Chapter 1

1

Cadence Bell sat on uncomfortable grey rocks at the far end of the curve of the dull grey shore, and watched the waves crash over and over under the looming grey sky. He’d been sitting on stone long enough for his left leg to go numb. He ignored it.

Water flung itself into the rocks again. Ceaseless. Mindless. Unconcerned with his presence. This felt oddly reassuring: insignificant, he couldn’t harm the world.

Insignificant. He shifted a hand, discovered a pebble, tossed it. It sank beyond his sight.

Beyond sight, beyond reach: like the world he’d left behind back in the glittering multifaceted gem of Londre, capital-city spires stretching to the sky, streets bustling with broadsheet-boys and violet-sellers, parliamentarians and Queen’s men, politics and taverns and theaters. Above all: theaters, palaces of imagination and greasepaint and paste jewels and stories that could change the world.

Cade had taken a bow, laughing, dragged up onto that stage by his players. An author surrounded by love. A Queen’s commission, court masques, rubies in his hair. A prodigy, the Court had murmured. They’d lavished his work with praise.

He squinted into the wind of Gull Skerrie, which lay about as far from the kaleidoscopic twirl of Londre ballrooms as he could get. The wind burned his eyes, unless that was something else. The waves murmured upward, though they did not sing of joy and farce and playful springtime dances. A year ago, when he’d written the lines for that pageant, the Queen herself had worn a flower coronet to play spring.

A year ago he’d had no sense of the stone about to land in his life. Ripples and ripples, and he was sinking.

“Cadence Bell,” he said, to the wind and the sea, “Queen’s playwright and artistic advisor. On the Inner Council.” The sea sighed at him with voiceless well-meant soothing rhythm; but it had no advice to give.

He squirmed around on his rock. The curlicue of neighboring Harbor Skerrie rose to the south, followed by dotted islands that question-marked into the mainland. Cade did not need question marks at the moment.

He did not look at the village as it lurked behind him. He especially did not look at his parents’ inn and boarding-house. Hisinn and boarding-house.

Cade did not hate The Bell. He never had. He’d loved his childhood: laughing, crawling about under fishermen’s legs, being scooped up and told stories about the selkies and the sirens and the vast and terrible storms and the narrow escapes and the giant sharp-beaked unicorn-fish. He’d known every curl of pipe-smoke and sea-soaked wool, and had fled Gull Skerrie as soon as he could, with his parents’ blessing at his back.

He found a bit of driftwood to gaze at, brown and thin as his thoughts.

He had not been able to write since coming home. He had not been able to write through the end of his father’s long illness, and his mother’s short and sudden one. He had not had time to think, and even when he had, concepts had flapped around like the island’s namesake gulls: clamoring, wary, restless.

His shirt was not warm enough, and his boots were growing wet from spray. They’d been bought for city streets and Court debates about patronage of the arts. Cadence Bell, even at the age of seventeen, had known his destiny lay in those streets, that Court patronage. He’d even been right.

He could barely recall those first exhilarating beribboned nights. Chess and banter and wordplay that might alter the fate of nations. Wine and lute-playing and invitations to operettas. The operettas drowned under the changing of sheets and the sound of his father coughing and the weary gnawing knowledge that someone had to open the inn and count money in the cashbox and pay the physicians and settle the will and stare at the business now in his name.

He found another pebble. Overhead a single gull called out, lonely on the breeze. The afternoon floated like the twig, adrift. He’d left Gwen and Rhys in charge; the pair of them could conjure up marvelous chowders and miraculous flaky fish, but had given him worried expressions about the cashbox. Cade probably ought to worry as well. Couldn’t find the energy. Couldn’t summon the interest.

His parents were gone. His life was gone. He was somehow still here. Tidying up loose ends, or not tidying them up, or not doing much of anything at all.

This pebble felt smooth, and chilly, and surprisingly round. He glanced at it in mild interest before throwing it.

Blue-white shimmer caught his gaze. He lifted it, turned the gleam around in fingertips. Iridescent promises caressed his skin.

A pearl, he thought. Under the dome of the sky, at the end of the world, on rocks in a fishing-village: a pearl.