping.

The only safety that existed was in being completely alone. That was one of the very first things Saint taught me.

You weren’t made for this world, Fable.

You weren’t made for this world, Fable. You want to prove me wrong? Get yourself off this island.

West’s eyes fell to my busted lip, and I watched the tick of his jaw.

“I’m not taking you anywhere,” his voice ground like wet sand against stone.

Wherever they had come from, they had to be a low-rung crew just beginning to get their route established. But how they’d managed to get a ship and a license from the Trade Council was a question that couldn’t have a simple answer.

And suddenly, I was that little girl again, swaying in my hammock on the Lark.

The man who’d taught me to tie knots and read maps wasn’t the same man who’d put the knife soaked with my blood back into his belt and sailed away. Soon, I’d be in Ceros. And I wasn’t sure anymore which man I would find.

My father had always told me that seabirds were the souls of lost traders. To turn them away or not give them a place to land or nest was bad luck.

“When we make port in Ceros and you set foot on that dock, I don’t want to see you again.”

I’d never been to the Unnamed Sea, but my mother was born there.

The taste of it resurrected a string of faded, frayed memories that made the knot in my stomach tighten, and I blinked them away before they could fully take shape.

Maybe theyre from where her mom was from

It took a moment to realize that it was two snakes intertwined, each one eating the other’s tail. It was a symbol I’d never seen before.

“A trader. His name is Saint.” Their eyes cut to each other as Willa sat up in the hammock, her feet swinging to the floor. “What do you want with Saint?” Paj laughed,

That was where my father’s rules came into play again. There was only one promise he had ever asked me to make. I roamed the ship as I liked, I explored the villages and docks and did as I pleased. As long as I didn’t break that promise, I never fell out of his good graces. I was to never tell a single soul that I was his daughter. That was it. I’d never once broken it, and I wasn’t going to start now.

“Crewing for Saint is a death wish.

“Since the beginning—two years,” Paj answered easily, which surprised me. “When West got the Marigold, he took Hamish and Willa on. Me and Paj soon after.”

Um editing issue its willa and paj, paj is speaking and says, "me and paj"? I thinkkk this was meant to be auster

Waterside strays—all of us.”

There were five guilds that controlled almost every aspect of life in the Narrows—the Rye Guild, the Shipwrights Guild, the Sailmakers Guild, the Smiths Guild, and the Gem Guild. Each had a master, and the five guild masters sat on the Trade Council. They were the only ones who could grant traders the licenses they needed to do business at every port,

I’d only ever seen Saint smile once, when I was spying on the two of them in his quarters. My mother took his hands from the maps he was working on and pulled his arms around her small frame. He set his chin on top of her head and smiled, and I remember thinking I’d never seen the spread of his teeth like that before. The frame of wrinkles around his eyes. He looked like a different person. Saint broke his own rules when he fell in love with my mother. He broke them a hundred times over.

“No.” I let the single word hang in the air, answering more parts to her question than she’d asked.

but the ship from the Narrows gave itself away. Its wide, ornate construction and detailed woodwork didn’t fit beside the simple ships made in the Narrows.

The rhythm of crewing a ship was like a melody I’d known my whole life and had only been able to hum to myself for the last four years.

There were only two things strictly forbidden on a ship because both could get you or your shipmates killed: love and drunkenness.

Legend said that adder stones brought good luck. They were collected on beaches and strung up as talismans to hide the helmsman from the eye of sea demons.

A shadow ship.

Nah they stole it

On Jeval, there had been little to frame the expanse of sky before it dove into the sea. Here, it was hedged in by the wayward patterns of crude, slanted rooftops, making me feel like I could disappear.

I’d been whittled into something else now.

They were more than shipmates, and the realization made me bite the inside of my cheek. I was almost … angry, but the feeling was immediately replaced by humiliation. I didn’t like that I cared one way or the other.

So Willa was telling the truth when she said they were Waterside strays.

She hadnt said that...

I didn’t want to see what or who might look back at me in that mirror or how different she was from the one who used to live inside these bones.

“That’s Bastian made.” He lifted his chin, looking down his nose at me. The great port city in the Unnamed Sea was known for its gemstone creations.

because anyone truly skilled with stones went to Bastian, where the Gem Guild was powerful and paid well.

“But don’t think that what you did in Sowan isn’t gettin’ round. Rumors have been pouring in the last three days.”

If they were Saint’s shadow ship, they’d hold a permit to trade gems because he would have made sure of it. But they didn’t, and that could only mean one thing—they were running side trade and pocketing on Saint’s ledgers.

Orrrrr not a shadow ship

“That’s the last of it. We won’t be stopping in Jeval anymore,” Hamish answered. I looked up at him, confused. When I’d traded with West on the barrier islands, he hadn’t said anything about it being his last time in Jeval. In fact, he’d offered to pay the next time he came.

a gem sage

Willa cried into her fists before she finally looked up at West, her cheeks wet. The others stood silent, as if waiting for her to say something. The sea calmed around us, the quiet that hit right before a storm conjuring an eerie silence as the man looked up to Willa with pleading eyes. She drew in a deep breath, her hands unclenching before she gave a quick nod, pulling the adze from her belt. Auster and Paj took hold of the lid, securing it back into place and the man’s muted screams disappeared as Willa took a nail from the purse at her belt. “What are you doing?” I whispered. But I already knew. She set the nail at the corner, slamming the adze down to drive it into the wood with one hit before she pulled out another.

She walked across the deck, stopping before West and lifting up onto her toes to kiss him on the cheek as more tears streamed down her face.

Maybe he imagined that I thought him a monster. And he would be right. I looked up into the blinding flash of lightning overhead. He was. We all were. And now this storm was going to make us pay for it.

And even though I could feel her power in every bone, every muscle, there was something deep inside of me that opened its eyes from sleep when I felt it. It was terrifying, but familiar. It was as beautiful as it was deadly.

Paj’s face broke and he cried into Auster’s wet hair, holding him so tight that his fingers looked as if they might tear the seams of Auster’s shirt open.