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my frustrations out on her,
either. Through everything, she'd stuck by my side. She'd ensured
we had a place in Port Mahon, and she'd never stayed still for
long, not when there was someone she could track down, someone from
her distant past who might help us out.
    Abruptly
stopping, I sat down on the raised path, and once she caught up to
me, Kouris sat in the sand, barely having to look up at
me.
    “It's
not so bad here, is it?” Kouris asked, tusks gleaming in the
moonlight.
    “It's not bad!” I replied instantly, and it took all the
breath out of me. “It's not bad at all. I like it here. I love it. I love getting
to work on the boats, getting to fish, helping out Reis. I've made
friends here. People like me, I've learnt so much, and I get to be
useful...”
    I slid
off the edge as I trailed off, toes curling in the warm
sand.
    “But?”
Kouris asked.
    I
circled her, full of as much restless energy as there were grains
of sand on the beach, threw my hands up and brought them down,
defeated before I'd even said anything. But I had to learn to force
the things I was thinking out, otherwise they'd fester in the dark
corners of my mind. Whenever it was too hard to say anything, I
thought back to the eight weeks it'd taken to cross over to Canth;
the eight weeks I'd spent in silence, huddled beneath the deck,
pretending seasickness alone had turned me so pale.
    “But I keep getting so angry, Kouris. I just...” I started,
refusing to let my jaw tense up. “I want to believe that we're
going to get out of here. I do believe it, but I can't stand waiting. Every time
you set out, I have so much hope that this is it, we're finally
being given a way back, but you always come back empty-handed. I
know how hard you're trying, but I just get so angry at myself for having hoped
that much, when it's all useless.”
    Kouris
didn't take her eyes off me as I paced, trying to stomp the
frustration out against the sand. She held out a hand but I didn't
take it. I didn't want to be close to her, not with this
heat.
    “It's
tough, yrval. Tough on all of us, but sometimes, staying still is
the hardest thing you can do.”
    “You'd
know,” I muttered under my breath, wincing the moment the words
were out of my mouth.
    My back
was turned to Kouris and the waves were drawing close, but she
couldn't have missed what I'd said. My shoulders rose, and without
turning to her, I could see the look cut across her features
against the clear night sky.
    “I'm
sorry.” I span on my heels and clutched her shoulders. “I'm sorry.
I didn't mean that. I did, but I meant, I meant that you'd dealt
with this before, and... that wasn't fair. I'm sorry,
Kouris.”
    Kouris
stared and she stared right through me, and my stomach sank like a
ship in a storm. I couldn't lose her. Not after all we'd been
through. My hands shook and my teeth ground together, and I scolded
myself, wanting to know why I couldn't accept the way things were.
Why I couldn't move my thoughts to the present and control what
rushed through my mind, out of my mouth.
    “No, it
wasn't,” Kouris said slowly, “But none of this is. Come on, yrval.
We're both tired.”
    The
silence we walked through was more stagnant than before, and the
sounds of Mahon no longer clawed their way across the beach towards
us. I glanced back once and it was all lights glinting in the
distance, making the hut seem a million miles away.
    I pulled
myself onto the pier and Kouris took a single step up and pushed
the front door open as I ducked under her arm. The candles had long
since burnt out and neither of us thought of relighting them. The
moonlight that spilt in through open windows was more than enough
to find our way across the living area by, and Kouris followed me
to my room, as she so often did.
    The bed
was more than big enough for the two of us, and my room was hardly
bare. I'd collected brightly coloured shells from the beach, bought
trinkets from passing merchants and red phoenixes carved