Shadow and Bone

AFTER
THE BOY AND THE GIRL stand at the railing of the ship, a
true ship that rolls and rocks on the heaving back of the True
Sea.
“Goed morgen, fentomen!” a deckhand shouts to them as he
passes by, his arms full of rope.
All the ship’s crew call them fentomen. It is the Kerch word
for ghosts.
When the girl asks the quartermaster why, he laughs and
says it’s because they are so pale and because of the way they
stand silent at the ship’s railing, staring at the sea for hours, as
if they’ve never seen water before. She smiles and does not
tell him the truth: that they must keep their eyes on the
horizon. They are watching for a ship with black sails.
Baghra’s Verloren was long gone, so they had hidden in the
slums of Os Kervo until the boy could use the gold pins from
her hair to book passage on another ship. The city buzzed with
the horror of what had happened in Novokribirsk. Some
blamed the Darkling. Others blamed the Shu Han or Fjerdans.
A few even claimed it was the righteous work of angry Saints.
Rumors began to reach them of strange happenings in
Ravka. They heard that the Apparat had disappeared, that
foreign troops were massing on the borders, that the First and
Second Armies were threatening to go to war with each other,
that the Sun Summoner was dead. They waited to hear word of
the Darkling’s death on the Fold, but it never came.
At night, the boy and the girl lie curled around each other in
the belly of the ship. He holds her tight when she wakes from
another nightmare, her teeth chattering, her ears ringing with
the terrified screams of the men and women she left behind on
the broken skiff, her limbs trembling with remembered power.
“It’s all right,” he whispers in the darkness. “It’s all right.”
She wants to believe him, but she’s afraid to close her eyes.