Fable (Fable, #1)

by Adrienne Young

But my father wasn’t the forgetting kind. Neither was I.

“And how did a Waterside stray become the helmsman of a ship like this?” She shrugged. “He’s West. He knows how to get what he wants.”

It was in the way his eyes dropped to my mouth sometimes when he looked at me. It was in the way his voice deepened just a little when he said my name.

West stood at the edge of something. In a matter of hours, everything was going to change. For him. For the crew. The day he’d come to Jeval through that storm, he hadn’t known where it would lead. He didn’t know that when he agreed to give me passage, the winds were shifting. There was so much about this world that couldn’t be predicted. And yet, we all knew exactly how it worked.

He looked at me with a hundred stories lit behind his eyes. Then he was coming closer. The air burned hot in my chest as his hands lifted and touched my face. His fingertips slid into my hair as he pulled me toward him and before I could even think about what he was doing, his lips touched mine. And I disappeared. I was erased. Every day on Jeval. Every night in the belly of the Lark. It all flickered out, leaving only the hum of the deep. Leaving only me and West.

His arms slid around me, and I folded myself into him, finding the place beneath his jaw, and he held me. So tight. Like he was keeping me from unraveling. 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.

“And I think I’ve loved you since the first time we anchored in Jeval.” He grinned suddenly, staring at the floor, and a bit of red bloomed on his skin, creeping up out of the collar of his shirt. “What?” The breath hitched in my chest. But his smile turned sad. “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.” He paused. “I struck the deal with Saint because I wanted the ship, but I kept it because of you. When you got off the Marigold in Ceros and I didn’t know if I would ever see you again, I thought . . . I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

And when he kissed me again, it was slow. It was pleading. The silence of the sea found us, my heartbeat quieting, and I painted each moment into my mind. The smell of him and the drag of his fingers down my back. The taste of salt when I kissed his shoulder and the slide of his lips down my throat.

Isolde was the wind and sea and sky of Saint’s world. She was the pattern of stars that he navigated by, the sum of all directions on his compass. And he was lost without her.