“So you are from the south end. Well, it’s even worse now. We’ve been heading south all night. Taste the water.”
She narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t move. She’d try the water later, when he wasn’t hovering around, watching her.
“Anyway, I’m going to figure out what the problem is.”
“And then?”
“And then . . .” He ran his hand over his head, shrugging. “Stop it, I guess. Fix it.”
“Fix it.” What did he think he could do? He was only a kid.
“Yes.” Suddenly he jutted out his chin. “If I can’t fix it myself, I can at least bring people back to the—the problem, whatever it is, and tell them what’s wrong. I’m going to figure it out.”
She barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes again—and only because he looked so . . . worried all of a sudden, like he wanted to be a hero but deep down wasn’t sure he could be. Like there was a tiny weasel of self-doubt buried inside him somewhere, twisting to get out.
And that made her like him. Just a little.
“So,” he said. “Why are you running away?” He grinned. “You can tell me. I won’t turn you in or anything.”
And, Artie told herself, this is why you don’t make friends with people. They are all of them way too prying and then they don’t believe you. There was so much of her story she didn’t want to talk about—didn’t want to remember. She closed down her face, turned her back on him, and stared north, to where they’d been. She stayed frozen that way until she was sure he knew they were done talking.
* * *
• • •
THE REST OF THE DAY passed in almost silence, but she couldn’t ignore this boy forever—the boat was too small for that, and he was way too friendly and kept talking to her. Being nice. It was weird.
The first night she didn’t sleep—she couldn’t get beyond a light doze with him nearby, snoring just feet away from her. All night she drifted off, pinched herself awake, and daydreamed, hunched in the corner of the cabin.
The next morning Putnam stretched when he woke, smiling and wrinkling his nose in the light that streamed in the window of the little room. He rubbed his head with his palm, smoothing his tight curls. Then he looked closely at Artie as if studying her, and said, “I think I’m going to sit on the front of the boat for a couple of hours, just . . . catching the breeze and thinking. If you want to sleep longer, you should shut the door to keep out the wind and catch a few more winks. Oh, and you’ll probably need to latch the door so it stays shut—you don’t want it to slam open while you’re sleeping.”
She nodded, exhausted, and he rolled up his blanket, stored it neatly in the corner, and left, shutting the door carefully behind him. After she’d locked it, she fell to the floor and dropped into a long sleep that lasted until the sun was streaming into the opposite window. She still felt a little tired—and stiff beyond belief—but knew it was past time to get up.
Putnam sat in the front of the boat, arms wrapped around himself. The breeze was cool, and he’d left his warm clothing in the locked cabin. The food was stored in the cabin, too—he hadn’t eaten all day.
But he didn’t say any of that. “You’re up! It’s been a great day so far—it’s good that you can catch some of it.”
“Sorry.”
“What? No—you needed the sleep. Hiking up from the southern part of the island to the capital was probably exhausting.” His eyes flicked over to her, then back out to sea. “I figure we can eat dinner and then I’ll drop anchor for a bit and we can wash up—I know I need a swim.”
Artie suddenly could feel all the sleep and dirt on her body and clothes. Was he trying to say that she stank? That she needed a bath?
Then she shrugged to herself. What did she care what he thought? “You’d be grimy too if you’d traveled so far.” Then she stopped, horrified at herself. She hadn’t meant to speak out loud.
“Exactly,” said Putnam. “And I haven’t walked nearly as far as you. I mean, I assume you’ve walked a long distance. I just stepped out of a tent and onto a boat. I can’t believe how tough you are.” He said it like he was impressed, not repulsed.
She didn’t know how to respond—what did one say to something that sounded like a compliment? “I’ll get the food.”
“That’s great. I was thinking that we’ll finish the scrap of bread that’s left and then move on to the plums. We have only a couple days’ worth of fresh food—but there’s plenty more in the ocean.” He paused. “I hope.”
They swam after dinner, on opposite sides of the boat. Artie was pretty sure Putnam was stripping down and washing clothes while he swam—he brought a smooth stone with him and some seaweed soap they’d found on the boat—but she kept a layer of clothes on, rubbing them with her hands as best she could and hoping they’d come clean in the water. Her skin, still raw and bruised, she avoided scrubbing, merely wiping it gently with an edge of cloth.
After she felt clean, she climbed back on the boat and toweled off as much as she could with a blanket. Then she went back in the cabin, shivering. The water was comfortable, but the bite in the air after leaving the water was suddenly sharp. Inside the cabin she turned on the heater and sat close to it.
“What’s that song?” asked Putnam, entering the cabin. The blanket was draped over his shoulders, and he was carrying his wet shirt.
“Nothing,” she said. She hadn’t even realized she’d been singing.
“Isn’t that one of the island songs I heard around the bonfires?”
She shrugged.
“You have a really nice voice.”
She shrugged again and looked away. She and her mother used to sing all the time, embroidering the songs they knew and stitching in new words or notes to suit the occasion. Sometimes they made up songs, whole cloth. But since her mom’s death, Artie didn’t sing. She had at first, but it had irritated her stepfather, especially if the fishing hadn’t been good that day, or if he’d had an argument with someone, or if the weather was bothersome, or if he was short of money—or any number of other things that might go wrong. She was never sure when those bad days would be, so she’d stopped singing except when she was sure she was alone.
But here, somehow, she’d forgotten.
“Never mind,” Putnam said, and she realized he had probably been waiting for a response from her. He draped his shirt over a hook near the heater and sat down opposite Artie. “It feels good to be clean, doesn’t it?” He peered at her. “Your face is bruised.”
He waited like he thought she would say something. Confess something.
The room felt like a trap.
The door was behind her. She could leave. She would go sit outside in the cold.
Putnam continued. “The spots on your arms—were you in a fire?” Then, before she could do anything, while she was frozen in shock that he would mention the scars, he said, “Because my dad has scars, too—from the fire when I was little. After my first mom died.”
She sat very still. He wasn’t really asking about her. He just wanted to talk about himself. That was okay. That was something she could handle.
“He has an enormous scar on one arm,” said Putnam, “not lots of small ones like yours. And when that one healed, it made his arm look wrinkled, like really, really old skin. But he has some little scars on the other arm, like yours, where his arm didn’t get burned completely, but ash fell on him, and it made dots. When his arm healed, it looked like someone drew little white dots all over.”
She nodded. He could talk about his dad all day as long as he didn’t ask her questions.
“Like yours,” Putnam said. “They’re faded now, but I think they must have looked like yours when they were newer. Dots all over. So is that what happened? A fire?”
She yanked the sleeves down and leaned toward the heater, hunching over her knees. “Hot oil,” she said.
“From a pot. It splashed on me when it fell.” That was mostly true. Her stepdad had thrown the pot. And he had been sorry afterward.
Putnam needed to stop now. She needed him to stop.
“I never realized—I never thought about how my dad’s burns must have looked when I was a baby.” Putnam leaned toward her to see better, and she shrugged even deeper into her clothing. “Your arms look like stars. Like there’s a constellation there.” He paused. “How did the pot fall? What happened?”
She stood and went outside, even as she could hear Putnam in the background saying, “Don’t go. Artie. I didn’t mean to offend you. The burns marks are . . . pretty. What I’m trying to say is . . .”
The ocean roared in her ears, like she was an empty shell, and she couldn’t hear anything else.
The scars weren’t pretty. There was nothing pretty about what had happened. If she let herself, she knew she could still feel the oil splashing on her, and she thought she would feel it all her life.
A few minutes later Putnam stood next to her, his wet head and trousers, warm from the cabin, now steaming in the cold outside air. “Artie. I’m sorry. I promise not to talk about it anymore. In fact, I won’t talk at all if you don’t want me to. Please come back inside, or you’ll catch your death of cold.”
The wind bit her. She went back inside and sat down. They sat for a long time, until Artie was almost completely dry.
Finally she said, “Catch your death of cold?”
“Something my dad says.”
“You sound like an old man.”
“I’ll try not to say that again.”
“It’s okay. It’s just—do you hang out with other kids? Or only with old people like parents?”
“I’m busy learning how to be the next king,” said Putnam. “I mean, I have friends, I get invited to a lot of things, but it’s because I’m the next ruler. I don’t have a good friend, like you could tell everything to . . .” He trailed off, looking embarrassed. “I’ll get supper. The plums are a little too ripe, and the water is kind of salty. But I’m hungry enough that it will taste great. I bet you are, too.”
She nodded to show that she was hungry, too. Pulling her knees in to her chest, listening to Putnam rummage in the bags behind her, her eyes drifted to her arms. Carefully she pushed up a sleeve and squinted in the dim light. The white scars that dotted her arm did look like stars. They did. She could see it now.
What constellation might they be? She found shapes and traced them with her free hand: A bird pecking for a worm. A small backpack. A flower going to seed. Or maybe the constellation was something mythological: A winged horse rearing up before taking flight. A sea monster stretching its tentacles in all directions. A bear reaching for something up high, maybe honey in a tree. There was so much there, in her arm, stars and planets and galaxies and maybe even entire universes.
“Ready?”
She looked up to see Putnam, still draped in his blanket like it was a king’s cape, holding a plate of food.
She shoved the sleeve back down to hide the burns—which is what they were.
No. Not ready.
8
RAYEL. ABOUT 100 YEARS EARLIER.
FOURTEEN YEARS old and alone in the world, Rayel stood on the small boat she’d stolen—the first thing she’d ever stolen in her life other than, as her mother claimed, her brother’s love—and hoisted up a series of little sails. She was glad that when she was ten she’d insisted on learning how to sail—even though her mother had said she’d never need the skill. She lived on a giant raft—how could she not need such a skill someday? Even back then, she’d known when to listen and when not to listen to her mother. Mostly: not.
The boat tacked steadily south. When she needed to sleep, she pulled in the sails, dropped anchor, and curled up in the little covered portion of the boat, which was just big enough—and well sealed enough—for a thin, dry mattress and a small pantry of food.
She fished, gathered seaweed, dried her food on the roof of the boat cabin, and packed it all away until she had a good store. She made a salve for cuts and soap for her clothes, remembering recipes their housekeeper had used and showed her. She swam every day, sometimes for hours. She found herself eating astonishing amounts of food.
At first she cried a lot. It was hard being completely alone on the water, knowing that she’d have to be alone for some time before she dared come back.
But as she got farther and farther from home, she felt stronger. Maybe stronger was the wrong word, because she was already strong. Harder. Like she was developing a shell. She grew big shoulders from rowing and lifting and lowering sails, a powerful body from all the swimming, tough hands from netting and cleaning fish, and a tough mind. And her heart? Completely encased in a locked box. She never cried now, not for anything, not even when she sliced her hand deeply with her knife while gutting a fish. Not even when she thought about her parents and how, in their own ways, neither of them had ever loved her for herself. Not even when she thought about Solomon.
There were no mirrors. Without mirrors, she had no face—only hands and arms and legs, all strong, and she thought they were gorgeous. Sometimes she flexed just to see the muscles move. No one was here to tell her she was ugly, either by words or glance. Even her turned-in feet were so muscled and sun-darkened! She loved them. And the fish, glittering under the surface of the water, admired her. Or at least they were curious, for they gathered whenever she swam. They’d not seen humans before—so she was by default the most beautiful and fascinating person they’d ever met. She ate many of them.
She traveled slowly south—the boat moving in spirals and zigzags and meanderings. She didn’t really have a goal at first. But as she wandered into the cold southern sea, she discovered something deeply astonishing.
The cold did not bother her.
It was a revelation, like finding out you could fly. It changed everything.
She’d heard stories about cold weather all her life but had never experienced it: biting wind, rain sleeting in icy drops, snow melting when it hit the water but sticking to the roof of the cabin. Raftworld floated in warm weather year-round, following the summer around the globe. Up until now, she’d heard the stories about cold the way one hears fairy tales or ancient history: sure, they might be true in some strange way, but probably only metaphorically, and they were never anything you’d actually live through.
But now she floated in the deepening southern winter. And she didn’t feel it. At all. Her breath turned to fog, first in the mornings only, and soon all the time. The hairs stood up on her bare arms and legs. It became harder and harder to dry fish properly, and she took to eating raw seafood, cold, which was not as bad as she’d thought it would be. Seaweed froze, and she had to warm it in her mouth to melt it enough to eat.
But she never felt cold.
She considered the phenomenon for days. Weeks. And finally she acknowledged that she had a gift for cold. An actual gift. Magical.
There were people—rare, only a few each generation on all of Raftworld—who had gifts, usually gifts that had something to do with the sea: walking on water, talking to fish, flying with the seabirds—things like that. Amazing gifts that people admired.
She laughed when she finally figured out what was going on. It made sense—in the way that her whole life made sense—that her gift was something no one on Raftworld would value. And that it was a gift that would never even be noticeable until she left Raftworld.
Then she wondered if maybe more people had gifts than anyone realized. What if someone had a gift to—she didn’t know—survive on the surface of the sun? Or eat an entire mountain? That person would likely never find out they had that gift. What if everyone had gifts, but only a rare few ever discovered what their gifts were, because the gifts weren’t valued or needed? Rayel spent a couple of days imagining what all the odd gifts might be—things never kn
own because the world didn’t ask for them. Maybe there could be someone with a gift to create a universe out of nothing, but only in a place where no humans would live. Or a gift to win a fight, single-handed, against a dragon or some other nonexistent monster. Or . . .
She was grateful she’d found her gift. That she’d gone out and discovered it, in a way. Now she felt more like she was setting off on an adventure and less like she was running away, and it was a good change of feeling.
So she headed south, on purpose now. This amazing cold world belonged to her, thanks to her gift. Why not see how far she could go in it—and find what was out there?
Days passed.
In some ways the landscape didn’t change much as she traveled: all around her lay the open sea. But in other ways it did: the sky and water more often took on the look of stone, the kind used on the Island nation of Tathenn for building things, gray and hard. The fish changed—they grew bigger and less brightly colored, and there were fewer of them. The seaweed no longer floated on the surface of the water; she had to net it from deeper; sometimes she dove for it.
The dolphins were slowly disappearing.
She’d seen pods of them all her life, close and far. The friendliest of the fish to humans—even humans who couldn’t talk with them, humans like Rayel who didn’t have that gift. She loved watching them leap and, when they came close enough, loved hearing them click and call to each other, loved seeing them nose the air and bob their heads at Raftworld. She had often walked to the dock area with Solomon to watch them. He had always waved, and when they leapt, he and she pretended the dolphins were waving back.
But in the colder water there were fewer and fewer dolphins, and when Rayel saw them, they didn’t seem to want to stay and play. They were migrating north, just like the birds.
Until one no-breeze day in which the boat lulled, barely moving. She peered down over the edge of her boat, feeling the weak sun on her back and daydreaming into the water. Over the lip of the boat she saw . . . something. Down beneath the surface. Too large to be a fish. Whitish. Not moving.
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