She brought Kran to the relative safety of the blacksmith’s porch. Waves still lapped at the bottom of the step, but the porch itself stood above the water. A good two inches of mud coated the stone, dotted with shards of glass and bits of broken lumber. Broken crab pots and smashed wooden pieces lay everywhere.
Oric sat on one, his face very pale. She remembered his hurt arm and felt a pang.
“Dara! Are you okay?”
She sagged with relief at the sound of Boruc’s voice. “We’re okay, but Oric’s hurt,” she called out.
“There’s plenty of injured on their way to the farms. Let’s get him to the healer so she can patch him up.” The big man splashed his way toward them.
“Can you help Oric?” Jendara asked.
“I can walk,” the boy snapped. “It’s just my arm.”
“Spoken like your father’s boy.” Boruc grinned. “None of our kin’s ever been much for complaining. Give me a minute to catch my breath—had to clear a lot of rubble to get here.”
Behind them, something crumpled and crashed. Probably a tree’s roots giving out, Jendara thought, or a damaged house giving in to the pull of the outgoing current. The whole village could fall down into the sea with this kind of flooding. She thought of her own little cottage and wondered what condition she’d find it in.
“Help! Somebody help me!”
Boruc caught her eye. “Sounds like you’re not the only one who got stuck down here. Want to lend a hand?”
Jendara nodded. She’d come to the island of Sorind to be part of a community, and helping out in an emergency was part of being a good neighbor. “Kran,” she said. “You start clearing out a place for hurt people. We’ll need places to sit and a spot big enough to lay someone down. Oric, you help as best you can, but take it easy till we get that arm bound up. I’ll be back with more folks as I find them.”
Kran gave her a mock-salute. Boruc paused a moment.
“I almost forgot why I started toward your house this morning. Happy birthday, Jendara.” He held out a linen-wrapped package, it shape roughly triangular and about half as long as her arm.
Kran grinned knowingly. Jendara raised an eyebrow. “Were you in on this?”
The boy nodded. She unbound the length of linen and smiled at the beautiful creation in her hand. Boruc was a true artist, and though stone was his preferred medium, the work he’d put into this piece of wood and steel made it something outstanding.
“A new handaxe.” She tested its balance in her hand. “It’s amazing.”
Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. The year before, she’d lost the handaxe that had belonged to her father—the only token she’d had left of her family, wiped out by raiders before Kran was born. In the time she’d spent on Sorind, Boruc had come to seem like a brother, part of the extended family she’d made for herself from crew and islanders.
The big man consented to a hug. “You’ll probably get some good use out of it today.”
He was right. The day crawled by as she shifted timbers, chopped open jammed and broken doors, and bandaged small wounds. Folks from the farms came down to lend a hand and bring lunch. The healer took Oric away to join his family, although he protested about leaving the repair work.
The tsunami had cruelly battered the island. Many of the houses on the higher ground in the village stood strong, needing only some surface level repairs—but a few were just gone, the island’s clay soil washed out from under them. The town’s gardens were ravaged, the livestock decimated. It would be years before the village fully recovered from the great wave.
After working most of the afternoon, Jendara and Kran finally headed toward their own home on the edge of town. Jendara had purposefully avoided looking in its direction all day. The roof of the house looked fine, but as they drew closer, she could see the massive driftwood log that had stove in the front wall of her house. Kran stopped beside the garden fence and stared.
“Well, shit.” She kicked the fence, then kicked it again. “Shit!”
Kran tapped his chest as though his heart pained him. It probably did.
“I don’t want to go in,” Jendara admitted. She’d built this cottage herself, working with Boruc and his brother Morul to frame the building with wood they’d felled in the forest beyond Yul’s farm. The Milady’s caulker, the green-haired gnome named Glayn, had helper her sew the curtains from fabric she and Kran had picked out on a trip to the mainland. The ship’s first mate, Tam, had helped her build the boxes for the bees in the garden.
The bees were probably all dead now.
She walked up to cottage’s splintered door, but found she could go no farther. After all the ruin and trouble she’d seen today, she was just too tired to think of clearing out the entrance of her own house.
She thought of the day of her wedding, only four or five months ago, when Vorrin had tried to carry her over this threshold, and instead knocked her head against the doorframe. She’d had a goose egg for a week.
She patted the frame with its ruined door. Their first home they’d had as a family, and she would have to rebuild most of the place.
“Could be worse,” she said out loud. “Plenty of folks lost everything they had.”
Kran tossed a smashed crate out of what had once been her potato patch and then made his way back to the garden fence. He paused to pet the dog and then climbed up to perch on the top fence rail. After a moment, she joined him. It was probably more comfortable than anything inside her soaked house.
Kran tapped her shoulder and pointed to the harbor. A tall ship glided across the water, its yellow-and-blue pennant snapping proudly from its tallest mast. The Milady. At least they’d have a dry place to sleep tonight.
* * *
Jendara watched from the beach as the dinghy approached. The four rowers stowed their oars, and the humans of the group began climbing out of the small craft to drag it onto the shore. Vorrin, her husband since early summer and her best friend for the past seven years, moved the fastest. Next to his massive first mate, he looked almost scrawny, and his neatly trimmed dark brown goatee stood as a contrast to the full beards the men of the islands wore. Even his hair, neatly clubbed back instead of left loose and decorated with sewn braids, marked his Chelish background.
Amid the humans, she saw Glayn the caulker, still clambering out of the dinghy. Despite his small size, the gnome immediately took his place with the others, working to get the boat ashore. Kran’s yellow-and-white dog kicked up a spray of water as she raced to meet them.
Jendara waved at the group: her closest friends—her family, really—gone the past week to repair the Milady. The rest of the crew must be waiting on board the tall ship, worrying. The island had to look terrible from the harbor.
“Thank the gods you’re all right!” Vorrin let go of the boat and ran to meet Jendara on the beach. He held her tight for a long moment. “We waited till it was safe to come into the harbor,” he murmured. “I thought I’d die from the wait.”
“It was pretty bad,” she admitted. “The flood surge wiped out the cottage.”
He leaned back to read her face. “Is it—is everything—?”
“The house is ruined. All the furniture soaked and smashed. I don’t think anything’s worth saving.”
“Oh no.” He reached out for Kran and gave him a hug. The boy didn’t mind. Even before Vorrin and Jendara had married, Kran and Vorrin had been close. The man had always been there for the boy.
The others approached. Tam, a giant islander with wild yellow hair, beard, and eyebrows, called out: “Is it as bad at it looks, Dara?”
“Is our cottage ruined?” Glayn blurted. He and Tam had finally built a place on the island after years of bunking on board the ship. Glayn loved the little cottage.
Kran was already writing on his slate. It’s fine!
“Wish we’d built as far up on the hill as you two,” Jendara added. “A tree fell on one end and smashed up your roof a bit, but nothing like ours. We’ve got nothing.”
Sarni, the newest and youngest crew member, not even twenty yet, patted Jendara on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about the cottage.” She sounded unusually solemn. Though the girl had been a part of their crew for less than a year, she had grown as close to Jendara as a younger sibling.
Then Sarni grinned, brown eyes crinkling in her round face—her usual expression. Everything about the teenaged girl was cheery and compact and brown, like sea otter who had decided to join human company. “Tell her the good news, Vee!”
Vorrin sighed. He didn’t care for his new nickname, and the young deckhand irritated him. But Jendara had taken Sarni under her wing after finding her running with a gang of vicious thieves raiding boats in Halgrim’s harbor. Perhaps because Jendara had saved Sarni’s life in that first meeting—or perhaps because Sarni knew that Jendara, too, had once run on the wrong side of the law—Sarni had been overeager to remold herself in Jendara’s image ever since.
“It was amazing.” Glayn beamed up at Jendara.
Tam nodded. “We only saw it for a moment—”
“You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was!” Sarni interjected.
“Hey,” Jendara barked. “Shut up and give me the news straight.”
“A new island,” Vorrin explained. “It was unbelievable—we were on our way here, and the sea went crazy. Off to the west of us, the water looked like it was boiling. Orcas were racing to get by, leaping up in the air.”
“That part was terrifying,” Glayn interjected.
“I thought we were dead,” Sarni added. “But Cap’n Vee wasn’t scared.”
“I nearly pissed myself,” Vorrin corrected her. “Thirty-seven years at sea and I never saw anything like it.”
“A new island?” Jendara shook her head.
“It just came up out of the sea,” Tam explained. “Real slow at first. It sounded even stranger in his matter-of-fact delivery. He was an islander, born and bred, and took things in stride.
“What do you think made it come up?” Jendara asked. “The earthquake?”
“That had to have something to do with it,” Glayn said. “Maybe it broke off of something at the bottom of the sea and floated to the top.”
“Rocks don’t float, Glayn,” Tam noted.
“Pumice floats!” Glayn shot back.
“Maybe,” Vorrin said, his dark eyebrows drawing together. He rubbed his neatly trimmed goatee, a sure sign he was thinking hard.
“All of this doesn’t matter,” Sarni blurted. “What matters is the gold!”
“Gold?” Jendara’s voice was sharp.
Sarni nodded. “We saw it through the spyglass.”
“I didn’t dare get close to it. But we could see the entire surface was built up, like a city covered it. And it practically sparkled in the sun—we could see the gold shining on the tops of buildings,” Vorrin explained. “It all looked really, really old.”
A golden city on an island that had just popped up to the surface of the sea. If it had been inhabited by sea creatures, they were probably dead or desperately escaping back to the ocean. If it had been inhabited by air-breathing creatures—well, they certainly weren’t going to still be around if the thing had been underwater.
“An abandoned city of gold.”
“Hail, Jendara!” a voice called.
Jendara glanced up. Another dinghy approached from the Milady. Half the crew had stayed in Halgrim for the winter, taking on extra work at the shipyards or staying with family. The four in the approaching dinghy and the four on the beach were all longtime friends, teammates who’d been on board the ship since the day Vorrin inherited it. Glayn had been with her even before that, serving alongside Jendara during the dark pirating days. Every last one of them was worth three of the cottages she’d lost. The thought eased a little of the hurt of losing her possessions. Possessions could always be recovered if there was gold at hand.
And perhaps there was gold at hand. “You didn’t see any other ships out there, did you? No one else was staking a claim on this new island?”
Kran looked from Vorrin to Jendara, a smile spreading across his face. He already knew what she was thinking.
Glayn chuckled. “If your house was ruined, your boy’s going to need an all-new winter wardrobe. And a new bow, and a spear, and a new—”
Jendara cut him off. “If that island has as much gold as your story makes it sound, Kran can have his own armory.”
“Are we headed back out?” a woman nearly as tall as Tam called from the second dinghy. It was Zuna, the Milady’s navigator. The sun winked off the tiny silver bells and glass beads woven into her many black braids. The dark-skinned woman and her comrades jumped out of the boat and began dragging it ashore.
Jendara and the others walked down to the meet this second group. Zuna put an arm around Kran. It had taken Zuna a few years to warm up to Jendara; the woman had served on too many merchant vessels to trust a pirate, repentant or not. But Zuna was dead loyal to Vorrin, and she’d learned to like Jendara well enough. Kran, no one could help but love.
Vorrin looked back at his ship. “We still have supplies on board from our trip to Halgrim, but not many. We’ll need to lay in some stores before we commit to anything. It might not seem like it, but winter’s coming. This warm streak won’t last forever.”
The group divided itself, long experience making instructions unnecessary. Three crew members hung back to ask Jendara about their kin in the village; they agreed to help get Vorrin restocked for the journey to the golden island, but were too concerned with Sorind’s well-being to sign on for this kind of adventure. Jendara couldn’t blame them. The Milady was a trading vessel. The crew, no matter how stouthearted, wasn’t all cut out of adventuring cloth.
Jendara kissed Vorrin on the cheek and left him to finish settling up with the crew members who were staying. She hurried to catch up with Kran and the long-legged Zuna, looking the other woman in the eye. “You sure you’re up for this?”
“If you’re asking if I’m up for a chance to make a fortune scraping gold off an abandoned city that’s been lost beneath the waves, then yes. I wouldn’t mind being rich.” Zuna broke eye contact and studied the ground, careful of debris underfoot.
Careful. That was how Jendara had always thought of the woman. She kept to herself most of the time, and had never misguided the ship in all her years of navigating. Jendara had never seen her worried or frightened. While the others had faced cannibals and skinwalkers last year, Zuna had broken her leg on a trip to the mainland and missed it all. Jendara wondered what she’d be like in a fight. No one could be that collected all the time.
“It might be dangerous,” Jendara warned. “There’s no way of knowing how long that island’s been underwater.”
Zuna stopped and glared. “If you want to mother someone, mother your son. I can take care of myself.” She pivoted on her rope sandal and strode away.
“What’s her problem?” Jendara snapped.
Kran patted her shoulder soothingly, then reached for his chalk. He paused and wrote: Island sounds great.
Jendara frowned at the slate. “Kran, you’re not going.”
What? He underlined the word twice.
“You heard what I said to Zuna. Parts of that island could still be flooded, not to mention who knows what kind of weird magic or critters might be on it. There’s no way I’m letting you go.”
He threw down his chalk so hard the tip broke off against his slate. It swung crazily on its cord. For a moment, she half-expected him to throw his slate off on the ground, the way he would have just a year ago, but instead he just stood glaring at her.
She folded her arms across her chest. “Let’s go check on Oric.”
His fingers curled into fists. He looked like he was ready to explode, but he didn’t.
She walked up the hill without looking back at him. She couldn’t take him with her, and she wouldn’t cave, but no matter how well Kran knew it, he wouldn’t let the matter go. He was going to be angry with her for a long time.
Jendara pasted a pleasant look on her face, smiling at villagers as she passed. But inside, she sagged with exhaustion. Raising a boy was like fighting a war, sometimes. And right now she wanted nothing but a bit of quiet and a pint of beer in her own little house.
In other words, she wanted the impossible.
* * *
Jendara stood at the deck rail as the morning wind blew sweet salt into her face. The trip to the island would take all morning and a good chunk of the afternoon; Zuna was planning a careful course that skirted the rocky shoals they’d seen off the northeast side of the island. The crew’s energy ran high—Jendara could hear it in their voices as they called to each other in the sails. It was a skeleton staff without the three Sorinders, although Vorrin had pressed their old friend Boruc into assisting, and she could hear the big man singing someplace up in the rigging. He wasn’t much of a salt, but it would be a short journey to this mysterious new island. They could manage the ship well enough with no weather.
She rubbed her eyes. She’d slept poorly, even though her and Vorrin’s bed in the captain’s cabin was comfortable enough. There had been a time when she and Kran were inseparable, more best buddies than parent and child, but over the last few years his temper and will had pulled them apart. Things had gotten quieter since Vorrin joined their little family, but in the last few weeks, there had been signs that the good times were coming to an end.
“You all right?” Vorrin set a hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t like leaving Kran like this. I hate fighting with him.”
“I know. But you were right to leave him behind. I tried to explain to him just how much Oric and Morul were going to need his help while we’re gone, but I don’t think it helped.” Vorrin shrugged. “I don’t know that much about being a father.”
“You’re the closest thing he’s ever had,” she reminded him. “His own’s been gone a long time.”
“I do my best.” He sighed. “Jendara, do you feel good about this trip? About this island, I mean?”
“Sure. We just lost everything we own, outside of this boat. After crew pay and all the repairs on the Milady, we’re flat broke. Anything that could make us a copper or two feels fine.”
He set his elbow on the rail. “I don’t know. I just can’t help but wonder what makes a sunken island come up out of the sea like this. You haven’t seen it yet, so you don’t know. It’s ancient. Just looking at it, you can tell. Whatever built that city, they lived a long, long time ago. Who knows what they were like?”
“We’ll be careful.” Jendara nodded to herself. “I’m sure everything will be just fine.”