“Right. I’m sorry, I’m just extra… tense right now,” Rory admitted with a weak smile. I shot him a look that told him to go on. “A little over a week back, my crew and I had a miserable journey. The waves came at us with a vengeance only the Sea Goddess herself could be responsible for. Each time I’ve returned to the sea since, I’ve been on edge, wondering when she’ll show herself again.”
Breena and I looked at each other and broke out in a fit of laughter. The salty sea air entered my lungs upon a sharp inhale and released with each choppy chuckle. The feeling reverberated through my chest and caused a mild ache in my belly where my muscles contracted. We didn’t laugh this way in the sea, and the action was foreign to me, yet so right all at once.
“Yeah, about that…” I trailed off, a laugh lingering in my throat. I cleared it before I continued.
“What could you possibly be laughing about?” His head swung to me specifically, and he looked me up and down. “It’s unsettling to see you happy.”
“Breena and I—wewere the Sea Goddess you feared,” I said, motioning between Breena and me.
“How do you mean?”
With a flick of my wrist, the water around us began to stir, lifting into waves that lapped up the sides of the ship and splashed over the rails. White foam rolled across the deck until it struck the top of Rory’s leather boots.
He stared at his wet boots in quiet astonishment before his head slowly cranked to me again.
“I almost lost one of my men, and you had the rest of them praying to whichever god would listen!”
“Yes, it was quite hilarious,” I mused, a little proud of myself, of both of us, for the scene we’d caused.
“Hilarious? You could have killed us!” His mouth gaped open, and I couldn’t tell if he wanted to laugh or scream in relief. I don’t think Rory knew either.
“I could have, yes, but I didn’t. We didn’t.” I motioned to Breena, who still held on to her smile. “We had to get you back to land somehow.”
“Yeah, that was one way to do it.” His mouth finally melted into a smirk, and he gestured to Breena as he asked, “And what is it that you can do?”
“Well, I may have disposed of your precious rum. Sorry about that. It’s not until we went to the Barthoah tavern that I discovered how costly the drink is.”
“You tossed our rum?” he grumbled. “That was imported from the lower isles, you know.”
“I didn’t, but I do now. It’s not very good, though, is it?”
Rory muttered something about us being ridiculous all while shaking his head. “I’d say you owe me, but… let’s just call it even,aye? And are you telling me the Sea Goddess isn’t real? That I’ve been praying to no one for safe passage my whole life?”
“I’m not about to tell you what’s real and what’s not. She may very well exist. What Iwilltell you is that my pod has been mimicking her since the start of our war, striking fear into the hearts of fishermen and trying to keep them out of our waters. No goddess has ever condemned us for our actions. Maybe she gets a kick out of it, or maybe the closest thing to a Sea Goddess you’ll get is… us.”
Rory let the words I spoke sink into his tender human brain, shaking his head in astonishment. “I can’t believe this. All this time.”
“All this time,” I repeated back at him.
His gaze drifted off somewhere in the distance as he said, “It’s a bit of a journey; you two should rest up. There’s hammocks downstairs. Feel free to head below deck and make yourself comfortable. I’ll call down to you when we approach the net. We’ll stop by the one closest to the cove to better preserve the catch.”
“You’ll be okay up here?” Breena asked.
“As long as no one throws around my barrels, I’ll be fine,” he said with a little snicker.
Breena and I headed below deck and found ourselves in one of those human nets Rory called a hammock. I fell into the same one I’d put her in the day we’d met, and she crawled in shortly after. She rested her cheek upon my chest as she curled into my side. My hand stroked her back as I settled into her with a deep exhale.
“Five days,” Breena whispered against the bare skin on my upper chest. Her warm breath tickled my neck. “Five days without you, and I feel like I just got you back.”
“Are you nervous to see Niven?” I asked, thinking about how it would feel to see my own sibling. Five days was nothing in thegrand scheme of things, but hadn't I only known Breena a few days longer? Isn’t that how long it had taken to flip my entire reality on its head? Who knew where we would be in another five days.
“Are you nervous to see your mother and Zellia?” she asked in response to my question. I let my silence answer her. What was there to say that wouldn’t form a pit in my stomach for the duration of our travels?
Breena and I sat in that silence for a long while until we both drifted off to sleep, guided by the rocking waves of the sea.
Rory hauled up a net full of fish and dumped the creatures into a large basket. He did this a second time, filling a basket next to the first: one for the Cove, one for the Dreslee. The fish flopped around, their mouths gaping open and closed as their gills flooded with air. I gathered the water that poured onto the deck and borrowed a bit extra from the sea. I created a dome of water over the two baskets to keep the fish alive and breathing until we made it to the Cove.
Breena and Rory both took turns poking the large bubble of water in quiet astonishment. Each time they did, I had to concentrate a little harder to keep my magic together, but I wouldn’t tell them that, not only for my pride, but also because I saw no point in ruining their fun.
