“WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?” Wil asked, as though having an answer would somehow better her situation.
Ada was little more than two years old, small for his age, and very bright.
He’d been sucking on his finger, but he extracted it from his mouth with a wet plopping sound and pointed to the cabin beside him.
The ship lilted just slightly, and Ada staggered sideways but didn’t fall. He was used to living at sea, had probably learned to walk here.
At least one of them was calm, Wil thought.
Ada walked forward, pushing the door open and inviting himself into the engine room. Wil jumped back to avoid touching him. And in that small gesture, a thousand new reasons plagued her. Ada was a child. Children needed to be cared for. Needed to be held, fed, changed. Ada was a crier at night—Wil knew this well—dependent upon his mother’s singing and rocking him to sleep. Wil couldn’t do any of these things, even though she thought she might be halfway decent at them under normal circumstances.
Even with her gloves, she wouldn’t dare risk it. A simple brush of her skin and he’d be dead.
“Ada.” Wil knelt before him. He fell to a seated position, playing with a length of rope he’d found on the floor. It was dyed green and vaguely resembled a bear made of knots and frays. “Do you know where your mother is?” She spoke in Lavean, even though she was fairly certain by his past responses and his time spent in port towns that he could understand Nearsh.
He shook his head. He was unconcerned, petting at the fray of the bear’s paw.
“Do you know where your father is?” Desperately, Wil considered the idea that she could leave Ada with his father. Even if it meant returning to the Southern Isles, she stood a chance at avoiding Zay and Loom. She would likely have to abandon the ship, but there would be some other way out, surely.
Ada shook his head again, his dark hair spilling over his forehead.
“Is he in Messalin? Cannolay? Is he still alive?”
He only went on playing with the rope bear, not even bothering to look up.
“What about your grandparents?” Wil pressed.
Ada regarded her with a puckered, curious expression. His blank eyes said he’d never heard that word, much less considered the possibility that his mother might have parents of her own.
“Who else takes care of you?”
“Loom.”
“There’s no one else?”
Ada didn’t answer, which was, in itself, an answer.
Somewhere in this exchange, Wil’s adrenaline had died down. Now all she felt was resignation. “There’s no one else,” she echoed. Doubtless, Ada was a wanderer, but for all the people he had seen, he belonged only to one.
Ada crawled forward and tried to get into Wil’s lap, and she moved away from him. “No,” she said, sharply. “You can’t do that. You can’t ever do that.”
She saw Zay in the fierce look Ada gave her just then. He had given her the gift of his trust and acceptance, and she had thrown it back at him. There weren’t many left in the world who would accept a monster like her, and he seemed to know it.
She slumped forward, her fingers tangling in her hair. Ada had no one in the world, save his mother and Loom. She tried to think. There were sometimes orphanages near port towns, her brother had told her, to house the children so frequently abandoned during times of famine or war. And perhaps she could pay one of them to keep Ada safe—just for a little while, until she found Pahn and returned for him.
Ada dropped onto his side and let himself tumble with the rocking of the ship, breathing out a little giggle as the motion took him. Wil didn’t know if he was too innocent to be wary of her, or if her week on this ship had made her an automatic presence in his tiny world, or if, for some inexplicable reason, he just liked her. But he couldn’t have guessed at the plans she was trying to rationalize.
She hated herself for considering leaving him alone in an orphanage full of strangers, his mother nowhere to be seen. But as horrible as it would be for Ada, it would be even more so for Zay, who was a different thing entirely when she tended to her son. She would do anything to reach him. Swim the seas to have him back.
Even if Zay had poisoned her with her own sleep serum, even if she was brash and wholly unpleasant, Wil could take no pleasure in separating her from her child. In truth, she admired her ferocity. She imagined her own mother would have been the same way if she had raised her children as wanderers in such a treacherous world, rather than in a castle.
Wil lay on her stomach, chin propped by her gloved fist. “There must be some way I can return you unnoticed,” she said. Ada didn’t know what this meant, nor did he care, and Wil laughed at the fun he seemed to be having.
By nightfall, Wil had already begun steering for Loom’s uncharted island. Ada was mercifully cooperative for most of the venture, especially when she sliced an apple into thin coins for him—something her nanny had done when Wil was small. He stuck them to his cheeks, and covered his eyes with them, exhausting all the ways he could entertain himself before eating them. The ship was home to him, as was the sea, and Wil carried about entertaining him as though nothing was amiss.
It wasn’t until sunset that Ada stood before the circular window in the control room and began to whimper. Maybe he thought his mother was out there buried in the waves, Wil supposed.
“Ada.” She slid from the stool and knelt on the floor behind him. “Your mother is on the island waiting for you, and we’ll be there soon.”
He looked over his shoulder at her, tears pooling in the divot of his upper lip.
She thought of her own mother before she could brace herself for the weight of such sadness. And she began to hum—if only to drown the image out—one of her mother’s old shanty songs. The humming turned to singing, about a man who turned everything he touched to gold, until it had destroyed him.
Ada’s sobs faded away as he listened. After that, she sang the one about the singing wolf, and the boy whose heart had been stolen from him so that he’d grown up with a stone in his chest, always listening for its beating.
He didn’t try to climb into her lap that time. He had accepted the distance that had to remain between them.
Somewhere in the fifth song, as the moon spread its broken light upon the dark sea, he drifted to sleep.
Wil reached forward and swept her gloved hand through his feathery hair, watching the way it fell back into place, as though he were too perfect a thing to be rumpled.
Though her castle had been full of children, she was the youngest one. She had never seen a child this small when they were sleeping, had never seen what a gift it was to be so young, in these quieter times when the eyelashes barely fluttered and the lips barely pursed, and all else was still. The sun had never burned his shoulders, and his hands didn’t know the calluses a sword hilt would give them. His muscles had never ached after a long day. How long was this window exactly? Too small to be remembered, she supposed. Eventually he would grow to be like the rest of the world, when imperfection and scars and regrets became inevitable.
She had the fleeting thought that this calm could last forever, if only she could find a way to hold on to it. Maybe that was a thought mothers had.
Wil had never thought about being a mother herself. It had always been something faraway to decide upon, when she was older. There had always been too much that she wanted to do first. And now, nothing viable could grow in her cursed body anyway, even if she had all the time in the world. There was no faraway someday.
“You won’t remember today,” Wil whispered to him, as he tilted his face into her gloved palm. “But I want you to know that I will.”