Mother and Father exchanged a look I couldn’t interpret. “You can try,” Mother said, surprising me. “He has always been fond of you. But we’ll wait until after sundown, so you aren’t seen. If Phaedra catches sight of you... Well, who knows what she’s capable of?”
My eyebrows rose. “Does she really wield that much power?”
“When the emissary came to pay your bride price, Phaedra told him you had switched places with Zadie. Our water supply was cut off not long after. In the wake of that event, she convinced the villagers that your betrayal of the king caused all our hardships,” Father said gently. “I don’t think we can be too cautious.”
I thought I saw the sheen of tears in Mother’s eyes, but she blinked before I could be sure. “Zadie, come help me. I caught a sunfish, and I intend to make a feast of it.”
Now it was my turn to gape. “You caught a fish?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” Mother snapped as she lifted the trapdoor. “Catching a fish is nothing compared to raising twin daughters.”
As the hours passed, my worry about how Governor Kristos would perceive my presence in Varenia only grew, especially knowing that Sami had been banished for “conspiring” with me.
“What if Kristos refuses to see me?” I asked Zadie, who handed me another fishing net to mend. Normally I would have found any excuse to avoid such a boring task, but keeping busy was the best way to pass the time.
“We won’t let him,” Zadie said, though judging by the way she was pulverizing the fish for our supper, she was as anxious as I was.
“If only we had some way of knowing if Sami made it to land.” I dropped the net and began pacing over the floorboards. Kristos would welcome me with open arms in that case.
“Surely he would have gone to see the kite seller if he had.”
The kite seller. Of course. He was Sami’s best contact on land, as far as we knew, and Sami trusted him to keep his secrets. “What exactly did the kite seller say to you when you saw him at the port market?”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “And for the love of Thalos, stop pacing! You’re making me nervous.”
I took a seat on one of our driftwood stools. “You said he gave you the rose, but did he say anything to you? Did he give you any hint that he might have seen Sami?”
She shook her head. “Not really. When I arrived at the tent, he was already packing away his kites for the day. He smiled when he saw me—he must have thought I was you—and handed me the rose.”
I put my hand on my knee to stop it from bouncing. “You’re right. He would have thought you were me,” I mumbled. “Which means he thought he was giving me the rose. You’re sure he didn’t say anything?”
“I suppose he must have, but I was so worried about finding you.” She chewed absently on a fingernail, an old habit I hadn’t seen since Mother put bitter squid ink on Zadie’s fingertips. “I do remember several Ilarean guards walking past us, which seemed to make him anxious. He was humming a tune over and over. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.”
I leaped up from the stool, too excited to sit still. “Try to remember it, Zadie. It’s important. He wouldn’t have been humming for no reason. It was a message, I’m sure of it.”
Zadie still looked doubtful. “Why wouldn’t he have just told me?”
“You said the market was crawling with guards. He had to be careful.” I turned to look at my parents, who had just emerged from their room. “Sami was at the port market. He left a coded message for me.”
Father scratched at his head, and Mother looked more skeptical than hopeful. “What message?”
“The rose, and a song, if Zadie can remember it.”
“I could remember it much more easily if everyone would be quiet!” Zadie had taken up my pacing and was still worrying at a jagged nail with her teeth. “It reminded me of our childhood,” she added in a softer voice.
“A lullaby?” Mother suggested.
Zadie shook her head. “No, something more obscure than that. Maybe one of those songs Sami used to sing, the ones he picked up at market?”
I hopped in place, more certain than ever that I was on the right track. “The one about the goat and the donkey?” It hadn’t been my favorite, since I had no idea what a goat or a donkey looked like, but Sami assured me it was funny.
“No, no. Something pretty, but with a melancholy tune.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward me. “‘My horse has a mane of handspun gold, and hooves of finest silver?’ That one?” It was a song that Sami had taught me when we were twelve or thirteen. I had never seen a horse then either, but Thalos knew I had imagined them a thousand times.
“Maybe. Can you sing it?”
I hummed the tune, then gasped as the final line came back to me. “‘And roses red around her neck, for no other horse is finer.’ Red roses, Zadie!”
I spun my bewildered sister in my arms. “I don’t understand,” she replied.
“Sami is alive!”
Zadie planted her feet to stop my spinning, and I waited for the room to come back into focus. “What if I’m wrong about the song?” Zadie asked. “What if it’s just a coincidence?”
“It is not a coincidence,” I insisted. “We have to tell the governor.”
“I’m sorry, Nor, but you can’t tell Kristos about the song,” Mother said.
Father placed his hand on my shoulder. “I understand that you want to help. But it might give him false hope.”
I hesitated. Maybe they were right. If I was wrong about this, Kristos would have even less reason to trust me. But hope was hope, and Varenia had been in short supply of it for too long. I couldn’t go to the governor’s house and prove to him that Ceren was dead and Varenia was free, but I could give him this.
“It’s not false hope,” I said, lifting the trapdoor. “Sami is alive. I know it.”
I wouldn’t give up on finding Sami, no matter what everyone else thought. Not only was he imperative to Zadie’s happiness, but he had risked his life twice to see me at the port market, and it was his loyalty to Zadie and me that had made him an easy target for Phaedra. If the tables were turned, there was no question Sami would search for me.
The only real question was whether, once I found him, I could return to a place that had turned its back on me and the people I loved.
And more importantly, would I even want to?
2