Waters of Salt and Sin: Uncommon World Book One Read online

  “I’m sorry, Zayn. You’re right about some things. About the caste system being wrong. That the lunar cycle would last an extra day last year. You always know the best place to catch those foul eels the high-castes strangely adore. But this? This is…I can’t just take off into the waters on a story.”

  “Because you think you’ll rise up on your own? How?”

  I lurched back like he’d hit me.

  Why was he trying to hurt me? Zayn had never been anything but kind, repairing our sandals when his hands were working right, passing gossip to me about which farmers might need a cheap grain transport. So why the meanness? He’d always been my friend.

  “You know I’m right, Kinneret. Think.”

  Even if I kept scraping together every last bit we didn’t spend on food or supplies, I’d never have enough to raise us all up. Thinking of my pitifully empty sash, I rubbed my temples and took a deep breath, my heart shushing with the most dangerous feeling in the world. Hope.

  It couldn’t be true. In 300 years, someone would’ve found it. Wouldn’t they?

  I stared at Zayn’s old quill and ink pot and thought about what my old age life might look like. Would I live in a hut with only wishes to keep me company, and dirt for a floor while some other girl wedded my Calev and had brown-eyed babies? My pulse beat in my ears. That feeling, hope, it tugged at my chest and spun a dream into my mind.

  Calev and I dancing at a harvest celebration. Avi clapping to the music. In this imagining, my younger sister’s skin glowed with health.

  I looked at my arms and fingers, chapped and sun-scorched and bony. Hope. Was that all it took to risk looking like a fool, to risk wasting light to run after an old man’s fantasy?

  I never, ever wanted to see Avi brush the last of her hair with her fingers and come away with a fistful of sunny locks. I ached with all the tears she’d already shed. How could I stand more of them?

  Closing my eyes, I whispered, “Say I did believe you. Say I was…up for this madness.”

  He stood, smiling. “Tell me again why you want it. I must be sure…the risk…maybe you should wait.”

  My eyes snapped open. I could at least try. If it didn’t work out, well, I’d be no worse off.

  “What’s to wait for?” I was getting carried away by the idea of it now. I almost wanted him to stop me, to clamp a gritty hand over my flapping lips. “More of being kicked around? More of watching Avi starve? Tell me what you know, Zayn, and I’ll do what I can for all of us.”

  I battled the possibilities back and forth inside my brain. A fly buzzed at my face and I swatted it away.

  Breathing out his long nose, Zayn clasped his hands behind his back and stared into the pile of maps. “Just remember what you have, Kinneret Raza. Before you go off into the wilds, risking all—”

  “I have nothing. I have a future in a boat with holes I can’t afford to patch.”

  “It is decided then,” he said.

  He ran a finger along a map of the choppy waters I sailed daily. “The wine jug with the map will be somewhere near here. Where the current paints a teardrop on the surface of the water.”

  My skin went cold. “That’s near the slave island.”

  Most slaves worked at Quarry Isle their entire lives, carving pale stone at night and sleeping a few day hours in a crowded pit they snidely called their Quarters.

  Zayn told me they were whipped to bloody shreds when the slavers thought they weren’t working hard enough. Food was nothing more than hard bread cakes, mealy and tooth-breaking.

  Father told me thirst had hounded his every waking moment there. “My skin was so different then,” he’d said. I remembered thinking what an odd detail that was to mention. “Like a dried barley stalk,” he used to say.

  Mother never would talk about it. When I asked her questions, she crossed her arms over her chest and just shook her head.

  Thank the Fire, Old Zayn had rescued them from that hell by hiring them before I was born.

  “Yes, it isn’t far off at all.” Zayn’s gaze flicked to me. “As I said, there are risks.”

  “How do you know he meant that current? Just because it has the shape of a tear?”

  His fingers pressed into my short sleeve. “I don’t know. It is a guess. A guess. But I think it’s a good one. And you’re the only one looking for it now. I have no other family who has heard the tale.”

  A good guess. I breathed out and turned one of the bells on my sash. “Is there definitely a shipwreck there?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve told you all I know.” He scratched at his scalp.

  I put my hand on his, and his cloudy eyes studied me. “If I find it,” I said, “I’ll give you any part of it you ask for.”

  Waving his hands, he shook his head. “No. I have a season or so left in me. I don’t have the sunlight to weather a change in status now. Not after all these years.”

  Before I could leave, my skin prickling with excitement and my thoughts whirling, Zayn pulled a coin-sized compass from his sash and handed it to me. The bronze was warm from his body.

  “Stop and note your course from time to time.” He smiled. The young man he once was peered out between his wrinkles. “You are capable of doing this, but remember, it’s your choice. You can return if you don’t cross too many boundaries. After that?” He held out his hands.

  “After that, I’ll be rich. I’ll have all the choices.” I went to the door, opened it, and squinted into the white sun.

  “I hope so,” Old Zayn said to my back as I walked away. “I hope so.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Silver. Loads of it. More than I could picture in a thousand of my low-caste, spit-on, calloused dreams. It would be raw. It could be cursed. But it would be ours.

  Heading away from dockside, I padded down the baked dirt road toward Calev’s home. Fallow fields of yellowed weeds chittered in the breeze beside stretches of barley. The sun would reign for another five hours. I had to move fast.

  At the first of Old Farm’s low, stone walls and wide-reaching fields, I eased past two men in calf-length tunics embroidered with lemons. I’d seen them with Calev’s father many times. Their noses wrinkled at the bells on my sash and made them ugly.

  I grinned at the men, teeth and all. Their Old Farm scorn couldn’t touch me. Soon, I’d be wealthy—rich enough to buy a feast for my sister and Old Zayn. And I’d be on my path to becoming a full-ship kaptan, lord of a real ship, its hull heavy with bright lemons, bundles of barley, rainbows of silk.

  Old Zayn might be softheaded, but I didn’t think so. The details of his tale were too specific to be imagined. I had one life to live, and by the Fire, I was going to take it by the tiller and steer.

  Passing through the estate’s wooden beam entrance, I touched the ridged surface of the blue-striped shamar yam shell nailed to the supports. It held a written prayer, and I hoped some of its magic would soak into me. Maybe Old Farm practices like this had helped them survive the Quest knights’ takeover, then the line of kyros since. It certainly couldn’t hurt to embrace that kind of power.

  At the edge of a shushing barley field, the earth’s scent in my nose, I skittered to a halt.

  Calev reined in his chestnut horse and waved, tossing his leg over to dismount. The warmth of the ground spread up through my feet and into my legs, stomach, and every inch of me. The harvest sun extended a beam over Calev’s obsidian hair. Two workers nodded at their chairman’s son. I breathed too quickly, willing my heart not to explode and expose my deepest secret.

  I was in love with my best friend.

  And he couldn’t know until I had the silver to buy my way to high-caste. Only then could he consider me. Only then could I dream of his fingers drifting along my cheeks and his mouth dusting mine. I shivered. I would not make him an Outcast. He’d never be allowed to enter his family’s home again.

  Beside the fields, Calev spoke to a man and a woman, his voice a lighter rumble than his father’s. “…and take the seasoned wood to re
pair the first storage barn. The cowshed doesn’t need it now. Not with this weather.”

  He held up his hands toward the blue sky and turned his red-brown eyes to me. As the workers hurried to follow his request, he gave me his smile like a First Sun gift, so much better than any spice cake or present wrapped in fine paper.

  “Kinneret.” He took my hands, and I looked at his. The land lived in bits and pieces under his short nails. I grinned. Such a land lover.

  The two men furrowed their brows at our show of caste-free friendship, and after giving Calev a respectful nod, continued on. The elders tolerated our closeness because I once saved Calev’s life.

  When we were both seven years, accompanying our parents at the bustling dock nearest Old Farm, Calev fell into the water. He couldn’t swim—silly Old Farms didn’t teach that until the children were ten years. I’d been swimming since I could breathe, so I dropped into the salty sea, grabbed him under the arms and dragged his skinny self to the rope ladder off our boat.

  The elders would keep on tolerating us, to a degree, until our Age Day in one moon. On that day, everyone aged one year, and Calev and I would be eighteen. Adults. After that, if we were seen doing anything more than everyday business, we’d be Outcasted.

  Calev tightened the deep blue headtie that rested above his eyebrows. The sturdy sandals he liked to wear on my boat stuck out from the bottom of his tunic.

  “Could we go on a quick ride before the port-scouting trip?” he asked, running a hand along his horse’s nose.

  My mind threw out pictures of Calev’s lean body in front of mine, sitting in his green tasseled saddle, the barley tugging at my skirt like paupers’ fingers and no Berker anywhere in sight. But we didn’t have the sun for a ride. I squeezed his strong fingers in mine.

  “We need to leave now. And it’ll take…” I tapped my lips, thinking. Who knew how long it would take to find the map? Maybe hours, maybe much longer. Zayn’s instructions would get me to the spot, but with weather and the possibility of the shipwreck moving over the last hundred or so years…

  If I told Calev seven days, he’d say no. One, and he might not warn his father of his absence. “Three days. At the most.”

  He smoothed a hand over his head. “Three? I told the council we’d be at sea just one.” Looking over his shoulder at the fields, he grinned. “It’s harvest.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Almost. And my father—“

  “Let your brother handle it.”

  His brother appeared from behind a painted wagon near the tool shed.

  “Eleazar,” I said, “Calev has something to tell you.” I jabbed a thumb at him.

  “I do?” Calev asked, laughing.

  “You do.” I pulled him two steps up the path toward the side of the fork that led to the sea. “Come on,” I whispered. “I need you.”

  From shallow water spearfishing to creeping onto full-ships to climb rigging, he’d always been with me. I didn’t need a lucky frog’s leg like other sailors. I had Calev ben Y’hoshua, eldest son of the chairman of Old Farm—the most profitable stretch of ground on the amir's sprawling lands. Everything Calev smiled on grew wings and flew on to greatness.

  “All right, Kinneret. I’ll go. But you might have to take me on as a crewmate when my father throws me out.”

  “Ugh. An Old Farm a sailor?” A laugh flavored my words. “It takes you way too much sun to get used to the swells.” I pretended to be sick, bending and coughing.

  With a gentle punch to my shoulder, Calev broke away and clasped his brother’s arm in both his hands. “Father knows I’m leaving. It’s been approved. I’ll just be gone a little longer. Three days at the most.”

  Eleazar mumbled something and his jaw tensed.

  Calev shook his brother’s arm. “It’ll please our ship’s kaptan. You know Kinneret is good at this. Come on.”

  The side of my mouth jerked up. It was a good lie. Their kaptan, old as the sea itself, knew I was a master at navigating the Pass. He’d never admit it, but when I’d been caught going through his maps during a visit to see Calev, he’d told me I didn’t need to spy. That I already knew the best routes.

  A frown ran over Eleazar’s freckled bottom lip. “I don’t know…”

  “The weather will change soon,” I said, thoughts of silver and food and Calev’s mouth swirling through my head. My life could completely change. I grinned, imagining Avi’s happy smile. “We need to go. Now.”

  “Fine,” Eleazar said. “I’ll tell Father. As usual.”

  A shadow of guilt crept into my gut, but I pushed it down.

  Wearing a butter-colored sash, a girl with the prettiest, darkest eyes walked out from behind the shed. My skin blazed and I swallowed hard. Miriam.

  She didn’t smile but nodded once to Calev. He straightened his blue and yellow sash and coughed.

  The skin over my knuckles burned as I fisted my hands tighter. They’d be married in a year if something didn’t change.

  Eleazar raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you should tell your Intended about your plans.”

  Calev closed and opened his eyes, then smiled at her.

  I willed my heart to keep beating. That smile. I was the one who’d found that smile first. Not her.

  She peered back at him, her chin tilted prettily. Pretty, pretty, pretty. High-caste, high-caste, high-caste. My teeth ground together. I looked at the fields, wishing I was a blind woman so I couldn’t see her beauty. I was well aware that my smaller, lighter eyes were mere field flowers next to the black roses she blinked at Calev.

  I tugged Calev’s arm. “We need to go now.”

  “If it’s so pressing, maybe we should enlist my horse.” He had a point.

  We bid them goodbye and mounted up as I did my best to push, shove, and smash the image of Calev smiling at Miriam out of my mind.

  Calev had tried multiple times to talk to me about his father and Miriam and how all that happened, but I made it clear I didn’t want to hear about it. The more the situation was mentioned, the more chance of it becoming real. In my mind anyway.

  Seated in front of me, Calev kicked the horse with his heels, bumping my feet. “Don’t worry about it, Kinneret,” he whispered. His breath smelled like lemons. “My father is so busy with harvest preparation, he won’t even ask them about me. Not until they need me. Which shouldn’t be until five or so days from now, if I’m guessing right.”

  I looked skyward. He didn’t even realize why I was grinding my teeth into nothing. At least Miriam and Calev weren’t hennaed yet. The Intention ceremony hadn’t yet been performed. I still had a chance. Not much of one. But still.

  The horse’s hooves ate the ground between Old Farm and the dock. I reveled in the feel of Calev, warm and strong, against my stomach, legs, cheek.

  When we’d hopped off, Calev slapped the mare to send her home. She was used to our comings and goings.

  “What’s this about?” Calev asked. “I’m all for avoiding harvest prep—it’s exactly as appealing as a hug from Aunt Y’hudit—but usually I know what kind of adventure you’re dragging me into.”

  Smirking, I eyed the sun. “I’ll tell you when we’re on our way.”

  The hill slanted down to the dock where my craft bobbed in the jittery water.

  Calev blew out a breath. “Last time you surprised me,” he held his groin protectively, “…ugh, those spotted leeches…”

  “No leeches, I promise. You’ll love this trip.”

  “That’s good,” Calev said as our sandals slapped along the dock’s wooden boards. “I’d take a bucket of Aunt Y’hudits over those disrespectful creatures.”

  I threw him a spicy grin. “You didn’t lose anything important to the blood-suckers, did you?”

  He grinned like a thief. “I’m fully equipped. Don’t worry.”

  I felt like I’d sailed over an enormous swell.

  Following me, Calev leaped onto the swaying deck. His feet barely missed the glass Wraith Lantern that would prote
ct us if we didn’t make some sort of landfall before sunset. Avi had sewn a new fist-width wick for it yesterday. Her long fingers were perfect for lacing the wool, iron, and pale malhatc fibers in sets of seven and three and five.

  As Avi untied us from the dock, I raised the stone anchor. The coconut-fiber rope scratched familiarly against my palms and salt-scented water dripped from its coils.

  “Oron is asleep again.” Avi pointed to the hull before giving Calev a hug. Her head used to bump the hilt of Calev’s curved dagger, but now, she stood high as his shoulder.

  After hauling anchor, we lowered the poles into the bay’s water and pushed our way into the open water of the twisting strait. Looking at the ridge of rocks and the narrow openings leading to our destination, I grinned.

  “I don’t like that look, Kinneret.” Calev lowered his pole onto the flat planks of the deck, which made a hollow sound because the only thing below was Oron.

  I set mine down, and Avi helped me tug the halyard and hoist the gaff to the mast top. Our lateen sail spread like a triangular gull’s wing.

  “Tell me where we’re going,” Avi begged, smiling.

  I breathed the salt air in, loving the way it pulled at my curls. Directly in front of us, the Pass was empty of other boats. A feeling shivered through me, a tease of a freedom I didn’t have. I couldn’t use Salt Magic to make silver appear in my palm. But by the Fire, I could sail my way to it. I forced my features into a vicious smile, a scorching grin forged to burn through anyone’s doubts, even my own.

  “I will tell you. Just not yet,” I said.

  Calev shook his head. “Let no one say you know nothing about theatrics.”

  My skirt brushing my ankles, I left Avi and Calev on either sides of the tiller and used the strong josi line to force the sail into a tip toward the bow.

  With the canvas like a second sky above us, we sailed close reach, at an angle going slightly into the wind. With my eyes trained on the sail and the water beyond, we sped into the Pass. Behind us, the stone wall around Calev’s home faded into the distance.

  I was finished with the tease. I wanted real hope.