Shadow and Bone

AFTER

THE BOY AND THE GIRL stand at the railing of the ship, a true ship that rolls and rocks on the heaving back of the True Sea.

“Goed morgen, fentomen!” a deckhand shouts to them as he passes by, his arms full of rope.

All the ship’s crew call them fentomen. It is the Kerch word for ghosts.

When the girl asks the quartermaster why, he laughs and says it’s because they are so pale and because of the way they stand silent at the ship’s railing, staring at the sea for hours, as if they’ve never seen water before. She smiles and does not tell him the truth: that they must keep their eyes on the horizon. They are watching for a ship with black sails.

Baghra’s Verloren was long gone, so they had hidden in the slums of Os Kervo until the boy could use the gold pins from her hair to book passage on another ship. The city buzzed with the horror of what had happened in Novokribirsk. Some blamed the Darkling. Others blamed the Shu Han or Fjerdans. A few even claimed it was the righteous work of angry Saints.

Rumors began to reach them of strange happenings in Ravka. They heard that the Apparat had disappeared, that foreign troops were massing on the borders, that the First and Second Armies were threatening to go to war with each other, that the Sun Summoner was dead. They waited to hear word of the Darkling’s death on the Fold, but it never came.

At night, the boy and the girl lie curled around each other in the belly of the ship. He holds her tight when she wakes from another nightmare, her teeth chattering, her ears ringing with the terrified screams of the men and women she left behind on the broken skiff, her limbs trembling with remembered power.

“It’s all right,” he whispers in the darkness. “It’s all right.”

She wants to believe him, but she’s afraid to close her eyes.

The wind creaks in the sails. The ship sighs around them. They are alone again, as they were when they were young, hiding from the older children, from Ana Kuya’s temper, from the things that seemed to move and slither in the dark.

They are orphans again, with no true home but each other and whatever life they can make together on the other side of the sea.