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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LORE

In all things, you will see My hand.

M orning, Your Majesty.”

Every part of Lore ached. Her head pounded, her eyes were gritty, and her back shrieked, stretched out on a thin layer of sand that barely cushioned against the shale of the cliff.

They’d stayed worrisomely close to the edge last night, not quite near enough for Lore to reach out and touch empty air, but not far off.

Safer that way, Dani said. Less likely for someone to come upon them by accident.

Not that anyone would be traveling on the cliffs, anyway. This part of the island, scrubby and nearly treeless, was mostly left alone.

The night before, they’d traveled halfway to the southern side of the island, where the repair dock was located.

They’d stopped to sleep on the cliffs as the sun began to rise, where Lore anticipated being kept awake by nerves and guilt and the interruption of her natural rhythm.

Instead, she’d dropped almost immediately into a deep sleep, ending up on the dreamwalking beach. No one else showed.

Still, she’d stayed there until she woke, not letting herself wander into another dream.

On the off chance that someone would appear, yes, but also as a test of her mettle.

The only other time she’d done this was when Anton was creeping into her dreams, unspooling her power to kill those villages, and dreamwalking still made her nervous.

Making herself stay, forcing it to be on her own terms, helped heal that fear. Not all of it, but some.

She wished there were a way to reach out through the aether, make Gabe or Malcolm or Alie fall asleep at the same time. But like Alie said, it wasn’t an exact science. They were all relying on chance, and chance had never seemed to be on their side.

Dani crouched next to Lore, holding a battered canteen. She sloshed it in her direction. “Be sparing. We won’t get fresh water again until we’re on the ship.”

Lore sat up, squinting. She took a tiny sip of water—it tasted like dust.

The sun was on its way down, the light behind the fog tinged pink.

Dani stood, brushing dirt off her knees.

“Steel your stomach now if you’re prone to seasickness.

” Dani stood and started picking her way over the cliff.

“I’m not holding your hair while you vomit, and I doubt the Ferryman will, either. ”

An hour, walking silently through the falling dark, and they were at the edge of another cliff face. Lights gleamed on the beach below, sickly and yellow through the ash. The repair dock was little more than a shape in the shadows, hidden in shifting gray.

Lore slipped into channeling-space. Threads of gold glimmered in the sand and the sea, tiny life-forms close to the shore and larger animals out in the depths, but there was nothing human-shaped.

At least, not near the docks. But out on the water, a vague human form glowed golden.

“He’s here,” Lore said, blinking to banish the strands of magic. “Not docked yet.”

“We’ll signal him when we get down there.” Dani stood, walked over to a notch in the cliff face. A set of rough-hewn stairs, the middles worn slick with use, led down to the beach. “Now for the hard part.”

I feel like there will be more than one hard part , Lore said to the goddess in the back of her mind. Nyxara had been quiet all day and into the night, a fact that she hadn’t noticed until now. It’d be terribly anticlimactic for me to slip on a step and die.

No reply. Lore frowned, a slow bloom of panic setting into her middle as she mentally prodded at the space the Buried Goddess occupied, the deepest shadows of her subconscious. Nyxara?

Maybe Nyxara was just hiding, tucked so deeply into the back of her mind that She was invisible. Lore prodded harder, going deeper, reaching so far into her head that stars started swimming at the edges of her vision. Nyxara, answer me.

But the space was empty.

The goddess was gone.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.”

Dani’s voice snapped her back, swaying on the cliff face as the other woman looked up from halfway down the stairs, her mouth set in irritation. “If you are, get over it.”

Lore started down, her thoughts one huge scream of apprehension. Had she done something, accidentally cast Nyxara out? She supposed she should be grateful, if she had; wasn’t freedom from the goddess exactly what she’d been working toward?

But instead she felt bereft, like something had been torn from her, just like she had when Mortem was gone. Nyxara had been a constant, the only person in hundreds of miles she could trust. Now Lore was truly alone.

Her foot almost slipped; Lore cursed, righting herself, focusing on the job of getting down the cliff without breaking her neck.

Dani reached the beach long before Lore did; by the time Lore’s boot touched sand, Dani was at the end of the dock, holding up a lighter.

She waved it back and forth, then up and down.

The shadows out on the water moved, coalesced into a boat. More barge than ship, maybe forty feet across, roughly the same size as the vessel that ferried prisoners.

With an air of relief, Dani extinguished the lighter and dropped it into her pocket.

Neither of them spoke as the barge approached. As it grew closer, Lore could see that it was old, repaired in a series of patchwork jobs that left some boards on the hull looking new and others so sea-weathered she was surprised they held. When it bumped the dock, the sound made Lore jump.

A door at the prow, opening. A face peering over the side, light-brown skin and dark curling hair, eyes narrowed. The Ferryman spoke with a slight accent, one Lore thought might be Kadmaran. “Code word?”

Ah, fuck, Lore didn’t know there was a code word. But Dani’s smugly satisfied smile didn’t change. “Tanzanite.”

Some obscure stone, one that could be found in the Second Isle mine. The Ferryman nodded, his face disappearing.

“You could have told me there was a code word,” Lore said.

“You have magic,” Dani answered. “I get to have the damn code word.”

A gangplank shuddered from the side of the boat, hit the dock with a muffled thunk .

“And now,” Dani said, stepping up onto the gangplank, “we’re officially fugitives.”

Lore followed, embarking silently. When she reached the deck, she went starboard, staring out at the beach while the Ferryman brought the gangplank back in.

There was nothing else to pick up; they were his only cargo.

He went back to steering without a word, adjusting a sail, bringing them back out into open water without the benefit of guidelines.

The boat rocked, waves growing taller the moment they left shore, made more concerning by the lack of visibility. “You should go belowdeck,” the Ferryman said, not looking at them. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

They did, Lore still drifting as if this were a dream. The hold was just as old and battered as the rest of the boat, the ceiling barely two feet above Lore’s head. She sat by the wall, tucked her legs up beneath her.

“Well, that was easy,” Dani said, sitting across from her. “Though maybe I shouldn’t say so until we actually reach the Harbor.”

“Why didn’t you do this before?” Lore asked. “If it was so easy?”

A flutter of some unnamed emotion across Dani’s face, but the other woman just shrugged.

“Why would I? I had a fairly good deal going on the Second Isle. No mines, and three meals I didn’t have to cook, which won’t be the case once we get to the Harbor.

I have no firsthand accounts, obviously, but we can assume it’s all very community-oriented.

Everyone pulling their own weight. That doesn’t interest me. ”

She was lying. Lore knew it like she knew the scar on her hand. But she also knew that she was the last person Dani would share her secrets with.

“You’d be free,” Lore said.

“I never have been,” Dani responded. “So it wasn’t really something to miss.”

She and the former noblewoman were more alike than Lore cared to admit. Had their roles been reversed, if she had been the one sent here with no divine plan burrowed into her head and no real escape, she probably would have done the same as Dani had. She was endlessly, horribly adaptable.

Maybe in other circumstances, she and Dani could actually be friends.

“I killed him,” Dani said casually.

The boat lurched. Lore grabbed at the boards to hold herself steady. “What?”

“Martin.” Dani shrugged, but the tension in her body belied the blithe movement. “Before we left. I went into his room and slit his throat.”

She couldn’t tell if the other woman wanted her to be shocked, or if it was a simple statement of fact, an item on her list that she thought Lore should know.

But Lore wasn’t shocked. She was, strangely, proud.

“Good,” she said, leaning her head back against the side of the boat. It lurched again, almost like a cradle. She closed her eyes.