Fable (Fable, #1)

by Adrienne Young

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.

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.

There was something knowing in the way he looked at me. Something that pulled at the knots in the net of lies we’d both told.

“What I want is not to die alone,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “I didn’t really choose this life. It’s just the only one I have.”

And he was. Because that kiss broke open some dark night sky within me filled with stars and moons and flaming comets. That darkness was replaced by the blazing fire of the sun racing under my skin.

Because the most deeply buried truth, hidden beneath everything my father taught me, was that I had wanted to touch West a thousand times.

It made me hope.

“And I think I’ve loved you since the first time we anchored in Jeval.”

wow!!!

“I have thought about you every single day since that day. Maybe every hour. I’ve counted down the days to go back to the island, and I pushed us into storms I shouldn’t have because I didn’t want to not be there when you woke up. I didn’t want you to wait for me. Ever. Or to think I wasn’t coming back.”

What he was saying—the things he told me—was his way of showing me he trusted

me. It was also his way of giving me the match. If I wanted to, I could burn him down. But if we were going to do this, I would have to be his safe harbor and he would have to be mine.