Chapter 171: What the Island Wants You to Hear

"*Kaelen. Daughter. Come home.*"

She bit me.

I’d had my hand clamped over her mouth for a full minute, and she finally got her teeth into the meat of my palm and *clamped.* I didn’t let go. Blood ran down my wrist. She glared up at me with her eyes swimming and her whole body trembling, and I stared right back and shook my head.

*Not him,* I mouthed.

*I know,* she mouthed back, around my hand.

*Then why—*

She spat my palm out, wiped her mouth on her furs, and put her forehead against the rock. For a moment she just breathed. The voice rolled on from the grass, patient and rumbling and so warm it made my stomach turn.

"He’s never once said that," she whispered, so quietly I almost lost it under the rain. "Not once in seventeen winters. You know what my father says when I come in late?"

"What?"

"’*You stubborn goat.*’" Her mouth twisted. "He says ’You stubborn goat, your supper’s cold.’ He doesn’t say *come home.* He says it like he’s already forgiven me."

I looked at the black stone line, and the silver threads quivering against it, and I understood something I should have understood in the field.

"It doesn’t copy what they say," I breathed. "It copies what we *wish* they’d say."

Kaelen’s eyes closed.

"Wren never called me an idiot with that much *tenderness,*" I said. "She’d have kicked me. Lyra wouldn’t have said *don’t die.* She’d have said it was the most irresponsible thing I’d ever done." I swallowed. "It’s not the voices. It’s the *wanting.*"

"That’s cruel," Kaelen said hoarsely.

"Yeah."

"That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard."

"Yeah."

She laughed once, wetly, and the laugh turned into something else, and she folded forward against my shoulder and shook. I didn’t say anything. I put my arm around her and held on, and the rain came down on both of us, and her father’s voice went on calling her name until, at last, it sank into the grass like a stone into a pond and was gone.

---

We climbed the ridge in the last of the light.

The black rock was sharp and slick, and Emmet kept slipping. Tamsin had him by the collar. At the halfway mark I caught him by the wrist and he turned, and his face was the color of dishwater.

"What was his daughter’s name?" he asked.

"Whose?"

"Oswin’s." He clutched the silk coat. "He told the voice ’tell her to eat her vegetables.’ Somebody has to tell her. Somebody has to *know.*" His chin shook. "But I don’t know her name."

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

"Ilsa," Tamsin said quietly, from above us.

We both looked up.

"On the ship," she said. She wouldn’t meet our eyes. "He talked in his sleep. Ilsa. Six years old. She likes honey on her porridge, and she’s afraid of geese." She shrugged, stiffly, a woman who had poisoned eleven people and wasn’t used to being soft. "I listen. It’s a habit."

Emmet nodded. He took a long, shaky breath, tightened his fist in the silk, and kept climbing.

I didn’t say anything. But I made a promise to myself, right there on the black rock, that if I ever got off this island, Ilsa would hear every word.

---

Kaelen’s camp was in a sea cave on the far side of the ridge.

It was a good one. Narrow mouth, deep belly, a dry shelf at the back where she’d laid out furs and a coil of rope and a neat row of dried fish. A tiny fire of driftwood flickered in the dark. She’d scratched four marks into the wall with the tip of a knife.

Four days. One for every morning she’d watched that grass.

"Tamsin, is it?" Kaelen said, handing her a strip of fish. "You’re thin. Eat."

"I’m a poisoner."

"I’m a barbarian. Eat."

Tamsin ate. Kaelen turned the rest of the fish over to Emmet, who wolfed it down, sobbing, and she crouched beside him and put a big hand on the back of his neck, the way you’d handle a puppy, and said something low and rough in her own language that made him cry harder and lean into her shoulder.

A faint gold curl of heat slid out of my collar. Aurelix peeked over my shoulder, small as a lizard, eyes gleaming.

*She’s very nice,* she murmured.

"Don’t."

*I’m only observing. She slapped you, kissed you, and adopted a child, all inside of ten minutes. It’s very efficient.*

"Aurelix."

*I like her,* Aurelix said, with great dignity. *I’ll allow it.*

"Your lizard," Kaelen said, without turning her head, "is judging me."

"I’m a dragon, dear," Aurelix said, and Kaelen’s eyebrows rose to her hairline.

"Huh," she said. "Of course you are."

---

The fire burned low. The rain hissed on the stones. For the first time since the ship, nobody was dying, and I let my head fall back against the wall and listened to the sea.

"Tell me about the island," I said.

Kaelen was quiet for a while.

"We call it Hunger Shore," she said. "My grandmother’s grandmother’s ships went out to fish near it once. Four boats. Only one came back. The man at the tiller had no eyes. He’d gouged them out himself." She turned a fish bone over in her fingers. "The old ones say the gods who lived here died, and left their hunger behind. It is still hungry. Some of it is still *alive.*"

"Fallen gods," Tamsin said slowly.

"Gods that are not dead," Kaelen corrected. "They are just *forgotten.* That is worse."

I thought about the Giver at the Citadel, asking so politely, so patiently, for a seat at a table. About the hand that had folded a man in half on the beach. About the field, picking the people I loved out of my head like berries.

"It isn’t random," I said. "Each place has a rule. The beach hunts what stands. The grass hunts what answers. They aren’t monsters, they’re—"

"Doors," Kaelen said.

"Doors?"

"That is what my grandmother called them. Every old god has a door, and every door has a rule." She looked at me. "If you break the rule, it opens."

I thought about the seventh chair. About two thousand smiling faces, saying *sit.* About the pale hand rising out of black stone, and the door I’d closed, for a moment, with a knight made of night.

*Valerian,* Aurelix whispered. *The Doctor isn’t putting you on an island of monsters.*

"No," I said softly. "He’s putting me in a *kitchen.*"

*What?*

"Every rule is a recipe." I stared at the fire. "He wants someone to break them. All of them. One after another. Until something that’s been asleep for ten thousand years finally sits down to eat."

Nobody said anything. The rain poured down. Out on the black water, something very large rolled over and sank.

---

I woke at dawn.

I don’t remember falling asleep. Emmet was curled on the furs with the silk coat tucked under his chin. Tamsin sat against the wall with her eyes shut and one hand around a knife. The fire was out. Pale gray light spilled in through the cave mouth.

Kaelen was gone.

I found her at the foot of the ridge, standing in the surf, with her back to me and her axe lowered. She didn’t turn at the sound of my boots.

"My skiff," she said.

I came up beside her.

It was a sturdy little thing, built from pine and sealskin, the kind of boat you could haul up a beach with two hands. She’d hidden it behind a boulder at the tide line, under a heap of kelp. I’d been planning, God help me, to ask if we could sail it.

It was in pieces.

Not smashed by the tide. Not splintered on rocks. The planks had been *peeled.* Every single board was stripped into long, curling ribbons, as neat as apple skin, and laid out on the sand in a spiral. The sealskin had been folded into a perfect, tiny square. The oars sat on top of it, side by side, like a gift.

"It was whole at sundown," Kaelen said, very quietly. "I checked it before I came to find you."

The tide hissed at our ankles. I looked down.

Beside the spiral, pressed into the wet sand, was a single footprint.

It was small. Bare. A girl’s foot, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, with five perfect toes. The water hadn’t touched it yet.

Beside it, curled on a wet rock, lay a single long strand of hair.

It was pale as moonlight.

And when I picked it up, I felt something go through me like a hook. A pull. Distant, and warm, and deep in my blood, as if somewhere out on the island something was whispering *Father?*

I hadn’t felt it in the field. I hadn’t felt it in the cave.

But I felt it now.