Riven Isles

44 | Farewell, Old Salts

In all honesty, I wish I could hold onto him long enough that the ship leaves without him. They missed the first one, already, and there are only two departing. I suck in a long breath of his sandalwood and tobacco and bravely withdraw, holding my shoulders back. I nod, he smiles.

I extend my hand to Mrs. Marks for a formal handshake—as it would be most improper to advance on a woman, would it not? She pulls me in and tousles my messy hair and kisses my head. The heat rises on my cheeks and as I hobble back on my crutch, my eyes glued to the dock. I shuffle my feet and adjust the wood under my arm.

"I wish you could stay," I admit quickly.

"I have a husband, and many more adventures to lead," Mrs. Marks answers.

"I have an estate expecting me back, and much work to do in Amity," Dr. Oswald answers. "My own children be wondering after me, and I long to see them."

"I know," I say. My eyes lift to look past them, to the dingy tilting at the side of the brigantine moored in the bay. A second large brig, already laden with a pirate crew unhappy with the change in their management, sits on the creaking mechanical platform, rising noisily and gradually and amazingly up the two-hundred feet of white water. I nod towards the dingy. "They'll be rowing back for you before long. I will miss you, but all the same, I..." I take a deep breath, as if it can conceal the squeak and the break of my voice, and rub my throat as if to blame it. "I wish you all the best, and safe travels, and... and I will see you both again."

"Are you sure you don't want to come, Walter?" the doctor asks. He taps his pipe out into the water and places it neatly in a wooden case. It slides perfectly into a pocket.

I nod, smiling very slightly, almost mischievously at the new world around me. I haven't seen any of it, and yet I feel as if I could not live with myself for leaving it. The peaceful way the water rushes all around us, and yet from the land is only a notch or two away from silence; the simple beauty of the village and the forest and the way their tall spires compliment one another, and contrast to the intermittent sag of weeping willows. Wisps fly over the land unchecked, finding things that make them happy—like the sea or the playing of small foxes in the street—to glow brighter by. There are delectable fruits on the smallest isle which I have yet to try, and a cabin I have yet to build. Opportunity and discovery and adventure is everywhere in this place, blossoming, and I would be a fool to leave it behind for Amity; a place that I could never call home again. My cottage and its hidden mysteries led me here when it crumbled. It seems poetic to settle at the source of what uprooted my life in the first place.

"You have grown so much, Walter."

I look up.

"I will admit, I saw Captain Avery as a rotten influence at first, but I will admit just as easily that I was wrong," Dr. Oswald says, resting both hands on his walking stick. "I was wrong to think he was a bad man, and I was wrong to think you were so impressionable as to try and become him, thread for thread."

I frown.

"You lost your mother," he continues. "And yet, her politeness, her propriety, her compassion and good sense and good heart live in you. And all those traits have strengthened over the last month as you have started piecing together who you want to be and have become someone destined to be great. Meeting your father, as little of a father as he was, was the best thing that could have happened for you. I can see you trying to become him, but leaving out the bad parts so that you have this fantastic combination of both your parents' best traits cooking, and in another year when I see you again, I am absolutely certain, I will be meeting with a new man; and one of the absolute finest. So, you must guarantee me that chance, Walter, do you hear? I want to meet the finest man in the world. Promise me that."