The air was cold.
That bothered me. Ain't no reason for us to be anywhere near coldness, not at this time of year, and not where we were sailing. Don't care how bad that storm knocked us off course.
Not a storm, I thought, remembering the sunlight, the scent of spider mint, but I shoved the thought out of my head.
I took another few moments to pull myself up to standing, and then took even longer to recover from it, standing in place and swaying a little. Then I shuffled forward, limping from a twinging pain in my left thigh.
We were someplace else. I knew that soon as I came out from the under the shadow of the rigging. The sky was the color of a sword's blade, and the water lapping up at the sides of the boat was dark gray, nearly black, and everything smelled like metal and salt. We were north, up close to the ice-islands, maybe. I'd only been there a few times in my life but I remembered the smell of the air, that overwhelming scent of cold.
A handful of crewmen were bunched up at the port bow of the ship, all huddled together, not talking. Chari was there, and Marjani, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. I limped toward them.
"Hey!" My voice came out strangled, raspy. Nobody turned around. "Hey, what's going–"
I stopped. We were in sight of land. Way far off in the distance was a line of green, that vivid darkalmost-black green you only get in the north.
And below the line of green was a line of black beach and below that, a strip of gray. The sky. A gap between the island and the sea.
And like that, all the pain in my body got replaced with the icy grip of dread, and I remembered how I'd smelled medicine back during the storm, before I–
Marjani glanced over at me, her eyes widening. "Ananna!" she said. "Oh, Aje, I thought you'd been thrown overboard! I–" She stopped, covered her mouth with her hand. "You look like hell."
I tried to choke out some kind of nicety, something about falling into the rope, something, anything to make her think I had nothing to do with us being within swimming distance of those horrible islands.
Instead, I turned away from her and hobbled over to the ladder that'd take me down below.
"Ananna? What're you… Stop, it's flooded–"
"Stay there," I said, cause what else could I do? She didn't listen, of course, and came chasing after me, grabbing hold of my arm. Pain shot up through my elbow.
"Let me go! I need to…" Do what? I didn't want to put it into words.
"Need to what?"
"Naji." It was all I could bring myself to choke out. I jerked away from her and half-slid, half-climbed down the ladder. Down below the floor was covered in a half-foot of dirty water, rum bottles floating by like they might hold some kind of message for me, and scraps of clothing and pieces of dried fish. I splashed through the water, the chill setting my whole body to shaking. Marjani had stopped at the ladder.
"Ananna, come back!" she said. "It's too cold. You'll get hypothermia…"
I didn't have the faintest idea what that was, and I didn't care, neither. I pushed my way into the crew's quarters.
The first thing that hit me was that horrible medicine smell, stronger than anything that ever soaked its way into the air of the crew's quarters before. My eyes watered and my throat burned and my skin prickled from all the leftover magic. The ship walls down here were all blood-red, transformed by magic.
And there was Naji, slumped across a hammock, blood trailing down his arms, his skin white as death. Bits of sail floated in the water around him like flower petals, leaving streaks of red in their wake.
He lifted his head when I came in, just enough that I knew he wasn't dead.
I splashed forward and picked up one of the scraps of cloth. His writing was all over it, the ink a brownish-red color, not black like Marjani's ink. It wasn't a story. I stared at it for a long time, not making any sense of those symbols, knowing full well it was a spell. I balled the cloth up in my fist and dropped it at my side. Naji moaned, dropped his head back. My anger swelled up inside me like a wave.
"You son of a whore," I said. "You filthy, mutinous, lying sack of shit–"
Naji tried to say something, but his words came out all slurred, and for a second I wondered how bad it had hurt him when I fell out of the rigging, if his body shattered like it was made out of glass. I hoped so. And then my anger was this flash of white light, hot and searing, and I waded up to him, pulled my arm back, and punched him square in the face.
"Ananna! What are you doing?"
Marjani crashed into the room. I hit Naji again, open-handed this time, and he tried to squirm away from me, shoving his hands between us to block me. I grabbed his wrist, dried blood flaking off on my fingers, and yanked him up off the hammock and punched him again. He slammed up against the wall.
And then Marjani had her arms around my waist.
"Stop it," she said. "Stop." She pulled me away from him, dragging me through the water. I strained against her, arms flailing, but it wasn't no use.
"Calm down," she said, over and over. "Ananna, this isn't the time. Calm do–"
She froze in place, staring at the walls, and I wriggled out of her arms and turned to look at her. Over on his hammock, Naji moaned my name.
"Shut up," I told him. My heart pounded up against my ribs and it didn't have nothing to do with the fight.
"The air," Marjani said. "It's all wrong…" Then she picked up one of the sail scraps and stared at it good and hard. I stood there with my chest heaving, waiting for her to get angry, as angry as I was. But she only seemed sad.
She looked up at Naji. "You shouldn't have done this."
"You don't understand," Naji said. "The curse–"
"Shut up!" I screamed at him. "You're going to get us killed." I turned to Marjani. "We were always headed for Port Idai, like I said. I never thought he'd do something like this."
"Neither did I," Marjani said. She splashed over to me. "I know about the curse," she said, her voice soft. "He told me."
"What?" I said.
"I tried…" Naji gasped. "Tried to save–"