Page 33 of Add To Hoard

The tide moves against the hull of the ‘Tenacious’. The wind is still from the northwest. The conditions are still good. I look at the brig and I do the arithmetic I have been turning over since I woke up this morning and the arithmetic produces the same answer it always produces: go. Now. While the wind is right and the tide is with you and the thing you came for is in your pocket.

I look at the brig. Then I turn away from it.

“The basin,” I say. My voice comes out even, which I am grateful for. “Before winter, if there’s another silt accumulation, it’ll block. The overflow lip on the eastern side is lower than the western — that’s where it’ll go first. You’d want to clear it before the wet season sets in.”

He is very still beside me.

He does not point out that the basin is clear. He does not say that the wet season is weeks away and I will not be here for it. He does not name what I am doing, which is the kindest thing he has done since he walked out of the treeline on the second morning and fixed his eyes on me and told me to leave.

“I’ll note it,” he says.

“And the overhang. After a bad storm, check the eastern wedge first. The grain runs —”

“I know the grain,” he says. Quiet. Not a correction. Gentler than that.

I stop talking. The wind comes off the water and the brig moves in its lines and the stone is warm in my coat pocket and I am standing on volcanic sand on an island I came to steal from and I am not leaving.

Not today.

I am not ready to examine why and I am not going to, but I am not going to pretend it is the basin either, not to myself, not standing here with him close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him even in the cold afternoon air.

“One more day,” I say.

It is not a question. He receives it as the statement it is.

“One more day,” he says.

Neither of us looks at the other when we say it. We are both looking at the water, easier, the coward’s option, and I am taking it without apology because I have used up most of my bravery on other things today and I am running on what’s left.

I look at the shelter.

The rock face of the northern formation, the dark interior, the cold fire pit and the worn stones of the floor and the wall that I have been looking at and looking away from for three days. Part of me has been circling it, the way of a thing you intend to do and haven’t done yet, and standing here now with the stone in my pocket and one more day agreed to, the circling gets closer.

Not yet.

But closer.

He follows my eyes to the shelter and back. He does not ask. He has never asked. One of the things about him. He watches and files and waits, and the waiting is not passive, it is a different kind of attention, the attention of a creature that has learned over a very long time that most things reveal themselves if you give them room to.

I wonder sometimes what he has filed about me. I wonder if the file is accurate. I think it probably is. The part I find most inconvenient.

I go back to the fire before the light fails. He goes back to the treeline, slower than he used to. The island is quiet around us both and the ‘Tenacious’ sits in its lines and the stone in my coat pocket is still warm, and I sit beside the fire. Tomorrow stays outside the ring of it, and the day after, and the crossing, and all the arithmetic I have been doing for eight years.

I think about one more day.

One more day is a thing I can hold.

16

MAELOR

Igive her the stone and she puts it in her pocket and she does not leave.

I walk back through the forest toward the Spire telling myself I am not thinking about this. I am thinking about it the entire way up through the black-barked trees with the afternoon light coming down in its thin columns and the island settling around me in its familiar register, and I examine it precisely the way I told myself I would not, which has become the pattern with everything that involves her.

One more day. She said it and I agreed to it and the name of it went unspoken between us, and I agreed to it the way I have been agreeing to things since she first appeared on my beach and said no to me and did not stop saying no to the things that were supposed to end this, the fog, the storm, the island's voices in the dark, my own instruction, the deadline I set with the full intention of enforcing it.

She has the stone. She could leave on the tide.