The Deepest Blue Read online

  “She’s cold,” Papa said. “Mayara—” He cut himself off, as if suddenly realizing there were many things he wanted to say to his daughter beyond the fact that they were drenched.

  If he says anything, I’ll cry. Again. She jumped up. “I’ll get her a blanket.”

  A few of the unhurt villagers were hauling the storm trunks out to the plaza—every family kept a trunk sealed against storms secure in the caves that riddled the islands. She hurried to the nearest trunk and dug through it for the thickest blanket she could find. Musty and old, the blankets stank like cabbage soup, but they were dry. She pulled one out.

  A hand clamped onto her wrist. She blinked, realizing that she’d been so focused on her prize that she hadn’t noticed Grandmama was sitting cocooned in blankets beside the trunk. Normally, Grandmama was an impossible-to-miss force.

  “I’m sorry,” Mayara said, not even knowing what she was apologizing for—ignoring her or using her power. Or not using it soon enough.

  Nearby, the clamdiggers were wrapping the dead in torn sails and then binding them in netting, as was tradition. At dawn, the bodies would be taken to the “death boats,” sea-worthy canoes carved with prayers for the dead, and then rowed out to sea.

  If I’d acted faster . . .

  “You should go,” Grandmama croaked.

  Mayara swallowed, a scratchy lump in her throat. She’d be gone soon enough. It wouldn’t take long for the queen to hear of what had happened in the spirit storm. She probably sensed it the moment I took control of the sea dragon.

  “Before the Silent Ones come,” Grandmama clarified. “You should run.”

  Impossible, Mayara thought. “You know I can’t. They’ll catch me. Besides, my parents need me. My mother—”

  “Run and hide. You know this coast. Find caves. Take that pretty new husband of yours and flee!”

  Mayara shoved back the wild hope that flared inside her. As tempting as it was, it wasn’t possible to run and hide forever, not from the Silent Ones. They were the queen’s enforcers, and they used the island’s spirits as their eyes and ears. “No one’s ever escaped.”

  “Oh, my little Mayara, pearl of my heart, if no one has done it, then you be the first. Like one of your dives. You’ve been the first to do the impossible before.”

  Mayara shook her head, stepping backward. “I . . . I . . . I have to take this to my mother.” Clutching the blanket, she fled back to her parents.

  Kelo was already with them—he’d brought more blankets, as well as candles. Lit candles ringed the plaza. Seeing him, she felt her knees buckle, but she didn’t let herself collapse, as badly as she wanted to fling herself into his arms. First, she had to take care of her mother. She tucked two blankets around her and felt her forehead. Cold and clammy.

  As Mayara straightened, Kelo wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. “You’ll catch sick like this,” he scolded her. “Can’t do that, not now. Let me take care of you.” He glanced at her parents, as if asking their permission.

  “Go with him,” Papa said. He summoned up an almost-smile, and it was tinged with so much sadness that Mayara felt as if her heart were shattered glass.

  His arm around her, Kelo led her away.

  “I don’t need ‘taking care of,’” Mayara told him, “but my parents do. Promise me you’ll look after them. I need to know they’re safe. Mother . . . she isn’t going to take this well. Papa will have his hands full watching her.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening, though. “Let’s hurry. You’re shivering. I’ve spare clothes in the studio.”

  His studio wasn’t with the rest of the village on the shore, so it wouldn’t have been swept away. And protected as it was by all his charmed art, the spirits wouldn’t have touched it. Any damage would be from ordinary rain and wind. I’ll change into dry clothes, and then I’ll help as much as I can . . . until they take me away. She was still in her sopping-wet wedding dress. It chilled her skin everywhere it touched.

  As they passed through the plaza, Mayara spotted her aunt Beila. She dragged Kelo toward her. “Aunt Beila . . . don’t respect her privacy. Make my mother be with you. She’ll need you, all of you, whether she admits it or not.” Last time, with Elorna, her aunts had given her mother space. Mayara had always thought that was a mistake. She wasn’t going to let it be repeated. “Promise me you’ll annoy her so much that she has to find the will to live, just to tell you to stop.”

  Aunt Beila clasped Mayara’s hand. “Oh, Mayara . . .”

  “Please, promise me,” Mayara begged. “I have to know she’ll be okay.”

  “We’ll be more annoying than fruit flies,” Aunt Beila promised. “But you have to promise us you’ll try to live too. Make the smart choice.”

  Gently, Kelo extracted Mayara’s hands from her aunt’s. “She needs to get into warm clothes, or she won’t be fit to make any choice.”

  Though Kelo was trying to hurry her through the plaza, Mayara paused again and again as she passed more aunts, uncles, and cousins. All of them wanted to wish her well, express condolences for her fate, thank her for what she’d done, or simply say goodbye.

  “Why do you have to have so many blasted relations?” Kelo growled.

  “I’ll change before I freeze, don’t worry.” Mayara picked up her pace so he’d stop fussing.

  They started up the path toward Kelo’s studio. It was strewn with debris. Limbs had been torn off trees, and leaves and branches had been flung everywhere. The rope railing that had run along the edge was gone. Mayara wondered how much worse the damage was down in the village.

  “I want to be back before the Silent Ones come,” she told him. “I want to be surrounded by everyone I love when they”—she swallowed hard, not wanting to complete that phrase—“when I have to go.”

  He was concentrating on his footing and didn’t reply, but she knew he’d heard her. The winding path veered up along one of the ribs of the ancient leviathan’s skeleton. His studio wasn’t far, but much of the path had been washed away.

  “Kelo, you know your art . . .” She wasn’t quite sure how to say it. His art was his life, his heart, his soul. He was going to be devastated to see it storm-ravaged. “It might not still be there.”

  “I have a trunk beneath the floor—that will still be there even if everything else was washed out to sea. It has the spare clothes. And I can make new art.”

  She hoped he meant that. Ahead, she saw his studio. Half the roof tiles had been torn away, and the door had been ripped from its hinges. It lay several yards away, broken against a boulder. Around the studio were remnants of his art and his materials: shells, pebbles, driftwood, all tossed together as if one of her toddler cousins had thrown a tantrum. But the structure still stood. His charms had protected it from the worst the spirits could do.

  Following him inside, Mayara felt her heart crack at the wreckage inside. Rain had soaked everything. While his studio was built too high up to flood from the tide, plenty of rain had gushed in through the damaged roof. The floor was covered in puddles. So much beauty, gone in an instant.

  Mayara lifted a driftwood horse out of a puddle. He’d been carving it to be part of a mobile to hang over Helia’s unborn baby’s crib. Now it never will. She choked back a sob and suddenly realized why Kelo had been so insistent on hurrying here. It was hard to say goodbye to the dead; it was going to be a hundred times harder to say goodbye to the living. “I know why you brought me here.”

  Not looking at her, he knelt in the puddles and yanked at the floorboards. “You do?”

  “You didn’t want to say goodbye in front of everyone.”

  Crack. One of the floorboards splintered as he pried it up. Over his shoulder, she saw a trunk lying in a pool of water that had seeped through the floorboards.

  “Kelo . . . I need you to know . . . you’ll always be in my heart.” She caressed the bit of carved driftwood, turning it over and over in her hands. “No matter what else they take away. No one can take away that.”
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br />   Still not looking at her, he opened the trunk and then handed her a stack of clothes.

  She peeled off the wedding gown carefully, as if it weren’t already ruined by rain, mud, and blood. Kelo took it from her just as carefully, set a chair upright, and draped it over the back. Drying herself with a blanket, she dressed in the clothes he’d given her: a thigh-high wrap dress plus water-resistant leggings.

  These were high-quality clothes, she noticed. Very sturdy. Very practical. And they fit her as perfectly as the wedding dress had. A suspicion began to tug at her mind. “You know my size.”

  “I just made you a wedding dress,” he pointed out. “That shouldn’t be a surprise.” He was watching her with a wary expression.

  The wrap dress had extra fabric that could work as a sling for supplies, and the leggings felt tough enough to withstand the scrape of barnacle-encrusted rocks. She noticed he’d pulled two packs out of the trunk. Most villagers kept only blankets and candles and a few essentials in their storm trunks. This outfit and these supplies . . .

  They were made for a journey.

  “You know that no one escapes the Silent Ones,” Mayara said. “It would be better for my family if—”

  “I’m your family,” Kelo said. “And it would be better for me if you were with me. That’s what we swore, remember? To share our journeys. So journey with me, Mayara. Away from here, until it’s safe to return.”

  She couldn’t ever return. “Everyone knows I—”

  “What do you wish Elorna had done?”

  Mayara flinched.

  He drew her closer. “Your sister did everything she was supposed to, was the dutiful islander, went with the Silent Ones . . . and she died.” His voice was gentle, even if his words felt like knife cuts.

  “I can’t escape this. You know that. I only have two choices: become one of the Silent Ones or go to the Island of Testing.” Why is he torturing me with this? He knows I can’t run!

  He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m asking you to pick a third choice.”

  “I’m supposed to be the impetuous one. Everyone calls me reckless, chasing after a sister who’s gone, as if I could catch her and bring her back.” She pulled away and looked at the two waterproof packs. “But I suppose this isn’t impetuous of you, is it? You’ve been planning this for a long time.”

  “Years,” he said.

  “You never told me.”

  “You never wanted to hear.”

  That was . . . not the right answer. “I thought we didn’t have secrets from each other.”

  He reached for her hands again. “It’s not a secret that I want to be with you forever,” he said simply. “You know I’m a worrier, Mayara, and a planner. Did you really think I wouldn’t prepare for this?”

  She wished he’d told her. She would have talked him out of this sooner, so he wouldn’t be clinging to this false hope. “Elorna tried to run.”

  He blinked.

  “She sneaked away without a word to any of us. I’d had a nightmare and I woke in the night. I went to go curl up with Elorna—sometimes she let me do that when I was scared. But when I went into her room, her bed was empty.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I climbed into her bed and went to sleep,” Mayara said. “I wanted her to escape. I didn’t want to tell anyone she was gone. I thought if I were in her bed, asleep with the covers over my head, everyone would think she was still there, and I’d buy her enough time.”

  “What happened?” he asked softly, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of the story.

  “She came back, before dawn, before anyone woke, and when the Silent Ones arrived, she was packed and waiting for them. I asked her why she didn’t keep running, and she said: ‘Because then I lose you no matter what. This way, there’s a chance.’”

  Mayara had never told anyone about that night. Maybe we do keep some secrets from each other. But it was a secret only because it hurt so much to say the words. He had to hear this, though. She continued. “Elorna said if she survived the test and became an heir, we’d see her again. She would have been allowed to visit. But if she ran . . . she couldn’t ever return. It would be too dangerous to come back—the Silent Ones would have caught her. She’d have to stay away from everyone she loved and everything she knew. She’d be alone.”

  It was the law: the Silent Ones had to sever all contact with their families. Supposedly, this was to encourage people to try to become heirs instead of choosing the safer route.

  Kelo cupped her cheeks in his hands. “I know how much you worship your sister, but you aren’t her. And you won’t be alone. I’ll be with you, and we’ll find a way to see your family again, once it’s safe.”

  She kissed him, her lips sweet and salty from the rain or her tears. “Oh, my Kelo, sweet Kelo, it won’t ever be safe again. Everyone knows. My family. Yours. Everyone in the village. The spirits themselves.”

  “So you just want to give up? Because I won’t. Not on you. There is nothing I wouldn’t do, nowhere I wouldn’t go, to be with you.” He wasn’t arguing—Kelo hated to argue. He was begging, and she loved him for it, even while she wanted to shake him for making this so much harder. “You’re my wife. We’re supposed to have forever.”

  “No one gets forever,” she said gently.

  “Well, I’d like longer than a day,” Kelo pleaded. “Call me selfish, but I want as many days as we can get. Now will you stop being so noble and fatalistic and run away with me? Before it’s too late, and we lose any chance to choose what happens to us?”

  “They’ll punish you if they catch us.” Maybe even kill him. Death was a common punishment for those who tried to help their loved ones evade their duty. She couldn’t let him risk his life.

  He was looking at her as if she’d said the most absurd thing ever.

  “You don’t think they’ll catch us,” she said, and she couldn’t help it—a grin began to tug at her lips. This is all absurd. I shouldn’t even be considering it. But he’d been thinking about this for years, he’d said, and she knew Kelo. He’d have thought through every aspect meticulously. Maybe I should trust him. I did marry him, after all. “You have a plan?”

  He knelt again by the hole that had held the packs and pulled out two rolls of sail wrapped in rope. Unfurling one of the rolls, he showed it to her.

  Mayara frowned. “I don’t understand. That looks like—”

  “We can’t hide in the village,” Kelo explained. “Even if it weren’t so badly damaged, that would be the first place the Silent Ones would look. And we can’t hide in any of the nearby caves. Every inch of those tunnels has been explored and mapped—they’d know exactly where to send their spirits to search for us. We also can’t flee over land—if we tried to cross the island on foot, we’d leave tracks, and the Silent Ones would be close behind.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “We hide with the dead. And sail away with the tide.”

  It was a crazy plan.

  Mayara loved it.

  He’d constructed two fake shrouds out of old sail and net that mimicked the simple shroud that all islanders used. But these were designed to merely look as if the body inside was bound. In truth, they’d fall open at the tug of a rope.

  “All we have to do is lie in the boats and wait for dawn. When the b-bodies”—he stumbled over the word, and she saw pain dart across his face; he’d known those who’d died as well as she had—“are carried down to the bay and loaded into the boats, we’ll already be there. Just two more dead, indistinguishable from the rest.”

  Mayara nodded. “They’ll row us out to sea and dump us over.”

  “And then we remove the shrouds underwater.” He pointed to the loops of rope on the net that would cradle rocks. “All the shrouds will be weighted to sink the bodies—so they’ll sink without us, and we’ll swim.”

  “East,” Mayara said decidedly. All the mourners would face the south, toward the open ocean, toward the blue of
death, as the boats were rowed out, and then as the bodies disappeared beneath the waves, the villagers would face north, toward land and hope. If she and Kelo swam east before turning back toward shore, they’d not only be swimming in a direction that no one would be looking, but they’d also be heading into the sun—the glare would help hide them. “You’ll have to stay under, though, until the mourners turn.”

  “You’ll help me,” he said, with such unwavering confidence in her that she felt like crying. Except she had no more tears left.

  “Always,” Mayara said. She took a breath. All right, she was going to do this. We, she corrected herself. She thought of Grandmama urging her to flee. Maybe we should do this. “It’s hours until dawn, and if we don’t return, the villagers will send out a search party. So we’ll go back to the plaza, be with our families for a while longer, and then slip away near sunrise.” She wanted to spend as much time with her family as she could before . . . well, before her life changed. Or ended.

  Kelo’s brow furrowed—it was how she could tell he was unhappy with something she’d said. He didn’t like to disagree with anyone. It occurred to her it must have been difficult for him to try to persuade her to run away, knowing how she’d feel about it. She felt a fresh rush of love. “Mayara . . .” he began. He stopped.

  “You want to go now?” she guessed.

  “We don’t know when the Silent Ones will come,” he said, regret in his voice. “It could be tomorrow, but it could be sooner. If it’s sooner, it’s better that we’re gone. And if it’s tomorrow . . . everyone will think we have a head start. They’ll search farther away. They won’t think we’re still here. Besides, we can’t guarantee we’ll have another chance to slip away. And we might need time to find or repair the boats, if they were damaged by the storm.”

  She studied his face, so earnest and anxious. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”