Chapter 16: Soren's POV

Soren's POV

The court did not touch us.

They hung in the water around the skiff, a hundred silver heads with their eyes lit, and they watched us go under the cliff.

That was their whole right until the Moot, to watch.

I swam ahead into the cave mouth with Minnie's hand in mine and Gus's oars knocking softly behind us, and no one followed.

The cave was a long throat of black rock.

Inside it opened into a chamber with a pool in the middle and a shelf of dry stone around the edge.

Walt Marlow had slept on that shelf once, in a gale.

I could still see where he had scratched a tally into the wall, a row of seven marks, one for every night he had waited.

Minnie climbed onto the stone and sat with her knees pulled up.

She was soaked to the skin and she was trying not to shake.

I came out of the pool on my forearms.

The tail pulled and shifted, and the water ran off me, and by the time I reached her I had legs again.

I wrapped Walt's flannel around her shoulders, because it was the only dry thing I had.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For going over the side."

"I would have gone over the side of anything for that."

She laughed, a little wet sound, and put her head against my arm.

Gus called a soft goodnight from the mouth of the cave, and the oars creaked away.

Then there was only the drip of the walls, and the glow of my own wrists in the dark where the old scars had begun to shine.

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