I want to belong to myself. I want to stop feeling worthless and pointless and hopeless and less, less, less than everyone else around me. I want to live, not just survive, and fill myself up with all the people who have loved me into this moment and this man. I want to believe I am good and kind and clever and worthy with as much conviction as I have believed the opposites. I want to stop picking at life like it’s a meal I don’t want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.
The captain holds out a hand to me. Her fingers are long and her skin white, wrinkled faintly like someone who has spent too long soaking in a hot bath.
What do you want, Adrian?
I want to sleep, I think as the sea rocks me, my name on its breath and my body suspended in its gentle embrace.
But what I say is, “I want to wake up.”
“So wake up,” she replies.
I come to vomiting mouthfuls of seawater and unsure how I am still alive. If I am still alive. My chest feels caved in, as though someone has been dropping stones upon it, one relentless boulder after another.
The vomiting turns to coughing, expelling more water from my lungs. I open my eyes, but the sun is so bright I close them again. Someone drags me onto my side and I spit up another impossible amount of water. My throat burns and I’m so cold, the coldest I’ve ever been. When I finally manage to open my eyes, my lashes are crusted with ice. Everything around me feels slow and distorted, like I’m looking at the world from beneath the rippled ice of the glacier cave.
I’m on a ship—the Dutchman. No. Not the Dutchman, because Sim is standing over me, sopping wet, water cascading off her shirt and her scarf plastered to her face like it’s her skin. Sim, somehow, here, and surely I’m hallucinating. Or I’m dead. And Sim is also dead.
But Felicity is here too, throwing a blanket over Sim’s shoulders and rubbing her arms and saying something I can’t hear because there’s still too much water in my ears.
I’m not on the Dutchman. I’m on the Dey, and Monty is on his knees beside me. He thumps me on the back and I cough again, this time managing to suck in a breath through the water in my lungs.
“Adrian? Adrian?” Monty has my face in his hands. “You’re all right,” he says, though I’m not sure if it’s for his benefit or mine. “We’ve got you, you’re safe, you’re all right. It’s going to be all right.”
I’m shivering so hard I can feel my teeth clack together, and he throws his coat over my shoulders, tugging it around me hard enough that I feel a sharp bite of pain in my rib cage and I’m still here.
Monty pulls me up until I’m sitting, trying to pull my arms through the sleeves of his coat but then suddenly, he’s pressing me to his chest, his embrace fierce and his body warm against mine.
“Did you see her?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer, just holds me tighter.
And in that moment, I feel wide awake.
31
Later, once we’re back on land, the story is pieced together for me like a quilt assembled square by square.
Sim took the Dey, and Monty and Felicity, in pursuit of Saad and me to Iceland. They found the fisherman we had sold our yawl to, and followed our path by sea down the coast.
It was Monty who spotted me in the water, floating on that iceberg I do not remember pulling myself onto. It was an impossible thing, that they came near enough to me, and that he spotted me at all among the diamond chunks of glacier floating out to sea. Almost like a compass pointed him straight there.
When they pulled me from the water, my skin was mottled blue and white, and I was barely breathing. The water was so cold it should have stopped my heart. I was wrapped in every fur on the ship, and tucked in bundles of hot coal wrapped in oiled paper between the layers. It seems miraculous I wasn’t accidentally burned alive in the process of trying to get me warm again.
Everyone on board denies seeing another ship anywhere near the Dey. But my spyglass is gone.
Between retellings of this miraculous rescue, first from Sim, then Monty, then Monty and Felicity at the same time, I dip in and out of sleep. I wake first on the deck of the Dey, then in a hammock belowdecks, then a camp on the beach. Once I wake with Saad beside me, his eyes closed and his breathing heavy and even.
Once I’m able to stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, our camp moves off the ice and into a green glen with a hot spring that Felicity makes me soak in until I sweat. The places my skin was blue blister, then turn black, and days after, the feeling still hasn’t entirely returned to my hands or feet. I grow drowsy and stiff again. Then and only then does Felicity propose drastic action.
I lose two fingers from my left hand and three toes, in what Felicity deems the easiest amputation she’s ever done, as I have almost no feeling in the dead tissue nor any blood flowing there. My right hand—the one I drew the stave upon—is untouched by the cold, and the lamp-black lines of vegvísir have sealed into my skin like a tattoo. I’m not sure it will ever wash away.
Felicity also stitches the few cuts on my face from the fall, though the only one likely to scar travels down from my hairline and bisects my eyebrow, which Monty tells me is very handsome placement.
“If I had planned this a bit better,” he says, tapping the scarred side of his face, “I would have had him shoot me through the eyebrow instead.”
“Yes, that would have gone well,” Felicity remarks dryly.
We are at the hot spring, Monty and I both submerged to our necks as the water steams against the cold air. Felicity has her skirt pulled up and her feet in the water. In the nearby glen, I can hear the sounds of the crew packing up their camp. The Crown and Cleaver is returning to warmer waters, Sim in command.
“When I lost my ear,” Monty tells me, tipping his head backward so the warm water soaks the back of his head, “people gave me loads of stuff. I was sitting at a coffeehouse once and a man dropped a farthing into my coffee because he thought I was a beggar.”
I think he’s trying to make me feel better, though there’s nothing to soothe. While I would have preferred to leave Iceland with all my fingers, I am, for the first time in a long while, simply happy I’m alive. Felicity’s prescription of warm water and her duplicate of the scale powder have loosened my chest so I can almost breathe deeply enough to feel sated.
Felicity pulls one leg out of the water, then mops sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. She picked up an English newspaper somewhere in Amsterdam, and she has it propped up against a stone, reading selections to us at random. “Weavers are rioting in London demanding fair pay,” she says as she licks her finger and turns the page. “The Royal Society is hearing papers read on artificial magnets. Like that will ever have any practical use, but go on, that seems like an excellent use of your time and resources.” She flicks the paper onto the grass, then lies backward beside it, staring up at the sky with one foot trailing in the water. The steam from the hot spring fogs her spectacles.
Monty grabs her foot beneath the water and tries to pull her in, but she yanks out of his grip and sits up, her skirt pulling tight as she crosses her legs beneath it. “If you try that again, I swear I’ll drown you.”