![]() ![]() After her first dive, she began making tally marks inside the lid of her trunk to mark the winnowing balance on her debt. Yes, she owed Sakre, but she couldn’t wait to be free. It was the only time he’d ever struck her, but she still sensed that violence in him, a glass-toothed eel waiting between rocks, always angry, never closing its eyes. And when your body floats to the surface, I’ll cut that expensive fucking ink out of you and poke it back into someone else’s skin, someone who respects magic. “Blood of the Five! If you dive with a ruined tattoo, you’ll just drown, you foolish girl. He’d slapped her across the face so hard that she’d tumbled to the ground. When the scabs had hardened and had begun to itch, Sakre caught her scratching at them, peeling up the edges with her thumbnails to see if the ink glowed underneath. ![]() The runes neither lit up in the bath nor when it rained, and she began to suspect the pretty poem was broken. The tattooed runes had soon puffed up and felt hot to the touch, and her brown skin turned a brick red around the edges of the poem. “Will it glow?” Jantz had asked, thinking of the witchlights that were fueled by droplets of kraken’s blood. Getting a tattoo didn’t feel good, but she’d been hurt worse before, and she was proud that she didn’t cry like Pigeon had. The runes trailed down her sternum and spread out over her growing breasts. The ink flowed into runes that formed a poem of Sakre’s personal design, an incantation to turn water to air. The tattooist had injected tiny dots of fishy-smelling kraken’s ink into Jantz’s flesh. Afterward, they’d gone straight to the inkhouse. He’d taken Pigeon and her for a meal at a pub, with meat and a whole slice of pie for each of them. Sakre had asked her if she wanted to become a diver, and since she’d been told to say yes to anything he asked, she nodded. She swallowed a lump in her throat, remembering the day he’d rescued her. She didn’t begrudge her debt to Sakre-for teaching her to dive, for fronting the money for her tattoo-but to emerge from a dive with a sackful of her own wares, to afford her own flat and maybe her own boat, maybe even someday her own orphaned divers. It was hard to believe she would be diving for herself soon. Search extra-hard tonight, since if you bring back more’n two, I’ll owe you in cold coin.” Be sorry to lose you―you’re the best diver I’ve trained. “Two pearls, same as the last two times you asked. Sakre pulled his saggy-brimmed hat off and smeared away the sweat with the fine hairs on the back of his arm. “You remember how much I owe?” she asked. She wasn’t going to argue with Sakre, not while he still owned her debt, and especially not when she was so close to paying it off. Jantz had never seen another diver in the three years since Sakre had bought her from the orphanage, but she shrugged and helped Pigeon tack into the shelter of the bluffs. Besides, more often we come out, the more likely someone’ll follow us and pick ’em clean.” No use taking ’em while they’re olives if they can be apples. “It takes a long time to grow pearls this big. “Then why haven’t we come before?” Jantz asked. “Once, one of my divers brought back a pearl the size of a cat’s skull.” “These are the ripest beds on the Grey Coast,” Sakre went on. Pigeon winced at the insult to the sea, but if the Wavekeeper himself had surfaced then to demand retribution, their boss would have haggled over the price of his own head. He wore the same threadbare captain’s jacket as he’d worn the day she’d met him, even though he could have afforded a replacement. ![]() Years of rum and sailing had whittled him down to necessities, left his skin plastered over his lean muscles like wet canvas draped over ropes. Jantz glanced over her shoulder in time to see Sakre swing down from the shrouds and drop lightly to the deck. The eerie witchlight barely swayed where it hung from the sloop’s prow, and the sails hung in tired folds. In calm weather like this, however, it wasn’t much of a risk. After he’d lost his right arm in a diving accident, their boss, Sakre, didn’t often let him at the helm. Her scrawny friend ignored her and returned his attention to gently guiding Sandina farther seaward. “It’s bad luck to say that word,” muttered Pigeon. “Wreck to larboard bow,” Jantz called from her perch on the prow. The wooden bones were the charred yardarms of a sunken ship. When Jantz spotted a black skeleton jutting up above the water, at first she thought it was just a tide-battered tree, but before long she could make out the shredded ropes and scraps of sail. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!. ![]()
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