“You’re being protective of me.” He grinned. “It’s sweet.”
The room was open on one side. Markos crossed the tile floor, parting the gauzy curtains to walk onto the balcony. The red roofs of Valonikos spread out beneath us like a lady’s skirts. The Free City was similar in architecture to Iantiporos and Casteria and the other seaside cities that had once been part of the Akhaian Emparchy. They all shared the same white columns, square pastel-painted buildings, and roof gardens with potted trees. Beyond the city, the sea stretched to the horizon, decorated with white dots—the sails of ships going in and out of the harbor.
“I was not,” I grumbled. “It’s just you don’t even sound like yourself. You told me you don’t trust Lord Peregrine.”
“That’s not—”
“That is exactly what you said. Now you’re just going to let him come waltzing in and put all these ideas in your head. It’s not you.”
“I suppose I’m meant to have all my beliefs—my whole life—already mapped out before I’m even twenty? That’s hypocritical, isn’t it? Coming from you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I mean two weeks ago you knew you were going to be a wherryman for the rest of your life.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.” I drew my finger along the balcony railing. “I only think you should be cautious.”
“When we first met Peregrine,” he said quietly, “he called my mother by her given name. It made me angry.”
“I couldn’t tell,” I said sarcastically.
“He wasn’t being presumptuous.” He sighed. “He knew her, better than most people. Apparently they were great friends at court, many years ago, before she married. I wish I’d known. I wish—” He shook his head. “I didn’t know enough about my family.”
I slid my hand on top of his, squeezing it. He squeezed back.
“My cousin Konto hates this city,” he said. “He wants to have it back.”
“How do you know?”
“The Theucinians are imperialists. I know how they think. Konto means to have me back too. Or dead. I don’t mean to let him take me.” His gaze took in the tiled rooftops and whitewashed balconies. “I’ve decided I don’t mean to let him take either of us.”
“Markos, what—?”
His eyes were alight with something I couldn’t name. “This is a beautiful city. I feel a peace here.” He leaned on the railing. “I feel as if I could be someone I like, in this city.”
“If Lord Peregrine gets his way—” I began.
“He doesn’t use his title anymore.”
“Just the same. If he gets his way, Akhaia mightn’t need an Emparch at all. Did you think of that? In a modern Akhaia, they wouldn’t need you.”
“No,” he said, and instead of looking angry, I thought he looked exhilarated. “They wouldn’t.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
He shrugged. “The world is always changing.”
“I didn’t think you, of all people, would want that.”
The breeze shifted his black hair. “I don’t know what I want anymore. The world is so much bigger than I thought. And, Caro, the funniest part is—” He laughed. “I think it’s a good thing.”
Hearing Markos talk like that was certainly a surprise. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why it made me so uneasy. It wasn’t that I begrudged him his excitement about Antidoros Peregrine’s ideas, but why did everything have to be changing so alarmingly fast, including Markos? I desperately wished for a moment to catch my breath.
An even greater surprise came the next day, when a wherry sailed into Valonikos harbor. She was not the newest wherry, nor the fastest. Her paint was scratched and gouged, marred with bullet holes, and her black sails much faded from the sun. A frogman stood on her cockpit seat, waving.
“Fee!” was all I could manage before my throat closed.
Pa jumped aboard, rocking the wherry. He grinned at Fee, and I saw the relief in his eyes. “Well, I reckon there’s a story here.” He ran a hand over Cormorant’s warm planks. “Caro, what have you done to my gods-bedamned paint job?”
That was all he said for a long time. He wandered up the deck, setting his hand on the boom and stroking the mast. I watched him trace a coil of rope and caress the brass portholes.
“Fee, how?” I took her slippery hands, spinning her in a circle. I couldn’t stop laughing. Or was I crying?
“Frogs fall,” she said. “Frogs swim. Webbed feet.”
“How did you escape from the Black Dogs? How’d you get Cormorant back?”
“Dark. Quiet. Water. Docks. Waited. Waited. Waited. Cormorant. Crept. Leaped. Man. Knife. Throat.” It was the most words I’d ever heard out of her at once. “Sailed.”
Fee’s eyes widened. I turned to see Nereus leaning on the boom behind me, hands in his pockets.
“Cousin.” He gave her a theatrical bow.
We sent a runner up to Tychon Hypatos’s house, and eventually Markos and Daria joined us. Markos showed his sister around the deck, regaling her with stories of our narrow escapes in the riverlands. Even Ma came down for a while. We all squeezed around the table and dined on meat pies and fresh fish from the market. Then, one by one, the others left and it was only me, Pa, and Fee. Just like always.
But not quite.
Cormorant’s cabin seemed cramped now in the homey lantern light. I trailed my hands over the shining wood of her cupboards, bunks, and shelves, lingering on the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth.
Had I really lived in her? It seemed like something that had happened years ago. An uncomfortable feeling. Swallowing hard against the lump in my throat, I climbed up to my favorite spot on the cabin roof.
“Ayah, so here we are.” The deck creaked as Pa joined me. “They all gone up to Iphis Street. I be reading your ma’s mind. She’s thinking, ‘If I get that young man a crown, then what might he do for the Bollards?’ ” He shrugged. “Don’t care for all that myself. Give me a good heavy load and a steady wind.”
He looked at me. “So then, this is where it ends for us. You and me.”
Tears burned my eyes. “Pa, don’t say that.”
“I’ve wronged you, keeping my silence.” He took a shuddering breath, staring down at his callused hands. “But now I’ve got to say my piece and hope you’ll forgive your old pa.” The sunset breeze stirred the graying hair around his face. “I knew you weren’t meant for the river.”
I dared not breathe.
“It were a long time ago. You must’ve been three or four. I was sailing up the channel when, don’t you know, the weather turned as bad as bad can get. The waves near swamped us. I took a reef, then another. Weren’t no help. I reckon that’s the closest I’ve come to being drowned. And then … she was there. With a voice like the deepest fathoms.” He shivered. “Like a wild thing.”
“Like a hundred knives,” I whispered.
Pa nodded. “Just so. ‘I ain’t one of yours,’ I said. ‘I belong to the one who lies under the river, and you well know it. Though I won’t say no to your help.’