Namesake by Adrienne Young

Author:Adrienne Young [Young, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

TWENTY-TWO

“He’s got ’em!”

Hamish’s voice calling from the window made me drop the quill on the table. I slid out of the booth and went to the doors of the tavern, propped open to the street. Paj was walking up the cobblestones with three rolled parchments under his arm, his collar pulled up against the bitter wind. He shoved past a group of men headed for the merchant’s house, almost knocking one of them over.

Clove had volunteered to be the one to go to the mapmaker, not trusting Paj to do it. He hadn’t hidden the fact that he didn’t think our navigator could get the Marigold to Yuri’s Constellation and back again. But I’d had other errands for Clove.

I looked out to the street again, watching for any sign of him. He was late.

I slid my hands into the pockets of the new trousers Willa had begrudgingly gone to buy for me. It felt good to be out of that ridiculous frock and back in a pair of boots.

Paj was barreling through the doors a moment later. He made his way to the booth where we’d set up and dropped the maps haphazardly on the table. He didn’t bother looking at me. In fact, none of them had so much as glanced in my direction all day.

West ignored Paj’s display of indignation, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “All right. What have we got?”

“Look for yourself,” Paj grunted.

“Paj,” Auster warned, raising an eyebrow.

Beside him, Willa looked as if she approved of Paj’s protest. She huffed, stirring another cube of sugar into her cold tea.

Paj relented under Auster’s reproach, opening the maps on top of the ship log Holland had given me. “The midnight was found in Yuri’s Constellation. It had to be. According to the logs, Holland’s crew had been dredging the islands for over a month when Isolde found it, and they continued in that spot for weeks after.” He set a finger on the broken cluster of land masses. “Since then, Holland’s crew has dredged the hell out of those reefs. First from the north, working their way south. Then from the south, working north.”

“But they haven’t found anything,” I said under my breath.

“Obviously,” Paj answered sharply. “They’ve been working at it almost twenty years and they’ve covered every reef that Holland’s crew was working at the time Isolde found the midnight. To say this is a fool’s errand is putting it lightly.”

I sat on the edge of the table. “Where are the geological and topographical charts?”

He sifted through the corners of the maps until he found the one he was looking for, and pulled it free. “Here.”

The diagrams unrolled before me. The stretch of Unnamed Sea was labeled in different colors and thicknesses of lines identifying the types of rocks and depths of water. Most of the reefs were encircled by basalt, slate, and sandstone—prime locations to find most of the stones that ran the gem trade. But if my mother had only found midnight in one place and Holland had been unable to find it since, we were looking for something different.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.