Whisper of the Tide by Sarah Tolcser

Author:Sarah Tolcser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

“What are you talking about?” I asked, barely able to hear my own words. The cannonball had done something to my ears. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

The woman was middle-aged, with an angular face and thin lips. She wore a gown of deep purple, trimmed in ribbon. As I watched, her face melted away to reveal a girl with an upturned pierced nose, deep brown skin, and amber eyes. Her dark hair was braided and twisted in an elaborate knot on top of her head. The earring that dangled from her left lobe was nearly three inches long, a column of jet beads with a shiny black crescent moon and star suspended at the end. A sprinkling of matching jet pins sparkled in her hair, reminding me of the night sky.

“Sorry,” Kenté said. “I forgot about that.”

I was so stunned to see my cousin that it took me a moment to realize what it meant. Somehow she’d known I was alive. And not only alive, but here, half an ocean away.

“How—when—what are you doing in Brizos?” I spluttered.

“Looking for you, of course. Everyone said you’d drowned.” She grinned, which was not exactly the reaction to my tragic death I would’ve preferred. “It was in the papers, even in Trikkaia. But I knew it couldn’t be true.”

Taking her hand, I scrambled to my feet. “Explain.”

“Well, if you’d really drowned, you would be at the bottom of the sea. Lying quite still as the fish nibbled on your corpse.”

“This is not what I meant by explaining,” I said, brushing dirt off my trousers.

“And yet every time I checked on you,” she went on, “I was quite certain you were moving. Traveling southeast. Every night I’d close my eyes and find you.”

I’d been so happy to see Kenté that I had forgotten her annoying tendency to talk in riddles. “Hold on—how?”

“My talisman,” she said, as if I was the one being cryptic. “You obviously got it.”

“Wait, you mean this?” I dug beneath my shirt. The chain was tangled in an awkward knot around the lumpy gold charm. I pulled the entire thing over my head.

Taking the talisman in her hand, Kenté kissed it. “Oh, hello, you.”

Another sharp cannon blast echoed across the water. Seizing her arm, I dragged her briskly toward the harbor. “If you get killed by a cannonball, it won’t matter if I’m already dead. The Bollards will murder me again. Let’s go.”

We both ducked as a cannonball hurtled over our heads, landing with the rattle of splintering wood.

Slinging the necklace back over my head, I asked, “So this thing has some kind of shadow magic in it? That’s how you were able to find me?”

“Didn’t I say so in my letter?” she said innocently as we hurried down the street.

“No.” I glared at her. “You said it was supposed to protect me from enemy shadowmen. You purposely neglected to tell me you were using it to track my every movement. As you well know.”

“It protects you a little bit.

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