POV: Liora
The silence after his leaving was the loudest sound I had ever heard.
I sat with my back against the blocked gap and the maiden beads wound between my fingers. The leather cord was soft from years of wear, shaped by a throat I would never know.
A girl had stood where I was standing, wearing this necklace, breathing this same air. She had not walked out.
I pressed the beads to my mouth and tasted salt and old leather, and my mind did what it always did when I was afraid — it counted.
The beads were fourteen. Fourteen small rounds of carved bone on a cord meant for a girl who had expected to be promised to a boy in a square and instead ended up here, in the dark, with whatever waited on the other side of that wall.
I set the beads down gently, because she deserved that much. Then I sat with my arms around my knees and waited for the dark to decide what it wanted to do with me.
It sent the creature.
A clicking across the stone floor, head low, needle teeth catching the thin light.
I grabbed the sharp stone and hurled it before I could think, and the crack of rock against the cave wall sent the creature scrambling backward into a gap I had not noticed — a narrow fissure near the ground, just wide enough for its round body to vanish into.
I was on my feet before the echo died. The creature had a tunnel, and tunnels led to places.
I dropped to my knees at the fissure and pressed my face to the opening. Cool air moved against my skin, steady and salt-tinged, the kind of breeze that meant open space on the other end.
But the gap was too narrow. I could fit my arm through up to the shoulder, and that was where my body stopped and the rock did not care.
"I am making a promise to a cave animal," I muttered. "This is where my life has arrived."
More chittering, closer now, and two round eyes appeared at the edge of the fissure, blinking up at me with the cautious suspicion of a creature that had recently been the target of a stone.
"There you are." I kept my voice low and my hands flat on my knees where it could see them. "I am sorry about the rock. That was not my finest moment."
It crept out one body-length and stopped, hackles half-raised, watching my hands.
"I am not going to hurt you," I said. "You are the only company I have, and the man on the other side of that wall is not speaking to me, so your standards are low and so are mine."
It blinked. Slow, the way a cat blinks when it has decided you are not worth killing. Then it settled an arm's length away and tucked its legs beneath itself.
"Good," I said. "We are making progress. Yesterday you tried to eat me, and today you are sitting. Tomorrow perhaps we will have tea."
It chittered and turned its head sideways, and the gesture was so oddly birdlike that a sound left me — not a laugh or quite, but close enough that it startled us both.
I hummed to steady myself, the three notes I had carried out of my grandmother's cottage and into this cave. The shaking in my hands slowed with each repetition, the way it always did, as though the sound itself were a rope I could grip.
The creature's hackles flattened entirely. It did not come closer, but it did not leave.
We sat like that for a long time, the creature and I, and at some point the adrenaline burned through its last reserves and my body made the decision for me. My eyes closed. The creature had not moved, lunged or shown its teeth since it settled, and my exhaustion was louder than my fear.
I slept in pieces, waking every time the dark shifted or the wind changed or my wounds screamed loud enough to pull me back. The leaves he had given me were doing their work — the edges of the gash had cooled and the swelling had eased — but my arms still burned where the rock had torn them.
Sometime in the deep hours I woke to a sound I could not place. A wet, heavy drag across stone, slow and rhythmic, coming from beyond the blocked gap. Not footsteps or the creature.
I held my breath and pressed my ear to the stone. The dragging stopped. Then a brush against the rock wall, close to the gap — too wide for fingers, too smooth. Whatever traced the wall moved in a slow curve that no hand could make.
Whatever was on the other side of that wall was not his hands and not his feet and not any part of a man I could explain.
The touching stopped and the dragging retreated, but I did not sleep again.
When grey light returned through the opening above the boulder, I stood and studied it. It was high, twice my height at least, and the rock between me and it was wet and smooth and angled wrong.
I tried anyway. I hauled myself up, braced one foot against a bump in the wall, and reached for the next hold. My fingers slipped. I fell hard, and the gash across my ribs tore fresh.
I tried again. Made it higher before the rock crumbled and sent me down. The impact drove the air from my lungs, and I curled on my side and waited for the ringing to stop.
The creature watched from its fissure, round eyes tracking me with what I chose to read as concern rather than appetite.
"I need rope," I said to no one. "I need weight and rope, and I need to stop falling."
The creature disappeared into its fissure and came back dragging a fish, silver and limp and freshly dead. It dropped the fish at the edge of my reach and retreated, watching.
I stared at it. "Are you feeding me?"
It blinked.
"I am being fed by a creature I almost killed with a rock," I said, and my voice wavered between disbelief and the kind of exhaustion that sits just beside laughter. "This island has a sense of humor." At least the creature was better company than my family.
I ate the fish raw because fire was a luxury I did not have, and the flesh was cold and clean and my body took it without complaint.
The creature watched every bite, its head tilting at each swallow, and when I finished it chittered once and disappeared back into its fissure.
I wiped my hands on the stone and looked up at the opening again. The light spilling through it was warm and gold, and wind carried the sound of birds.
Birds. The same birds he watched from wherever he was. The same sky. There was a way out of this cave, and I was going to find it, and if the man behind that wall would not help me then I would do what I had always done.
I would do it alone.
But first I needed him to talk to me, and needed to know what he knew about this island, its currents, its edges, its rules. I hated that, but hating it did not change it.