“Do you think we’ll make it to the caves by this time tomorrow?” I murmured, my gaze still on the stars.
“Of course. We did make it halfway in one day, didn’t we?”
I nodded, taking comfort in his words, even as I knew he meant only to ease my worry.
We didn’t find the caves by dusk.
Peering into the night sky, I’d never felt smaller. We seemed insignificant compared to the endless twinkling sky, the infinite calm sea, and the great monumental stones. They made the possibility of finding the Unnar Caves seem so out of reach.
That night, as I lay curled beneath the blanket, it wasn’t green eyes that haunted my thoughts. It was yellow ones with black slits. I had nearly bartered my soul for the Seer’s vague answers, and I kept wondering if I’d missed that second where blue sea met green terrain. And now, I feared I would miss the caves, too. And this time, I wasn’t just carrying the dragging weight of my own burden. Now, many lives were at stake, including Marshen’s.
The following morning, I didn’t remove my eyes from the cliffs. I fought and suppressed my every instinct to look at the sky, to confirm that we were absent from the Phoenix.
The same opposing thoughts persisted, though—every second was a series of hope and fear. Hope that they existed, and fear that they didn’t…or that they wouldn’t want to show themselves to me.
But then I may have seen a crevice, a fissure. It wasn’t very wide, but I was almost certain it was there.
I hurried towards the bow and shouted at the top of my lungs. “Marshen!” Again. “Marshen!”
He did not stop.
I grabbed the wooden paddle and bent over the railing, slapping the water’s surface. “Marshen!”
He kept moving. Gods damn him.
For a second I thought about jumping, but to do so from a moving boat seemed too risky. My other option was not the safest either, but what better way to attract a shark?
I reached for Marshen’s dagger. I hissed as I cut across my left palm, allowing blood to trickle drops of red into the deep blue sea.
Marshen stopped. He shifted.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“I think I saw a crevice farther back. Over there,” I shouted. Drops of blood splattered on the wooden floor as I pointed towards the cliff.
“I’ll move us there. Prepare the paddles, I’ll join you on board soon.”
I didn’t complain when Marshen dripped water all over the deck, soaking my feet.
“Boreas, you smell exactly like him.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s as if you didn’t have your own scent to begin with.”
I covered my palm with a piece of cloth and pressed down firmly, not bothering with the salve. I avoided Marshen’s gaze like he was Daekon himself.
Cutting my own palm and then opting to paddle was a terrible sequence. Marshen ended up doing most of the paddling.
“Next time, cut somewhere else,” he said over his shoulder.
“Next time, I’ll cut your tongue. Go farther left. Around there, I think I saw it.”
“I think you’re right.”
It was ingenious, the way the vertical sandstone panels stood in alternating rows of towering rocks. SailingMercyin a zigzag motion around their reddened edges felt as if we were moving through the interlocked teeth of two colossal hair combs that united into a dead end.
The cave’s aperture was out in the open, yet cleverly concealed, hidden behind many layers of sandstone. It reminded me of Semuel’s stable—of Cinnamon, always concealed in the open.
