I hesitated. Lying was the safe thing to do, but I had a feeling that Corvo was in my room for a reason, and it wasn’t to hide fromCaptain Starr. If I lied to him now I would never find out why he had come to see me.
“Sometimes I sense things about ships and the sea. I had a feeling I needed to go down to the beach this morning.”
He nodded. “I wondered if you were an Intuit. I was surprised to see one of your kind living in a place like this instead of among your own.”
“My kind?” People like me had a name besides ill-wisher?
No one would talk about my mother, and the few things that had been said were vague, but I’d had the impression that she hadn’t been a local girl. Had she come here on a visit and stayed because she fell in love with my father? Or had she been forced into that marriage? I would never know about her, but learning there was a place where people like me were accepted was a gift—and a goal.
Corvo studied me. “The world gave humans the land that surrounded the Mediterran Sea as their territory, but the islands within the Mediterran have always belonged to theterra indigene. Intuits escaping persecution from other kinds of humans were allowed to settle on those islands, as long as they didn’t fight with or interfere with us. They farm and fish—and teach us human skills.”
“Like sailing a ship?” I asked.
“Like sailing a ship,” he agreed.
He came to some decision. Pushing away from the wall, he reached into a pocket and pulled out two silver coins. Not looking at me, he placed the coins on the windowsill and rested one finger on top of them.
“This will buy one transaction with theterra indigene,” he said. “You may ask any of us for one thing—including passage on a dark ship heading for an Intuit village.”
My head spun with the enormity of what he offered. “But howcan I contact you? The telephones don’t work much beyond the neighboring villages anymore.”
Another casualty of the war with theterra indigene. Humans no longer had quick communication over longer distances because telephone lines had been severed and couldn’t be repaired in the veins of wild country that now broke apart the Alliance of Nations. Every attempt to restore the lines had ended in piles of human corpses. We were reduced to communicating as our grandparents had done, with letters sent overland or by ship.
“Set the coins where they can be seen and speak your intention clearly. Someone will hear you and relay the message.”
How?I asked a different question. “Who is Tethys?”
Corvo smiled, showing a hint of fang. “She is an Elemental. She is the voice and heart and fury of the Mediterran Sea.”
So the Elementals were real.
“Why would you help me?”
“You were willing to help someone who was different from yourself. I felt I should return the favor.”
One moment he stood there, looking at me. The next moment, a column of smoke filled the same space before it flowed out the window and Corvo, in his other form, disappeared into the night.
The next morning, men checking the baited trap found Captain Starr’s missing men. Both had a round mark on their chests bigger than a man’s hand—and holes that looked like they had been made by circles of curved teeth latching into flesh while something else had scraped the flesh away to reach the hearts and all that rich blood.
The men’s legs had chunks of flesh ripped away, and those bitemarks indicated that a large shark had fed on the bodies after death. Maybe after death.
The shark bites disturbed the men who downed rough whiskey before going to work, but the round marks in the dead men’s chests terrified all the men whose work brought them into contact with the sea.
As I served drinks and cleared tables, I listened to the grandfathers whisper about giant sea lampreys that were as long as a man is tall—lampreys that had a taste for warm-blooded prey. Human prey. And I heard another word whispered that day to explain a creature that shouldn’t exist:Others.
Captain Starr’s ship set sail a few days later with its hold full of provisions, along with the goods he had wrung from the village’s merchants that he would sell for his own profit.
The morning after that, I ran errands for Mara, who claimed to be feeling poorly. I seldom had a chance to visit the shops on the main street, and almost never by myself. Mara didn’t like to deprive herself of the enjoyment in seeing people flinch when they looked at my face.
Corvo hadn’t flinched. I liked him for that.
That morning, I crossed paths with Lucy, who had been my friend before my father used his fist and a knife. We used to walk on the beach and talk about our hopes and dreams. I wasn’t allowed to take those walks after my face healed because Mara decided that Lucy had given me ideas and that was why I’d thought I could get married and work anywhere but the tavern after she and my father had gone through the trouble of raising me.
Lucy came up beside me as I perused a cart of used books,standing where she could see the undamaged side of my face. She said nothing, just picked up a book and examined it, as if I were a stranger. As if I meant nothing at all and never had.
Then she said in a low voice, “Be careful, Dett. I heard things while Captain Starr was staying at the inn.”
Lucy’s family owned the inn that catered to ships’ captains and well-to-do merchants.
