“I can help you,” I said hoarsely, “but on one condition.”
He reached out, raking fingers over the sand, but his hands only disappeared into the soggy mire.
“What?” he gasped. I could no longer see him; the clouds had shrouded the moons like thick smoke.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, inching forward as far as I could without sinking myself. “That night, when Zennia…Iknowthere’s more to it.”
Though I couldn’t make him out, I could sense his confusion, his panic. “I don’t know what you mean. I told—I told everyone what happened. We searched—”
“I saw you back there,” I interrupted coldly. “I saw those fights you bet on with your friends. Did you take her there to try to make her fight? Did something bad happen to her—and you covered it up?”
The awful possibility had only just struck me. Even more awful after seeing those nobles laughing and joking and teasing the Shearwater.
“What?” His voice had cracked like glass. “No. Gods, no. I don’t do that any—” He cut off and let out a breath, harsh and shaky. “Okay,” he continued, his words running together, “I admit, there’s more to what happened that night, but believe me, I haven’t brought ours along for years. It was…wrong. It’s all wrong, I know…” He sounded broken.
“Tell me,” I demanded, shocked at myself. I didn’t recognize the voice coming out of me. But I needed to know. I burned for the truth.
Emment let out a strangled sob. “She saw it, too,” he said through rasping breaths; he was still trying, unsuccessfully, to get free. “I brought her in with me, but not to fight. The other Orha, they all stand there watching, but she—she suddenly got really angry. Marched right in, tried to break up the fight. She was”—Emment paused, took a great gulping breath—“saying things to my…my friends. Things I couldn’t countenance.”
I could picture her anger, clear as water. The way her nose—her whole face—would’ve screwed up. The flare in her eyes. The hunch to her shoulders.
“I dragged her away, back to the causeway. Said Father would hear of it first thing in the morning, that her placement with us was already at an end…”
The clouds shifted again, letting through pallid moonslight. I picked out Emment’s grimace in the gloom.
“And then, look, I promise you, it’s what I told the others. The water, it turned choppy, then…wild. Must’ve been a sudden squall off the ocean. Our rowboat couldn’t cope, and we both went over. When I climbed back in, she was nowhere to be seen.”
My eyes raked his face for any duplicity, but all I could see was drunken misery, and—to my horror—a cracked-open honesty.
“No,” I forced out. “There’s something else.”
“There’s nothing else,” Emment said, sagging. His panicked wriggling had only made him sink further; there was no way he was getting out of here without help.
“How did you get back?” I pressed. “If Zennia was…gone?”
“There were oars in the bottom of the boat,” he said weakly. “The water had calmed by then. I rowed back.”
My legs felt weak. I crouched on the sand, my own black misery draping over me.
“Please,” he choked, “don’t leave me here.”
I raised my eyes, taking him in.
If I punished Emment Shearwater, I’d be punished, too. My contact might never know what had happened to me. Whatever the Cage was hiding about Zennia—and I found myself even more desperate to know now, to see if their story simply matched Emment’s or if he was keeping something from me—I would never find out.
I wouldn’t let that happen.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I conjured my emotions. They were star-bright right now, red as blood—red as laconite. Emment wasn’t wearing the stone tonight. Together in our boat, it would have hindered my efforts.
There was nothing preventing me from saving him but myself.
I tried to squash my anger, my grief. Instead, I imagined myself back at Arbenhaw. This would make a good exam, a detached part of me observed. And the thought of Arbenhaw brought Zennia’s face to my mind.
Two days,I told myself. In just two days, I’d get the time and location of that second meeting, and there I’d finally find out the truth. No more drifting along unmoored; no more of this terrible, all-consuming uncertainty. The thought calmed me. I breathed out, long and slow.
“Displace,” I said to the saturated sands. And to the meandering stream: “Divert your course.”
This slow-moving water, soaking the sands, was a world away from the raging torrents of archwater. It was sluggish and heavy but permissive, too. Pliant. I felt the sand shift and constrict around my soles. Emment yelped in surprise. He must have felt it, too, that tightening around him.
