Nemi carried the broth across the yard with both hands because the bowl was full and Vara did not tolerate spilled broth.
Sorrel was awake in the spare room, propped against the wall where Nemi had left them, and they had not moved much in a day and a half. That was the thing Nemi kept noticing. Not the sickness itself but how carefully Sorrel managed it, how they held their hands still on the blanket with an effort that was its own kind of exhaustion, how they turned their head slowly to the door as if fast movement might spend something they were rationing.
“You brought food,” Sorrel said.
“Vara made it. She makes broth when she doesn’t know what else to do with a person.”
“Is that what I am. A person she doesn’t know what to do with.”
“For now.” Nemi set the bowl on the stool beside the bed and sat on the floor with his back against the doorframe. He ended up there most evenings now, close enough to help and far enough to let Sorrel eat without being watched. “She’ll decide about you eventually. She decides about everyone. Takes her a while.”
Sorrel got the bowl into their lap and held it there without lifting the spoon, taking the warmth up through their palms first. The room smelled of the broth and of the sea that was still in Sorrel’s clothes no matter how many times Vara had scrubbed them.
Through the wall came the sound of the kitchen. A ladle against the rim of the pot. Vara moving between the stove and the table with the particular heaviness she carried when something was in the house that she had not yet made her peace with.
She had not made her peace with Sorrel. That had been clear inside the first hour. Not hostility, because Vara was not hostile about anything, but a watchfulness, the flat assessing look she gave a wall when she suspected the crack ran deeper than the surface showed. She had set a place for Sorrel at dinner the first night without being asked, which was her way of saying they could eat under her roof. She had not once said their name.
—-
The island had opinions.
By the second day everyone had come by, or found a reason to pass close, or sent a child to pass close and report back. This was not rudeness. It was Pell doing the only thing Pell knew how to do with a thing that had never happened. Look at it from every angle until it stopped being strange.
Maret came under the excuse of the wall. She stood in Vara’s yard with her arms folded, a big woman who ran the east-side families and worried about them the way some people worry a loose tooth, and she looked at the closed door of the spare room longer than the wall could account for.
“You didn’t finish my base course,” she said.
“I’ll finish it.”
“When.”
“When the stranger’s steady enough that I’m not needed here.” Nemi wiped his hands on his knees. “Couple of days. The wall’s not going anywhere, Maret. It’s held forty years with a soft base. It’ll hold a week more.”
“It’s not the wall I’m asking about.” She let that sit, then unfolded her arms, which was as close as Maret came to backing off. “Half-dead people who wash up asking questions. My grandmother had sayings about that.”
“Your grandmother had sayings about everything.”
“She was right about most of it.” Maret looked at the door one more time and left, and Nemi watched her go and thought about how the island was a body, and how a body notices a splinter before it understands one.
Dato was gentler about it, because Dato was old enough that not much frightened him anymore. He came at dusk and sat on Vara’s step and did not ask to see the stranger at all. He just talked, the way old men talk, in loops that circled back on themselves, and somewhere in the third loop he said, “My father used to say the sea brings you what you’re owed. Good and bad. He didn’t believe it. He just liked saying it.” He rubbed his jaw and looked out at the water going dark. “Wonder which one this is.”
“Haven’t decided,” Nemi said, which was true.
“No,” Dato said. “Suppose you haven’t.”
—-
On the third morning Sorrel was sitting up on their own when Nemi came in, and there was a fraction more color in their face, and they had the look of someone who had spent the night deciding how much to say and had landed somewhere.
“I owe you the truth,” Sorrel said. “Or as much of it as I can give you without you deciding I’m mad. Which you might anyway.”
“Try me.”
Sorrel was quiet for a moment. When they spoke, they did not speak the way Nemi expected a person with a secret to speak. No grand opening. They talked the way Dato talked, in a person’s own memories, except Sorrel’s memories were older than Sorrel and had been handed down.
“My grandmother told me stories when I was small. Her mother told her. Back and back, further than I can follow. About a time when the islands weren’t alone.” Sorrel’s hands had gone still on the blanket again, that deliberate stillness. “Not alone the way we mean it now, everyone rowing to everyone else across bad water. Connected. There were living connections between the islands, and people and goods and ideas moved along them, and the islands were close the way rooms in a house are close. You didn’t cross the sea to reach your neighbor. You just went.”
“Bridges,” Nemi said.
“That’s one word. Every island had a different one. None of them match, but they’re all pointing at the same thing.” Sorrel looked at him. “And the connections ran through particular places. Anchor points. And the people who kept those places alive had a name too, a different name on every island, and all the names meant the same thing underneath. The one who holds the world together.”
“That sounds like a story you tell a child.”
“It is exactly a story you tell a child. My grandmother told it to my mother as a child, and my mother believed it until she was old enough to be laughed at for believing it, and then she stopped. Three generations of my family were called mad for not letting it go.” The stillness in Sorrel’s hands broke, just slightly, a tremor they pressed flat against the blanket to stop. “I’m the one who wouldn’t stop. I’ve spent my whole life looking for a place where the story was still true. Somewhere the connection wasn’t dead.”
Nemi thought about the grove. About the stones in their patterns, and the tide that pulled wrong, and the warmth that everyone on Pell lived inside and never questioned. He thought about it and said nothing, because saying it out loud felt like handing over something he did not yet know the value of.
Sorrel watched him not say it.
“You feel it,” Sorrel said. “I can see you not talking about it. You’ve felt it your whole life and you never had a word for it, so it just became the way home feels.”
“Everyone here feels it. We don’t think about it.”
“That’s because you don’t know it’s unusual. You’ve never been anywhere it stopped.” Sorrel leaned forward, and the effort cost them, and they spent it anyway. “I need you to show me the places on this island where things don’t make sense. The stones. The tide you’re not talking about. The spots where a thing behaves the way it shouldn’t. I think Pell is one of the anchor points. One of the old ones. And I don’t think it’s dead.”
Outside, through the window, the light was coming up through the water the way it did, filling the harbor from below. Nemi had seen it every morning of his life. For the first time it looked to him like a thing that might be trying to say something, and he did not like how much he wanted to answer.
