Four years ago
That night, the sharp sound of the bell rang out, and my father came for me, pulling me from my hammock, bleary-eyed and confused.
I didn’t know what was happening until the hatch flew open before us, and the lightning struck so close to the ship that it blinded me, the sound erupting painfully in my ears. Black spots drowned out every bit of light in my vision, and I blinked furiously, trying to clear it.
Saint tucked me into his jacket as well as I could fit and then he barreled out into the roaring wind, the rain spinning, not falling in any one direction.
I’d never seen rain like that before.
“Mama!” I shouted, looking over my father’s shoulder for her, but there was almost no one on deck. And when I looked up to the tangle of clouds above us, I screamed. The mainmast of the Lark had snapped in two.
I knew what that meant. There was no coming back from a broken mast. We were abandoning ship.
I clawed out of Saint’s jacket, slipping from his grasp and hitting the deck so hard it knocked the breath from my lungs.
“Fable!” A wave crashed over the starboard side, sweeping him off his feet, and I ran for the hatch.
“Mama!” I screamed, but I couldn’t even hear my own voice. There was only the howl of the wind. The growl of the ship.
Arms wrapped around me, dragging my weight to the back, and another face appeared before me. Clove. Saint threw me in his direction, and I slid over the flooded deck until I slammed into him.
He didn’t wait. Clove climbed up onto the railing with me in his arms and jumped into the wind. We fell into the darkness, hitting the water with the sound of a thunderclap, and suddenly, everything was quiet. The raging storm was replaced with the deep hum of the sea. Beneath the surface, motionless bodies churned in the black water, the masts and prows of long-dead ships illuminated below us as the lightning struck again and again.
When we came back up, I choked, clinging to Clove with shaking hands. Saint was suddenly beside us. “Swim!” he shouted.
Another ear-splitting crack sounded like a cannon shot, and I turned in the water. The Lark’s hull was splitting in two. Right down the middle.
“Swim, Fable!” I’d never heard my father’s voice sound like that. I’d never seen his face broken into pieces with fear.
I cut through the water, swimming as fast as I could against the suck of the sinking ship pulling it down with it. Saint stayed with me, coming up over the crest of every wave at my side. We swam until I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs and my stomach was half full of seawater. When the orange light of a lantern flickered ahead, I started to sink. Clove’s hand took hold of my shirt, and he pulled me along with him until I was floating on the water in his wake. When I opened my eyes again, one of my father’s deckhands was lifting me into a small boat.
“Mama…” I cried, watching the bow of the Lark sink in the distance. “Mama, mama, mama…”
Saint didn’t speak a word when he climbed in after me. He didn’t look back. Not even once.
We didn’t raise the small sail until the next morning, when the gales had hushed and the sea fell into sleep. I sat at the stern, filling buckets of water until the hull of the rowboat was empty. Saint’s eyes stayed on the horizon. It was only then I noticed that the man who’d pulled me from the water was injured, his pale face betraying his fate. It took him only hours to die, and just moments after he took his last breath, Saint dumped him over the side.
We pushed up onto the smooth beach of Jeval the next morning. I’d never been to the pyre-rich island, but my mother had dredged its reefs. I lay on the sand, the waves crawling up to touch my bare feet, and while Clove went to find food and water, my father took the knife from his belt.
“Do you trust me?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye with a calm that terrified me.
I nodded, and he took hold of my hand with his rough fingers, turning it over until the soft skin of my forearm was between us. I didn’t know what he was going to do until the tip of the knife had already drawn blood.
I tried to pull away, but a firm look from him made me still under his touch. I buried my face into my knees and tried not to scream as he cut into me, engraving smooth, curving lines that reached from my elbow to my wrist. When he was finished, he carried me out into the water and cleaned it, bandaging the wound carefully with torn pieces of his shirt.
Clove returned with a bucket of shellfish he’d bartered for down the beach, and we made a fire, eating the meager supper in silence. My stomach roiled against the pain throbbing in my arm, my heart aching with the loss of my mother. And we didn’t speak of her. In fact, I would never speak of her again in those years on Jeval.
I didn’t ask what had happened. If she were alive, Saint would have never left her behind.
We slept there on the beach, and when the sun came up, Clove readied the rowboat. But when I waded out into the water behind him, my father set a heavy hand on my shoulder and told me I wasn’t coming with them. His lips moved around the words as he looked down into my face, his expression as unreadable as ever. But I couldn’t understand him. He said it three times before the bits finally came together in my mind and my hands started to shake at my sides.
“Why?” I croaked, trying not to sound pathetic. My father hated it when people were pathetic.
“Because you weren’t made for this world, Fable.” For a moment, I thought I saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes. The edge of emotion in his voice. But when I blinked, the mask that was the father I knew had returned.
“Saint…” I didn’t want to beg. “Don’t leave me here.” I looked to the boat, where Clove was waiting. But he didn’t look at me, the set of his shoulders like the cut of stone.
“You make me a promise and I’ll make one to you.”
I nodded eagerly, thinking he’d changed his mind.
“Survive. Get yourself off this island. And the next time I see you, I’ll give you what’s yours.”
I looked up into his face. “And if I never see you again?”
But he only turned, his hand slipping through my fingers as he walked away.
I didn’t dare cry as he got back into the boat. I didn’t make a single sound. The tears streamed down my face in hot rivulets, disappearing into my shirt. My heart twisted up on itself and threatened to stop, every part of me screaming on the inside.
And when the little triangle sail disappeared over the horizon, I was alone.
