CHAPTER 19

Strange Marks

It’s said that all legends start small, and the legend of Cannek Reed was no exception. He was sixteen when he left his home in the Everican interior—a skinny kid with hunched shoulders and an awkward gait that gave little indication of the greatness inside him.

Except for his eyes—those striking blue eyes, the color of the water on a clear day.

His mother’s eyes, though she was long gone.

There had been one last beating the night before he left. Shouting: his father’s wet voice washing up against the windows, seeping through the cracks into the still black night.

His father had struck him. More than once.

More than twice.

The pain had spread across his cheek, his back, the side of his head, like the splatter of water on flagstone.

Eventually his father’s anger eroded, as it always did, into drunken sleep. So it was quiet when Reed left.

His footsteps were drenched with dew.

His heart was filled with the sounds of the ocean.

He didn’t look back.

In Kelanna, folks said you’d never been home until you’d been to sea. At sixteen, however, Reed had never even seen the ocean. His father had forbidden it. Reed’s mother had left his father for it, or for a Gormani sailor—the stories differed depending on who you asked—and for Cannek the water had always been out of reach beyond the ridges that insulated his country from the Central Sea.

But he’d felt the water calling to him his whole life—streams, brooks, little rivers—chattering to him as they ran down to the sea.

It took him a few days and a few moments of doubt before he crossed the mountains, but when he finally saw the ocean it was worth it.

The sea was a magnificent tempestuous creature, bluer than the sky, with silver crests and wings of spray and mist. Its voices were white birds with black-tipped wings and the deep thrum of water on rock.

But in the little port town, he couldn’t get anyone to hire him. “Can’t hire a sailor who can’t sail,” they said, laughing.

But he had to be out there. The water was waiting for him.

He stowed away in the bowels of a passenger ship and sailed off in the stinking darkness of the bilge.

Days passed. Three nights of sneaking out, filching handfuls of food and a few gulps of fresh air before retreating into hiding again. He would have made it all the way to Liccaro if not for the tailors.

They weren’t actually tailors, of course, but he’d never learned who they really were.

They were on deck one night when he popped up from the main hatch for a glimpse of the sky. It was overcast, but the moon floated through the clouds, its light an oil slick in the darkness.

“Isn’t there anywhere else we can hide it?” the woman asked. Reed couldn’t make out her features, but she wore a sharp silver ring on one of her fingers.

The man shook his head. “What is ridden comes to pass.”

Clutching the lip of the hatch, Reed blinked in confusion. He was about to duck out of sight when the woman turned, her dark eyes fixed on him, as if she’d known he was there all along. She raised her hand, and something struck him in the neck.

He collapsed.

The man and woman stalked toward him.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even open his mouth to scream.

“We’re sorry,” the woman said, plucking a dart from his throat.

The rest of the memory was fragmented, as full of holes as a rusted bucket: the man carrying Reed belowdecks—the weave of an oversize sweater beneath his cheek—quarters packed with bolts of cloth and needles sharp as spines—in the ceiling, a knot of wood shaped like an eye.

Reed couldn’t be sure, but he thought the woman may have smoothed his hair from his forehead. Maybe he was reminded of his own mother, except for the odd tang of copper at the back of his throat.

Over the years he must have blocked out most of what happened, but he still remembered the worst of it: the man uncorking a bottle of ink—the woman lifting a scrap of parchment decorated with dots and curious designs the like of which Reed had never seen.

The man dipped a needle into the ink and began piercing the flesh of Reed’s chest over and over and over. Reed tried to scream. Tried to flinch or wince or cry. But the paralysis held him fast.

He didn’t know how long he lay there or what else they did to him, but he remembered the pain folding over itself again and again as the man deepened the tattoos, making sure they would never fade.

They mopped up the blood—or did they?

The man washed his hands, he thought.

The woman set the sheet of paper on fire and dropped it into a metal bowl.

Maybe she withdrew a bottle of amber liquid from her bag. Maybe she pinched his nose shut to get him to swallow, or maybe she injected him. All he remembered was falling back into darkness, which closed over his head like ink.

•   •   •

Shivering and wet, he awoke to salt water splashing into his face, up his nose, and down his throat. He gagged, recoiling.

He could move again.

His chest ached. His legs were numb. Raising his head, he looked around.

He was tied to a barrel—floating in a turquoise sea with sandbars peeping up from beneath the water. The passenger ship was nowhere in sight.

The morning sun blazed down on him. Every now and then a faint thread of blood leaked from the tattoos on his chest, drawing white water snakes that circled him, curiously, their tongues flicking in and out, testing for blood.

He fumbled with the ropes, but they’d swollen in the water. His shriveled fingers couldn’t undo them.

He attacked the fibers with his teeth, pricking his lips and gums on the rough cord.

Black-tipped sharks emerged beneath him. Pain surged through his calf as one of them sunk its teeth into him. Reed kicked out, but the shark had already circled away. Blood streamed from the bite.

Something flashed in the waves—another triangular fin, another tipped tail. The creatures were all around him now, darting in to nip at his body and darting out again. Panic gripped him.

Was this how he was going to die?

It couldn’t be. He’d waited sixteen years to see the ocean. It couldn’t betray him like this.

There was a gunshot. Water sprayed up around him. A white snake split in half, its pieces snapped up by sharks before they’d even begun to sink.

A shadow fell over him—a ship with white sails, a green hull, and a figurehead shaped like a tree.

There were more shots. Someone whooping, “Lookee what we got here!” Laughter. Bullets sank into the waves around him, scattering the open-water predators.

People lowered themselves over the rails. Reed’s bonds parted beneath their knives, and he slipped under the surface, flailing and coughing. He’d never learned to swim.

The sailors lifted him up by the armpits, remarking on his strange tattoos, and hoisted him onto the deck, where he collapsed, limbs throbbing, chest stinging.

“What’re you doing out here, boy?” someone asked.

In answer, Reed vomited up seawater.

“Easy,” the man said, hunkering down beside him. He had a severe face with dead gray eyes and a notch on the bridge of his nose. “You’re safe now. You’re on the Current of Faith.”