Page 51 of Add To Hoard

I am here.

I think: this is the night I will count from.

Whatever comes after, the crossing, Blackwake, Bren healed and whole and standing in the light. I will count from this.

Three days,* some part of me notes, still keeping the tally. *I have three more days.

Tonight,* the rest of me answers back. *Tonight is not three days from now. Tonight is now. Be here.

I am here.

He pulls me close afterward and I let him, my back against his chest, his arm across my ribs, both of us breathing. The ash of the fire is pale at the edge of the pit. The stars are doing their work above the cloud cover, invisible but present, as they always are.

"Maelor," I say.

"Yes."

I can't finish it. I have the words. I have had them since the spring, maybe before, maybe since he knelt in the volcanic mud and fixed my brig's hull without being asked, but they are the kind of words that once said become part of the record, and I am leaving in three days, and I don't know what the record does to either of us if I say them now.

So I say: "I'll fix the shutter."

His arm tightens across my ribs. Not much. Just enough.

"I know you will," he says.

We lie there until the cold finally makes its case for sleep, and neither of us says the thing, and both of us know the thing, and the island holds its quiet around us like it is keeping the secret too.

29

MAELOR

Iwake before dawn and I do not lie still.

I get up and I build the fire and I eat and then I go to the brig. Hull check, the patch is perfect, has been perfect, I know it is perfect and I check it anyway because this is the last time and I am going to do it completely. Lines — all four, tested, taut, everything as it should be. Provisions — stowed and secured, the water casks full, the weight distributed correctly for a solo crossing. The spare sail that someone stored and forgot about, still in the hold, still serviceable.

The ‘Tenacious’ is ready.

I stand on the deck for a moment and put my hand on the wheel and look at the cove and the rock formations and the treeline and the shelter. Twelve days. I put my hand on the wheel and I look at what I am leaving — the wedge still seated exactly where I drove it, the basin running clear, the fire pit I built and rebuilt every evening. The overhang that kept the rain off us. The cove that stopped trying to kill me and started simply being a place I lived.

“Thank you,” I say to the brig, quietly, because I have always talked to things that cannot hear me and I am not going to stop now.

I go over the side and walk up the beach to the shelter.

The rock face is cold under my hand. I crouch at the base of it where the stone is flattest and I take the knife out and I hold it for a moment and look at the wall.

I have been thinking about this since the night I sat at the fire with my hands shaking. The thinking goes back to the warm day when the island played my own voice back to me. Since Vaelka sat on my beach and told me what it cost him to argue for me, and since Ysara said ‘I’m glad you came here’ at the treeline, and since he covered my hand with his in the warm water of the spring.

I know what I want to say.

I press the blade to the rock and I start.

The stone is volcanic basalt, which is harder than it looks but yields to a good knife applied with patience, and I have patience and a good knife and I am not in a hurry. The letters come slowly and I make them clearly because they need to be readable and they need to last. When I finish I sit back on my heels and I read it:

May Lord the capable, the brig did not sink. The fog did not yield. I made it here. Will you find me there?

I stand. I leave it.

I walk to the treeline.