Page 11 of Add To Hoard

I put my hand on the hull before I go ashore.

“Stay,” I say. “I’ll be back.”

I drop over the side into water that comes to my knees and walk up onto the black sand of Bloodstorm Peak.

The island feels different under my feet than any ground I have stood on before, though I cannot immediately say how. The sand is black and fine and cold and wet, volcanic grit the same everywhere, and the rock formations are rock formations, and the treeline fifty yards up the beach is trees. Nothing announces itself as supernatural. Nothing glows or breathes or reaches for me.

And yet.

There is a quality to the air here that I noticed from the water and notice more acutely now, a density, a weight, as though the island has more presence per square foot than land is supposed to have. The kind of feeling I associate with walking into a room and realizing someone was just in it, the particular aliveness of recently occupied space. Except that the island has this quality everywhere I step and in every direction I face, and it does not diminish as I move further up the beach.

The island is awake. I do not know how I know this, but I know it the way I know weather coming, in the body before the mind catches up.

Setting out the bedroll from the supply chest when the first voice comes.

It is not a sound exactly. It arrives the way certain memories arrive, not recalled so much as suddenly present, occupying the same space as current thought. A man’s voice, harbor-rough, with the particular sneer of a drunk who has decided the woman nearest to him is a reasonable target for the evening’s surplus contempt.

Weak, weathered woman, out here on your own? Surprised you made it past the harbor mouth.

I know that voice. Not specifically — there is no face attached, no incident I can pin it to, but I know its type with my whole body, the way you know a sound that has been aimed at you enough times that you stop hearing it consciously and start feeling it instead. The docks have been full of that voice my entire life.

I keep unrolling the bedroll.

Is that fish I smell, or something worse? Someone ought to tell her. As a courtesy.

Laughter. Several voices now, the kind of group laughter that is really just one person’s cruelty amplified by the number of people willing to echo it. I have eaten this sound for breakfast for eight years. I am intimately familiar with its nutritional value: none.

Pretty enough, maybe, if you scraped the dock off her. Though the scars⁠—

“Yes,” I say, out loud, to the beach and the air and whatever is behind both of them. “I have scars. I am aware of the scars. I received most of them doing work that none of you were capable of. Next.”

The voices shift. A different register now, smoother, the merchant tone I know just as well, the voice that appraises rather than jeers, which I have always found marginally worse because it thinks itself more civilised.

I’ve got a mackerel you can clean. Since you’re here. Make yourself useful.

The cold of the island sharpens around me, pressing in at the edges of my coat, finding the gaps. The treeline seems closer than it was. The dark between the trees is absolute and dense and has a quality of attention to it that I leave unexamined.

I am very tired. I am past the point where tired is a sensation and into the territory where it is simply the medium I exist in, the water I swim through. My shoulders are a statement of grievance I no longer have the energy to read. My hands have not been properly warm since I left Blackwake.

The voices press.

Thought she was going somewhere. Look at her. End of the world and she’s still got fish guts under her fingernails.

What did you think was going to happen, dock girl? What exactly did you think you were going to find out here?

And underneath those, quieter, the one that knows where the soft places are:

He’s already gone. You know that. You just couldn’t say it out loud.

I stop.

I sit down on the shore with my bedroll half-unrolled beneath me and my elbows on my knees and I breathe. In and out. The cold air tastes of salt and sulfur and deep time. The voices wait with the patience of things that have been doing this for a very long time and are not in any hurry.

I look up at the treeline. At the dark between the trees that are watching me.

“Right,” I say. “Fuck. Okay. I just came through a fog bank, then a storm, then whatever that approach was, and now I’ve got dock voices in my head and something in the trees watching me and I am—” I stop. Breathe. “I am too tired for this tonight. Whatever this is. Rain check. We’ll do the whole—” I gesture at the treeline, at the air, at the general situation of the island and its apparent opinions. “—all of this, in the morning. When I have slept. Right now I am lying down.”

I pull the bedroll flat and lie down on the cold ground with my coat pulled over my shoulders and my knife where my hand can find it and the sound of the water working at the ‘Tenacious’ hull in the dark behind me.