Finder's Shore (5 page)

“Perhaps we’ll deal with that later,” Marta says. “For now, the practicalities.”

Dev is not alone in his reservations about my inclusion on the trip. One of the governors suggests I’m too young for such a weight of risk and responsibility. I don’t remind her that I carried my share of both when Ebony Hill was attacked. It strikes me that the governors don’t really understand what it was like. Perhaps they can’t — or perhaps the intervening year has allowed them to forget.

It makes no difference. Marta’s will carries the discussion. “We’re agreed then. Lara will captain
Explorer
with her usual crew; Ness and Ronan are included for their knowledge of the islands; and on Brenon’s recommendation, Farra heads the mission.”

“It’ll be cramped with three extra bodies on board,” Lara says, “especially if you expect us to bring back a catch of fish as well.”

“As Ness is a medic, perhaps Kush could stand down. There’s no need to have two,” someone suggests.

“Kush is a sailor as well as a medic,” Lara replies, in a voice like cold water. “And as captain, I believe I choose my crew, if not my passengers.”

Marta quells her with a look. “Certainly you choose your crew. As
Explorer
’s captain, you have complete authority regarding sea-sci work undertaken after the mission to Dunnett is complete. But assessing the potential 
for trade with the islands is the key priority of the trip, and responsibility for that rests with Farra. I trust that’s understood?”

Lara’s nod is terse, her expression leaving no doubt that she resents her research voyage being subverted.

As we walk back through the courtyard, I make the observation to Ronan that Marta and Lara share stubbornness as a trait. He laughs, though he refuses to tell me why.

The breeze bites sharp in my face, swelling the sail above till it seems it must tear and spill the wind it’s caught. Dev, salt dried in pale whorls across his cheeks, pauses beside me. “Dunnett lies west of those skerries — see the smudge on the horizon?”

“It looks like cloud.”

“It is: cloud around the island’s hills.” He hesitates. “Ness, you don’t have to do this. Farra or I could go first and you can land later, once we know where things stand.”

“No.” We’ve been over this often enough, always coming back to the same point: I alone know Dunnett Island. “It’s definitely tonight?”

He nods, reluctance scrawled across his face. “If anything goes wrong, get off-shore straight away. If there’s trouble, you’ll be safer in the boat than on land.”

Of that, I’m unconvinced. Our departure from Dunnett, in the dark, in a dinghy, with only a compass bearing to guide us back to
Explorer
, feels to me the flimsiest part of our plan. Dev has more faith than I in 
both the compass and Lara.

“And make sure you hide the boat well. If anyone finds it, you’ll be trapped.”

I sigh. His faith seems not to extend to me. “We will be careful, Dev.”

“I know, I know.” His smile holds both apology and apprehension.

“We’ll be on the island for less than a day, and we
probably
won’t need to go any farther than Leewood,” I assure him. “Even if we do, it’ll only be to Merryn’s. And while we’re there, the dinghy will be safe in the cave at Skellap Bay.” My heart sings as I say it, even as my belly lurches.

My emotions have been pulled back and forth so many times they don’t know where to settle. Knowing that I’ll soon see my brother and cousin sends delight fizzing through me, but within my anticipation lurks a corner of doubt. I can’t guess how things might have changed in my absence, or how Ty and Sophie will react. I try not to let myself expect too much.

“You should get some rest,” Lara says, coming up beside Dev. She’s been happier since we set sail, and it occurs to me that she likes the tainted air and crowds of Vidya no better than I. “I’ll take us as close as I can so you’ve less distance to row, but it’ll be a slow tack with the wind against us. You’ve hours to wait yet.”

My eyes roam the sea horizon. The skerries are fading from view in the withering light, the smudge of island already lost. My belly dips and sways like the ocean below us. Above, wind snaps in the sail. “I doubt I’ll be able to sleep.” 

“Try at least. It’ll be a long day tomorrow by the time we pick you up, and who knows whether you’ll get the opportunity after you land.” Lara links her arm through Dev’s. As our eyes meet she smiles.

Last night she made me promise that I’d keep myself safe. “Devdan wouldn’t forgive himself if anything
happened
to you, Ness. You should have seen him last summer when news of the Paras’ attack on Ebony Hill arrived in Vidya. He blamed himself that you were there.” For all that she’d been aiming for off-hand, I’d caught the intensity underlying her words. Her smile had been lopsided. “It matters to me, that he’s happy,” she’d added.

Dev’s happiness matters to me as well, though I’ve understood for a year that my feelings are different from Lara’s. With a last glance towards the horizon I bid them goodnight.

Even though I’ve grown accustomed to the shift and sway of the ship, I can’t settle. An image of my Pa creeps into my head: Pa with his strong arms and fanciful stories, his smile broad in his weathered face. But I recall also the sadness that engulfed him, that would send him up Cullin Hill to stare out across the ocean. I’ve sometimes wondered why he stayed on Dunnett after Mama died. But then, where would he have gone? We’d heard what had happened on his home island of Tay. He was lucky he’d been at sea when the sickness swept through his people.

Or perhaps it wasn’t lucky to be alive when nearly everyone you knew and cared for was dead. An image of Ronan, alone on an empty sea, jostles for a place beside 
Pa, bringing a premonition of disaster leaping up within me. Spreading my fingers wide, I press my palm against the wall above my bunk, so that I can feel the sea’s pulse like a heartbeat. “Be with us, Pa,” I whisper. Who knows whether he hears me.

It’s a relief when Lara’s hand shakes me out of my tattered dreams. In the galley, Kush slides a heaped plate towards me. The bread tastes doughy and damp on my tongue, the beans soggy with egg. I push the food away half-eaten.

“You’ll need the energy,” Kush says. He’s fine-boned and tall, his skin dark like Dev’s, his nose too long for his face. His eyes are watchful as a gull’s, but softer.

“I’m not hungry.”

Ronan reaches for the plate. It was Farra’s decision that Ronan should come with me. “If anyone questions us, we can tell them I was the stranger Ness found,” Ronan had argued, “and that she helped me because I was from her father’s island. That way there’s no need to bring Vidya into it at all.”

“It could work.” Farra had discounted Dev’s objection that Ronan looked nothing like him. “Only Ty and Sophie saw you up close, Devdan, and they won’t give Ness away. With the island connection, her actions would seem more misguided than traitorous.”

“Jed saw me too,” Dev had pointed out.

“Inside the cave, at night,” Ronan had answered. Now that he’s found his voice, he can be almost too convincing.

“It’s irrelevant because they won’t get caught,” Lara had countered. “Ness makes contact with her family, 
finds out where things stand, then we pick the pair of them up as agreed.”

As I watch Ronan eat, I let myself look square at the reality of all the things that could go wrong: the timing, the weather, our landing and departure. What if I can’t find Ty or Sophie? What if we’re discovered — will Ronan’s story hold? Would even Marn believe it? Thinking of Colm Brewster’s hard eyes, I doubt it. And even if I do find my family, what then? Will they be happy to see me, or will they have given me up for dead long since, and be content, as well, to leave it that way?

“There are too many risks,” Dev had announced, when we were working out the plan.

“There are always risks. It’s the way life is.” Lara’s brusque tone had earned a scowl from Dev, but half an hour later, as they stowed a sail, they had nothing but smiles running between them.

Lara puts her head through the galley door. “I’ve taken us as close as we can risk in the dark,” she says. “Are you ready?”

Ronan and I follow her out. At the ship’s rail I hesitate. “The weather should hold,” Lara says, “but if it clags in before dark, get off-shore straight away. We’ll be waiting.”

Our gear is already stowed. Dev steadies the ladder as I clamber down to the dinghy. We’d debated taking the larger surfboat, but I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get it into the cave. “The dinghy is more manageable,” Lara confirmed. “And it isn’t as if speed is a factor.”

As I settle within it, it seems a frail thing set against 
the expanse of ocean around us. My heart begins a slow hammering.

“You’ve got the flares?” Dev asks, leaning from the deck above. “Any problems, Ness, you use them.” I force my face into a smile. The dinghy rocks as Ronan steps off the ladder. My hands grip the gunwales.

“Ready?” Farra calls. The quarter of moon slides free of cloud, silvering his face and the surface of the sea.

I nod, coiling the rope as he casts us off. Spray flicks across me in a cold baptism as Ronan manoeuvres the oars. When I turn to look back,
Explorer
is already dropping behind, the figures at the rail barely distinguishable. Wind tugs at my hair as we slide through the
moon-burnished
water. Somewhere ahead lies the island where I was born. Eagerness lifts like a wave as I search the night for my first sight in three years of the bird’s-wing curve of Skellap Bay.

The dark feels thick as treacle as Ronan pulls us cautiously forward. Cloud has stolen the moonlight, but the crash of waves on rock and the smell — of beached kelp and drying salt — warn us of the island’s shore.

“Veer a little to your right,” I advise, my voice pitched just above the slap of waves.

Cold droplets scatter across us as we meet a swell
side-on
. The cloud severs abruptly, unveiling the looming mass of the headland and, tucked beyond, the pale slash of the bay. “There!” I say, excitement coiling in my chest. My eyes latch onto the glimmering curve of sand, its tangled line of flotsam a dark husk across it. I hunt for the path 
that leads up from the shore, but the cloud closes again, shuttering my vision. “Farther right,” I whisper. “If we land in the centre of the bay we can walk the boat back to the cave.” He takes two cautious strokes, the water hissing past the dinghy’s sides. “Here,” I whisper.

“I don’t like landing blind.”

Our little boat tosses in the swell. A sudden rift opens in the cloud, showing the bay ahead. The wash of light is gone as quickly as it came. “Straight in,” I tell him.

We find our way by luck alone, the boat lifted by a swell and swept forward, its keel scraping sweetly over sand. A wild laugh tears up within me and I seal my lips against it. Ronan ships the oars as a following wave shunts us higher, slewing the dinghy sideways. “We’ll have to wait for a break in the clouds to shift it into the cave.”

He’s right. The rocks below the cliff are too great a hazard in the dark. Impatience brews within me as we stand aimless on the sand. When the clouds finally blow clear, I tug at the dinghy’s rope and lead it bucking like a pony along the incoming tide.

As the mass of the headland looms ahead, I peer in doubt. Something’s wrong. Where the waves should run deep along the channel that edges the cliff, they curl and crash instead against a tower of rocks. I hand the tow rope to Ronan. “I think there’s been a rock fall. I’d better take a look first.”

“Wait.” He rummages in his pack and hands me a torch. “Don’t use it until you’re inside the cave.”

Water flicks up from my heels as I hurry across the damp sand, the incoming waves frothing around my 
ankles, waking an image of Sophie skipping away from the sea foam.

Boulders are jumbled high around the mouth of the cave, so that it comes as a relief when I find a narrow entry. Inside, the dark is absolute. I crank the torch’s dynamo handle and memories come leaping from the shadows as the thin beam dances around the walls.

The cave is not as I remember it. Rubbish lies strewn across the floor — not the flotsam of the sea, but ugly piles of teck: old drums and rusting metal, crushed and warped into unrecognisable shapes. There’s a smell of death about it. For a moment I let the arc of light linger on the ledge, as littered as the cave floor, where we cared for Dev, then I turn and clamber past the rocks.

I know why Colm has done this. Even gone, he sought to punish me. Jed knows we cared for Dev in the cave, and I told Ton myself that it held memories of my father. This purposeless desecration shows me the edge of Colm’s fury.

“Someone’s filled it with rubbish,” I tell Ronan, forcing back the unreasonable grief that knocks at my heart. “And the rock fall has half-blocked the entry. We can’t use it.”

We tow the dinghy beyond the tongues of the tide, dragging it as close as we dare to the cliff. I can hear the drip of water off an overhang of rock — fresh water, trickling from above. In winter the flow can turn to a torrent, but now there’s just enough to braid shallow channels across the sand.

“This close to the cliff, it won’t be seen from above,” I 
tell Ronan, though I know the greatest risk of discovery comes from the far end of the bay. “And if we lay driftwood across it, it’ll look no more than sea-wreck.”

“What about the inlet you mentioned?”

“It’s on the far side of the headland. We wouldn’t find the channel in the dark.”

I can feel his misgivings, but he raises no objections as we stumble about, gathering driftwood. “No one visits the bay,” I tell him quietly. “Even before, it was only ever Ty and Sophie and me who came here.”

“We should move it as soon as it’s light,” he says, unfolding a square of sailcloth in a hollow amongst the dunes. “It’s not safe leaving it in full view.”

I don’t answer. At the bay we’re only minutes from Leewood. The inlet is hours away. For a moment I stand listening to the surge of the sea. Beyond the hill at our back, Ty and Sophie are sleeping. Tomorrow will bring what it will bring. I push my misgivings aside and settle beside Ronan, doubling the heavy groundsheet back across our damp legs, grateful, as I close my eyes, for his reassuring presence beside me.