POV: Liora
I finished the raft alone at dusk with bleeding hands and a jaw so tight my teeth ached. Thalen did not appear. I had told him not to come, and he had listened, which was either respect or cowardice, and I did not have the energy to determine which.
Maw sat on the beach, keening. A high, thin, wretched sound, the cry of a creature that understood departure even if it could not understand why.
"Go back to him," I said, pushing the raft toward the waterline. "He needs you more than I do right now."
Maw did not move. It pressed its body into the sand and keened louder, and the staying almost broke my resolve. The fierce, toothy thing that had brought me dead fish and slept at my feet, choosing me even now.
"Go back." My throat closed on the second word. "I cannot take you where I am going."
I had left the diary on the table in the main hall, open to the last entry. He could read it or burn it. That was his choice now, and I was finished making choices for men who could not make them for themselves.
I shoved the raft into the water and climbed on before my body could overrule my decision. The current grabbed the frame immediately, and within seconds I understood every warning Thalen had given me about the crossing.
The sea wanted the raft in pieces and me at the bottom. The currents dragged from three directions, violent and relentless, and the timber twisted against the joints I had lashed with every knot I knew.
The first wave tore the left crossbeam free. I caught it, hauled it back, and retied the rope with fingers already raw. The knot-work I had taught Thalen, turned against me by a sea that did not care about irony.
"Hold together," I told the raft, because speaking to inanimate objects was apparently who I was now. "You are not allowed to kill me. I did not survive a cursed man and his tentacles to drown on a pile of driftwood."
I nearly drowned twice before the mainland current caught me and dragged me toward shore. The raft was falling apart — timber splitting, rope fraying, every joint screaming. I held it together through stubbornness, because drowning after everything else would have been insulting.
I washed ashore in darkness, half-dead, torn palms and a gash above my left ear. I crawled toward the lights of the village. The first person to see me dropped his lantern. Glass shattered on cobblestones.
"Liora?" The fisherman's voice pitched upward, breaking. "You — they said you were —"
"Dead." I pulled myself upright, swaying, blood running down the side of my face. "Clearly they were wrong. Where are my parents?"
The man did not reply.
I moved through the streets at the pace my legs allowed, which was slow, with an expression that discouraged conversation. Doors opened, faces appeared, and the crowd gathered behind me in silence.
"Is that the elder's daughter?" someone whispered from a doorway. Another voice answered, lower: "The one they sent to the sea." I did not correct either identification.
My parents stood in their doorway. My father in his elder's composure, my mother behind him, Calla behind her. The precise arrangement of a family that had always known its order and mine within it.
"Liora." My father said my name in the flat register he reserved for inventory — checking what had arrived against what was expected. "How did you get here?"
"I built a raft." I stood in front of my own home, salt-crusted and alive, and neither of them moved toward me. "I crossed the strait and survived. Would you prefer I had not?"
"Do not be dramatic," my father said, which was his answer to every question he did not want to face directly.
"That is not possible," my mother said. Her voice came out thin and determined, the voice of a woman with strong feelings about what the impossible was allowed to do. "The currents alone —"
"I am standing in front of you." I held up my palms and let them see the rope burns and the split skin. "Does this look impossible?"
My mother's mouth opened and closed. My father's face settled into the expression he wore when a conversation was not going the way he had planned it. Neither of them reached for me, and the crowd behind me had grown thick enough that I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. If they wanted an audience, I would give them something worth watching.
"There are no gods in the deep," I said, loud enough for the gathered crowd. "There is only an island and a man. The sacrifices do not appease anything. They die on stone and sand, and the sea does not care."
I had expected shock. Anger. The sound of a village confronting what it had been feeding its daughters to for generations. What I got was worse.
Silence. Then the slow settling of people who have heard and decided not to. A woman in the second row crossed her arms. A fisherman near the back shook his head, the dismissal fixed in his face before I finished speaking.
"The girl is confused," someone murmured. "The crossing damaged her mind."
"She has been alone on an island for weeks." Soft enough to sound sympathetic, loud enough to carry. "The strain —"
"I am not confused." The words cut through the murmur and landed nowhere. The crowd gave me their patient, courteous attention — the kind people offer things they have already decided are wrong but not worth arguing with directly.
"We will discuss this in the morning." He said it to the doorframe, not to me, which told me everything about how much discussing was actually planned.
"There is nothing to discuss." I did not move from the street. "I told you what is on that island. What you do with the information is your concern."
My father's hand found my mother's elbow and steered her backward through the door. He had spent decades sorting conversations into the ones that happened in public and the ones that disappeared behind closed walls, and this one had been categorized before I opened my mouth.
Calla watched from behind my mother and said nothing, which meant she was already working on the version she preferred.
"You look terrible," Calla said, delivering the observation with great care, as though careful delivery made it kind.
"I look alive," I said. "Which is more than you expected."
The crowd dispersed slowly. I stood in the street and noticed the absence at the same moment I noticed my hands had stopped shaking. Jorin was not in the doorway. Calla was not wearing a ring.
"They did not marry?" I asked my mother, and her face tightened in a way that answered the question fully.
"There were complications." She stepped back and the door closed. The lock turned on the other side.
I had crossed a cursed sea on a raft held together, and my parents had closed the door.
The village settled around me with the uneasy quiet of a place that had listened to testimony and decided the witness was the problem.
Jorin found me at the edge of the square, leaning against the wall of the fishmonger's stall with my torn palms pressed against cold stone.
I saw him before he reached me — the familiar walk, the angle of his shoulders, the way he held his hands slightly open at his sides.
My jaw unclenched before I could stop it, which was irritating and involuntary and said more than I wanted it to.
I was tired. Salt-ruined and hollowed out. He was standing in front of me with an expression that held no darkness, no shame, no tentacles reaching and retreating, and my body registered all of that before my mind could remind it why to be careful.
"Liora." His voice was quiet and rough.
"Hello, Jorin." I pressed my palms against my thighs. "It has been a while."
"I looked for you." He stepped closer, and I let him. "After they took you. I went to the elders, I went to the shamans. No one would tell me anything."
I knew what he was. I had known since Calla's contradictions, since the arrangement my father had made before Jorin ever found me on the rocks.
His feelings and his convenience had always pointed in the same direction, and I had never managed to find the line between them. But tonight I did not have the energy to hold that suspicion where it belonged.
"Can we walk?" he asked. "I have questions. And I think you could use someone who is not going to calculate what your return costs them."
I caught myself reaching for my waist where a tentacle used to rest and stopped my hand before it found only cold air and exposed skin.
The ghost of Thalen's touch lingered there, warm and specific and aching, and I pressed my palm flat against my hip to smother it.
"Yes," I said, and fell into step beside him, and the simplicity of walking next to an uncursed man felt both restful and wrong in equal measure.