The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

Author:Emery Robin [ROBIN, EMERY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

CEIRRAN

We came the next day to a green little isle lying in a long swathe of beach along a fallen old coastline. It was entirely uninhabited. Even the seagulls only swooped low over the white sand, and didn’t roost. There was nothing very remarkable about it, except that it was the farthest the captain could sail with any certainty of seeing land afterward. Between us and the next western port lay thousands of miles of open ocean.

The barge docked on the beach and Gracia and I disembarked, followed by a flurry of servants with food and blankets. Gracia allowed them to fuss over us briefly before she dismissed them to the ship, and they went, grumbling.

I sat on a rock and watched her kneel on the sand. After a little while, she said, “You can never know, of course.”

I stayed silent. It was often best. A few moments later, she continued distantly: “Nearly every island was once a continent, and nearly every continent inhabited. But the planet was already seventy percent water. Not everything is a drowned city. Some places were always islands. Empty, except for the trees.”

She stood. “You can never know,” she said, “of course,” sounding more businesslike this time, and tucked her arm into mine, and guided me to the blanket where a feast of cakes and fruit and wine waited for us.

The servants stayed on the ship that afternoon. Gracia was uncharacteristically quiet, and had been since the day before; she seemed sometimes to be hardly aware she was with me at all. Nevertheless I fed her grapes, and laughed when she came to life enough to nip at my fingers. We went up into the greenery, and I watched her as she pushed through the tall grasses, her skirt hiked up around her legs, hair stuck to the back of her neck with sweat. At the highest point of the island grew a cluster of soft poppies with orange-silk petals. I plucked one, and she tucked it deep into her braid, and I watched it sway across her back all the way down.

Evening crept in, a soft grey like a cat’s coat, and a coolness with it. We pulled the additional blankets over ourselves and sat on the slope above the beach, Gracia tucked into my side, and watched how the sun sank into the colorless page of the water, how the sky bloomed first deep blue around it and then indigo and then at last a flat, quiet black. The moons were scattered above it, tonight only thin slivers. In the water they multiplied into twelve, forty-eight, wavering in the dark.

At last Gracia said, a soft murmur below my ear: “What do you remember about your parents?”

“My parents?” I said.

“You weren’t born by crèche,” she said. “I know that well enough. How many did you have?”

“I—two,” I said. “Two, a man and a woman. The man—my father, he died not long after I was born.”

Gracia shifted a little against my side. She always ran very warm; tonight it was like a spark against my rib cage.

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