“You searched for her?” I whispered, thinking of the bay: its miles-wide vastness, its deep, choppy waters.
“Didn’t find anything,” Tigo murmured. “But that’s no surprise. She’ll be out east by now, I expect. At rest.”
His words left me cold and oddly comforted at the same time. “I didn’t realize someone had seen,” I croaked. “She’s really gone.”
Tigo nodded, his gaze far off. Rhianne, however, still looked jittery.
“We should go,” she said to Tigo, eyes darting to the doorway. “It must be getting on for seven by now.”
“I’ll be there soon,” I said, getting up to rinse my cup.
The two of them seemed stiff shouldered, closed up. I often sensed a remove when people were with me, when they detected that strange frosted glass between us. But I didn’t think the Orha’s reserve was born from that. It seemed to stem from suspicion, from things still left unsaid. The gambling, the accident—all that was no doubt true—but I got the impression Tigo had used them as a cover, to try to put down my prying about the brothers.
For something about the Shearwater family nagged at me.
There were secrets on this island. And I found myself hungry for them.
—
I didn’t have long before Miss Haney would miss me, but I couldn’t bring myself to face the day just yet. My limbs throbbed as though I’d been churned in a barrel. I trudged up the steps to my third-floor room, the sea breeze whistling through the cracks in the windows, and lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.
The revelation about Emment and Zennia hung over me, a shadowy cloak stifling the tiny part of me that had secretly hoped my friend might just have survived. But Emment had seen her drown. They’d searched and hadn’t found her…
She wasn’t hiding. She hadn’t run. She was truly gone.
I lay there gazing at the wall above my bed, watching the way thelight pooled in its crevices, the nooks and crannies between the rough stones. As I did so, a memory came to me suddenly: standing tiptoe on my bed at Arbenhaw, a week or so after we’d been moved to single rooms. Tapping on the stone and hearing Zennia tap back. Hissing through a crack,“Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I blinked, my pulse sounding louder in my ears. A tingle ran over the skin on my arms. Clambering up, I peered into the clefts in the wall.
Some were mere cracks—too thin for what I sought—but others were slightly crumbled and gaping. Feeling at once fevered and foolish, I stretched up, ran my fingers across them.
And then, with a twang in my chest like a bowstring, I saw it: something pale in the blackness. Something that looked a lot like paper, rolled up tight and pressed into a fissure.
I scrabbled, picking at it, easing it out. I told myself it would likely be nothing—a blank page stuffed there to keep out a draft, or a lover’s letter from a previous inhabitant.
But when I finally drew out my prize and carefully unrolled it, smoothing the creases, my heart began to bang against my ribs. For writing covered the sheet of paper. And some of it was in a code I recognized.
I jumped down, ignoring the jar in my muscles, and ran to the window, where light speared in. Now I could see the writing more clearly. Or, rather, the lines and numbers and shapes.
It had been one of the first things we’d done in lessons, after I’d finally realized we were friends. A code, concocted in total silence, achieved by sneaking glances at each other’s papers. We weren’t permitted to speak in lectures, but we were allowed to sit side by side. Eventually we could have secret conversations just by inking symbols in our margins.
There was only one person who could have written what I’d found. My fingers shook as my eyes roved the paper, easily translating the code—into a letter.
13th Illir, Bower Island
Corith,
I’m not sure why I’m writing this to you, since I can’t imagine a circumstance in which you’ll ever read it, but you know I’ve never been one for introspection. It feels easier, somehow, to “talk” to you instead.
I miss you. I even miss Arbenhaw, if you can believe it. I thought it would feel good to escape to somewhere new, even if a tough job awaited me there, but this place…it’s hard not to feel trapped out here. And the people—well, you know how I feel about the Hundred.
I probably shouldn’t have written that last part. I so wish I could talk about everything I want to, but I worry about this “journal” being discovered and then being forced to translate its contents. Rexim Shearwater seems like the type to do that. I can already tell he, and his eldest daughter, don’t like me.
But it’s not just the fact that I don’t feel welcome, and how cut off we are out here. It’s that I can’t seem to shake the feeling that everyone on this island knows something I don’t.
I can see up to the castle in the early hours from here, and sometimes I make out lights in odd places. Like the culverhouse, where they keep crows to send their letters, and one of the towers in the curtain wall, which Miss Haney says aren’t used for anything anymore.
Anyway, like I said, I shouldn’t be writing this, and it’s probably nothing—maybe the isolation is getting to me.
