Page 120

• Alessia •

THE DOCKS ON this side of the island smell of fish guts, making me realize they must do most of their fishing from this side because the breeze carries that rotting smell to me.

The path from the cliff descends in uneven stone steps worn smooth. Eagan patiently walks behind me, letting me set the pace. Three men stand on the nearest dock, loading nets into a dinghy that has seen better days. The metal is streaked with rust where the paint has peeled away.

One man, heavyset with an unruly beard, hauls a bundle of netting over his shoulder and drops it into the boat with a grunt. The second is younger, wiry, his hands moving fast as he coils rope into neat loops. The third sits on an overturned crate mending a torn net with a bone needle, his fingers working automatically while his eyes track me and Eagan approaching.

I stop at the edge of the dock, noting the old wooden boathouse that looks like it is one powerful gust of wind away from toppling into the ocean.

“I need wagons,” I say, and my voice comes out stronger than I feel. “Shovels. And I need hands. People who can haul seaweed from the shoreline, collect shells and crush them, gather sand from the beach.” My eyes dart to the dead bonfires scattered along the shoreline. “And whatever ash you have from burning driftwood or waste, I need that too.”

The bearded man turns to look at me. His eyes move from my face to my dirt-stained hands to the boots caked in red, and then to Eagan standing behind me.

“And who’s asking?” he says, dropping another bundle of net into the dinghy.

“Someone who’s trying to fix your soil.”

The younger one laughs first. A short bark that he tries to swallow and fails. The man on the crate looks up from his mending, and his expression shifts from wariness to amusement.

The bearded man straightens up and wipes his hands on his trousers, and the grin on his face is wide and patronizing and so achingly familiar that my teeth clench before he even opens his mouth.

“Why don’t you go make yourself useful and find something to sweep, girl.” Their laughter triggers something.

It’s as if time stops and rewinds within a blink. I’m no longer staring at the three fishermen.

Sable’s small fingers are threaded through mine, quivering and sweaty from our long walk, and the scent of campfire and burnt flesh is pressed into our clothing and hair.

I can’t remember why we came here, but with every heavy step I took, my mother’s last scream settled deeper into my chest.

I’m standing in front of the saloon while Sable stares through the dusty windows. The town isn’t much to look at. A dozen buildings at most, with huts and patched tents clustered near the docks where new arrivals always seem to appear.

Men are repairing fishing nets outside one shack. Someone is skinning a rabbit near another. Smoke drifts from cook fires.

The island provides if you know where to look, that’s what Mama used to tell us. She said that’s why people here leave the Arcanum alone, that they need our tinctures more than they fear our company.

Most people never came to our cottages. The Arcanum sat deep in the forest beyond the crop fields, far enough from town that the noise of working days and celebrating in the night never reached us.

Men like this never reached us.

Sometimes people arrived carrying someone bleeding or feverish. Mama and the others would patch them up, hand them medicine, and send them home again. The same men who built this town with their bare hands, who built our cottages far from sight.

But I’d never seen a saloon before. The men inside are laughing and hollering, slapping a table, their rowdy voices carrying outside into the street. A woman stumbles over a man’s outstretched legs and spills a drink in his lap, making the man jump up.

She laughs at first, but then as he lunges for her, she shrieks and races for the door. She makes it onto the saloon porch just as the man catches up to her, his friends on their heels, still laughing, even louder now that they are outside with us.

“Stupid woman!” the man curses. “Look at what you did!” He rips her closer with a hand in her dark hair.

“So sorry,” she stammers, trying to use the bottom of her skirt to dry his pants.

“Leave it! Go be useful and get me a new drink,” he snaps, shoving her away and toward the saloon door.

The man turns to his friends, but a scream rings out so loudly, their smiles falter. They peer down the dirt road where their wagons are.

One steps off the porch of the saloon. “What is it?” the man with wet pants asks.

The younger man shakes his head. “I have no ide—” The rest disappears in a spray of blood. Something flashes through my vision, too fast to see what.

One second the man is standing there, and the next, his body crumples to the ground right before us. Sable gasps and buries her head in my side.