Fable (Fable, #1)

by Adrienne Young

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.