One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

“I don’t know yet,” I replied. Putting down the box, I carefully removed the lid. “Did you remember pants?”


“Blessedly, yes,” said Etienne.

“Good.” The box was filled with scraps of paper that seemed as random as the stickers at first glance. I picked up the first one; a list of chores, written out by one of the house Hobs, clearly intended for a child. Half the chores were crossed off in purple crayon. I bit my lip, digging a little deeper. The crayon was there, about three layers down. I remembered bringing her that, too. “Oh, oak and ash.”

“What is it?” asked Tybalt.

“Her childhood.” I tipped the box out onto the floor. Lists of chores, crayon sketches, dried flowers taped to pieces of parchment . . . all the things I would have expected to find in the dresser drawer of the child she’d been when she was taken. One of the papers landed upsidedown, revealing a block of much tighter, more compressed writing. I picked it up, skimming quickly.

Rayseline’s handwriting never improved much beyond her initial childish scrawl, but it was legible. Almost too legible. She’d turned her scraps into a sort of disassembled diary, one that became more comprehensible as I flipped more and more of them over and shuffled them into something like chronological order.

“Toby?”

“Just a second.”

—understand what they want from me. I don’t think they understand what they want from me—

—light is always so bright here, the edges of things are so sharp, and they won’t stop talking to me TALKING TALKING TALKING I just want them to all SHUT UP and let me THINK—

—don’t even know my mother anymore—

Taken together, they painted the picture of a girl who was terribly angry, both younger and older than she was meant to be, and scared almost out of her mind by the world she’d been thrust back into. The “almost” was the first to go. Etienne was looking at me in silent curiosity, years of training forbidding him to interrupt. Wordlessly, I handed him the paper in my hand. It managed, in just five words, to be the worst one I’d found so far.

Sometimes I miss the dark.

Etienne read the slip of paper without comment, passing it to Grianne. Her face remained impassive, but her Merry Dancers flared a brief, sickly red, outward manifestations of her internal dismay. Tybalt was the last to read the paper. Like the others, he didn’t say anything. Just handed it back to me, and waited.

“I want to see whether I can get these into any sort of real order,” I said, starting to shove scraps of paper back into the box. “I don’t expect them to have a full blueprint for the kidnapping, but . . . well . . .”

“Any port in a storm,” said Tybalt quietly.

I glanced at him and nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Come on—let’s finish searching this place. We have a lot to do before tomorrow.”

We combed through the rest of Rayseline’s bedroom, and found nothing else that seemed relevant. She had a lot of dresses, any one of which probably cost more than I make in a year; she had a lot of broken toys, hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe. I left them where they were, unable to shake the feeling that I had done something wrong by finding them in the first place.