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She wasn’t just a ship. She was an idea. She was the thing I’d risked my neck for a hundred times over the last two years and my chance at a trade license, along with a crest of my own.
But there was something about the helmsman that reminded me of gemstone. Like even when he wasn’t speaking, I could still hear, or feel, something in the center of my chest.
I looked at her one more time, tracing the shape of her face, her jaw, the curve of her throat. I etched it into my mind to keep for no other reason than I felt like I had to. And then I turned and walked away.
“And we, my friend, are going to finish it.”
That single map held a vision for the Narrows that was real. Heart-achingly real.
He was just trying to make something he could keep.
But this—he and I—we fit, somehow.
knowing what scent I’d find there. Deep ocean. Saint.
I didn’t know what exactly I’d gotten myself into by walking through the door of that tavern. But something about it felt like I’d been waiting for it my entire life. Like every path I could have taken from my mother’s study that night led to one place—right here.
They were connected in places the eye couldn’t see.
Or maybe because he’d put words to the thing that had been unspoken, like letting a wild animal loose from its cage.
There wasn’t much Clove seemed to take seriously, and I wondered if it was his nature or if he’d seen enough of the world to understand just how little control he had over any of it.
This trader who sailed into storms and spoke to the sea, who’d bound himself to demons, was the first soul who’d ever asked me what I wanted. And the answer was, somehow, so easy to give. I wanted him. But it was more than that.
“I want to build something that’s not theirs.” “All right,” he said. “Then we will.”
He wasn’t like other people. The weight of his presence was like a leak on a ship, slowly filling its hollow spaces.
It was about that dark gleam in his eyes. The way he said exactly what
I said a kind of goodbye that didn’t need words or promises or plans.
I couldn’t go back and erase my signature from that contract with Zola. But I could cast my lot alongside Saint’s and know that there was something true in it. Because there was. The hum in the air that hovered around us. The calm that settled in my blood when he touched me. The feeling that we were only the beginning of a story that would be told long after we were gone. They were things I could take with me. A year was nothing if it let me come back to this.
I’d never been given anything, not even from my father. He’d believed in earning. Making myself worthy of something. But I was painfully aware that there was nothing I could do to merit that feeling of warmth at my side. And I wouldn’t pretend to.
It was a thing that could build cities or burn them.
If he were here now, he’d say that the sea was in the helmsman’s eyes.
I was thanking him for. I was mostly just glad he existed. That I’d been lucky enough to find him.
They didn’t know this man who measured his words and bartered with their truth. No one did.
She was beginning to feel like a permanent fixture in my surroundings. A part of the landscape that made up my life. And I couldn’t help feeling like it was rarer than that gemstone in my pocket.
My blood was nailed into the hull of that ship. My bones had built it. There was a version of myself that would live in its skeleton for as long as it sailed the Narrows. And when it found its end in the deep, it would take that part of me with it.
That was the irony of it. The tales of the Narrows were different than the ones I’d heard as a child. They weren’t just the stories of the traders who sailed these waters or the people who lived on its shores. They were the
story of the sea itself. Her love and her anger. Her favor and her cruelty.
Saint believed that she would never betray him. He’d given his heart to her, after all. Like he’d given it to me. But something told me the deep wouldn’t share a love like that forever. One day, she would take.
